thinking of a comment hours earlier
i can't help but see this painting as a prototypical MRA gamergater fuckface. we've known - *men* have known, after all, a man painted this - for a long time that some shit is just plain boorish. it's just not done.
and so from Berthold Woltze - The Irritating Gentleman. cw for eye contact.
the layer here that victorians would instantly know and we may not in modernity is the look she gives the viewer - one of deep pain and sadness, along with "not this shit again from another boring blowhard man" - is directly connected to her clothes. she's in mourning, and given she is travelling unaccompanied, a victorian would likely infer that it is her parents or spouse who have died - someone she is the closest to.
so not only is the irritating gentleman awful, but doubly so to victorians.
she's putting out those social marks that are above and beyond having headphones on as a "please leave me alone" signal. she's wearing on her sleeve (literally!) how much she is in pain and needs to be treated sympathetically. it's why the boorish fool is meant to be so skewered to the original audience: even in patriarchal victorian sensibilities, he's so incredibly out of line it's painful. he should be defending her, not harassing her!
