Women

Deciding that Thanksgiving was best spent alone this year, I called to inform Dolly, who soon after answering the phone declared that someone was at her door. "I'll see you later!" Ah well, that's Dolly. I will never have the relationship that I would like with my mother, but I love her. What can I say?

Later in the day, which was snowy and blustery, I drove to the local multiplex and saw Walk the Line and Pride and Prejudice. The movies had similarities. Sexual attraction, misunderstanding, longing and desire, waiting, pursuit, succumbing.... "happy endings". Mo says Joaquin Phoenix is hot, and I say Joaquin never lets you down. He captured that Johnny Cash intensity. Don't you just have the feeling Joaquin is crazy in real life, too? (Why is that hot? See why I can never trust myself to have a relationship with a man ever again?)

Pride and Prejudice totally satisfied my need for a good period piece. Visually rich with costumes and landscape and close-ups of crowded chaotic dancing at balls, shadows on faces and hands running over marble sculptured nudes, I loved it. Of course Darcy is the perfect quiet brooding misunderstood flawed love interest.

I wonder whether girls who see the movie think of the treatment of women in late 18th century England. Do they see the movie simply as a love story in which to submerge themselves? As history? As silliness? Do they look critically? In some ways women have come so far, and in others it seems that we have gone full-circle and our need to attract men really is based on survival. Was love possible in Georgian England when society was based on their subjugation? Is love possible in 21st century US, where misogyny is quite open and flourishing, where strong women are still "bitches" and strong men are "heroes"?

I love the stubborn and feisty Elizabeth Bennett and the supportive sisterhood that Jane Austen's novels modeled. The goodheartedness that existed with the bad. The tomboyishness, the bare feet on dirt paths, the experience of nature that travel demanded in an age without commercial airlines, air conditioning, all of the luxuries that we consider essential today. I love the giddy Lydia, the world of girls, the sad and silly fate of women, who have experienced a form of genocide themselves. The joy that resides amidst the pathos.