What was unattractive about Paulines life?
To Pauline, almost everything about her own life was unattractive. The social situation of her parents was a cause for acute embarrassment on more than one occasion in “Heavenly Creatures.” She hated the poverty that forced her family to take in boarders. She clearly grew to hold her mother in contempt because Honora had run away from home with her father, because she was ‘stupid’ and seemed to be a dull, plodding kind of a woman and because her mother eventually forced Pauline to contribute financially to the family. Most of Pauline’s criticisms of her family and her mother in particular revolved around class, status and money. Pauline eventually summed these feelings up in her phrase “I loathed Mother” and her reasons: “Because she nags me.” Juliet didn’t help matters. Clearly, she shared many of Pauline’s attitudes about the Riepers, all the more evident because of her politeness when she was at the Riepers’ house. The scene where Juliet first comes over for tea is a splendid study
To Pauline, almost everything about her own life was unattractive. The social situation of her parents was a cause for acute embarrassment on more than one occasion in “Heavenly Creatures.” She hated the poverty that forced her family to take in boarders. She clearly grew to hold her mother in contempt because Honora had run away from home with her father, because she was ‘stupid’ and seemed to be a dull, plodding kind of a woman and because her mother eventually forced Pauline to contribute financially to the family. Most of Pauline’s criticisms of her family and her mother in particular revolved around class, status and money. Pauline eventually summed these feelings up in her phrase “I loathed Mother” and her reasons: “Because she nags me.” Juliet didn’t help matters. Clearly, she shared many of Pauline’s attitudes about the Riepers, all the more evident because of her politeness when she was at the Riepers’ house. The scene where Juliet first comes over for tea is a splendid study
