trennels | The Redeeming Characteristics of Edwin Dodd

Entry tags:

The Redeeming Characteristics of Edwin Dodd

I have only managed to think of two.

Now, I freely admit that The Ready-Made Family disturbs me for good and personal reasons. Nonetheless, I find the character of Edwin Dodd almost entirely without redeeming social importance...

with the possible exception of these:

(1) He volunteers to help Nicky when her query directly relates to his personal area of expertise and interest.

(2) He shows up just in time to rescue his daughter from a paedophile, when she was only in danger in the first place because she was running away from him.

Other than this, he seems cold to the point of cruelty, has a ridiculously short temper, doesn't appear capable of apologising in a reasonable way, and seems to hate his children while wanting to own them as precious property.

However, I have not read Cricket Term.

Edit: the day before the wedding, Chas is thrilled to see him and climbs out a window and runs towards him. So there must be some positive in there somewhere, though I note neither girl is that excited...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I don't like him at all. I concede to your two redeeming characteristics but I certainly can't think of any more!

I know we see him entirely through the Marlows' eyes - but the fact that he calls Karen 'Katie' is quite enough to grate... and the way he treats his children is appalling.

I have read Cricket Term, millions of times, and though he doesn't show any signs of being horrible at all in that, neither does he redeem himself any further as far as I am concerned!

The Katie thing came straight out of the blue. And it made me want to slap him. Then there's all the thwart-the-kids-because-he-can stuff.

the fact that he calls Karen 'Katie' is quite enough to grate

Oh, I liked that! I thought the new name - together with the SHOCK AND OUTRAGE on the part of (some of) the Marlows when they heard it - was a really economical way to show how there's more to Karen than 'Kay'... and how her family are unable to accept that. We never hear Karen objecting to the name, do we?

I like Edwin, but will have to have a think before I can explain why.

I agree, but you put it better than I was going to :-)

Given that Karen doesn't object to it, it shows how there is more to their relationship than we know. People have all kinds of nicknames for their partners and it really isn't any of the family's business. At least it wasn't snugglebunnykins or something.

Yes, I like to think that Karen decided to use the name when she went to university, part of getting away from being regarded by her family as both bookish and useless. There's quite a lot in the books about that, generally contrasted with the wonderfulness of Rowan (ahem!).

I feel sympathy for Edwin when he's longing to read the paper quietly at breakfast, but has to participate in this noisy family gathering. I also wonder if some of my sympathy is because he resists that whole "couldn't ask anything better of life but to be a Marlow" thing?

I agree, I quite like Edwin too, but cannot work out why exactly.

(3) Interesting badger-ish hair?

Or am I inventing this fact?

I think the badgerish hair is canon.

He likes Dorothy L Sayers novels?

Yes, that was my first thought. And I've forgotten what film he quotes that also impresses Nicola. Though I'm not sure that these are precisely 'socially redeeming characteristics', just things that make him a bit more likeable.

Danny Kaye's Secret Life of Walter Mitty. I'd say that the ability to appear to share interests with people is probably what got him his two wives in the first place.

Edwin does come across brutal and unpleasant, though he strikes me as the sort of emotionally repressed man for whom anger is the only acceptable means of expression. In fairness, he's been through a stressful time (separation, death, prospective loss of children, pressured into a marriage he has doubts about), and he probably found the confident, challenging Marlows would be hard to cope with.

My sense of Edwin is of an awkward intellectual who has been raised under a cold-showers-to-toughen-'em-up regime of discipline where any sign of rebellion or emotional vulnerability is something to be ridiculed and quashed. A strict boys' boarding school or brutal father, perhaps.

I've met men with that combination of intellectual rigour and emotional repression. Maybe Edwin was attracted to Rosemary because her warmth and gentleness, which he both craved and despised, and she to him because there's something deeply touching about being the one to lure the broken child out of the beast. She had to live with both, though, and perhaps seeing the beast in Edwin-as-father was what led her to leave. What does Edwin do then? He latches onto another nice, unthreatening woman, the much younger Karen, and then commandeers her to provide his children with the warmth he on some level understands to be desirable but could never provide himself.

My whole mental picture of him changed during the conversation with Rose:
"So do I" (miss her mother)
When I read again the scene with Karen and
"Are you sure he does want to marry you?"
I now see it in a completely different light.
(Yes, I know that I might not be quoting exactly.)

I'm now sure that the author's intention was that he has real feelings for Karen. The "Katie" is surely an awkward attempt to show real affection, by someone who still doesn't understand what went wrong in the first marriage, and is still shocked by the death. And the fact that there are three children from the first marriage does suggest that he has some -er - social/emotional skills, doesn't it?

Even the appalling scene with Peter seems more understandable when you consider that schools were still beating pupils well into the 1950s.

I think of him as a classic product of his time, with a rigid idea of the Right way to behave and that demanding unquestioning obedience is the best way to enforce that. He has the emotional awareness of a brick, but means well.

Not an uncommon sort of chap even in the 80s - when public schools were still sometimes beating boys, for that matter

Given that rape within marriage was a legal impossibility until *very* recently, the three kids don't prove any social skills at all. *Addressing* Kay as Katie makes perfect sense to me - but referring to her as Katie when talking to her family doesn't - unless somewhere it's clear that she prefers the name?

>>>>>Given that rape within marriage was a legal impossibility until *very* recently, the three kids don't prove any social skills at all.

I take that point.

>>>>>Addressing* Kay as Katie makes perfect sense to me - but referring to her as Katie when talking to her family doesn't - unless somewhere it's clear that she prefers the name?

I'm not sure about that, since they didn't meet in the home environment. I find it rather touching.

It would be very Karen to decide to change her name on arriving at university, tell everyone she was Katie, but not be able to cope with explaining the change to her family and especially Rowan. Though I admit there is absolutely no textual evidence whatever of this.

I'm not sure how one gets 'Katie' from Karen, really. And then Edwin objected to Chas and Fob, which are the same sort of nickname.

Karen - Kay - Katie. But yes, the latter sucks.

According to the Oxford Dictionary of First Names (c1996, Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges), Karen is the Danish form of Katherine, and since Katie is a common pet form of Katherine, I assume that's why Karen uses it. Like

ankaret, I think Karen must have used Katie when she went to university, and Edwin calls her that because that's how she was introduced to him, or else how she introduced herself.

Maybe Edwin objects to relative strangers nicknaming his children? I have a name which is commonly abbreviated to short forms that I dislike very much, and I have met people who instantly use those short forms when I've introduced myself using the full form of my name. I also regard Fob, at least, as more of a nickname, than a pet or short form. And it may be that he sees Fob as a ugly nickname for a name he likes very much.

He says he doesn't like the nicknames, but there's no suggestion that he tries to stop anybody using them.

My sister's a Karen, and she was Katie (and Kay) at home - as

katlinel says, you work backwards from Karen to Katherine (or at least, we did).

I also like the fact that his children 'get' his dry sense of humor. It shows IMO they've had more interaction with him than we might think, and positive interaction at that.

I don't see how it shows that interaction was positive - it just shows that they're used to it.

They think his dry jokes are funny.

I would have thought that a good proportion of parents of 3+ children have had at least one run away from home, or at least they did in the days when children were allowed out without a lead. Especially just after a dead mother, a new stepmother, and a new home have all appeared in quick succession. (Most runaways don't get so far, and usually come back in time for tea!)

Have to say that he went up in my estimation when he whacked Peter - I'd wanted to do that every time he starts on the mummerset. Of course it was extremely violent and unacceptable, but I did have a modicum of sympathy.

Peter himself admits afterwards that he had rather asked for it!

I, too, like Edwin, and really feel a bit sorry for him, faced with Nicola and Peter.... no wonder the poor man went gruff on them! I liked the fact that he "badly wanted to laugh" at Charles, along with the rest of the family.

Yes, I agree. I see Edwin as a strong Myers-Briggs type I who would loathe suddenly being uprooted into a house as full and noisy as Trennels with all the family at home. Not to mention having to work out unusual relationships with teenagers who he can't quite dismiss as children because of their relationship to his wife. Not to mention the huge stress of separation - wife dying - rushed into second marriage - new job - new area...

I always feel that he
(a) started from the difficult position of being wildly prejudged by the younger Marlows
(b) and the even more difficult position of being caught up in Rowan's disapproval of Karen
(c) added to this with some tactical errors at the start due possibly to shyness, unfamiliarity with large-Marlow-type-family life, and general difficulty of the situation
(d) never had a way/found a way/tried to find a way of improving these relationships, not being a relationship type of person.

I don't think I'd have done too well faced with all that either.

But I do think that the children's relationship with him seems to me to indicate that in better circumstances he wasn't a bad father or husband. And the interaction with Nicola indicates something of this too. I always like his honesty about the children's pantomime and the touches of dry humour he lets slip from time to time.

I've forgotten - what does Giles make of him?

Tracking through previous discussions on this topic I notice that someone pointed out the class issues here too. If Edwin is lower-middle (which the evidence suggests) and the Marlows are decidedly upper-middle, that's another reason for him to feel insecure and that might manifest itself in the kind of behaviour we see in RMF - leading to the explosion with Peter. Not an excuse, nor even a mitigating circumstance, but a possible explanation.

Giles went to meet him in "Run Away Home", and came back saying he "ran a very tight ship" and would be fine as a brother officer, but as a brother-in-law, he was a bit much.

I'm sorry - that's the second time today that I've forgotten to log in. It happens when I'm replying to email.

I'm not sure how one gets 'Katie' from Karen, really. And then Edwin objected to Chas and Fob, which are the same sort of nickname.

I made a similar comment to this earlier as I am going through the back posts - I think you are right that Edwin is an odd and rather conflicted character. It says in AF's introduction to the Girls Gone By editions that he was originally going to a wife-beater - before AF decided that this would be going too far and he could just be really bad tempered and wind everyone up. I think this tension between bad Edwin/OK but really bad-tempered Edwin remains. Apparently in an earlier version of Run Away Home he beats Charles and Rose, upsetting Karen. He clearly does have some fatal attraction for her though. Personally, I hope she does eventually go back to University and doesn't spend her whole life as a housewife do to his rather dubious attractions.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The Redeeming Characteristics of Edwin Dodd

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

Edwin Dodd

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject