Franz and Emil
30 October 2025 07:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeI've just realised, on checking back, with "Little Men", that I got Franz and Emil the wrong way round: Franz and not Emil is the elder brother, depicted as a sterotypical German of that era, "big, blond and bookish, also very domestic, amiable and musical". (Ironic to think how the condescending views of the Anglosphere about Germans morphed from the old trope of 'hardworking, simple and sentimental' to that of 'Teutonic stock villain'...)
Since I only have *one* Franz/Emil equivalent character in "Little Gentlemen" --I feel there is a limit to how many German-speakers I can credibly introduce into the household!-- I could in theory arbitrarily decide to call him "Emil", as I have been doing. But since I wanted to have him as the one who is sixteen and basically an adult (in Alcott's book he is functioning as an assistant teacher, and back in the seventeenth century he would definitely be verging on manhood; Raoul de Bragelonne takes part in his first battle at fifteen) it makes more sense to avoid confusion by using the name of the older brother. I have thus gone back and altered all the occurrences, and will have to mentally adjust my concept of the character after thinking of him as 'Emil' for the last month.
Since I only have *one* Franz/Emil equivalent character in "Little Gentlemen" --I feel there is a limit to how many German-speakers I can credibly introduce into the household!-- I could in theory arbitrarily decide to call him "Emil", as I have been doing. But since I wanted to have him as the one who is sixteen and basically an adult (in Alcott's book he is functioning as an assistant teacher, and back in the seventeenth century he would definitely be verging on manhood; Raoul de Bragelonne takes part in his first battle at fifteen) it makes more sense to avoid confusion by using the name of the older brother. I have thus gone back and altered all the occurrences, and will have to mentally adjust my concept of the character after thinking of him as 'Emil' for the last month.