Courtesy of NJ.Com
Don’t you find it interesting that very few people swoon these days? At one time swooning was all the rage with women. Look how some of the men seem unimpressed in the picture. This is a movie still, not real life. My ex-husband almost swooned once. That was the beginning of the end. I think I was trained by my mother to have limited compassion for male weakness and even less compassion for women who faint. This is not something I’m proud of. I just always found fainting ridiculous.
The interesting thing about swooning is that in America it’s taken breaks in between epidemics. Strange that. But here’s where I confess that maybe I’ve been wrong. One of my teenaged daughters swooned at school a few years back right into the arms of a handsome male teacher. She said she was mortified . . . I believed her. . . not really. I thought she was being dramatic and felt slightly annoyed. My other daughter said that many of her female classmates were jealous.
In young women hormonal changes bring on low blood sugar sometimes leading to swoons. I didn’t know this when my best friend years ago swooned into the pancake batter face first on the morning of a sleepover so we teased her about it for years (one of the many things that led to a short break in friendship during college).
When a second younger daughter of ours swooned recently and fell with a thud to the floor at Sunday school I didn’t doubt her. Maybe that’s progress.
But what about the epidemic in Victorian swooning? What about wanting attention and not getting it? What about times changing and some girls feeling unfit for modernity? I’m super excited to have experienced other people’s humiliation–well, that’s a joke, but humiliation is the mother of invention, right? I know exactly who will become a swooner now in book five!
