It should be noted that Marian Richards was the same sort of flawed, imperfect human being we all are. As her on-site biography attests, she appears to have grown up in a stifling, friendless environment dominated by the sort of brutish, obscuratist patriarch that seem to populate the Pattersons' world. Old Man Barclay and his Tory swinishness and default misogyny and foul temper ended up producing a woman who was awkward in social settings, had a difficult time both understanding and dealing with people and who (despite thinking him too naive to live in this world) envied her husband his easy-going ways and ability to handle himself in a public settting. While the first years of their marriage seemed to go by in a rush of happy accomplishment, things took a turn for the worse when Elly started displaying signs of a personality.
While Jim and most of the human race saw the inquistive, strong-willed little girl Elly was starting to become as a neutral phenomenon who only needed the mildest correction to keep her steadied, the Marian who got held down all her life saw her child as a petty tyrant in the making who HAD to be subjected to iron discipline to keep her from becoming an angry monster who shoved and bullied her way through life and made life a chaos in which Marian would spend the rest of her life never winning arguments. The solution to the non-problem Elly was is best expressed as follows:
Axiom 1c:
Marian made a point of never letting Elly win any sort of argument as a child owing to the mistaken belief that by doing so, she was saving her from becoming a belligerent monster who stormed through life running people over.
Of course, the problem with this policy is that this sort of thing doesn't work especially well in real life. If you make a point of making sure that your kid is forced to lose all the time for her "own good" like Marian did, you're going to create the sort of monster you fear..especially when you spend most of your time wailing about chaos and anarchy and also play clear favourites. The end result of this sort of thing is, of course:
Axiom 1d:
Not being allowed to win arguments combined with Elly's innate negativity to make her see the world as a chaotic, horrible place in which she had to defend herself against an endless array of opponents who wanted to destroy her and laugh at her suffering as they did so.
If you are digging back into Marian's biography, this one is fascinating because the storyline is very much a sort of "Here is Lynn's version of her own real life mother's life". It does not have the smell of the more even-toned writing of Beth Cruikshank, but seems a lot of like Lynn venting at her imagined version of her mother and father up to and including the way Elly/Lynn was treated by her mother. It is closest thing Lynn has ever written to be like her opinion of her mother in the Tom Heintjes' interview of 1994. Lynn hated her mother's father and in the biography he plays off as this ogre of a man who suppresses his daughters and steals away their inheritance money, like a character out of a Dicken's novel. This is almost the same description Lynn gives him in the Tom Heintjes' interview, where the man suppressed his daughters by not giving them a college education back in the 1930s/40s. However, it does not take much looking at the situation to realize just how far off Lynn was from reality and how petty her reasoning is. Not many women got a college education in the 1930s and 40s, so she might was well blame society as blame her grandfather.
ReplyDeleteUrsula Bainbridge served in WWII, her sister Monica married a wealthy Montreal man, and of course the prize jewel was the sister unmentioned in the Marian biography of Unity Bainbridge who the father did actually send to art school, the same Vancouver School of Art Lynn went to decades later.
As for Marian herself, she is brave enough to serve during WWII, but somehow is completely powerless in the face of the evil father and the Mervyn / Jim character literally has to rescue her with a marriage proposal, which in many respects is insulting to the obvious independent nature of her mother. While Jim takes Marian away from her family, in real life, Ursula made Mervyn move to be close to her family. That tells you that this hatred is all Lynn, but when isn't it?
Then the whole business of disciplining Elly / Lynn the child, Lynn has a real difficulty with this one, because you can tell she wants to say Marian was like the Ursula Lynn described in the Tom Heintjes' interview, but she can't quite go there and say Marian brutally beat young Elly. After all, Marian in the comic strip cannot be portrayed as an evil ogre, just a slightly annoying mother. She's Elly's mom after all and comic strip Elly has to have a great mom. The funny thing about the version of Marian in the comic strip, with the constraints put upon Lynn in being forced to portray her kindly, is that she is probably closer to the real Ursula than any other story Lynn has told about her. I like that part about it. The part of Marian that people will read and remember is truly Ursula.
She cannot allow herself to admit that her mother did the best she could any more than she could admit to her mother being a badass. Doing either thing makes a nonsense of her almost sickening worship of her enabling man-child father. In the first instance, she'd have to admit that people loved her mother for a good reason and that would make her the thing she fears and hates: an abnormality. In the second, admitting that Mom was cool too would to Lynn make Merv lesser and that isn't allowed for in her world-view.
ReplyDelete