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Elly and Deanna's shared blindspot
Mar. 1st, 2013 02:00 amAs I tried to say yesterday, it seems to me that a lot of the animosity that Elly directs at Marian comes from the same source as the hatred Deanna feels for Mira. From what we've seen, both alleged dictator parents are being upbraided for expecting more of their daughters than they're willing to (or, for that matter, able to) deliver. Just as we have Marian not seeing how stupid Elly really is, Mira seems to have convinced herself that most of why Deanna's life sucks is because Mike is dragging her down because she doesn't want to have to face the fact that her youngest is an apathetic dumb-ass with an allergy to being happy and a fear of failure that mandates that she not do anything to improve her lot.
What compounds this horrible mother-daughter cold war is that we have to remember that Deanna and Elly deign to feel pity for their fathers owing to a belief that their domineering mothers overruled them too much. While it's true that Marian point-blank refused to let Jim own a dog because she thought she was doing right by the family and that Mira tends to engage in a certain amount of social climbing and doing the whole apron matron thing to Wilf in a similar belief that she's doing her husband a solid, it seems to me that when Dee and Elly bemoan the cruel way in which their mothers tyrannized their fathers, they both wound up speaking fluent Nonsense. It seems to me that Jim is a lot stronger a personality than the daughter who thinks of him as something of a victim realizes. The most tragic example of her belief that aside from spanking her, Jim could do no wrong is that she doesn't realize that most of why Phil 'got away' with things is not just because Marian freaked out because Elly was more active than a girl 'should' have been, her poor, frail dad seems to have spent a lot of time transfixed by the idea that his daughter having pre-marital sex and/or smoking a joint would inevitably to the Soviet conquest of North America. She also can't see that Marian was less a tyrant than she was an enforcer for a real ogre.
As I said, she shares this defect with Deanna. A man who sits on his arse watching his wife and child get into a pointless scrap because he's too lazy to do something about it can't exactly be called a good guy so it occurs to me that just maybe, Wilf is the same sort of jerk Jim was. We don't really get the sort of proof that we get when Jim ranted about Society heading into the abyss because he lives in a world where Liz ain't going to be burned at the stake for playing house with Eric but watching Wilf let Mira take all the blame tends to disabuse me of any idea that he's all that nice a person.
What compounds this horrible mother-daughter cold war is that we have to remember that Deanna and Elly deign to feel pity for their fathers owing to a belief that their domineering mothers overruled them too much. While it's true that Marian point-blank refused to let Jim own a dog because she thought she was doing right by the family and that Mira tends to engage in a certain amount of social climbing and doing the whole apron matron thing to Wilf in a similar belief that she's doing her husband a solid, it seems to me that when Dee and Elly bemoan the cruel way in which their mothers tyrannized their fathers, they both wound up speaking fluent Nonsense. It seems to me that Jim is a lot stronger a personality than the daughter who thinks of him as something of a victim realizes. The most tragic example of her belief that aside from spanking her, Jim could do no wrong is that she doesn't realize that most of why Phil 'got away' with things is not just because Marian freaked out because Elly was more active than a girl 'should' have been, her poor, frail dad seems to have spent a lot of time transfixed by the idea that his daughter having pre-marital sex and/or smoking a joint would inevitably to the Soviet conquest of North America. She also can't see that Marian was less a tyrant than she was an enforcer for a real ogre.
As I said, she shares this defect with Deanna. A man who sits on his arse watching his wife and child get into a pointless scrap because he's too lazy to do something about it can't exactly be called a good guy so it occurs to me that just maybe, Wilf is the same sort of jerk Jim was. We don't really get the sort of proof that we get when Jim ranted about Society heading into the abyss because he lives in a world where Liz ain't going to be burned at the stake for playing house with Eric but watching Wilf let Mira take all the blame tends to disabuse me of any idea that he's all that nice a person.
