I'm so grateful to my parents that we were poor when I was a child. When I was a brat, my parents had education, class, culture, and not enough money to buy the clank out of an old fender. We lived in a rather poor, multi-cultural neighborhood in Berkeley, California, and later moved to a suburban neighborhood in a smaller town in California. My sister and I grew up as kind of hybrids: The rich kids we were somewhat jealous of (some of them actually had swimming pools IN THEIR OWN BACK YARD) looked down on us because we lived in a semi-slum neighborhood, but were somewhat intimidated at the same time due to the education level of our parents and the fact that we had more books in the house than the local library. Our neighbors, for the most part, didn't quite understand us well, but we mostly got along with them, except for the types who hated anyone who used words with more than one syllable. They never quite understood why the folks had discussions about books, politics, and ethics with their children around the dinner table.
One thing our parents and this life taught us was to never make judgments on people because of where they came from or who their parents were. If my parents had been on the upper middle class socio-economic scale all my life, I could have ended up being the kind of person who spends his time despising the 47% (from a presidential campaign about a decade ago) who lived debauched lives on the back of honest taxpayers. Thankfully, I can remember wearing worn out clothes and shoes and know that there are desperate single mothers out there doing their damnedest to feed their children.
Then we have jerk boy...I mean Angus. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He's not a toxic macho rapist type, but he's pretty entitled. When his car hit Lisa, he wasn't the Marquis d'Evremonde throwing money out and questioning why the poor cannot keep their children out from under his horses hooves, but his charity is patronizing and pretty much sets up Lisa's hackles. His determination to bring her along on his vacation is decent, but seems like it has a great deal to do with his sexual attraction toward her, something that would definitely have taken a different tack if she had been of higher social status. On the cruise, he seduces her and is somewhat shocked that she is repulsed by his intention of coming to see her at his convenience for sex. He only comes back into her life when the femme fatale brings her pregnancy to his attention and claims Lisa did it on purpose to blackmail him. He believes it, hook, line, and sinker, and shows up furious. When he realizes that she didn't do that, he is willing to marry her, TO GAIN POSSESSION OF HIS CHILD. He cannot really bend his narrow little mind around the fact that taking HIS/not their child away from her would be devastating to her. After all, she's demi-monde, not beau-monde like him.
I saw this exact thing in the US Military years ago. I was an enlisted Marine who became an officer. At the officer Basic School, where mustangs (former enlisted officers) were outnumbered about 15 to 1, there was an unwritten rule or instruction that was very pervasive. It was, basically, that you could never completely trust an enlisted person. I hated that mindset, which followed me for years and prejudiced my career, as I wasn't a "real" officer since I had been enlisted.
This is the same thing that Lisa is up against. She isn't the "true metal," and therefore her emotions, beliefs, and morals can be judged by a completely different standard from those "born to the purple," no matter how stupid this is and how obvious it is an egregiously false standard.
If you want to read a really unpleasant expose of this, try Georgette Heyer's "Barren Corn." I had to shower after reading it, and wanted to go to combat so I wouldn't have to think about things like that.
I'm so grateful to my parents that we were poor when I was a child. When I was a brat, my parents had education, class, culture, and not enough money to buy the clank out of an old fender. We lived in a rather poor, multi-cultural neighborhood in Berkeley, California, and later moved to a suburban neighborhood in a smaller town in California. My sister and I grew up as kind of hybrids: The rich kids we were somewhat jealous of (some of them actually had swimming pools IN THEIR OWN BACK YARD) looked down on us because we lived in a semi-slum neighborhood, but were somewhat intimidated at the same time due to the education level of our parents and the fact that we had more books in the house than the local library. Our neighbors, for the most part, didn't quite understand us well, but we mostly got along with them, except for the types who hated anyone who used words with more than one syllable. They never quite understood why the folks had discussions about books, politics, and ethics with their children around the dinner table.
One thing our parents and this life taught us was to never make judgments on people because of where they came from or who their parents were. If my parents had been on the upper middle class socio-economic scale all my life, I could have ended up being the kind of person who spends his time despising the 47% (from a presidential campaign about a decade ago) who lived debauched lives on the back of honest taxpayers. Thankfully, I can remember wearing worn out clothes and shoes and know that there are desperate single mothers out there doing their damnedest to feed their children.
Then we have jerk boy...I mean Angus. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. He's not a toxic macho rapist type, but he's pretty entitled. When his car hit Lisa, he wasn't the Marquis d'Evremonde throwing money out and questioning why the poor cannot keep their children out from under his horses hooves, but his charity is patronizing and pretty much sets up Lisa's hackles. His determination to bring her along on his vacation is decent, but seems like it has a great deal to do with his sexual attraction toward her, something that would definitely have taken a different tack if she had been of higher social status. On the cruise, he seduces her and is somewhat shocked that she is repulsed by his intention of coming to see her at his convenience for sex. He only comes back into her life when the femme fatale brings her pregnancy to his attention and claims Lisa did it on purpose to blackmail him. He believes it, hook, line, and sinker, and shows up furious. When he realizes that she didn't do that, he is willing to marry her, TO GAIN POSSESSION OF HIS CHILD. He cannot really bend his narrow little mind around the fact that taking HIS/not their child away from her would be devastating to her. After all, she's demi-monde, not beau-monde like him.
I saw this exact thing in the US Military years ago. I was an enlisted Marine who became an officer. At the officer Basic School, where mustangs (former enlisted officers) were outnumbered about 15 to 1, there was an unwritten rule or instruction that was very pervasive. It was, basically, that you could never completely trust an enlisted person. I hated that mindset, which followed me for years and prejudiced my career, as I wasn't a "real" officer since I had been enlisted.
This is the same thing that Lisa is up against. She isn't the "true metal," and therefore her emotions, beliefs, and morals can be judged by a completely different standard from those "born to the purple," no matter how stupid this is and how obvious it is an egregiously false standard.
If you want to read a really unpleasant expose of this, try Georgette Heyer's "Barren Corn." I had to shower after reading it, and wanted to go to combat so I wouldn't have to think about things like that.