There's not much to say about this one beyond what is already on there except to put my hands up to having been heavily inspired by a story published some time ago on the Ladies Becoming Maids blog http://lady2maid.blogspot.com/ and a story which involved all manner of what were basicaly brainwashing techniques and some really quite good psychology...so going down that track and considering some of the ideas - and interpreting them in the context of experimental psychology - I started to think...hmmm...what if someone were to take a group of young adults and deliberatly dress them, talk to them and treat them as children? It was the age regression thing which interested me most in the aformentioned story I've been aluding to (see below - I don't think the link works, so use it as a Google seach term). There is also the use of drugs - and even an induced coma at one point - and someone commented that they'd never seen drugs used in the context of a tale of domination. Well, I have invoked deliberate drug addiction (prescription drugs) as a means of gaining control over someone in one of my books years ago.
I loved the story of miss Caroline becoming the maid you could have written that
ReplyDeleteI definitely wish I had... It needs editing though...But I'd have concentrated a bit more on the regression aspect. One thing which has started to.interest me more of late is non- corporal punishment.... I've got some interesting variations and enhancements on that theme in mind, which I've been working on today. My opinion on the subject - for what it's worth - is that the task should be deliberately pointless and tedious and yet still require 100% of the girl's concentration
ReplyDeleteScrubbing and waxing a wooden floor???
ReplyDeleteScrubbing and waxing a wooden floor certainly qualifies as an erksom and tedious task but does it take her full concentration or might she be daydreaming to some degree? Plus it is a task with a potentialy useful outcome and which she might even be able to take pride in, to some degree. Now, imagine, if you will, a small, windowless, white-painted room with a bright glossed painted floor or bright white floor covering (lino, say) brightly lit from a single pannel fitted flush in the ceiling but otherwise totaly featureless and silent. She has a small dustpan and brush. A woman quite deliberatly pours a quantity of peppercorns on the floor, which of couse bounce and scatter all over the place. sweeping them up is a nightmare, since they tend to scatter about but she manages somehow. The woman walks back in, the girl struggles stiffly to her feet and goes to stand in the corner with her nose to the wall as she has been trained while the woman closely inspects the floor, the woman might even give the girl her cane to hold while she does this (I think there should always be some element of, at least the threat, of corporal punishment). The woman calmly pours the dustpan's contents on the floor and orders the girl to start again...The reason being that the woman stipulates that the girl is to sweep the peppercorns into a neat pile in the centre of the floor before then sweeping them into the dustpan. I can think of many refinements to this procedure....But does the room realy have to be silent? You see, I think there might still be plenty of opertunity for daydreaming or thinking about other things and I like the idea that her mind should be kept within the confines of the institution just as much as her physical self. So possibly there might be a speaker hidden somewhere from which there might come some sort of thing she is required to learn and to be written down later...nothing educational of course...perhaps nonsence poetry or even strings of unrelated random words or digits or a mixture of both.
ReplyDeleteGlad you are back. Do you plan to write a new book? I loved the heiress signing away everything trope.
ReplyDeleteI'm mainly interested in the pictorial stuff now to be honest. An image can say SO much more than words. I know I've been annotating my pictures up to now but my thinking now is that maybe it might be fun to post some images without saying what they suggest to me and see what others think might be happening or what sort of storyline they would attatch... and then maybe create - or try to create - another image based on those ideas, if that makes any sense at all?
ReplyDeleteregarding the peppercorn idea... as an alternate approach, the floor is carefully scrubbed with a toothbrush, only to have the disciplinarian walk in with her muddy Hunter wellies.. causing the girl great distress as the floor is now worse than when she started.
ReplyDelete