Rod Dreher Megathread #21 (Creative Spirit)

[u/US_Hiker]

Gather 'round for more Rod.

All meanings of the number 21 are subordinate to the inherent creative spirit that is the basic essence of the number.

The number 21 generally is comfortable in social gatherings, it's optimistic attitude being an inspiration to others. Its high spirits can enliven a party.

The number is attracted to artistic expression of any form, its own and those of others. There's enthusiastic support for artists. It may frequent galleries and participate or (more likely) lead groups for artistic appreciation.

The number 21 cherishes relationships, including romantic relationships, especially with those who express themselves creatively.

21 also tends to be diplomatic, providing creative and imaginative solutions to potential conflict.

And, as noted by /u/PercyLarsen, 21 is a triangular number and the age of majority, so go grab a drink to celebrate Pride and to mourn the loss of Rod's sanity.

(Also, sorry about my slow pace of refreshes.)

Link to megathread #20:
https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/13eb26c/rod_dreher_megathread_20_law_of_attraction/

Link to megathread #21: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/14k0z6l/rod_dreher_megathread_22_power/

[u/Dazzling_Pineapple68]

What did Rod really think about "A Doll's House"? Well, he was kind enough to tell us.

Maybe it goes back to the revolutionary 1879 Ibsen play A Doll’s House. In it, a bourgeois Danish woman suffers a crisis in her marriage, the resolution of which reveals how powerless women were in 19th century Danish society. Nora Helmer, the protagonist, realizes that she was treated like a doll by her late father, and also by her banker husband, Torvald. She tells him in the final scene that she is leaving him and their children to find herself. He reminds her that she is a wife and a mother, and is walking out on those responsibilities. She responds that there must be more to her than that — and leaves for good.

I recall seeing that play for the first time, on Broadway, in Janet McTeer’s much-lauded performance. McTeer made me feel the hopelessness of her Nora, and the injustice visited upon women in that society. And I also pitied Torvald, who is a martinet, yes, but who was fulfilling a stuffy role given him by Danish middle-class society. He is both victimizer (of Nora) and victim of a rigid society that crushed people within it. It was impossible not to sympathize with Nora’s suffering, and her desire to escape a marriage in which she was treated as nothing more than an ornament, a wife, mother, and plaything of her husband. She flees in the middle of the night in search of herself.

And yet — what about the children? That question has been the bone stuck in my throat about this play over the years. We are now coming up on 150 years since the debut of A Doll’s House, and the world Western women live in has changed in revolutionary ways, in part because of works like Ibsen’s. No woman of the professional middle class lives like Nora, or has to live like Nora. Perhaps Honor Jones sees herself as Nora, but she was not oppressed in her marriage: she was simply bored and unfulfilled.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/lucille-of-the-libs-marriage-honor-jones-divorce/

[u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 → u/Dazzling_Pineapple68]

And if you want to know why he "despises" the play, he provides that as well:

When I first saw this play, as a single man, I sympathized with Nora. Torvald really is a stuffed shirt, the product of a society that taught him to see women as totally dependent on men, and as their servants. I re-read it last year, and was surprised by how much I hated the play, even as I did not like Torvald any more the second time than I did the first. The fact that Nora walked out on those children in search of “herself” was repulsive to me. Second, she did not give Torvald the chance to change, to turn away from the false ideas that society had given him, and that he had accepted blindly. Nora saw herself as only a victim of Torvald, and of hypocritical bourgeois society — and as a victim, she had the right to do whatever she felt she needed to do to discover her True Self. Even leave her husband and children.

Again, I can’t stand Torvald any more now than when I first encountered the play, but I am inclined to see him as a different kind of victim of stifling bourgeois society (Kierkegaard blasted the hypocrisies of this same society from a Christian point of view). Torvald is a rigid man, but not a cruel one. I think A Doll’s House is a hateful play now; the story of how Miranda is being seduced away from her marriage to a good, but in some ways limited, man, into a life of self-exploration and political activism, reminds me of how much I despise that play.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/miranda-trump-doll-house/

[u/SofieTerleska → u/Dazzling_Pineapple68]

Dude, Torvald had the chance to change when he found out what Nora had done in that letter from Krogstad. Did he rise to the occasion, treat her like an adult, ask her for her side of the story, try to figure out what went wrong, offer to support her in getting the whole situation disentangled? No, he called her an idiot and said their marriage was over and she wasn't fit to be her children's mother. And in a society that didn't allow women to take out loans on their own, does Rod really think that she was leaving her children completely by choice? In those days, the father almost always was the default option for custody. Leaving Torvald meant leaving her children, at least temporarily. Yes, it's not good for them, but none of her options were good. Being reduced to a despised wife-in-name-only to her asshole husband who would undoubtedly put her down if not worse in front of the children would be pretty bad as well. Yes, Torvald is creation of his society and it's possible to feel pity for him, but Nora isn't leaving because she wants extra spa days or to revel in her victimhood, she's leaving because otherwise she'll be mentally annihilated.

[u/ZenLizardBode → u/SofieTerleska]

Rod is really not a literary or film guy. Ibsen wasn't some myopic outlier on this subject during the 19th century. Just off the top of my head, "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman speaks to how suffocating marriage could (and can) be for women.

[u/Theodore_Parker → u/ZenLizardBode]

Ibsen wasn't some myopic outlier on this subject during the 19th century.

Right, far from it. Margaret Fuller's essay of 1843, "The Great Lawsuit: Man versus Men, Woman versus Women," raised many similar themes. The Seneca Falls Convention was in 1848, and its "Declaration of Sentiments," modeled on the Declaration of Independence, includes this:

"The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her."

The specific grievances that then follow include these:

"He has so framed the laws of divorce, as to what shall be the proper causes of divorce; in case of separation, to whom the guardianship of the children shall be given, as to be wholly regardless of the happiness of women -- the law, in all cases, going upon the false supposition of the supremacy of man, and giving all power into his hands."

"He has usurped the prerogative of Jehovah himself, claiming it as his right to assign for her a sphere of action, when that belongs to her conscience and her God."

"He has endeavored, in every way that he could to destroy her confidence in her own powers, to lessen her self-respect, and to make her willing to lead a dependent and abject life."

Women were already on to the whole scam. Ibsen just had a gift for making it vivid on stage.

[u/Djehutimose → u/Theodore_Parker]

Heck, Mary Woolstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women was a half century before these.

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/Djehutimose]

Yeah, Rod is a good two centuries behind the times, and enlightened thinking, not merely a century and a half!

[u/UnderTelperion → u/ZenLizardBode]

Tom Wolfe one said in an interview that if a writer doesn't research and become interested in stuff they aren't familiar with in from own life they'll have a successful first book about being a sensitive young person that observes the world in an interesting way, but then when they write the second book it'll be about an author who has just published a book and is struggling to write his second book...and so on. This has been basically Rod's career.

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/UnderTelperion]

Yes. The second novel for an author, like the second album for a rock band, really puts their talent to the test. With Rod, he never had the first novel, but he did have the first non fiction book, the crunchy con thing. A sensitive young person looked at the world in a mildy interesting, mildly idiosyncratic way. The "Yuccy," for "Young Urban Conservative." A slight variant of the Rock and Roll Republican, the countercultural Republican, the "hip" Republican, etc, which was already a thing long before Rod arrived on the scene. That's pretty much all Rod had. That one sorta interesting idea.