At some points, she strikes me as a very repulsive person. She is all about money and jewels and appearances and doesn't strike me as very authentic. She seems like a person who would wear too much make-up and is generally unpleasant to hang out with. Sometimes I think that Billy is wondering why he is married to her because she is insensitive or boring (seriously, how much does one need to talk about the pattern for one's silver?). Here are some of my favorite descriptions of Valencia:
She was rich. She was as big as a house because she couldn't stop eating. ... She was wearing trifocal lenses in harlequin frames, and the frames were trimmed with rhinestones. The glitter of the rhinestones was answered by the glitter of the diamond in her engagement ring. The diamond was insured for eighteen hundred dollars. (136-137)
She was one of the symptoms of his disease. He knew he was going crazy when he heard himself proposing marriage to her, when he begged her to take the diamond ring and be his companion for life. (137)
He had been rewarded for marrying a girl nobody in his right mind would have married. (151)
Valencia adored Billy. She was crying and yelping so hard as she drove that she missed the correct turnoff from the throughway. (233)At other points their relationship just makes me want to laugh. There is very little romantic about their relationship. For example, in the conversation recorded on their honeymoon Valencia starts crying because she "never thought anybody would marry [her]." "'Um,' said Billy Pilgrim" (153).
"Um." What kind of response is "um" to a bride on her honeymoon? That is just such an awkward moment when it seems like a great place for a romantic scene. But no, we just get Billy Pilgrim uncomfortably not wanting to audibly express his thought about no one in their right mind marrying her.
But at the same time there are a couple of very sweet moments with Valencia. My favorite is when Valencia decides that she will lose weight for Billy and become beautiful to please him. Billy responds, "I like you just the way you are" (153).
There is enough in the text that you can read this as just a detached Billy saying something without a lot of meaning or significance because he knew the marriage "was going to be at least bearable all the way" (153).
But I like to see it as a touching moment where Billy looks to her and affirms her as she is, not asking her to become someone else for him. Maybe they aren't the most loving couple ever, but he recognizes that their relationship means a lot to her and doesn't want to hurt her.
So while I sometimes nod my head along with Billy's realization that he might be crazy to marry Valencia, I also find their relationship satisfying as a model of love, more so than his relationship with Montana Wildhack, because he stays with her even if she isn't beautiful or enjoyable. He loves her just the way she is, as much as Billy can really love. Which makes me think of the song, but that is really just a side note.
1 comment:
Valencia is a tricky character for me (and we were so focused on the "historical" aspects of the novel, and how these relate to the outer-space plot, that we really did neglect the Ilium sections). The idea that Billy doesn't even really *mean* to marry her definitely undercuts any of the novel's fleeting glimpses of tenderness between them. Billy does *sort of* say the right thing when she promises to lose weight (although his word is "like" and not "love"--some would see this as an important distinction!), but it's mainly because he knows there's no point in her trying. In general, I see his marriage as one of the main indications of how detached and indifferent Billy has become to his own life in the years after the war. It's akin to how he "likes" his son okay but doesn't really *know* him.
And Valencia's death scene sort of rubs me the wrong way, too--it is crazily funny, but at the same time, it can seem pretty cruel the way Vonnegut orchestrates it, so that her hysterical, overemotional rush of love and concern for her husband (who's just been in a plane crash! that also killed her father!) seems like one more farcical bit of comedy. I don't know--it just seems a bit *wrong* how funny that scene is. I generally see Vonnegut as an incredibly big-hearted writer for such a bitter guy, but that might be one exception.
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