Sunday, May 17, 2009

The Daily Backwards Life of Elly Patterson

In today's reprint of For Better or For Worse, we have a glimpse at Elly Patterson's daily routine.

First, she does the cleaning. Second, she does the ironing. Third she does the wash. Fourth, she puts the baby in bed. Fifth, she tries to use her free time for a cup of coffee and looking at a newspaper / magazine. Sixth, her son comes home from rolling in the mud and asks for food.

It seems like a strange chronological succession compared to my life. I usually do the ironing after I do the wash. When my kids were little, I often did the cleaning while they were asleep. Not only that, but I rarely put my youngest to bed, when my oldest had not yet been fed. Everything seems out-of-order to me.

However, I need to remember that this is the land of Milborough revisited. This is the land where the sports bars have flat screen TVs, while the house TV has dials for UHF and VHF. This is the land where Anne Nichols can unbirth a child. This is the land where a daughter can form complete sentences one day and revert to a one-word dialogue the next. When you live in a land like this, where time seems to be running amok, then maybe today’s reprint of For Better or For Worse makes perfect sense.

If I take today’s strip, this is the land where you do the ironing before you do the wash, instead of the opposite way around. This the land where you sit down to read the paper and have a cup of coffee just before your child comes home from school or the mud pits (or wherever), instead of the opposite way around. It’s all starting to make sense now. If I reverse the chronological order from what I would expect in my life, then I get the daily life of Elly Patterson.

Certainly it’s better to try and apply a certain logic which would make sense of the comic strip than to look at yet another, nonsensical attempt to make us pity poor Elly Patterson. What the reprint tells us is, even at the very beginning, in the first years of the strip, the worst strips Lynn Johnston does are the ones where she tries to make us sympathize with a poor, put-upon Patterson. She is so over-the-top. How could Lynn ever think that these kinds of strips would work? No housewife is going to look at that long litany of accomplishments Elly is spouting out that she did, and think “Wow! She’s done so much. I hope she gets time to rest.” They are going to think, “There’s no way she did all that stuff. Big liar!!”

7 Comments:

Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

howard,No housewife is going to look at that long litany of accomplishments Elly is spouting out that she did, and think “Wow! She’s done so much. I hope she gets time to rest.” They are going to think, “There’s no way she did all that stuff. Big liar!!”That or they'll think she did a rushed, slipshod job on all of them. Either way, they are not going to sympathize with Elly's non-stop negativity.

2:55 AM  
Blogger April Patterson said...

Sixth, her son comes home from rolling in the mud and asks for food. She really seemed to enjoy drawing him filthy, didn't she? Then she has a reason to go into this. :)

3:59 AM  
Blogger howard said...

DreadedCandiru2,

That or they'll think she did a rushed, slipshod job on all of them. Either way, they are not going to sympathize with Elly's non-stop negativity.-

There is a certain element will all these kinds of stories which requires a certain suspension of disbelief. When Lynn Johnston starts piling it on, she eventually hits a point where only the most ardent fans can look at it and still relate to the story. “Rushed slipshod job” could be a way to explain it, although you know that’s not the way Lynn is thinking about it. She has done the “Elly does a good job and gets a reward, which is interrupted by one of the kids” sequence over-and-over again.

6:31 AM  
Blogger howard said...

aprilp_katje,

Sixth, her son comes home from rolling in the mud and asks for food. She really seemed to enjoy drawing him filthy, didn't she? Then she has a reason to go into this. :)-

It does seem to make chronological sense now that the Malevolent bath duck strip appeared before the “Michael comes home after rolling in mud” strip.

6:32 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

No housewife is going to look at that long litany of accomplishments Elly is spouting out that she did, and think “Wow! She’s done so much. I hope she gets time to rest.” They are going to think, “There’s no way she did all that stuff. Big liar!!”Yes. No one bothers to clean the house (and you know Elly has cleaned all of it, scrubbed the toilets and everything) and do all the laundry and the ironing in one day. What I find interesting is that Elly puts all these chores on the same level as putting "the baby" to bed. (Elly calling Liz "baby" instead of by her name, freaks me out, by the way.) Putting a toddler in her crib for naptime is not hard.

Poor poor Elly. Her son wants something from her. My mom always had snacktime with me when I came home from school, and every neighborhood mom I knew did the same. (My mom ate a lot of peanut butter and honey sandwiches, apples and Spagghetios back then.) She'd sit and eat with me, then I'd go play, and as far as I could tell she never considered it an imposition. Often she'd even play with me. But Elly can never do something for someone else that is also for herself. It's either-or: if someone else gains benefit from it, then it doesn't count for her.

1:52 PM  
Blogger DreadedCandiru2 said...

clio_1mBut Elly can never do something for someone else that is also for herself. It's either-or: if someone else gains benefit from it, then it doesn't count for her.Of course; that's because she's not too terribly bright. Her mind can only hold one thought at a time so helping Mike AND herself is beyond her.

2:37 PM  
Blogger howard said...

clio-1,

But Elly can never do something for someone else that is also for herself. It's either-or: if someone else gains benefit from it, then it doesn't count for her.-

It’s interesting how Elly never seems to take enjoyment from her children. One of my favourite strips is this one from 7/9/2000 where we see Elly Patterson playing with the Mayes’ kids Paul and Rosemary. Not only is it one of the few times we ever see Elly playing with children but; contrary to Elly’s prediction in the strip, she never plays with her grandchildren the way she plays with Paul and Rosemary. As we go through the reprints, I will be interested to see if Lynn ever shows us young Elly playing with Michael and Elizabeth this way.

4:41 PM  

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