Maybe I heard it wrong, but did they refer to Ravenna as a "typical cornfed Midwesterner Goth"?
1. I was surprised to hear Mel refer to one of her betrothed as "cornfed" as I've only heard that as an insult for being overweight, referring to a woman as though she were livestock being intentionally fattened in order to provide richer tasting meat.
That's strange. I always thought "cornfed" had a more literal meaning to it, i.e. they live in the corn belt and thus eat lots of corn. And of course all the generalized misunderstandings of living in that area being attached to that person, but still a pejorative term. But not necessarily meaning that the person is overweight. I'd always assumed it was synonymous with "redneck".
Wikipedia and the
Urban Dictionary tend to back me up on this.
2. What exactly is typical about her? I live in the Midwest and I don't know a great deal of people who I would describe as having a Goth style, and even fewer that might be described as "cornfed". So, the way I read that was that women in the Midwest are typically both Goth and cornfed was a rather baffling statement. Perhaps it was meant to say that women in the Midwest tend to be more likely to be overweight? I think both men and women in the Midwest tend to weight more than in other US regions, but even then, I'm not really sure what the point of saying that was, either in the context of the story or for the character herself.
I agree with you on the Goth part. I would not think that people from the Midwest are particularly pale of skin and dark of hair, nor of Goth temperament. This bothered me only a little bit, but I answered it in one of two ways: alternate reality, or the author, like any good writer, did no research whatsoever. This is not meant to fault the author, Stephen King himself said that you should not stop your writing to do research, and I'm an amateur writer and I never do. It was simply more pronounced in this case (if it were indeed the case). Like I said, it didn't bother me much.
I took it to mean that Ravenna was a typical, down-to-Earth person from the Midwest. Not bothering herself too much with what could have been and what might be, but simply living the moment, like any good (I'm sorry about generalizing here) redneck farmer. This, in my opinion, went a long way toward explaining her personality, her kindness, her actions throughout the story.
Please don't call me a bigot or a racist or anything like that. I tend to think that I am not (in fact, the only people I hate for being who they are, are racists), and the views I express here are not my own, but simply how I understood the phrases. I know many people from the Midwest (my mother's family, for example) and many of them are not farmers, rednecks or partial to corn.
-I didn't get that they were a trio until quite a ways into the story, as Ravenna was offstage and referred to in ways that I found rather vague. It's possible that I'm just slow on the uptake, but I could've used some more explicit mention of her being a bride as well earlier in the tale.
Well, when the story started out with "... and one of her brides had trouble recognizing her" I knew something was up, and when Dr. Green said that Ravenna was with Cory and Mel responded with relief and "She and Cory are great together" I knew exactly who was getting married.
Although I admit the gender swapped roles from the widely accepted "standard" threw me off balance a little, but I liked it. Like I said, I'm not one for social conventions or base assumptions (even though I made some of my own, I was glad to have been proven wrong).