seekingferret (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
seekingferret) wrote2015-01-28 05:20 pm
seekingferret) wrote2015-01-28 05:20 pm
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Howard Stark: Yeah, I know, and I was wrong. But you have to understand, a kid like me doesn't get to where I'm at by doing...
Peggy Carter: What? Wanted for treason?
Howard Stark: I grew up on the Lower East Side. My father sold fruit. My mother sewed shirtwaists for a factory. Let me tell you, you don't get to climb the American ladder without picking up some bad habits on the way. There's a ceiling for certain types of people based on how much money your parents have, your social class, your religion, your sex. And the only way to break through that ceiling sometimes is to lie, so that's my natural instinct... to lie. I shouldn't have lied to you. For that, trust me, I am truly sorry.
from Agent Carter S1E04, "The Blitzkrieg Button"
---
I'm having a hard time not reading that as Howard Stark coming out as Jewish. It's possible he's coming out as gay, or coming out as gay and Jewish. Those are also valid readings of the subtext, I think, but there is so much coming out as Jewish subtext there it's absurd. (I guess it's also possible he's coming out as Italian Catholic. Certainly Italian Catholics in this era faced similar kinds of religious and ethnic discrimination in the same Lower East Side neighborhoods. I think in general in the comics, Maria Stark is more usually coded Italian than Howard is. Her 616 maiden name is Carbonell, though I don't believe that's been confirmed in MCU. In any case, I don't think this scene would have so much edge if he's just confessing to being Catholic, even in 1946.)
In any case, Agent Carter has been phenomenal so far overall, but this scene kind of made my week. I loved the gloriously twisted intersectionality of it all. Peggy Carter is an upper crust British woman being bossed around by a bunch of upper class American men, so she makes an alliance with an even richer, even more sexist American on the basis of their wartime camaraderie: the war being for her as for so many others the great equalizer of race and gender and class and creed. But just as returning to the home front has forced Peggy to reconfront sexism she thought had been washed away by blood, so too for Howard Stark he has returned from the war that made him a hero to find that he's still a mistrusted outsider on the homefront.
(Of course, this whole narrative makes the complete absence of African-American characters from the story even more glaring. And if IMDB is to believed, they're bringing back some of the Howlers next week, but not Gabe and not Izzy, so grrrr...)
Peggy Carter: What? Wanted for treason?
Howard Stark: I grew up on the Lower East Side. My father sold fruit. My mother sewed shirtwaists for a factory. Let me tell you, you don't get to climb the American ladder without picking up some bad habits on the way. There's a ceiling for certain types of people based on how much money your parents have, your social class, your religion, your sex. And the only way to break through that ceiling sometimes is to lie, so that's my natural instinct... to lie. I shouldn't have lied to you. For that, trust me, I am truly sorry.
from Agent Carter S1E04, "The Blitzkrieg Button"
---
I'm having a hard time not reading that as Howard Stark coming out as Jewish. It's possible he's coming out as gay, or coming out as gay and Jewish. Those are also valid readings of the subtext, I think, but there is so much coming out as Jewish subtext there it's absurd. (I guess it's also possible he's coming out as Italian Catholic. Certainly Italian Catholics in this era faced similar kinds of religious and ethnic discrimination in the same Lower East Side neighborhoods. I think in general in the comics, Maria Stark is more usually coded Italian than Howard is. Her 616 maiden name is Carbonell, though I don't believe that's been confirmed in MCU. In any case, I don't think this scene would have so much edge if he's just confessing to being Catholic, even in 1946.)
In any case, Agent Carter has been phenomenal so far overall, but this scene kind of made my week. I loved the gloriously twisted intersectionality of it all. Peggy Carter is an upper crust British woman being bossed around by a bunch of upper class American men, so she makes an alliance with an even richer, even more sexist American on the basis of their wartime camaraderie: the war being for her as for so many others the great equalizer of race and gender and class and creed. But just as returning to the home front has forced Peggy to reconfront sexism she thought had been washed away by blood, so too for Howard Stark he has returned from the war that made him a hero to find that he's still a mistrusted outsider on the homefront.
(Of course, this whole narrative makes the complete absence of African-American characters from the story even more glaring. And if IMDB is to believed, they're bringing back some of the Howlers next week, but not Gabe and not Izzy, so grrrr...)