Wednesday, October 06, 2010

Linda

What did you think of her and the way she approached life? Were you sympathetic?
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5 comments:

Erin said...

Linda was one of those protagonists that I like and root for but don't identify with at all. She was very emotionally immature and made choices I didn't approve of, but the story was written in such a way that made it seem OK. Like normally I would be rather biased against someone who abandoned her child. But the Linda-Moira story seemed OK to me. Even funny.

11:31 AM, October 07, 2010
cl said...

Yes, that's tough. She was fun and charming and hard not to like despite her shortcomings. Her chief fault was certainly her selfishness, but I don't see how she might have come out much differently what with her upbringing. She wasn't to be educated (although she still sort of crafted a slapdash curriculum for herself) or do much other than make a suitable, rich marriage at a very young age. And then I think that's all you're supposed to want even though you then have a terribly long life ahead of you to fill. And she didn't know how to fill it.

11:00 AM, October 20, 2010
kc said...

Good points. I also found myself liking Linda, despite her emotional immaturity, as Erin described it, and not being on board with many of her decisions. The story graphically bucks the notion that all women are natural mothers and are wholly fulfilled by caring for children. I think Linda's choices regarding Moira are more sympathetic in their time and place — where she didn't really have a meaningful choice about becoming a mother — than they would be now. Christy, I like your observation that she didn't know how to "fill" her life. So true. She was given no meaningful resources with which to navigate the world and could rely only on her vivid sense of freedom.

12:31 PM, October 20, 2010
Erin said...

Yeah, she didn't have much in the way of internal resources. She had grown up believing her life's worth would come from whatever man she was with, which really set her up for failure.

8:30 PM, October 20, 2010
cl said...

I hadn't really thought how that might have been perceived at the time to have a protagonist who wasn't a lovey-dovey mother. That must have been unique.

1:32 PM, October 21, 2010

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