What did you guys make of this:
Speaking of Betty: Her world was not the world and could never include the readers of his column. Her sureness was based on the power to limit experience arbitrarily. Moreover, his confusion was significant, while her order was not.
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Hmm. I was going to ask about the bucolic interlude at Betty’s aunt’s farm. I think the quote you put up might help with that. There has been a long tradition of pining for the simpler times and simpler life of the country. Sometimes too, this is put religiously with cities being the site of vice and corruption against the pure certitudes of rural life. But West is having none of it. He gives an image of the two running around naked in Eden. While Lonelyhearts might be less miserable during this romp, he knows he won’t be “cured”, won’t forget the letters, and won’t be able to stay on the farm. Betty’s solution of dedicating yourself to the simple but time consuming labors needed to live life and keeping an ordered world and an ordered mind that doesn’t ponder the endless chaos and misery outside, is just not available to Lonelyhearts since he knows those things are still out there.
ReplyDeleteYou haven't told us what you make of the passage, Kim! I'd love to hear your thoughts. :)
ReplyDeleteAnd your thoughts on the women more generally.
ReplyDeleteShanxi, My first impression is that the passage was maybe a way of saying that Betty's a bit shallow, that she goes through life with blinders, that she never pauses too long to think about other people's suffering, that she has no tragic sense. But then I don't know if that's quite right.
ReplyDeleteA little later in that same passage Lonelyhearts talks about entropy and how life tends toward disorder. He uses the example of mandolins striving to be out of tune. And how people have to constantly work to maintain the order that Nature naturally seeks to destroy.
Maybe Lonelyhearts is drawn to Betty because her undauntable, if somewhat superficial, spirit is kind of an emotional anchor for him.
Not sure what I think of the women in this book, DW. I sort of had the feeling that West didn't think much of women. But it's hard to tell because all of these characters were so strange, and all the male-female relationships seemed fraught with hostility and resentment ... but then so did the male-male ones. What did you guys think?
Isn’t Betty the closest to a “normal” person in the story? She doesn’t dell on suffering in general, but she does seem to be trying to cure Lonelyhearts ills by getting him out of town for some rest and preparing and taking him food when he is incapacitated in his room. She is acting in accord with a traditional womanly caregiver role that fits her expectation of being his wife.
ReplyDeleteLonelyhearts, on the other hand, has a pathological fixation on suffering. One of the cinema-like images that intrigued me was as they returned from the country he saw all the people in the streets as grotesquely deformed. Betty chose a project of pragmatic size—saving Lonelyhearts, while Lonelyhearts has gone mad with the burden of the whole city.
Yeah, I’m not sure I would say West is treating the women any worst than the men particularly since Betty seems to be the only character with much by way of redeeming features.
I’m still mulling over the remarkable passages from when Lonelyhearts leaves the Doyles until the end. One involves Lonelyhearts and Betty. As they leave Shrike’s place, Lonelyhearts suddenly realizes that Betty is the sort of person who dresses for parties. This has a sudden effect on Lonelyhearts and for the rest of the scene he is interacting not with Betty but with the party dress. What do you make of this and how does it relate to the passage you quoted?
That's a nice observation, DW: "Betty chose a project of pragmatic size—saving Lonelyhearts, while Lonelyhearts has gone mad with the burden of the whole city."
ReplyDeleteIt again reminds me of "Catcher in the Rye" and how Holden felt saddled with a similar gargantuan burden, and meanwhile he was so moved by his little sister, Phoebe, and the things she did at elementary school and the trinkets and objects she so innocently found meaning in. The example of her life was some kind of window into a lost Eden that comforted and amazed Holden, or, as he'd likely put it, that "really killed" him. I thought maybe something similar was going on with the party-dress in "Lonelyhearts" — a fascination that Betty can be so genuinely into and unironic about evening wear and parties.
I like how you have extended your “Catcher in the Rye” comparison. If they lack the usual sort of connections that people have, then it is easy enough to see that characters like Lonelyhearts and Holden would be hostile and alienated. But the interesting idea here is that they are weighed down by the woes of humanity in general because those connections, for most people, help limit the scale of our concerns and build a framework in which we live our lives.
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