To my
sentimental ears, "my woman" conveys "a woman who was mine - as in,
she
was everything to me, but I don't need to explain that to you, it's
too
private, and you see my meaning".
Jenny objected:
But think about it. "My woman." Not "Sarah," or "Becky," or "Jill"; not "someone I cared for" or "a woman who meant a lot to me." Very cavemannish really; it doesn't give her a name or a face or even suggest that there was anything at all between them.
It's normal. I say "my husband" instead of "Allan", if I don't expect people to know who he is from the name, in relationship to me. If I wasn't married to him, I'm not sure what I would call him: "my guy" would be less juvenile than boyfriend, less explicit than lover and less of a mouthful than anything else.
And, leaving the internal logic of the story aside and seeing it from a technical standpoint: why would the scriptwriter make her Gan's "woman" and not Gan's "wife" (which would have been a more effective pathos conveyor and leave the audience less puzzled)?
What is he trying to convey by having Gan say "my woman"?
Laws that did not allow certain people to marry? We know of married lawyers and scientists, but was marriage recognised in the working classes? Or that someone had forgotten whether it had been established that the marriage contract existed in the future and used the same terms?
Helen said (in answer to):
What is he trying to convey by
having Gan say "my woman"?
Laws that did not allow certain people to marry?
It occurred to me last night that, since many statements made in B7 reflect an economical attitude toward truth (perhaps it's a scarce, rationed resource) perhaps the decedent was Gan's "woman" and the trooper's wife, and the trooper killed her when she happened to be in bed with Gan at the time.
-(Y)
-
Dana Shilling -
Helen Krummenacker