I can just picture how ostracized Wallis would have been if she had decided to end her marriage to David.
Divorced women were ostracized. It was the ultimate scarlet letter. How many film stars from that era did not divorce because it would have meant the ruin of their career?
Wallis' first husband was an alchohoilc who brutally abused her. She was subject to savage beatings. She eventually got away from him and yet it was a mark
against her that she left him at the time. To this day the ending of her first marriage is attributed to some character flaw and innate shallowness.
Her second marriage to Simpson she never intended to give up, it was given up for her through the machinations of David himself. He went behind her back, called Simpson to a meeting, and there her fate was sealed. We cannot say what Simpson would have done without the pressure David brought to bear. It's a remarkable piece of the story, because had Simpson not caved, she could have held David off. Without Simpson, she was powerless to effect her removal from David.
After kind of being backed into a corner where her present husband and her want-to-be husband connived and plotted on how to make it all happen behind her back and then the subsequent marriage and being known as "That Woman", a divorce from David would have magnified the ostracism to the nth degree
I don't see Simpson as conniving. I think David is the culprit here. Whatever occurred in that meeting, it was enough to convince Simpson to walk without talking to Wallis. It's a very curious moment in the whole proceedings.
and unless Wallis was strong enough in her own skin to handle things, retreating to a nunnery or being a recluse somewhere would most likely be the only place where she could feel comfortable.
We know she had considerable strength. She survived an abusive marriage and the ostracism leaving the husband entailed. No PTSD back then, and no sympathy for the woman. ('She must have deserved it', would have been the whispers).
It's easy in hindsight to say she could have refused to marry David, and she certainly could have, but the man was threatening her with stalking across the world, and killing himself. Someone here has mentioned that he got her to accept responsibility and guilt for him. She felt obligated if nothing else. Its a very complicated psychological/emotional web that had been, and was being woven, to keep her in place by his side. Someone objected to the notion that she was a captive, but she was, as so many women of her time were. Marriage was essential for social standing and economic survival, but what came along with that was more often than not a harrowing ordeal.
Events had forced her to make her bed where it ended up and it was perhaps easier to "go with the flow" of things and lie in the bed of her own making rather than being a lone woman against the world.
I think you have summed it up, Osipi. She had already experienced the wasteland that greeted any unmarried woman between her first marriage and her second. She already knew what lay in store so she made the best choice she could.
It's curious how people want these historical figures to be saint-like. In several instances Wallis was handed a poor hand, but she played it the best she could. That she maintained sanity is in itself remarkable imo. Powerful influences came into play around her and we are hardly in a position to lecture that she shouldn't have been embittered, or grandiose, or entitled. She dealt with what she had in the way she could. She was a southern belle. It was in her to be that.
Oh well. A fascinating woman imo. Her circumstances, her choices, her undeniable strength. Remarkable, really. And the animus goes on. The BRF's part, especially the QM's part, in how they were dealt, is the real nasty in my book. JMO.