theresebelivett replied to your post “meteorit3737 replied to your post “Headcanon that in 1984, Donna ends...”
i am so deeply here for discussion of/figuring out what's goin on with donna's extended family and her relationship with them, that goes on in my brain a lot
meteorit3737 replied to your post “meteorit3737 replied to your post “Headcanon that in 1984, Donna ends...”
Oh, are we really going there? :) Well... So, Donna's parents look like pretty toxic people. I think Donna's brother was older, since he was able to escape from them, and she is younger, so her mother tries to keep her daughter close.
My understanding is that Donna’s parents must have been generally supportive, they must have paid for her music lessons, and they might have at helped pay some if not all of her college tuition (they literally offered to buy her a house, and a college degree is another status symbol I feel like the Emersons would have been into), but that they still expected her to move back home and marry a Hunt Whitmarsh, and be a comfortable, well-off homemaker. They expected Donna to meet and maintain their standard of upper middle class respectability, and couldn’t fathom why she’d choose to marry someone who wouldn’t secure that lifestyle for her? (Incidentally, as a man, her brother wouldn’t have to think of marriage that way, and their parents wouldn’t worry about whether or not a female spouse would be able to support him. Maybe he’s not estranged from them, maybe they just let him live his life?)
I think that when we meet Donna, in 1983, she also feels somewhat obligated to stay close to her parents, considering that they bought/bribed her and Gordon with a house. She also needs the help; between work in and outside her home, Donna doesn’t have much time to make friends, so it seems like she relies on her parents, her mom especially, for contact with people outside of her nuclear family, and some semblance of normalcy. Donna clearly needs more though (I’m thinking of 1x03, and how bored and aggravated Donna looks when her mother cuts her off to talk about country club gossip, and how great Hunt is doing); most of us need and deserve more! Halt and Catch Fire is a lot of things, among them a quiet indictment of how late 20th century suburban, middle class, white and heterosexual life in this country was structured to be atomized and miserably lonely and built around consumption and avoiding real self-reflection.
