Sense and Sensibility

Emphatic Girl has discovered a new cable feature: press a button and you get a menu of movies from which you may select; you can then stop, start, and pause the film, quite as if it were a DVD or tape. When I rose this morning she pulled me in to the sunroom, where the TV lives, and showed me this feature and the film she had selected, Sense and Sensibility. A few years ago she had watched the film when I was watching it with my mother-in-law; she had only a hazy sense of what was going on, I think.

So this morning she decided to watch it. Because the film can be started and stopped, she would start and stop it frequently, asking about things she did not understand. So far I have explained entail, jointure, the servants' hall, manners ("Why do they keep curtsying and bowing?"), the economics of marriage in Regency England ("You mean, someone wouldn't marry you because you didn't have enough MONEY?") and what a corset was (with side commentary on girdles and bras). Whatever she lacked in background information and understanding, EG totally got the emotional story, hissing Willoughby, crooning "I love you!" whenever Colonel Brandon came on stage, and scolding Marianne for showing too much, too soon. "Though I think Elinor should have told Marianne what that EVIL Lucy Stone was doing!"

During the course of the movie both Spouse and Sarcasm Girl came into its orbit and were drawn in.