Thanks Allan. I think it's from Its Image on the Mirror. Will check later.
When the Collier children were six and ten, a social worker came to the place where they were living in Montreal, and shortly after that they were taken away from their mother, whom they loved without knowing what the word implied, or even that it existed, and sent to their father's mother in Ontario. Their father was dead. Their mother was no longer capable of looking after them properly. When women turn strange, it happens very rapidly. The first sign is lack of care about clothes and hair, and all at once they are sluts. Drinking slides in. They attract frightening men—at first men without wits, money, affection, or a job, compared with whom the woman seems a monument of character and strength. At the end, the men around them are almost respectable (by contrast) but very unkind. I have more than once seen women get into this state, and the common factors were drink, and dirt, and weeping, and rages, and being preyed upon, and finally seeming so sexually innocent that one is frightened. One says she is alcoholic, she is manic-depressive, the children should be taken away. Yes, they are seeing things they shouldn't and not getting proper food, and in moral and perhaps physical danger (someday she will set the place on fire); but if the mother still has her qualities—those that attracted, say, her friends or her husband in the first place: warmth, generosity—do you take them away for their own good? One day someone tells—a janitor's wife, an anonymous friend of the husband—and the life that seems safe from inside (to the children) but perilous from without is destroyed. Whether it is the right thing or the wrong thing as far as the children are concerned, it is the end of love.
This link to a thesis suggests an even livelier quotation, surely edited for family newspapers.
"When women turn strange, it happens very rapidly. The first sign is lack of care about clothes and hair, and all at once they are sluts. Drinking slides in."
I'm guessing this must be a piece of dialogue rather than Mavis speaking as herself?
Thanks Allan. I think it's from Its Image on the Mirror. Will check later.
When the Collier children were six and ten, a social worker came to the place where they were living in Montreal, and shortly after that they were taken away from their mother, whom they loved without knowing what the word implied, or even that it existed, and sent to their father's mother in Ontario. Their father was dead. Their mother was no longer capable of looking after them properly. When women turn strange, it happens very rapidly. The first sign is lack of care about clothes and hair, and all at once they are sluts. Drinking slides in. They attract frightening men—at first men without wits, money, affection, or a job, compared with whom the woman seems a monument of character and strength. At the end, the men around them are almost respectable (by contrast) but very unkind. I have more than once seen women get into this state, and the common factors were drink, and dirt, and weeping, and rages, and being preyed upon, and finally seeming so sexually innocent that one is frightened. One says she is alcoholic, she is manic-depressive, the children should be taken away. Yes, they are seeing things they shouldn't and not getting proper food, and in moral and perhaps physical danger (someday she will set the place on fire); but if the mother still has her qualities—those that attracted, say, her friends or her husband in the first place: warmth, generosity—do you take them away for their own good? One day someone tells—a janitor's wife, an anonymous friend of the husband—and the life that seems safe from inside (to the children) but perilous from without is destroyed. Whether it is the right thing or the wrong thing as far as the children are concerned, it is the end of love.
as I was saying ... damn time women stopped being concerned what others think of them or their appearance. Grrrr.
Best Christmas gift Bill xxx
Short story, "Orphan's Progress". https://core.ac.uk/download/30695740.pdf
This link to a thesis suggests an even livelier quotation, surely edited for family newspapers.
"When women turn strange, it happens very rapidly. The first sign is lack of care about clothes and hair, and all at once they are sluts. Drinking slides in."
I'm guessing this must be a piece of dialogue rather than Mavis speaking as herself?
https://www.academia.edu/8508630/Dissertation_Transnational_Conversations_The_New_Yorker_and_Canadian_Short_Story_Writers