Look at Me!

Tessa Hadley's Married Love looks at the pathetic life of Lottie. The black sheep of the family, Lottie longs for the attention her family generally believes she doesn't warrant. This is a story of a girl’s fight to no longer be ignored and overlooked. The only action drastic enough to grab her family’s attention is her marriage to a man old enough to be her father. Edgar appears everything that Lottie’s family is not; a man who values free artistic expression, a man who must submit to “the erotic drive [that] was a creative force.” She is first drawn to him for these reasons. He nourishes her music creativity. She is his muse. Lottie tries to escape the chaos of her own family, but ends up creating her own. Instead of creating the harmonious married life she wanted with Edgar, she is thrown into the world of overstressed motherhood, no longer her husband’s muse. She never finds and maintains the attention she believes she deserves.