October 20, 2004
It’s the Little Things
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux or one hundred years before botox culture.
by Honora Howell Chapman
Private Papers

What’s a bourgeoise girl to do?

These days, if she’s a reader of the LA Times, she has to flip through page after page of ads for plastic surgery while sipping her shade-grown, free-trade blend. In fact, she can ever get her dog an eyelift, too, because, you know, we must all look our best. Have we all gone completely INSANE? Do you really want someone injecting botox between your eyes after having had a couple glasses of chardonnay? If Princess Diana were still alive, would she have succumbed to these last ditch efforts to restore her fading youth? Luckily (and sadly), we’ll not be reading those tabloid reports.

Seriously, what’s a bourgeoise girl to do?

Right now, on TV and on the big screen, we find two very, very different answers. One comes on the weekend boob tube care of ABC: Desperate Housewives. The other is an independent film, Thérèse, available in some cities. (For once Fresno has a film before San Francisco!)

Let’s see what ABC has cooked up for us this week. The new episode of Desperate Housewives is "Pretty Little Picture," and the web blurb reads: “The women decide to go ahead with the big dinner party the late Mary Alice had planned to host, despite the more-than-minor disturbances in their own lives, as adulterous Gabrielle finds herself with a nine-year-old blackmailer (guest star Ashley Bukowki), Bree struggles to keep her crumbling marriage a secret and Susan bares all — in more ways than one — as she confronts her ex (guest star Richard Burgi).” (http://abc.go.com/primetime/desperate/) Bree?! Mary Alice, for those of you who aren’t devoted to this new, hopefully-network-saving confection, committed suicide before the first episode began, thus setting up the premise for the show’s whole miserable revelation of the tawdry underbelly of suburban lives. Not exactly pity, fear, and catharsis, but I think that would be asking way too much of ABC. This show is a cheap thrill and lacks the strange wisdom of the quickly yanked “Pasadena” from a few years ago. But it’s oddly addictive, like any soap opera, and the desperation depicted isn’t just the housewives’. Overall, however, a bourgeoise girl would (or should) run screaming from this neighborhood of überneatly manicured front yards. No good answer to our question to be found here, that’s for sure.

The complete antithesis to this picture of a satiated, anomic circle of hell is found in Thérèse, a compellingly beautiful film. (When I looked, over 80 Yahoo viewers had given the movie a B, presumably because there are no horse-and-buggy chases, but the scene with the fire during the Joan of Arc play must have raised its grade from a B-.) Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1925, lived only 24 years (1873-1897), but her life story and her spiritual autobiography, Story of a Soul, have inspired generations of Catholics and non-Catholics with their message of love and childlike simplicity. The movie lovingly captures her happy, bourgeois home life with four sisters, the loss of their mother during her childhood, the devotion of their father, and the entry of all the girls into vows over the course of several years. Thérèse petitions to enter the Carmelite convent at the relatively young age of 15, and continues to persevere in her childlike devotion to God. We’re light years away from the Desperate Housewives as Thérèse learns from the formidable Sister Augustine how to dust the cobwebs and then sew the altar cloths. (Anyone who has attended Catholic school will laugh at the scary penguins, young and old.) Finally, “The Little Flower,” as Thérèse became affectionately known, succumbs to TB with humility and grace.

Thérèse became the rock star of 20^th century saints, without a doubt. She even inspired Mother Teresa (who, in turn, inspired Princess Diana to do good deeds, though she did not change her name) to take her name when she, too, chose a life of devotion to God and humanity. Thérèse’s patronage includes: AIDS sufferers; the diocese of Fresno, California; florists and flower growers; France; loss of parents; missionaries; Spanish air crews; and tuberculosis. Quite a grab bag—she’s busy. But anyone, including Desperate Housewives, should heed Thérèse’s words and chuck the morning paper:

“I am simply content to find myself always imperfect, and in this I find my joy. Good deeds count as nothing, if done without love.”