Thread

A lot of people out there think “Karen” is a fairly recent meme, but Karen has always been with us.

Before she was referred to by her first name, Karen was known to our ancestors as Mrs Grundy.

Though she has probably always been with us since ancient times, Mrs Grundy first entered modern public attention in 1798 when she was written as an unseen character in Thomas Morton’s play Speed The Plough.

In the play, Mrs Gundry first appears as a cowed audience to the accomplishments of Dame Ashfield. The character then became embedded in the public consciousness and transformed into a feared middle-to-old-aged female dispenser of disapproval.

Mrs Grundy quickly became a figurative name for an extremely conventional or priggish person and a personification of the tyranny of conventional propriety. Throughout the Victorian era till the early 20th century she was feared for her position of censorious authority.

I first learnt of Mrs Grundy when reading Samuel Butler’s (namesake of the Butlerian Jihad) 1872 novel Erewhon. In the land of Erewhon, Mrs Grundy has been elevated to the position of the goddess Ydgrun (an anagram of her name) who dictates all social norms.

As a figure of speech, "Mrs Grundy" quickly spread throughout the English-speaking world. Part of the success of this early meme was how the name Grundy sounded like it had associations with Karenish noises like ‘grumble’, ‘mumble’, ‘grunt’, and ‘gruntled’.

She appears in many books from the 19th and 20th centuries. Aldous Huxley wrote of her ”to the puritan all things are impure". Dickens put her in Hard Times. Thackeray includes her in Vanity Fair. Jack London frequently criticised her as “fanatically moral”.

Walter de la Mare described her as “High-coifed, broad-browed, aged, suave but grim, A large flat face, eyes keenly dim, staring at nothing...on each of those chairs has gloated in righteousness”.

Sounds like not a lot has changed.

Robert A. Heinlein probably summarised how to best deal with a real life encounter with a Mrs Grundy.

“Freedom begins when you tell Mrs. Grundy to go fly a kite."

Freedom-loving masculine men have always sought to escape the censure of Mrs Grundy (or the “tyranny of the longhouse” as @bronzeagemantis aptly describes it). An 1836 book about living in the Canadian wilds contained the following sound advice :

“We bush-settlers are more independent: we do what we like; we dress as we find most convenient; we are totally without fear of Mrs. Grundy; and having shaken off the trammels of Grundyism, we laugh at the absurdity of those who voluntarily forge afresh and hug their chains."

With the fin de siècle erosion of the Victorian moral consensus, Mrs Grundy began to lose her power, and by the 1920s she was already little more than a faded laughing-stock mocked for example in this advice book for teens: Mrs Grundy is Dead.

Some of you may recognise the Grundy name as she has somewhat survived to 2020 in Archie comics. Archie’s teacher Mrs Grundy 1st appeared as the stereotypical humourless ageing prude. Now she’s been revamped into a “hotter” version but she tellingly still sports “problem glasses”

The one saving grace of Mrs Grundy is that she at least did her part in keeping a stable society together, whereas her granddaughter Karen is mostly entirely selfish.

Where the Karen is concerned about Karen, Mrs. Grundy was mainly concerned about you.

It is my belief that Karen / Mrs Grundy has many names and has been with us since ancient man first left nomadic life and began life in the pastures. She is an archetypal primeval force of collective madness and the enemy of civilisation. Always be ready to confront her.