Elly, Phil and the real injustice.

[dreadedcandiru2]

It seems to me that my earlier post about Elly holding a grudge against her parents for unfair treatment is hogwash. Given how it baffled her that Annie would reject her mother's teachings, it seems to me that Elly wouldn't be trying to turn herself into Marian if she thought she was a bad parent or especially unfair. Also, her constant bleating about how she got married instead of merely cohabiting and her incessant fretting that her children might emulate Phil and Georgia means that she respects the values her parents taught her. Most of her angst stems from the lesser fear of not measuring up to her mother and the greater fear of not being listened to. As we see in the strip, her non-stop hostility and martyrdom come from her realization that her husband and children tend to tune out her non-stop lecturing because they don't seem to take her seriously. Since she's as angry at Phil as she is at them, it seems to me his refusal to listen to her was the real source of all the bickering between them. Given her love of the idea of being in charge of people, I should think that she saw herself as a deputy mother, duty-bound to help her parents by giving Phil what she sees as gentle reminders to behave properly and which he (and, more than likely, their parents) saw as intrusive lectures about something that was neither really a problem or any of her business. As howtheduck reminds us below, the big project she had that wasn't trying to manage his love life for him was getting him to stop smoking. As we see from doing a keyword search on the catalog, neither he or Jim listened to their female relatives about kicking the habit and only did so on the orders of a male doctor. Of course, this is just an example of what really bothers Elly about her childhood. Based on Phil's snarling about Elly more than making up for whatever 'unfairness' she perceives herself as having suffered growing up and on seeing the long, boring, off-point and essentially futile tirades that Mike, Liz and April were subjected to as children, what I now think happened is that she had a habit of trying to help her parents (or what she thought was helping) by lecturing Phil about an issue about which she had imperfect and incomplete knowledge; not only would he angrily tell her to keep her opinion to herself, Marian or Jim would tell her to step off because he already had two parents, both of whom actually knew what they were doing. This, of course, means that all her ranting about dolls, curfews and bicycles are a smoke-screen to keep from doing something she hates doing: talking about what really bothers her. She doesn't have the guts and the honesty to simply confront Phil and ask him "Why is it that I did everything I was supposed to and all I get from Mom and Dad is 'Well, if your choices make you happy, we're happy for you BUT...' while all you ever did was rebel against every norm and they spend their lives boasting about you? How the Hell is that fair?" What she doesn't want to admit is that Jim and Marian might actually have a reason to be more proud of him; as we know, he worked his ass off to get his degree (while she sort of wimped out when John came into view) and he's still chugging along like a boogie-woogie choo-choo train. As for her being the model wife and mother she's supposed to be, that's a bit of a stretch. She shrieks at the incompetent dentist she landed because he can't even read her simple mind, she treats her children like they have the plague, her idea of fine cuisine is Cheapie Weenie Casserole and her idea of keeping a tidy house is moving the dirt around after doing all the laundry every day. They can't help but compare Phil having the good life to all of her chaos and martyrdom and thus finding her wanting. Not, of course, that she sees it that way; in her mind, all she has to do is to prove once and for all that she's more loyal to what she thinks their values are and she'll get all the praise she's so far been denied; the way to do that is to get Phil to settle down.

Comments

[howtheduck.livejournal.com]

Possibility that she saw herself as a deputy mother, duty-bound to help her parents by giving Phil what she sees as gentle reminders to behave properly.

As near as I can tell from looking at Lives Behind the Lines, Elly's issues with Phil are very close to Lynn's own issues with her brother Alan. In the book, Lynn talked at length about how the way she treated her brother with respect to his smoking was very similar to the way that Elly (and then later Georgia)reacted to Phil's smoking habits. In this respect she was not very different from Marian, because Marian complained about Jim's smoking as did Elly later on. I remember the anti-smoking edicts were starting to come about in the political scene more heavily around the 1980s. My workplace at the time went to completely non-smoking in 1985 and they were pretty militant about enforcing it.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

I also noticed that it took a male doctor to get both Jim and Phil to finally quit; there's something about both of them that makes them not take female advice as seriously as they should.

[howtheduck.livejournal.com]

Phil did temporarily quit for Georgia as I recollect, but then he went back to smoking. Ironically, if Lynn reprints the strips coming up to the "Connie goes to Montreal" sequence we will get this sequence about Connie adoring the pipe Phil left (http://catalog.fborfw.com/indexkeywords.php?q=pipe&Submit=Search) which comes before it. That's a definite contrast to the anti-smoking edicts of Georgia and Elly.

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

I wonder if that's why Elly had that case of the giggles when she contemplated smokers burning to death; knowing her, she's vengeful enough to want Phil to spontaneously combust for never listening to her.

[howtheduck.livejournal.com]

I forgot about that strip. However, it is possible that this could be an outlet for Lynn's own anti-smoking thoughts. She did have the Kelpfroths get burned up thanks to smoking and they were a nice, childless couple like Phil and Georgia. So much of the strip comes from Lynn's own life, so why not the Kelpfroths too?

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

It was in one of the retcon from March 2007:

I went outside for a walk and on the door I noticed a sign that read "hand sanitizer flammable if not completely dry". I laughed to myself, imagining the guy who accidentally lit his digits while trying to light his smoke.

She said she was under a lot of stress at the time but, knowing her, she'd have thought it a gut-buster if Jim was still healthy.

[aprilp-katje.livejournal.com]

It's curious that Connie is thinking that she cannot ask Elly for Phil's address in order to send him the pipe. And then 12 days later, she drops hints until Elly gives her the address. Bwuh?

[dreadedcandiru2.livejournal.com]

It was twelve days to us but to her, it was twelve eternities without a man in her life; Lynn cannot stress enough how clingy, needy and desperate single women are or how big a threat they pose to marriages.

(Of course, she shot herself in the foot by making that into a good thing when the marriage threatened was Thérèse's and Liz was the one doing the threatening; not that she will admit it, of course.)