Sit down, don’t rock the boat.
What They Say:
Episode #10: “Katarina’s Dinner”
Katarina invites Arte to the dinner she prepares at Yuri’s, and Yuri tells Arte more about Katarina’s past.
The Review
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Katarina takes Arte to dinner at her uncle Yuri’s house. A cheerful staff happily make a large meal for everyone to partake in, with Katarina running the kitchen as a pint-sized chef. Yuri takes Arte aside and lets her know what Katarina’s young life was like.
We learn Katarina was raised by her wet nurse, with the son of her nurse taking a brotherly role in the family. Away from the city with only a small staff, Katarina learned a love of cooking and grew up as a girl of a lower class would. That freedom was brought to a crashing halt when she is told she will have to return to her own mother soon. Katarina rails against the pushing away from the only family she ever knew and didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to her surrogate mother before the woman died.
Not only that, Gimo, the son, refused to talk to Katarina after that. The girl was left without a home, not belonging to either family. She was unwanted by everyone who should have mattered to her.
It was easy to see Katarina’s mother as part of the problem in this situation. We learn that she’s just as much a victim of society’s expectations for how upper-class women are supposed to behave. Katarina’s mother was doing what she was told to do. Stay quiet, support her husband, don’t argue with him. Her daughter is her failure to produce yet another son. Her daughter was seen as a burden and sent away to a wet nurse. Noble ladies don’t breastfeed their own children, that is beneath them. She was never given a chance to bond with her daughter. It makes sense that her daughter would form a motherly attachment to her nurse.
Arte’s righteous indignation actually works out in her favor. Her angry appeal to Katarina’s mother and mouthing off to the head of the household doesn’t get her immediately ejected from her employment but results in a mother and daughter finally forming a much-needed connection. It gave Katarina’s mother the courage to stand up for what was best for her daughter’s happiness. And in the end, all Katarina wanted was to be seen. If it was in a negative light, at least she was still being seen. Instead, she gets what she really needed, a mother again.
I do find it curious that, once again, the lesson appears to be to suck it up and work within the system. Katarina eventually acquiesces and shows proper manners to her father. Sure, she does it mostly to save Arte’s job, but it shows growth on Katarina’s part. Or does it? It’s hard to say. It’s more of a cold, hard reality check.
Arte breathes a sigh of relief at not failing her new job, and for reuniting a mother and daughter.
In Summary:
As comforting as it is to see Katarina finally accept her mother and vice-versa, there is still an underlying sense of unease in the lessons being learned in this series. It will be centuries before women are given basic human rights in Italy, so for Arte and Katarina, and independent women like them, the best they can hope for is baby steps in the right direction. Independence means playing by society’s rules and working within them to achieve desires and gain success. Men like Leo and Yuri, who are willing to look past matters of gender and class roles, are rare. All of the girlish spark in the world won’t save you from history, and this series isn’t about to break that anachronism.
Episode Grade: B
Streamed by: Funimation
