Middlemarch.
HBO’s series Girls.
While the rest of the world is concerned with important affairs, this blog will concern itself with the affairs of the heart that so-called plain girls indulge and delight in.
There is nothing I like better than to curl up on my couch on a rainy afternoon and watch a good film.
Especially, if it is in black and white.
And it gets even better when there are Academy Award “noms” attached to it.
The year is 1966 and the city is London and Lynn Redgrave is our girl, Georgy.
Charlotte Rampling is her seductive and promiscuous roommate.
Alan Bates provides the eye candy and James Mason plays on the side of the establishment.
While I am devouring this gem of a film, Lena Dunham is tweeting to the world about another George.
George Eliot’s Ugly Beauty by Rebecca Mead is the subject of the September 19th 2013, edition of The New Yorker.
“If George Eliot’s Wikipedia entry has received an unusually high number of views this week, the responsibility lies with Lena Dunham, who tweeted a couple of days ago that the Victorian novelist’s page was “the soapiest most scandalous thing you’ll read this month.”
“Thesis: she was ugly AND horny!”
“There’s a lot more to George Eliot than her less than conventionally beautiful appearance and her possession of a sexual drive—as there is to every other woman whose looks and sexual drive have been the subject of popular commentary, among them Dunham and her “Girls” alter ego, Hannah Horvath.”
Plain girls and sex.
Mouseburgers and penetration.
As I watched Lynn Redgrave’s heart-rendering performance, I was consoling myself with the one fact about the film, and that fact was the sexual playground is a much fairer one to romp around in these days for a girl like Georgy.
Call me the queen of rationalization.
Call me a dreamer.
Because what I was truly thinking was I am watching the 20th century’s version of the 21st century’s version of Lena Dunham’s Girl’s while she is falling in love with a 19th century novel.
Middlemarch was Eliot’s seventh novel and is considered to be one of the great masterpieces of English literature. It was published in 1874 to great popularity.
It dealt with many subjects including the status of women and marriage.
“Eliot was profoundly adroit at charting the intricacies of desire and revulsion in her novels, and in her life she knew what it was to live in fulfilled, enduring intimacy with a passionate and loving partner.”
Apparently, we can learn a great deal from the 19th century about beauty, sex and marriage and mouseburgers.
Georgy Girl ends with Georgina taking on the responsibility of motherhood when she ends up taking the baby from her two married friends while they walk out on both the institutions of marriage and parenthood.
Remember, the pill was not even a decade old when this film was made so we are dealing with the idea that sex can come with serious consequences.
And babies.
Lena Dunham’s character Hannah in Girls has told us she is the voice of her generation.
If she is not the definitive voice, she certainly has great impact on young girls everywhere.
What will Lena Dunham take away from Middlemarch for Hannah and her fans?
“Hannah Horvath (and the many young women who see their own real lives reflected in her imagined one) could learn a lot from “Middlemarch,” and from the choices of its author, about how to live creatively and lovingly in the face of sanctimonious disapproval and cruel disparagement.”
Let us hope that the young Dunham chooses to do this and help put to rest this idea of only beautiful women having great sex and love lives.
What good is history if we do not learn from it?
Yay!
Penetration is not just for the pretty!
Or this is how Henry James would put it.
“Even the
magnificently,
ugly,
deliciously
hideous.”
can get laid.
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