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The nature of the beasts: Elizabeth.
Dec. 18th, 2015 01:28 amOf course, the odd thing about Michael is that despite being hampered with male entitlement, he does seem to have a sort of warped moral code. Even though his idea of right and wrong is predicated on not having the guys be embarrassed and shown up by moms who want to make them slaves to family politics, he does have something resembling a system of ethics and ideas of what honorable behavior might be. This is not quite the case with Liz who thinks that right and wrong are a function of whether people make way for her.
As I've said before, Elizabeth seems to represent not only the tendency Lynn has to idealize her father and make of him a perfect man and love object despite his being quite obviously a rather boring white guy who was scared out of his mind of social change that might make him give up free stuff, she also seems to represent Lynn's incessant hunger for essentially unearned approval as well as her lack of curiosity as to how others see the world. Mike has to pay a certain amount of attention to how others think in order to survive in the work force but since Liz was handed authority by being given a teacher's licence, she has no such restraint on her swinishness.
This, I think, is why she was putty in Anthony's hands when he grew tired of being married to Thérèse because she started to make dangerous, scary noise about no longer caring about what a bunch of old men who were never going to budge thought about them and thus needing to leave the familiar and bland behind them. Liz doesn't like to have to care about how the people around her think and she sort of wanted to be carried around on a litter all her life so all he had to do is wind her up and watch her alienate and anger someone to the point that she got so sick of her, she just threw stuff her way to get rid of her. Given that said stuff happened to be her husband, child and a significant chunk of her self-respect, you can appreciate the need to not be around the Breath any more than you have to. Meanwhile, Liz assumes that Therese is a bad person because she said bad things about her and wants her to be alone and never have Daddy smile at her again and no, she's not some spoiled five year old running around in an adult world. To imply that would mean that she's also Lynn's lack of anything similar to self-awareness and that would be awful.
As I've said before, Elizabeth seems to represent not only the tendency Lynn has to idealize her father and make of him a perfect man and love object despite his being quite obviously a rather boring white guy who was scared out of his mind of social change that might make him give up free stuff, she also seems to represent Lynn's incessant hunger for essentially unearned approval as well as her lack of curiosity as to how others see the world. Mike has to pay a certain amount of attention to how others think in order to survive in the work force but since Liz was handed authority by being given a teacher's licence, she has no such restraint on her swinishness.
This, I think, is why she was putty in Anthony's hands when he grew tired of being married to Thérèse because she started to make dangerous, scary noise about no longer caring about what a bunch of old men who were never going to budge thought about them and thus needing to leave the familiar and bland behind them. Liz doesn't like to have to care about how the people around her think and she sort of wanted to be carried around on a litter all her life so all he had to do is wind her up and watch her alienate and anger someone to the point that she got so sick of her, she just threw stuff her way to get rid of her. Given that said stuff happened to be her husband, child and a significant chunk of her self-respect, you can appreciate the need to not be around the Breath any more than you have to. Meanwhile, Liz assumes that Therese is a bad person because she said bad things about her and wants her to be alone and never have Daddy smile at her again and no, she's not some spoiled five year old running around in an adult world. To imply that would mean that she's also Lynn's lack of anything similar to self-awareness and that would be awful.
