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Loryat wrote: |
She is very involved with the school and the girls, but she's also involved with the san's patients (to the extent of knowing their prognosis when they don't etc). She's often visiting them or their relatives. (In fact with all the visiting she gets done it's a miracle she gets any writing done.) I think Joey is suppose to be a very humane person who people naturally turn to in their troubles. As for her continued involvement with the school and insider knowledge of all the goings on, it's not surprising when she writes school stories for a living and has numerous children attending it. She's the sort of person who doesn't forget how it is to be young, which is why all the others turn to her. |
RroseSelavy wrote: |
If Joey "can't let go," what of, e.g. Rosalie Dene? *sets cat among metaphorical pigeons* |
Clare wrote: |
What's more important to Joey? The fact she's a wife, a mother or a Chalet School girl? |
jennifer wrote: |
As a person, her obsession with the school comes across as rather sad. By the end of the series she's a forty year old woman who is living next door to her old school, and her life is firmly focussed on the current middles' pranks, chats with the mistresses, gossip about new girls, and keeping up correspondence with massive numbers of old girls. She is vocal and adamant about being a school girl at heart, and insists that she will never fully grow up - there's sort of a Peter Pan feel about that. This is a woman who will come into the school to chat with the headmistress during school hours, and then interrupt a class in session to say hi to the students, and who has a private telephone line to the headmistress's study. |
jennifer wrote: |
My psychological analysis of Joey's fixation on the school... |
Lesley wrote: |
Talking about character v author's plot - I think you have to divorce the two.
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Lesley wrote: |
Talking about character v author's plot - I think you have to divorce the two.
First you say - well, the reason Joey was there was because EBD loved the character too much and wanted a continuing thread on which to hang her series, As that is what happened that's fine. But then you have to look again as if it were not a work of fiction but that it was real - so in that case why would this intelligent, vivacious, talented woman choose to remain beside her old School for her entire life and ensure that her entire circle of friends were connected with the same? So I can understand why EBD wrote Joey as she did - it's always useful to have a mainstay among your characters. I think she made a mistake in not allowing Joey to grow and develop paeticularly, but she was writing for an audience of young girls. However, Joey as an actual person does need to have some reasoning behind why she choose to remain with the School and, like Clare, I think Jennifer's summary to be an extremely likely possibility. |
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