Lucy Jordan is set in my opinion in the 1960’s, where women were house wives and did nothing else but “clean the house for hours or rearrange the flowers”.
This already is not typical of women today. Women today have jobs and are independent. Women in those days were portrayed as staying at home and being a homemaker. They cleaned the house, washed the clothes and dishes, did the cooking, and took care of the kids when they got home from school or when they stayed home from school for being sick. Women also did most of the shopping except when the bags got to heavy.
Today, women are much more than homemakers. Women are working for publishing companies, advertising agencies, as well as producers and directors. Not only do they have the work to deal with at the office, but they also have the work at home but not so exclusively. Women are busier individuals today than during the sixties. I don’t believe women today are very much like the women of Lucy Jordan’s time. The closet life of a woman in the 21st century to a woman in the sixties in my opinion would be a lady of the elite middle class.
A woman who does not work; firstly because she does not need to as her husband would bring in all the money and secondly because they are still living in the traditions of their ancestors who might of only given their servants orders, therefore not even cleaning the house but ordering for the house to be cleaned. What I would class as a typical day for many women in the sixties underneath the facade they showed to the world is the whole ballad of Lucy Jordan. Many woman put on a front to everyone else but never realised everyone else was probably doing the very same. This would lead women to depression.
They would think that they were alone in the world; the only ones who felt bored and like their life was completely mundane. When women felt depressed they would usually go to the doctor who would prescribe them Valium, meaning that there was a century of women taking Valium. Women of today would not settle for just antidepressants, they would go out and find a hobby, start work if not working or do a course, something to stimulate the mind. Lucy Jordan’s morning seems to consist of nothing more than sending her children off to school and kissing her husband goodbye as he leave for work, “Her husband, he was off to work, and the kids were off to school”. After they were gone she was alone.
Being alone for hours would sooner or later drive anyone insane. You can only clean the house or rearrange the flowers so much, you cant keep doing as the dirt wont have time to collect. So I guess all she could do was go back to bed. She would lie in her “white suburban bedroom”, white meaning colourless which in my opinion represents boredom, it also shows the way it is meant to appear to be pure, innocent and perfect. She would lie ” ‘neath the covers, dreaming of a thousands lovers”. Under the covers she would feel stuffy, with no air to breath causing dizziness, this represents how she is feeling, she wants to break free, she needs air.
Her dreaming of a thousands lover is her need for something new in her life, she is bored and wants excitement. She is so out of touch with what is going on around her that “she let the phone keep ringin’ as she sat there softly singin’ pretty nursery rhymes she’d memorised in her daddy’s easy chair” this showed in some sense madness, just sitting there singing while the phone rings but also reminiscing about the good times in her life, when she felt more or less complete and as if her life was perfect. This is a typical life of a woman in the 60’s, dreaming of a perfect life that does not exist and boring oneself into depression. I think that Lucy Jordan tried to commit suicide many times before actually succeeding. The reason I think this is because in the last verse the line “on the rooftop where she’d climbed when all the laughter grew too loud”, it seems too indicate in my opinion that she had been on to the rooftop many times when the voices in her head mocked her and grew louder and louder, she went up there to get away from everything, to get fresh air, to have a release from reality. The voices, I believe were caused by too much time alone dwelling on things or they were real laughs off people pretending to have a good time when they were really just as sad as her but she thought she was the only one and everyone was laughing at her.
She was paranoid. I think that Lucy Jordan committed suicide by jumping of the roof of her house or some type of building because she felt isolated and trapped; she wanted a life that did not exist. She knew she could no longer fulfil her dream “at the age of 37, she realised she’d never ride through Paris in a sports car, with the warm wind in her hair.” She realises her life is going nowhere, she has commitments and she feels her life is going to be pretty much the same. Death is some sort of release from her, she doesn’t even think of her children because depression causes selfishness.
In the first verse it say ” ‘Til the world turned to orange”. This indicates a change, a new life or some sort of excitement. I think she has died in this verse because “she bowed and curtseyed to the man, who reached and offered her his hand” I think this is God, as many people in England in the 60’s believed in Christianity and also because he would be someone to take her out of her current life and God is meant to greet you when you die. The last line of this verse “and led her down to the long white car that waited past the crowd”, the crowd is either a crowd who saw her fall and came to gather and she is now only a spirit and can see them watching her dead body on the floor or it is everyone greeting her into heaven, as for the white car it is the door to her new life. The final thing that makes me believe she committed suicide is that in the last chorus the wording has slightly changed, she is now fulfilling the dream she one time thought she could never do. She has died and is living out her dream as a new life, in heaven, in perfection with no boring housewife duties.
