I find it rather curious, the paths a mind will choose when pain forbids any normal entertainment. It would appear I am coming round again, the migraine is dissipating and I have had enough drugs and sleep for four people in the last three days.
My thoughts these last few days had a tendency to try and establish some sort of common ground between myself and the protagonist in Cornelia's book, Madeline. I know that sounds laughably absurd, but there you have it. That is precisely what I have been thinking about.
Madeline, as near as I can see, is trapped in the worlds preconception that she is a debutante. She needs to be accepted as she is, for who she is, not what other people think she is or should be. Madeline comes from a family where taffeta dresses lace handkerchiefs and cotillions rule the night and tennis lessons at the country club rule the day. Why, I wonder, do I feel such an affinity with this character?
People who know my family history must just as surely try to put this round person into a square slot. Somewhere along the line I probably wore somebodies third or fourth hand taffeta dress and patent leather shoes or borrowed a pair of lacy anklets for a special occasion. We were very poor according to the ways of the world. We survived without a lot of things, though rarely out of everything all at once. Many times we were out of heating fuel and forced to live with the heat the kitchen stove gave off. Being hungry was pretty much normal for us. A family that can't even afford a box of table salt is destitute and we often were that. As for the social graces, well, lets just say I was well into my twenties before I realized that a cotillion was not something you sheltered under during a storm.
And so I have to wonder, where does it come from? This affinity I feel with the fictional Madeline. Is it because she wants the same things I do? To be seen for who we have become and not as what we were born to be? Whatever the reason, I feel it is a great testimony to the skill of Cornelia's pen. For me at least, she has written a character as real as life.
There is always hope.
Betty
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