Free Coffee at Luke's: An Unauthorized Gilmore Girls Gabfest (Smart Pop Series) by Jennifer Crusie, Leah Wilson Page B

wonders why she and Lorelai can’t have as close a mother-daughter relationship as Rory and Lorelai (“There’s the Rub,” 2-16). And, most outstandingly, when Lorelai and Rory are introducing Emily to the joys of the mall food court and Emily overhears Lorelai on the phone adeptly dealing with the Dragonfly Inn’s start-up issues (“Scene in a Mall,” 4-15). This last is a particularly banner moment in Lorelai and her mother’s relationship, with Emily actually openly expressing pride in her daughter for the first and only time, even if that pride is tinged with envy and self-pity. And despite their friction, Lorelai was quick to leap to her mother’s defense when Jason “Digger” Stiles callously canceled Emily’s launch party for his and Richard’s new business venture (“An Affair To Remember,” 4-6) because she understands how much planning these society events means to her mother: that it is the only way Emily feels able to contribute in life. Seems Grandma Gilmore is a tragic character and she doesn’t even know it! (If a tree falls in the forest on a tragic character but she doesn’t consider herself tragic, is she?) It’s hard not to wistfully wonder what Emily’s life might have been like had she not chosen to marry Richard, in much the same way Emily herself laments her daughter’s road not taken.
     
    Lorelai, of course, vehemently feels that she narrowly escaped from a lifetime sentence in a gilded cage. But Emily adores the gild and dismisses the very notion of there being a cage! This is a fundamental difference between Emily and her daughter’s conceptions of high-society life, on which they may never see eye-to-eye, and it explains a lot about their relationship. Where Lorelai sees confining, smothering, soul-crushing prison bars, Emily sees a perfectly comfortable life with far more freedoms (of opportunity) than Lorelai’s, and honestly can’t fathom where her daughter gets such melodramatic imagery.
     
    In Emily’s view, Lorelai unnecessarily deprived Rory during her childhood (prior to asking Richard and Emily to pay for Chilton in the pilot episode of the series) purely out of spite! That deprivation involved not only keeping Rory away from the obvious creature comforts of wealth but, for no reason other than Lorelai’s own willfulness, also actively limiting Rory’s chances of success by preventing her from taking advantage of every competitive edge at her disposal—i. e. those made available more readily (or even at all) only to families of a certain social standing. In Emily’s eyes, pouting teenaged Lorelai was far less concerned with little Rory’s long-term well-being than with her own pride, stubbornly working a low-paying, lower-class job, and hoarding young Rory away from her perfectly willing-and-able-to-help grandparents just to be contrary.
     
    EMILY: (to Lorelai): Oh, you’re so perfect and I was so horrible. I put you in good schools. I gave you the best of everything. I made sure you had the finest opportunities. And I am so tired of hearing about how you were suffocated and I was so controlling. Well, if I was so controlling, why couldn’t I control you running around and getting pregnant and throwing your life away? (“Rory’s Dance,” 1-9)
     
     
    It may appear that everything between Lorelai and Emily has to be on Emily’s terms, but partly it seems that was because Lorelai inherited her mother’s stubborn streak, so naturally would prefer everything to be on her own terms instead. She wants her mother to change/ budge/see the error of her ways, but Lorelai herself rarely does. And the few times Lorelai has, it has only been with the most drama-queen-ing, woe-is-me-ing, eye-rolling theatrics: allowing her parents to lend her nearly a hundred thousand dollars for Rory’s private high school education; conceding to Rory’s decision to attend her grandfather’s alma mater, Yale, instead of Harvard, on which Lorelai had always had her heart set for