Work Text:
It's not that Eliza was dumb, an idiot or stupid.
She was acutely aware of her position as a woman, a high society woman, but a woman at last. Words to describe her situation wouldn't be uttered until decades after her time, but she knew that her path was drastically altered the moment she was born a girl, the moment she stopped being a potential man and was, instead, a fragile baby girl. And still, she had a brain and a mind of her own; she wasn't a willing fool, she had a spirit, she had a world inside of her. It was just that, despite it all (and under the shield that her last name provided her), she had grown and decided to be kind. Despite how many times her tenderness led to her demise, despite how many times she was dismissed as naive, she was gentle. Gentle and soothing, not as a newborn calf, but as a cold river. Her determination to be affable was itself a force embedded in her nature.
It wasn't strange for women in her times and circumstances to bow; it was certainly not an unexpected attitude for a woman to be gentle, sweet or passive. It was even more common that men stepped on women who they deemed submissive enough to take the blow.
Eliza could be rich, but she was still laced into place.
When Hamilton cheated on her, the heart ache wasn't caused by the utter disrespect and humiliation it caused her, she had grown a tolerance to her dignity being degraded (how else could she have survived this world long enough to be courted in the first place?) No, the sharp, nauseating pain came because the humiliation was a long overdue reminder. She was a woman, now and until the end; Alexander was a man. He was a bright mind, a brilliant writer and a tormented child, he was also completely incapable of comprehending anything he couldn't imagine himself experimenting. The only hatred Alexander had in mind when writing the pamphlet was toward the Reynolds', maybe even Jefferson, but it was an absolute slap in the face to Eliza. Because the hate Alexander felt for her was so deep in the creeks of his brain that he couldn't even phantom it was hate. The way he stepped all over her, his marriage, his children just to secure his political career, just went to tell how disposable her love was to him. He didn't do it because she viscerally hated her; he did it because his political career and his potential were more personal to him than Eliza was a person in his eyes. The knife was on his hand long before he even met Eliza.
And so, she felt the betrayal and the disappointment seep deep into her mind, deep into her bones and to restrain her every breath. She felt the shame that should belong to him blurring her face into a mere paragraph. It was simply too much, to much of the oh so familiar sensation all of a suden. She went after the letters, her first and last act of violence to reply to all of his "love". And as the letters curled into themselves and the ink faded from black love poems into fleeting gray smoke, she couldn't help but wish she was born anything, anything but a woman. Anything but a daughter, anything but a bride, anything but a wife, anything at all but her inescapable destiny.