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Content note: spousal violence, sexual assault, spoilers for Mrs. Hawking parts 2 and 3
Normally when I write these little speculative scenelets from not-immediately-relevant points in the Hawking timeline, I post them to my journal with some musing about the story and how the piece at hand fits in. Often they are from points that will never actually feature in the main shows, but are still canonically part of the story and inform the events in the plays we do see.
This scene definitely count as an example, however, it stands apart from every other one I’ve ever written.
As I mentioned, I try to keep the Hawking shows more or less family friendly, without pulling punches with the drama. You could maybe debate me on that— Elena Zakharova is a drug addict, Christopher Austerlitz is understood to have sexually assaulted a maid —but we avoid vulgarity, excessive darkness, or much in the way of sexuality. Even when something like that is present, it tends to be alluded to obliquely— Justin and Miss Sherba, for example, are definitely have meant to have had sex at some point during the course of part three, but we let that fact remain an unspoken implication. I’ve joked that with an asexual protagonist and the rest of the cast made up mostly of Victorian prudes and goody-goodies, it’s easy to get away with nobody ever wanting to talk about sex!
But something that has always been part of the fabric of the story has been that Mrs. Hawking’s marriage to the Colonel involved rape. Neither of them exactly saw it this way— he couldn’t conceive of a woman enthusiastically consenting to sex, she filed it under “all the reasons marriage was abhorrent to me” —but any and all sexual activity between them is what we the modern audience would understand to be assault. This underlies a lot of Mrs. Hawking’s anger and antipathy at her husband and her position in life— but we have never made direct reference to it.
The daily reality of what their marriage must have been like took me literally years to conceive of. I kept tripping over the fact that they were unhappily bound together for nineteen years, and yet never had an honest conversation about their problems with each other. I knew such things did happen, so I know it wasn’t impossible, but it was hard to imagine that frank truth would never come out somehow— even if only in a moment where nerves were frayed so thin the parties involved couldn’t hold back their feelings anymore.
I balanced it by planning out the epochs of it, from the screaming fights of the early years, to the cold silence after they lost the baby, to the near-decade the Colonel spent abroad to get out of the house, to the final handful of years they basically lived around one another. But it really came down to having to adjust my mindset to imagine what people without a modern mentality and its bias toward openness and honesty about one’s feelings, particularly to one’s partner. These are Victorian people; they don’t always have the language and understanding to even grasp their own feelings, much less express them, and they are bound by proprieties that we may not be. These things combine to make it so honest communication might have been literally impossible, as they would not have known how to say these things to each other.
This scene is meant to sort of typify what their life together would have looked like. I think this was a fairly representative moment of at least the early few years of their marriage, before things grew so icy they didn’t even fight anymore. It’s heavier and darker than what I want the main shows to focus on; this will CERTAINLY never feature in any of them. But I believe it’s an important thing to understand when trying to grasp why Mrs. Hawking’s marriage was so damaging to her.
This was tough to write. And being a slightly squeamish writer, I’m always just a little embarrassed to create anything of this nature. But I think this is a meaningful piece. I think it’s emotionally honest— and true to the larger narrative I’ve created.
Content note for spousal violence and sexual assault.
( Mustn't Fight - from the early timeline of Mrs. Hawking )
Normally when I write these little speculative scenelets from not-immediately-relevant points in the Hawking timeline, I post them to my journal with some musing about the story and how the piece at hand fits in. Often they are from points that will never actually feature in the main shows, but are still canonically part of the story and inform the events in the plays we do see.
This scene definitely count as an example, however, it stands apart from every other one I’ve ever written.
As I mentioned, I try to keep the Hawking shows more or less family friendly, without pulling punches with the drama. You could maybe debate me on that— Elena Zakharova is a drug addict, Christopher Austerlitz is understood to have sexually assaulted a maid —but we avoid vulgarity, excessive darkness, or much in the way of sexuality. Even when something like that is present, it tends to be alluded to obliquely— Justin and Miss Sherba, for example, are definitely have meant to have had sex at some point during the course of part three, but we let that fact remain an unspoken implication. I’ve joked that with an asexual protagonist and the rest of the cast made up mostly of Victorian prudes and goody-goodies, it’s easy to get away with nobody ever wanting to talk about sex!
But something that has always been part of the fabric of the story has been that Mrs. Hawking’s marriage to the Colonel involved rape. Neither of them exactly saw it this way— he couldn’t conceive of a woman enthusiastically consenting to sex, she filed it under “all the reasons marriage was abhorrent to me” —but any and all sexual activity between them is what we the modern audience would understand to be assault. This underlies a lot of Mrs. Hawking’s anger and antipathy at her husband and her position in life— but we have never made direct reference to it.
The daily reality of what their marriage must have been like took me literally years to conceive of. I kept tripping over the fact that they were unhappily bound together for nineteen years, and yet never had an honest conversation about their problems with each other. I knew such things did happen, so I know it wasn’t impossible, but it was hard to imagine that frank truth would never come out somehow— even if only in a moment where nerves were frayed so thin the parties involved couldn’t hold back their feelings anymore.
I balanced it by planning out the epochs of it, from the screaming fights of the early years, to the cold silence after they lost the baby, to the near-decade the Colonel spent abroad to get out of the house, to the final handful of years they basically lived around one another. But it really came down to having to adjust my mindset to imagine what people without a modern mentality and its bias toward openness and honesty about one’s feelings, particularly to one’s partner. These are Victorian people; they don’t always have the language and understanding to even grasp their own feelings, much less express them, and they are bound by proprieties that we may not be. These things combine to make it so honest communication might have been literally impossible, as they would not have known how to say these things to each other.
This scene is meant to sort of typify what their life together would have looked like. I think this was a fairly representative moment of at least the early few years of their marriage, before things grew so icy they didn’t even fight anymore. It’s heavier and darker than what I want the main shows to focus on; this will CERTAINLY never feature in any of them. But I believe it’s an important thing to understand when trying to grasp why Mrs. Hawking’s marriage was so damaging to her.
This was tough to write. And being a slightly squeamish writer, I’m always just a little embarrassed to create anything of this nature. But I think this is a meaningful piece. I think it’s emotionally honest— and true to the larger narrative I’ve created.
Content note for spousal violence and sexual assault.
( Mustn't Fight - from the early timeline of Mrs. Hawking )
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