Empress Theresa: Chapter Fourteen Analysis

What a way to open a chapter that we have here! Theresa is being heaped with praise and love and admiration for her plan to create rain around the world. This strikes me personally as very strange, because the last time this happened a drunk from the slums and his family had to build an enormous ark, take two of every animal and ride out the flood without dying of starvation, dehydration, incest, unhygienic conditions, or just plain boredom. You’d think that a devout Catholic like Boutin would realize that worldwide rainfall might be a bad idea, and not just in a biblical sense.

Anyway, Theresa’s now proclaimed the biggest hero in history. Even in the middle of a baseball game, the players and the spectators get up and cheer for Theresa’s victory. People from around the world celebrate her so much that Theresa begins to cry joyful tears. By now, we all know that it’s because people love her. The only reason she does anything that she does is for being admired and loved unconditionally by everybody. A fantasy that the author has clearly had more than once. The celebration ends with Theresa and Steve going to bed.

The very next sentence has them waking up and turning on the news to see how famous Theresa is now! Church bells are still ringing across Europe and world leaders are guffawing and simping about how Theresa has created a ‘new and better world.’ It’s a new era! A new dawn! And millions of people are flocking to the Parkers’ mansion to get a glimpse at their wonderful savior again! But Theresa wants to see Blair for an as of yet unspecified reason. She’s given a military escort to the Parliament building where she whines about how she never wanted to be famous. All of us in the audience know by now that any of her gripes about being famous are complete crap, since literally one page ago she was basking in her own fame. Also, we already saw her relishing her indecent conduct during a worldwide broadcast and how awesome she thought it was to be on TV all the time for being a star pitcher on a boy’s baseball team.

After a mostly expositionless trip where we barely even know how or when she got there, Theresa has arrived at the Parliament building, and has to do nothing but make a simple request to Blair in order to get on the speaking floor. It’s there that she makes it a very explicit point to explain how she doesn’t want to be famous and how she just wants everyone to think of her as a normal person. Someone in the room very fairly asks why she is there to speak on worldwide television if she doesn’t want to be famous and well-known. Oh boy, does that piss Theresa off. How dare this miserable peon speak out of turn and question her!? And she gives him a heaping dose of lecturing that so many impotent beta males have their self-inserts do in the fiction that they write.

Let’s take a moment to talk about tyranny. The word is defined as when somebody in a position of power uses their power in a way that is unjust, unfair, oppressive, cruel, or inhumane. People who practice tyranny are called tyrants. And one of the surest signs of being a tyrant is the inability to handle criticism. You are always right and everyone else is always wrong. You do not stand for being questioned. Nobody is allowed to satire you. Theresa just showed us that she has the potential to be a very dangerous tyrant. Her next step would be to censor what kind of jokes are allowed to be made, which is also a major sign of a tyrant.

Theresa continues her speech by saying that she was baffled by the other kids at her high school who couldn’t wait to reach adulthood, because she understood that adulthood is just a crazy mishmash of responsibilities and difficult decisions (which are things that Theresa clearly can’t handle). Because even though she’s an eighteen year old college student who is trying to get a degree for a career working with children, she says that she’s still a kid! Seriously!? In reading the actual speech, you can tell that the author is just a grieving man-child who laments the loss of his childhood and the ‘burden’ of adult life! This is why you’re better off reading books like Peter and Wendy. That book teaches you that growing up and losing your childhood are not only inevitable, but are also not bad things. Boutin is clearly an advocate for infantilizing and coddling people who are chronically ‘done adulting.’ And that’s probably what pisses me off the most about this novel.

Now that I’m done fuming, let’s get back to the story. Theresa keeps up her prissy, entitled celebrity spiel by saying that she doesn’t want any reporters or admirers or fans or investigators or anything else in that vein to approach her ever. This has touched the heart of every woman in the room and brought them to tears, just because they are women too. In the author’s eyes, all women think and act the same way and all have the same soft, feminine hivemind. But it’s not just the women in the room this time. Theresa’s castrated, lobotomized cheerleader of a husband is moved by her speech as well.

It seems like Theresa’s speech has hit a note for a lot of people. Now there’s no attempt to make a movie about her, because no actress can capture the authenticity of such a real girl like her. Really? Theresa comes off as real? Nothing about her has seemed remotely human since the story began. Too bad they’ll never make that movie about Tecumseh instead. He’d definitely be more interesting (and more human) than Theresa. Most of all, she’s now able to walk around in public without getting mobbed. In fact, whole streets are cleared as she and her security personnel walk around town. Even when she visits a restaurant, tables are cleared so that she’s on this little island of her own in the middle of it all. She got her wish. Now she’s an unapproachable Karen. And she’s happy.

The narration shifts to third person, because–Hey, look at that! It’s Jan Struthers! Remember? She was Theresa’s friend who disappeared, like, eleven or twelve chapters ago. Now she’s back. She’s living with her parents now, because her government job fell through. And as she’s watching the ‘all Theresa network’ on TV (seriously, that’s what it’s called), Blair mentions Jan by name. Apparently Theresa wants to talk to Jan. But what about? Whatever it is, Jan cries because Theresa is still her friend. Oh, sappy days…

Back to a first person narrative, Theresa and Jan talk. And it’s so meaningless that their dialogue isn’t even elaborated on the page. But we do learn that Jan had collaborated with the Canadian PM to keep Theresa safe before the US government could try to nuke her. What do you know? The US acted too fast for the Canadians to do anything about it, thus negating any relevance that Jan’s plan had to the plot.

Speaking of the US government, what happened to the president after he resigned? We’ll find that out in the next chapter. See you all on Monday.