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Return of One Native/Bows
19/8/08 11:58Sarcasm Girl is back! She had a wonderful trip, and returned looking improbably gorgeous. This morning she went off to her first City College class: Psychology.
I went off to give platelets and red blood cells, and brought the DVD of Sense and Sensibility to watch while I was being all punctured and stuff. I remember thinking, when first I saw the film, that the bowing/curtseying was damned near constant. This time I was looking at the quality of the bows and information they convey: the first-meeting bow, which is longer and deeper than the sort of everyday bow between acquaintances. There's the chilly I'm-being-polite-but-that's-about-it bow--more a quick duck of the head. There's the bow/curtsey of someone like Mrs. Jennings or Sir John Middleton or Mrs. Palmer, who can't wait to stop being polite and gossip. There are Marianne's brief, distracted curtseys (I think this is the first time I really noticed how often Marianne has to be reminded of her manners) and Elinor's unfailingly polite ones. There are the deeper, unheeded curtseys of the servants, and of someone lower on the social scale (Lucy Steele) to someone higher up (the delicious Harriet Walters, as Mrs. John Dashwood). And the thing that's nice about the bows in the movie is that most of them seem reflexive, instinctive, as they would have been.
I'm not sorry that I don't have to curtsey all day long. 1) Ow, my knees. 2) Curtseys in pants look lousy. Still, I wonder what, if any, social cues we give off without thinking about it.
I went off to give platelets and red blood cells, and brought the DVD of Sense and Sensibility to watch while I was being all punctured and stuff. I remember thinking, when first I saw the film, that the bowing/curtseying was damned near constant. This time I was looking at the quality of the bows and information they convey: the first-meeting bow, which is longer and deeper than the sort of everyday bow between acquaintances. There's the chilly I'm-being-polite-but-that's-about-it bow--more a quick duck of the head. There's the bow/curtsey of someone like Mrs. Jennings or Sir John Middleton or Mrs. Palmer, who can't wait to stop being polite and gossip. There are Marianne's brief, distracted curtseys (I think this is the first time I really noticed how often Marianne has to be reminded of her manners) and Elinor's unfailingly polite ones. There are the deeper, unheeded curtseys of the servants, and of someone lower on the social scale (Lucy Steele) to someone higher up (the delicious Harriet Walters, as Mrs. John Dashwood). And the thing that's nice about the bows in the movie is that most of them seem reflexive, instinctive, as they would have been.
I'm not sorry that I don't have to curtsey all day long. 1) Ow, my knees. 2) Curtseys in pants look lousy. Still, I wonder what, if any, social cues we give off without thinking about it.