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dreadedcandiru2I'd like to expand on the point I started to make with my previous entry. The reason, of course, is that as much as Elly sort of resents John, she needs him to enable and to validate her strongish need to not make much of herself. We might find his inability (or, more correctly, sullen refusal) to admit that he's ever been unjust, uncaring or unsympathetic to be an appalling character defect; she, on the other hand, needs his steady entitlement to help silence her nagging doubts about the world.
Were the strip to continue, it, as I said, would be fairly likely she'd be deprived of her crutch and, for the first time in decades, really have to rely on her own strengths to survive. This, as I said, would be a fairly intriguing thing to see because, as we know, she's spent so much of her life in a holding pattern waiting for her chance to finally answer the question "Who am I?" For the first few months, of course, she'd answer that with the statement "John Patterson's widow" but I can imagine a crisis that would finally get her off her couch and back into the world again: the discovery that Anthony is not the man she and John thought he was.
If that were the direction the new team were headed in, they'd, of course, start to slowly skirt the issue of the sunken-chested, morose, marriage-destroying hoptoad's sole 'good' feature being his slavish devotion to the Patterson family. Sooner or later, of course, we'd end up dealing with a repetition of the mess Annie found herself in slightly before she was placed on embargo as Liz finally catches Anthony in a lie. The difference, of course, is how Elly would handle it without John around to enable her need to duck the issue; she'd be forced to confront a problem head on and the experience, although scary and novel, would, in the end, be liberating.
That's because she'd finally be forced to confront not only the fact that she likes to surround herself with lying yes-men instead of people who tell her what she needs to hear, she'd finally realize that the voice in her head that tells her that she's an insensitive, self-absorbed clod who doesn't want to learn from her mistakes is her best friend. Without John around to soothe her need to listen to that odd thing he doesn't have called a 'conscience', she'd do something he's too chickenshit to do: examine what she believes and why she believes it.
Having finally figured out who she really is and what she really wants, the Elly of this new order would be a lot more fascinating than the idiot we saw wishing to repeat the past; that's because she'd finally start surrounding herself with fewer idiots like Connie and more fairly-impressive types like Anne. She might even go so far as to admit that she didn't know what she was doing half the time as a wife and mother.
Were the strip to continue, it, as I said, would be fairly likely she'd be deprived of her crutch and, for the first time in decades, really have to rely on her own strengths to survive. This, as I said, would be a fairly intriguing thing to see because, as we know, she's spent so much of her life in a holding pattern waiting for her chance to finally answer the question "Who am I?" For the first few months, of course, she'd answer that with the statement "John Patterson's widow" but I can imagine a crisis that would finally get her off her couch and back into the world again: the discovery that Anthony is not the man she and John thought he was.
If that were the direction the new team were headed in, they'd, of course, start to slowly skirt the issue of the sunken-chested, morose, marriage-destroying hoptoad's sole 'good' feature being his slavish devotion to the Patterson family. Sooner or later, of course, we'd end up dealing with a repetition of the mess Annie found herself in slightly before she was placed on embargo as Liz finally catches Anthony in a lie. The difference, of course, is how Elly would handle it without John around to enable her need to duck the issue; she'd be forced to confront a problem head on and the experience, although scary and novel, would, in the end, be liberating.
That's because she'd finally be forced to confront not only the fact that she likes to surround herself with lying yes-men instead of people who tell her what she needs to hear, she'd finally realize that the voice in her head that tells her that she's an insensitive, self-absorbed clod who doesn't want to learn from her mistakes is her best friend. Without John around to soothe her need to listen to that odd thing he doesn't have called a 'conscience', she'd do something he's too chickenshit to do: examine what she believes and why she believes it.
Having finally figured out who she really is and what she really wants, the Elly of this new order would be a lot more fascinating than the idiot we saw wishing to repeat the past; that's because she'd finally start surrounding herself with fewer idiots like Connie and more fairly-impressive types like Anne. She might even go so far as to admit that she didn't know what she was doing half the time as a wife and mother.
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Date: 2011-07-01 08:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-07-01 10:11 pm (UTC)