Once you discovered more about Mrs. Stone's own youth and the callousness she was capable of (I'm thinking specifically of the unreciprocated one-night stand with her fellow actor and the firing of the subordinate over jealousy — and generally of the unexamined vanity of her youth), did your sympathy for her shift at all? At one point I had the sensation of finding her less likeable for her faults but simultaneously more human and sympathetic.
Did you like her? Did she ever strike you as heroic?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I found myself resisting that somewhat since the reveals seemed so directly tailored to create just the shift you describe. The one detail we get of her childhood is the “King on the Hill” game. Then we are given an account of her career as explicitly a decades’ long continuation of the same game. At the beginning of the book I filled in my own mental backstory of an actress of the thirties and forties, but this wedge of her history narrowed her to one dimension and thus made her less human and therefore less sympathetic. If Williams had provided a bit more ambiguity to her background, I would not find it so manipulative and wouldn’t resist engaging.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason I had trouble connecting the Mrs. Stone of the present with the Mrs. Stone of the past. They felt like two different people to me.
ReplyDeleteWould the delusional but still aggressive life of Norma Desmond have been a more believable outcome than the unfocused floundering of Mrs. Stone? How is it that Mrs. Stone ends up drifting if she had never before been passive in her life?
ReplyDeleteWell, maybe she's never been passive per se. But she always had a tremendous amount of order in her life. There's a passage about how she always had this rigorous schedule. Hairstylist, photographer, restaurant, theater, etc. "As long as you know where you are to go ... there is a feeling of impregnability." But when the career ends and the husband dies and the schedule that had ordered her life falls away, then she is subject to drift.
ReplyDeleteI don't think a Norma Desmond ending would have been satisfactory here. Mrs. Stone differs from Norma in that Mrs. Stone acknowledges privately that she wasn't that great of an actress. She's matured in the sense that she can now acknowledge "unpleasant truths" about herself, which she couldn't do as a young woman. She's not delusional. She's not seeking a return to a former glory because she understands that the glory was itself rather unreal and undeserved.
As per your comment on a different thread, might, then, Mrs. Stone be about to embark on an adult life with some self-understanding and an appreciation of others as more than just a means to her ends? Although she knows that their relationship is based on false premises, she does seem to be trying to do something like this with Paolo.
ReplyDeleteI did like how, after those structuring aspects to her life had disappeared, she “let herself go” for a bit. But then she started riding again to regain some tone knowing full well that it would not restore her youthful glory but would, perhaps, help her regain her composure. There’s a realistic modesty to that—discovering that she was not, in fact, going to die young, she takes some sensible steps to get on with living.
And she seems to reject the plastic surgery option — Oh my God, can you imagine plastic surgery in the 1950s? She looks at the surgeon's card and says no, surely not that, but she doesn't throw the card away either. She slips it back under the clock.
ReplyDeleteThat was a good way of showing that she did still long for her beauty and could only reluctantly admit that there was no way of getting it back.
ReplyDelete