So I changed my tune, after my last Gossip Girl post. I watched another episode with my roommate, and then became a little obsessed with it, catching up on the entire season’s worth of episodes. I also found that it’s been pretty widely (and constantly) written about, even meriting coverage by the British press.
In the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James describes Isabel Archer, writing, “She had seen very little of the evil of the world, but she had seen women who lied and who tried to hurt each other.” In the class I was taking at the time, our professor pointed to that line, and said that Isabel would be encountering far greater evil, evil that would seem incomprehensible to her then, as the novel progressed. And while I could see his point, I also thought that “women who lied and tried to hurt each other,” was no small sin. It’s also a type of evil most people encounter, and while the antics on Gossip Girl are more than a little melodramatic, I’ve also come to find them quite compelling. The show’s depiction of friendship-the ways in which friends can love each other very deeply, without there being a rational reason behind it-is, I think, its strongest virtue.
I also started reading (and enjoying) these very loving recaps-the writer draws parallels to Joseph Campbell, among others, and it’s made me feel better about my new fixation.
Tonight’s the finale: 8 pm on the CW, so tune in! 🙂