Mayfair Witches - A Bit of Review During the Break

Mayfair Witches in 2 Weeks, AMC

While Super Bowl Sunday was in progress in New Orleans, AMC did not air a new episode of Mayfair Witches. Instead, we were able to watch the episodes already aired, in order.

We were also able to see featurettes that discussed some of the more interesting things about Season 2. Of course, I was quite fascinated by the featurette that discussed how the scenes that appeared to be playing out inside the dollhouse!

In recent years, I've come to build 3D models of things, which does include the Mayfair house of the novels.

My first love was miniatures, and seeing how the scenes within the dollhouse, which were events in and around the house in life, were filmed and then merged with the dollhouse was something I didn't even cough once while watching.

Last night, I (mostly) limited it to rewatching the episodes, which I had meant to do with one in particular. I'm glad I did, and the one following it. Not just because I got to go googly-eyed with the dollhouse again, but because I wanted to understand how Rowan split and why. Simply put, she went into the Victrola, which had been in the Mayfair house on its table for eons. Not until Dolly Jean removed the Victrola from the house to bring to her own house did Rowan learn that it had belonged to Julien.

Dolly Jean's house is almost certainly based upon the Amelia Street house of the novels. There has been A LOT of confusion over the years about which New Orleans house Anne Rice used for the house Rowan Mayfair inherited--it was Rice's own home on First Street in the Garden District that she used.

Anne Rice also owned a house that is on the corner of Saint Charles and Amelia Streets, the John Rouse house. It is a beautiful and wonderfully whimsical looking house that Rice used for the home of Mona Mayfair in Lasher.

The house, built by Mona's ancestors who had come from a plantation built and owned by another branch of the Mayfair family, was associated with those "Fontevrault Mayfairs". Those who have read the novels will, I hope, recall just WHY these Fontevrault Mayfairs found themselves in need of a New Orleans outpost. And just WHY this branch, the "Fontevrault Mayfairs", came to be in the first place.

Yep, 3D model of mine.  It's break time...

For those who need a bit of a memory jog or have enjoyed the series but have not read the novels, I'll throw you a bone. No, I didn't find it under the...
Never mind.

The reason for the split in branches and the existence of Fontevrault in the world of the Mayfair family has...well, everything to do with Julien Mayfair.

In the novels, Dolly Jean was definitely a "Fontevrault Mayfair". For those who have not yet read the novels or have forgotten, I don't want to give it away (you have GOT to read the novels now, for this if no other reason--I know, I'm wheedling). I keep mentioning Mona Mayfair, but now that we've reached this point in the season and the series, I can mention another character in relation to this home of Mona Mayfair.

My 3D Model of the Mayfair House

Evelyn.

At first, I was puzzled as to how Evelyn became the character she did. How did this go from Ancient Evelyn to...

Then, we saw the episode I was just referring to when I got to the issue of Dolly Jean's house on the show.

More to the point, we saw what happened after Rowan and Moira went into the house out of concern for Dolly Jean.

If you went to a relative's house and saw that they appeared to be in some sort of unresponsive fog, and no one else appeared to be around, would you stand outside and do nothing?

I should certainly hope not.

My AI Render of a Sketch of the Amelia Street House

Regardless of Evelyn's wrath at discovering Rowan and Moira in the house, no one with any common sense could argue against the two going in out of genuine concern for Dolly Jean. Especially when one of them is a licensed M.D.

And maybe the good doctor did not understand what was going on there, but isn't that why she went in? To understand what was happening to Dolly Jean that appeared to be potentially dangerous and provide medical assistance if necessary?

As it turned out, what was happening did indeed have the ability to be fatal if Dolly Jean wasn't pulled out of Julien's Victrola before the hourglass ran out. When Evelyn went to do this, that is when we learned that she was actually Ancient Evelyn. Dolly Jean's older sister.

Did you notice that Evelyn and even Dolly Jean to a significant extent were far more loving towards Julien, far more devoted to his memory than Cortland or Millie Dear? They didn't harbor any illusions about Julien's...dark side, or even his postmortem role as a puppeteer of living Mayfair descendants who blunder into his afterlife hidey-hole. At all.

This was why Rowan was repeatedly warned away from going into the Victrola to confront Julien and demand he help her find Lasher.

Rowan went anyway. The problem is, she really wasn't as prepared to confront Julien Mayfair as she thought she was. Julien Mayfair knew how to manipulate Mayfairs in life and that clearly hadn't changed in death. Rowan went to leave, but she either hadn't been properly briefed on the rules or she wasn't listening, as he would undoubtedly have had anyone believe.

Only Julien was allowed to decide who left his Victrola hidey-hole and survived it. Generally speaking, we all know that when we assess our situations with our hearts and not with our intellects, we can make rash decisions that end up destroying us. It's not to say that only using the intellect to make our most important life decisions and assess the true circumstances we find ourselves in can only lead to painless results.

That was made clear when Julien explained to Rowan just how he'd split her into two. Her intellect, trapped in the Victrola with him, felt nothing, no emotion. Looking back into the dollhouse at the other half of Rowan, what was she seeing? That part of her with Lark, acting and thinking only from her heart. Was that part of Rowan who was with Lark and baring her heart wrong to do that? No, not necessarily.

Indecision on Rowan's part as to the wisdom of telling Lark the most important details about her out of the love she clearly still felt for him is the sort of thing a puppeteer like Julien would find amusing. If he ever behaved that way, it was because he was manipulating the person he was behaving that way with. Without Rowan's intellectual side, Julien pretty clearly hoped Rowan's heart-driven mind would not be enough to gather that she was, in fact, still partially stuck in the Victrola.

Oops.

When he did, he might as well have stomped over to his bar and smacked down the Scotland vineyard's finest Mayfair reserve and, like a petulant child, whined, "Fine!"

Of course, Julien Mayfair didn't want Rowan to find Lasher. But since splitting her in two so it would kill her didn't work, he'd let her know where Albrecht Escher took Lasher. Obviously, he had become aware that because Cortland had been manipulated and betrayed by Escher, that meant Julien had, as well.

Uh oh. There's some departure from the novels here, yes.

Mayfair Witches in 1 Week, AMC

Despite that, I'm pretty curious to see how modern-day Scotland is for Rowan, Lark and the Mayfairs who travel with her. So far, we do know Lasher was taken to Scotland and Ciprien Grieve, who was also lied to, was whisked away to the Talamasca motherhouse in Amsterdam. Why?

And who is this Ian fella all of a sudden?

Well, so far, Ian is a brute. Enough of a brute that my soft heart forced my hands over my eyes and even caused me to divebomb behind my laptop screen so I could glare at some idiotic old social media screenshots instead as I permanently and with nasty glee deleted them from my existence. It was therapeutic.

In the novels, Lasher and Rowan did indeed go to Scotland. It was different, though. When characters in the present day return to a location occupied by their ancestors long before, if the reason for the appearance of the present-day characters is related to those ancestors and what happened to them, this is the kind of bridge across time I love to read about. Anne Rice loved to write about them. I'm hoping to see this play out well in the series the way it did in the novels.

I kept forgetting the name of the Talamasca guy in the series, Albrecht Escher. I kept wrinkling my brow wondering, "What...who...?"

In the last few weeks, I recalled something.

Albrecht Dürer Self Portrait, 1500

In the beginning the novel, Lasher, Gifford Mayfair thought Lasher looked like the self-portrait of Albrecht Dürer.

Classic paintings are a part of the Lives of the Mayfair Witches, most notably Rembrandt's The Anatomy Lesson. It's hardly surprising that Rice's character would use classic art to try to illustrate for the reader what Lasher's physical appearance was. Even if it was from the perspective of an individual character.

If you've ever heard of the artist, M.C. Escher, you probably have some idea of his work. One could spend hours staring at his work, following the staircases straight into walls, that sort of thing. I heard the character's name, Albrecht Escher, and thought, "Oh!"

Just for funsies, I thought I'd throw that out there.

As for Ancient Evelyn, the reason it fits for her also to live in the house Dolly Jean lives in, which is probably meant to be the Amelia Street house in the series is because in the novels as well, Amelia Street is her home. In fact, the Amelia Street house can be said to belong to Ancient Evelyn the way the First Street house now belongs to Rowan. The short answer is inheritance.

I'll have to really do a page to screen comparison that will spell a lot of this out, including the fact that Gifford and Alicia Mayfair were actually Ancient Evelyn's granddaughters. There is one other thing about Ancient Evelyn that might or might not be interesting.

Recently, the question has been, "Where is Lasher?" That is a bit of a shift from the question we've been asking since Day One. Episode One. Book One.

What does Lasher want?

Rowan thought Cortland knew what that was. It's believed Julien Mayfair knew what that was. But did he? How about Ancient Evelyn, though? Does she know?

In Lasher, she had a pretty good idea. And she did share it with Julien. She did so in the form of a poem. And while I am first going to direct you to the page of the Parlor where that poem can be read, that page will in turn direct you to where in the Mass Market edition of Lasher that poem can be found.

I might have a hard cover edition of Lasher around here somewhere...