Irene Forsyte: Beautiful victim, or ugly bitch?

Cafe Society
1

The title basically says it all.

Yesterday our family watched the 1st ep of the second series of Forsyte Saga shows on Masterpiece Theater. A major character is Irene Forsyte. She is supposed to be a great beauty, who was terrribly abused by her first husband Soames.

The Dinsdale clan is not quite so appreciative and forgiving of dear Irene. She certainly does not strike us as overly attractive in either appearance or mien. Nor are we sympathetic to her position of agreeing to marry Soames, so long as she could leave whenever she wished.

Wondering what any of the rest of you thought.

2

I think she was more naive than anything when she married Soames. She really didn’t believe she had any other options, and only realized she did after experience matured her.

As for her beauty, to each his own. That kind of dark-haired, alabaster-skinned, aquiline Pre-Raphaelite thing was very big in the 1880s when Soames met her, and if this is how she is described in the books (I’ve never read them), I think they picked a good actress.

Also, she has managed to somewhat win back the affection of her former friend, now stepdaughter June, whose fiance she stole, which says alot for her personality. June is nobody’s fool.

3

Irene has fair hair and brown eyes in the books.

My sympathies are mostly with her; I believe Irene married Soames without realizing what she was getting into. He did promise when he proposed that he would let her go if the marriage didn’t work out, but didn’t mean it even at the time and made her utterly miserable in trying to get away from him. I don’t think she is perfectly faultless–the affair with Bosinney ‘n’ all–but I can understand why she did it.

But, oddly enough at the same time, and even though he is played so utterly creepily in this new series, I have my moments of sympathy for Soames too. He did love her, in his hyper-possessive, suffocating way, and really seems to have no idea why his treatment of her is so repulsive.

4

I feel similarly about Soames. Sure he’s a freak, but he really just wanted someone to love him. Of course, it didn’t help that he was so darned unloveable!

Irene was coming from nothing. Yet she felt she should be able to dictate unreasonable promises.

She should never have married him.

5

PBS has it in for me. Unfortunatly, I have nothing to contribute about Irene. Here is why…

PBS on Dish Network is about as reliable as my Jeep, which is to say totally and completely unreliable. The only guarentee is one of dissapointment. Shows that are supposed to appear regularly don’t. Shows that are advertised don’t materialize at all. I don’t know what the story is exactly with PBS on Dish, but if you ever try to catch a two-parter of anything, you are pretty much assured of missing the second part.

So I turn the tube on and see whats coming on PBS. Ah, Masterpiece Theater! Thats always a good watch. Whats this? The Forsyth Saga? Part one of seven? Damn! I don’t dare watch part one, knowing full well I’ll never get resolution. Oh, well, I guess I’ll watch some insipid dreck on Discovery or something.

Next week: Whats this? Part two of seven? Well, I already blew it by watching a ten minute “Cold Case File” stretched into an hour of sheer bordom and repitition. Guess I better pass on part 2 also. Humm, whats on The Hitler Channel…

Next week: Part 3, huh? How about that! Kinda like hitting all your lotto numbers and not buying a ticket. Ah, there is no way I would have caught all seven episodes anyway, so its no big deal. I’ll just watch this cement I poured cure.

And so it went for seven weeks straight. Masterpiece Theater right where I should be, right where you would expect it in a perfect world. And I didn’t watch a single episode! Damn you PBS on Dish Network, how you mock me!

6

Neither, but she’s certainly not an entirely sympathetic character in my eyes.

Admittedly, I never did see the very beginning of Forsyte Saga, so I missed most of Soames’ courtship. I did start watching right before she accepted his proposal rather than have to work for a living. So…

She agreed to a marriage to someone she knew she didn’t like. At all. Now, I’m sympathetic to establishing some ground rules before marriage, although the nature of what she insisted on clearly established that she wasn’t giving him much of a chance.

After they were married, though, I don’t understand why she rebuffed his obvious attempts to make her happy. Granted, he’s far from the most naturally likeable guy, but man, did he go out of his way for her, without seemingly the slightest trace of appreciation on Irene’s part. Feigning passion wasn’t required, but basic politeness would suggest some recognition of his efforts. Would it be that hard to acknowledge enjoying a social activity alongside him? Later in the marriage, as Soames got increasingly desperate as to how to make the relationship work, he lost much of my sympathy, and of course the rape threw the rest out the window, but for quite some time I found him much more appealing than she was.

7

I haven’t seen the recent version. I read the books and saw the original PBS version of the Forsyte Saga (many many more episodes than the new version). In my memory Irene was a beautiful blonde. The original tv version, which was enormously successful, presented her as a bit of a villain and a bit of a victim. I think that’s why it was so successful - because the characters were so 3 dimensional, so real.

8

It’s my understand that, whether or not she was willing to try at first, it was the sex that killed all hope of the marriage working out.

The first book of The Forsyte Saga, The Man of Property starts with June introducing Bosinney to the family; Soames’ and Irene’s courtship, as well as Jolyon’s leaving his first wife for the governess, is all backstory, ten years in the past. We don’t get to see it as it happens, only see that the marriage is already in serious trouble even before Irene meets Bosinney.

I’m going mostly by Jolyon’s explanation of the matter (the books are online; see Sitemap for the letter Jolyon writes, about half-way through the chapter), but I assume that what he says here is based on what Irene told him about her marriage to Soames.

As a well-brought-up Victorian girl, she would have had no idea what to expect on her wedding night, and that first time apparantly came as a nasty shock to her. A husband who was tender, patient, and sensitive might have helped her overcome the problem (she doesn’t seem to have any difficulties with love or sex later on with Bosinney or Jolyon)–but… well… Soames isn’t exactly a man you could call tender and patient. With his insistence on the performance of “wifely duties,” he could only make matters worse and worse, until Irene got to the point where she was so repulsed that she couldn’t stand to have him touch her or be near her at all. And from that point on, there’s nothing but disaster.

A point of interest: Check out the biography of John Galsworthy at http://www.classicreader.com/author.php/aut.170/ – especially the bit about his wife’s previous, unhappy marriage to his cousin. This seems to be the basis of the Soames/Irene/Jolyon triangle in his novels, and suggests where the author’s sympathies lay.

BTW, a description of Irene from The Man of Property:

9

Miss Map , thank you for your post. Until now, I had thought completely as Selkie does. I couldn’t understand Irene’s attitude toward Soames. It bothered me that she married a man who was so clearly besotted with her. I know she made the “rules,” but she should have seen that he wasn’t really thinking that he’d ever lose her. To me, even if she did need money, she had been quite thoughtless of Soames feelings.

Of course, the miniseries doesn’t show us all that’s in the book (and I do need to read the book), so maybe in the miniseries Irene is a bitch? In the book a beautiful victim?

Honestly, it’s not even her treatment of Soames that makes me dislike Irene, but her treatment of June. June is the first of the Forsytes to welcome her. She’s so kind and smart and witty, and clearly has lots of affection toward Irene. And what does she get? This bitch sleeps with her fiance. Now, of course, Bosinney is more to blame, but damn. Irene was hardly blameless. And I loved when June said, “You have such a brilliant way of being cruel while seeming so kind.” Something like that. She nailed Irene.

And then? June’s own father takes up with her! And excepts June to forgive her because he loves her! The first time we see Jolyon he’s leaving his wife for another woman. Then he “falls in love” with the woman who hurt his own daughter so badly. And all in the name of luuurrrve. Jolyon? An ass.

Ok, I’ve had my say. :slight_smile:

10

It’s rather difficult to get inside Irene’s head and really understand her motivations, especially from the book. I’ve only read it once, but I don’t recall any specific instance of seeing things from her point of view. We see her through other people’s eyes–Soames’, both the old and young Jolyons’, June’s, Jon’s–and so the perception is colored by that person’s view of her. She’s incomprehensible to Soames, a bitch to June (although June does seem to forgive her later on), and this poor, lovely, much-put-upon creature to the various Jolyons who adore her. My chief impression of her is that she’s remarkably passive; she seems to be carried along by other people most of the time, and does very little of her own volition.

So many of the key plot points in the book are not seen directly–Irene’s affair with Bosinney, for example. Rather than have scenes with these two lovers, we usually have outside and second-hand views of the whole matter, and are left to infer what’s going on.

I said above that my sympathies are with Irene in her marriage with Soames but, yes, the most injured party in all of this is June. I’m somewhat amazed that she manages to have the congenial relationships she does with both her stepmothers, when she has very good reasons to resent them. And she seems very attached to her father, in spite of everything he’s done. In the miniseries, it actually looks like she was pushing for Jolyon and Irene to get together!

When I first watched the first episode of this new series with a friend, we discussed Jolyon’s leaving his wife and child to run off with the governess, which seemed to us to be questionable, if not reprehensible, behavior–and yet he’s clearly meant to be a sympathetic character. By our modern standards, he doesn’t stand up very well, but I can see that by the “all for love” ethic that Galsworthy is promoting here in reaction to Victorian morality, hypocrisy, and the impossible marriage laws, Jolyon is supposed to have done the right thing. By those same standards, we are supposed to also sympathize with Irene and Bosinney (although I can’t help thinking that, even so, it would have only been fair for Bosinney, once he’d fallen in love with Irene, to break it off with June rather than drag the poor girl along).

I’ve read one of Galsworthy’s other novels on that website (Beyond) and looked at the first few chapters of The Country House, and this seems to be a basic theme for him: people trapped in miserable, loveless marriages break away to try and find happiness elsewhere, in spite of the consequences to themselves or others.

Back to Soames–the chilling and appalling thing about him is that, by Victorian standards and laws, his attitude toward Irene is considered perfectly acceptable. He is well within his rights to compel her to come back and live with him, to have sex with him whether she wants to or not (the idea that a husband could rape his wife is a fairly recent one. The 1970s?), and to bear his child. He doesn’t feel that he’s done a thing wrong; as far as he can see, he’s given her a comfortable home, good social position, and big chunks of jewelry, and she should have nothing to complain about. I think that he and Irene really have such vastly different ideas of what marriage ought to be that they don’t understand each other at all in that regard right from the beginning. The sex ruined it completely, but it might have turned out just as badly even if that had been better.

11

Undeniably ‘ugly bitch’. As the utterly desperate Soames kept imploring, if she only would “behave”: Words have meaning, and it seems 99% of people would do well to spend a little time among dictionaries and a thesaurus or two.

Behave obviously means to employ self control in order to meet expectations of accepted action; but if we delve a little deeper (I think we all have a solid grasp on the concept of “being”) but I also think a vast majority might benefit from a little brushing up on the concept of “have” and “having” as a verb, more on that in a moment, first:

Behave

verb

to manage the actions of (oneself) in a particular way “If the children behave themselves properly and sit quietly during church, they’ll get their ice cream afterward”

Synonyms: acquit, bear, carry, comport, conduct, demean, deport, quit

Related Words: check, collect, compose, constrain, contain, control, curb, handle, inhibit, quiet, repress, restrain; moderate, modulate, temper; act, impersonate, play

Near Antonyms: act up, carry on, cut up, misbehave, misconduct

What precisely did Irene “constrain, contain, control, curb, inhibit, repress, restrain”? -Any positive feelings and actions towards Soames. Knowing perfectly well that he desperately desired children, she not only withheld any sort of directions as to how to please her sexually–she instead coldly and with calculation washed her womb out every single time she allowed him access. Let’s look a little closer at “have” as a verb:

Have

verb

1
to keep, control, or experience as one’s own “My uncle has a sizable collection of black powder rifles”

Synonyms: command, enjoy, hold, own, possess, retain

Related Words: keep, reserve, withhold; bear, carry; boast, show off, sport

Phrases: rejoice in

Near Antonyms: abandon, cede, disclaim, disown, hand over, relinquish, renounce, surrender, yield; discard, dump; decline, reject, repudiate, spurn; need, require

Antonyms: lack, want

2
to agree to receive whether willingly or reluctantly “We decided that I would have the job of calling the volunteers on the phone" "She refused to have him as a husband”

Synonyms: accept, have

Related Words: accede (to), assent (to), concede (to), confirm, consent (to), OK (or okay), ratify, sanction, warrant; acquiesce (to), bow (to), capitulate (to), give in (to), submit (to), succumb (to), surrender (to), yield (to); abide, bear, brook, countenance, endure, shoulder, stand, stick out, stomach, support, sustain, swallow, sweat out, tolerate; adopt, embrace, welcome

Near Antonyms: dissent (to), object (to), oppose, protest; hold off, resist, withstand; combat, contest, fight

Antonyms: decline, deny, disallow, disapprove, negative, refuse, reject, spurn, turn down, veto

3
To bring forth from the womb “Her grandmother had 11 children”

Synonyms: birth [chiefly dialect], deliver, drop, have, mother, produce

Related Words: labor; breed, multiply, propagate, reproduce, spawn; beget, father, generate, get, sire; calve, kid, kindle, kitten, litter, pup, whelp

Near Antonyms: abort, lose, miscarry

I think after a thorough understanding of the concept, the full meaning of the word “have” is undertaken, there is no possible argument to be made that the character Irene did anything of the sort when it came to Soames. As a matter of fact, she did precisely the opposite. She decided from early on that she would not love him–it was a conscious decision and one she re-affirmed with determination.

In the miniseries, Irene acquiesces to letting her precious son choose whether to marry Fleur. Obviously then, the offspring of Soames Forsyte wasn’t in ‘reality’, quite the abomination she’d once claimed. If she’d ever actually tried on a selfless perspective, if she’d actually ever had Soames, i.e. accepted him, enjoyed him, commanded him, rejoiced in him, taken sport with him and yes- possessed him, what a power couple they’d have made!

12

I’m going to have to disagree with you here. After all, the whole point is that literally everyone who ever finds out what Soames did in forcing Irene–finds it utterly UNacceptable. Remember also, that the same “rights” are afforded wives as husbands–as is made clear through Winifred’s divorce proceeding. Also, I believe the concept of “he doth protest too much” is used when it comes to Soame’s repeated “I did no wrong!” -and indeed at the end, as he confesses to Fleur, he is very much grieved that every time she sees him Irene is terrified, and that particular moment is obviously forefront in her mind…even HE knows what he did was loathsome, and out right wrong.

13

Oh Irene,

There is always an chance for beauty. If one is not initially attractive, they might still have beauty of heart which can supersede the physical. Though Irene was not an attractive woman physically, I thought she might have redeeming qualities.

I was wrong.

She marries a mam who did his best to make her happy, and didn’t so much as show the slightest degree of appreciation. No, as a matter of fact she made a conscious decision to not like him or give him a chance.

Really, you are not going to entertain the thought of giving your husband a chance? It got worse.

She makes friends (BFF status) with her husband’s niece, then has an adulterous affair with her (niece’s) fiance.

Lastly, she, apparently not having reflected on her past actions, has another adulterous affair with her BFF’s dad (who is actually an inlaw).

All this with out the slightest hint of remorse. She even said a much. Her lack of physical appeal was amplified by her selfish repugnance.

It was just a shame that Soames’ actions (specifically forcing himself on her) almost dignified her repulsiveness.

I wanted to like her, but she made it hard to finish the story. I kept hoping the author’s sense of justice would not fail (for Soames also), but unfortunately I was wrong.

14

I agree - “Ireeney” is an absolutely loathsome woman. The only time I felt bad for her was in the very beginning when her mother put the weight of the world and on her shoulders and said she’d better support them both. But that’s where it ends.

I’m not sure what she expected of Soames going into the marriage- that she could just be a complete bitch while he bends over backwards to provide her the lap of luxury?! EGH! wrong. She hadn’t slept with him ONCE, until he “raped” her. She had actually slept with Bossilly as her first time (in the miniseries, I haven’t read the book but I definitely plan to).

Second victim of Irene’s completely self-centeredness with ZERO regard for anyone else: June. This bitch steals her fiancé and then had the nerve to SLAP June after June “reacts” to this woman’s umpteenth selfish act in the story. Just the WAY she flaunted it in front of all June’s family at that ball. Despicable. Then later on without remorse, marries her father. If I were June I would have murdered this woman.

I noticed no one mentioned the old man she latched herself onto at the end- under the guise of “enjoying his company.” She knew damn well he had no other friends or family and that he was at death’s door. No shocker there, we know she thinks of no one but herself.

That’s it, there’s probably more, but those are the three main points I wanted to hit. This woman is not a victim, and she deserved EVERYTHING that happened to her, including Soames, and the death of Bossilly. Karma’s a bitch, and so is Irene.