Deborah Kerr’s portrayal of the English widow Anna Leonowens in the 1951 film of the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit, The King and I, is a great depiction of an interesting woman and the play is an enduring examination of the mysterious and ambiguous attraction between a man and a woman of divergent cultures and races.  Anna is a widow with a young son who comes to the magnificent Siamese court, where she has been hired as a tutor to the king’s many wives and children. She arrives in  hoop skirts, dignified and yet not aloof, with a combination of  British refinement and maternal affection for her new students. The King, immortalized by Yul Brynner, is a charming tyrant.

With the death of her husband, Anna’s life has taken a difficult turn.  She exudes no bitterness. She is the antithesis of many contemporary female roles, such as the character April Wheeler in the vile 2007 movie Revolutionary Road. April has everything – beauty, two young children, an attentive husband, a roomy house in the suburbs – and yet she kills herself because her husband declines to move to Paris.

Anna and her son are essentially alone in a foreign land and yet in one scene, she gazes at a young couple and, in them, is heartened to find the counterpart of her past:

When I think of Tom.
I think of a night,
When the earth smelled of summer
And the sky was streaked with white,
The soft mist of England
Was sleeping on a hill.

I remember this,
And I always will…
There are new lovers now
On the same silent hill,
Looking on the same blue sea.
And I know Tom and I are a part of them all —
And they’re all a part of Tom and me.

Hello young lovers, whoever you are,
I hope your troubles are few.
All my good wishes go with you tonight,
I’ve been in love like you.

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N.W. writes:

I have been following the conversation on cultural relations at your site with great interest. It is heartening to see people discussing the matter in an honest straight-forward fashion. Perhaps we will prove Mr. Holder wrong after all.

I believe part of the problem in coming to terms with this issue is the common tendency to skip over the concrete particulars and instead firmly ground oneself in the cloudy abstracts. I may be tilting at windmills, granted, but nonetheless I shall begin my campaign against that stalwart bastion of the Enlightenment “the imperative to love all of humanity.” Now, this is a tall and dark fortress with innumerable passages, corridors and gates from which sally forth many a foolish knave, crying their challenge, “Halt foe, dost not thou love all and equally so?” to which I reply with a quixotic “How? How are we to love all of humanity?”

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  In this entry on marriage, race, and civilization, Kimberly, the preternaturally wise young mother, offers this advice to a man who says the war for traditionalism is lost: Like St. Augustine, I think he believes that the truth must be quite complex, beyond the reach of the common mind, and so he feels alone, and that would terrify anyone! But the truth is not complex. It is so simple, one must be very humble to understand it. His pride is blinding him, and in anxiety, he's banging on your door... Do you know who the army is? I'll bet you do. It's us. St. Louis de Montfort revealed this to me, I believe, but I'm no authority, so don't bet your soul on it. It's just my opinion. The way he describes the army that the Lord is building, it would make any housewife feel strong! The army is the heel of the Woman who is the Arc of the Covenant, the heel that "crushes the head of the serpent." This heel is unnoticed, unappreciated, and trodden upon.

Speaking of mixed marriages, is the stunning blonde wife of Tiger Woods, the Swedish model Elin Nordegren, deserving of sympathy? After all, she did physically attack her husband. If she were a man, assault charges probably would have been filed by her spouse. On the other hand, her sudden lack of self-control is not difficult to understand. Not difficult at all. Here are two views.

A male reader writes:

I see her as having attacked him in screaming rage and humiliation. I see her, in 60 seconds of intense fear and hatred, as defending her pride, her dignity and her honour as a beautiful young wife cheated and betrayed; as a young mother defending her home and her children. 

During her 60 seconds of violence she forgot about the private jets, the cars, the houses and the yachts. She forgot about the money. I like to imagine that for those few seconds she wanted to kill him for being a rat instead of a man. I respect her. I like her for it.

Mrs. N. writes:

I was grieved to see the comment of the male reader in your blog. Why on earth would we applaud a woman for forgetting herself so completely as to think she had the right to resort to physical violence? Mrs. Tiger is hardly the first woman to find herself married to a man who has been unfaithful to his vows. As a society, we discipline our sons to the point of emasculation for exhibiting any form of aggression and yet we encourage our daughters to give vent to every emotional whim and applaud them, when a truly devastating blow comes, for devolving into hysterical lunatics thrashing around without control. Tiger may have been deserving of a punch in the nose, but not from his wife. It is unfortunate that shame has lost much of its usefulness as a behavior modifier in our culture because they are equally deserving of a healthy dose of its benefits.  

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A male reader writes:

I have become a daily reader of yours and just finished your pieces on public “I love you’s” and “mom” as slightly smarmy, sentimentalized uses of the language. I fully agree. 

I am an overly-educated soon-to-be-elderly unrelapsed Catholic and father of a lovely daughter whom I had to raise essentially alone in the face of relentless poisoning by her mother. It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. 

I could never understand how a mother could do such a thing to her own child. My daughter is, in some ways, still paying the price for it. 

I will skip several steps in the usual tedious syllogism and repeat what you already know: The so-called sexual revolution was the worst thing that ever happened to young women. 

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  Dead love is a terrible thing, lying stone cold on the hearth of our minds without any movement or sign of life. But living love can seem dead. It experiences its own comas. The reality of what is lovable awakens it. We could not possibly keep before us what we have perceived about the people we love any more than we could preserve intact the vision of spring when it is winter. Love is nothing without memory and memory sleeps. One day we awaken and we are standing at the cottage door. Beyond lies the ocean and the wild moor. We remember.    

  Is love a serious thing? Or is it easy and cheap? Here's what I think. Love is so serious and delicate, one should never wave its banner in public, except during weddings and catastrophic events, such as volcanic eruptions or earthquakes. "I love you!" one cries out as one slips into the crack that has just opened in the earth. In that case, it's okay if one's private devotions are displayed. I could never loudly tell someone - husband, friend, child or parent - that I loved him while I was speaking on a cell phone standing in line at a supermarket or eating in a restaurant or waiting in a packed elevator. Is there something wrong with me? This emotional promiscuity is everywhere. Perhaps I am frigid, maybe even autistic, but I say anyone who can wear his heart so visibly on his sleeve may not truly possess one. Since the advent of this amazing technology, I have heard many dozens, maybe even hundreds, of  women tell their husbands and children they loved them over the phone. I was once waiting to vote in a presidential election when a middle-aged woman told a man over the phone that she loved him. He apparently made some witty remark. She protested that she definitely did love him. But, she said, if she were living in Europe, where the men were more interesting, she probably wouldn't. I suspect people like being heard telling others that they love them. Love has become a status symbol. To fail to publicly display it is like keeping a beautiful diamond…

  There is Christmas cheer in Washington. According to this story in yesterday's New York Times: An unusual holiday message began appearing this week in the nation’s capital on the sides of buses and trains. “No god? ... No problem!” reads the advertisement featuring the smiling faces of people wearing Santa Claus hats. “Be good for goodness’ sake.” Similar campaigns by evangelical atheists have taken place in other cities in the United States and Europe. But it seems believers haven't figured out how to react yet. Should they be hurt or outraged or perhaps indifferent? According to one prominent Christian spokesman, they should be hurt. Ian Urbina reports in the Times: “It is the ultimate Grinch to suggest there is no God during a holiday where millions of people around the world celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ,” said Mathew D. Staver, founder and chairman of the Liberty Counsel, a conservative religious law firm, and dean of Liberty University School of Law in Lynchburg, Va. “It is insensitive and mean.” I don't follow Staver's thinking. Any believer who encounters strident atheism for the first time in the form of an ad on a bus has probably lived a life so sheltered and secure from secularism he can hardly be laid low by this one encounter. No, I can't see believers breaking down at the sight of these ads. Most likely they swim in a sea of un-belief. They are accustomed to strident atheism. Many have been strident atheists. They can handle one…

  When did grown women start publicly referring to themselves as "moms"? The other day, Sarah Palin said she was concerned about foreign policy as "a mom with a son in Afghanistan." Soccer moms, hockey moms, stay-at-home moms, working moms, single moms. What ever happened to 'mother'? Rule #1 of domestic nomenclature: Do not refer to a woman as a mom unless you are that woman's child.  Rule #2: Do not refer to yourself as a mom with anyone who is not your child. The less time and energy women expend being mothers, the more adorable motherhood becomes. This cornball vocabulary trivializes and demeans an exalted and timeless institution, this sacred vocation that has wrecked more lives than any other. A mom is decorative. A mother is severe and semi-official and disturbingly ever-present. A mom sits in the bleachers and yells, "Go, Buster! I love ya!" A mother takes you by the ears and scrubs your mouth out with Fels Naptha. As Florence King said, "Let's face it: We like the idea of motherhood, we like the symbols of motherhood, we like the metaphors of motherhood, and we like the cute, casual vocabulary of neo-motherhood that we have cooked up, but we don't like motherhood..."