Connie and Annie: Stereotypes in Stereo

[dreadedcandiru2]

As a means of bracing myself for the inevitable, soul-ravaging reminder of how it’s good that Liz crawled back into the womb, I’d like to take this opportunity to remind us about why Annie and Connie are also the sort of screaming idiots that litter the chick-lit cosmos. The means by which I intend to do so involves my essay about something I referred to as the Foob Infidelity Cycle: as you will recall, it’s a means by which a woman can reduce a man to peonage while still claiming the title of victim despite being the aggressor. You will also recall that Annie dismisses Steve’s likes and dislikes within earshot as if he actually were part of the furniture and has the unlovely habit of not being able to handle the weird, unfair male concept called ‘cause and effect’. If her child has six fingers, it isn’t simply a harmless fluke, it’s because she’s a failure as a mother and if her life hasn’t turned out to be the Disney fantasy she’d hoped, it’s not because Hollywood lied to her, it’s because of a plot against her. In the real world, Steve’s infidelity would be a glowing opportunity to re-examine her life and see that reality is preferable to the chick lit cosmos; what happened, of course, is that she shifted from being one stereotype (the delusional little wifey ready to believe any lie) to another: Wife-as-prison-warden. In both instances, she defined who and what she was in relation to a man instead of being a person in her own right. This explains why she doesn’t respect Connie: Connie’s men have a habit of escaping her clutches so her fellow cliché is seen as being weak. Also, since Annie is fairly stupid, she doesn’t quite realize that the feminist posings that confuse, frighten and irritate her are the result of protesting too much; a person whose brains hadn’t atrophied from lack of use would immediately spot Connie as only spouting about how she didn’t need a man because she didn’t have one. Annie, on the other hand, would ask how it was even possible to protest too much. Annie’s tendency to look down on Connie for having a child out of wedlock are equally suspect; she simply isn’t smart enough to realize that Lawrence is meant to be bait for men who want an instant family. Connie, by the same coin, has no real reason to regard Annie as the brainwashed victim of a scoundrel; she herself defines herself by who she’s married to and has made it quite clear that nothing, not Greg’s daughters and not even the son she used to attract him are more important than being Mrs Greg; to shake her heading in despair at someone more tenacious and equally ready to sacrifice herself in order to avoid the horror of defining herself as a person rather than an adjunct to someone with a penis seems, well, a trifle silly.