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Rosemary Pilkington: A Study In Pink

Character description and discussion

About:

Rosemary Pilkington is a young secretary who works for the World Wide Wicked Company. While she may be skilled enough at her job, her mind is focused on one goal: to marry a handsome business tycoon, and live a perfectly picturesque life as a devoted wife and mother in a beautiful home outside of the city.

Our first interaction with Rosemary is when she, along with most of the other employees at WWWC, see J. Pierrepont Finch physically collide with the big boss J. B. Biggley in the centre of the business floor. Instantly impressed by his nerve, she introduces herself and makes it clear to him that she’s a friendly face who is more than happy to help him out. Hoping her best friend, Smitty, who is secretary to the personnel manager, will be able to help with Finch’s possible employment at the firm, Rosemary begins to beg Smitty to come to her aid. To her joy, however, she finds that Finch has secured employment all by himself, and the first scene ends with her singing of the life she now has planned as the future Mrs Finch.

While she may not be ambitious where her career is concerned, Rosemary is still a very driven and determined character. As soon as she clocks eyes on Finch she locks onto the goal of marrying him, which she goes after with full thrust. She is protective of this goal, and makes it very clear when she’s unhappy with lingering threats, such as those coming from the flirtatious ex-cigarette girl Hedy LaRue.

Rosemary is clearly a very emotional person, and is also not afraid to show it. When she is convinced Finch is having relations with Hedy during the big company party, she goes to find them both, hoping to catch them in the act and give them a piece of her mind. However, as upset and angry as she is upon seeing him, all of this negativity melts to happiness when Finch tells her he loves her. She flips straight from shouting at him to marveling over the idea that her dreams are finally coming true - abandoning all rational thought, and ignoring his questionable past behaviors, by instantly agreeing to marry him. She repeats this behavior later on, when she forgives Finch for making her feel unimportant compared to his career. She neglects to seriously consider his actions, because, at the end of the day, she wants that perfect life of her dreams and nothing else seems to matter.

There is no denying that though she is determined, Rosemary is also proud. The second act opens with her deciding to not only leave Finch, but also her job, after being made to feel like her hopes for a romantic connection with Finch are a lost cause. She would rather leave and start fresh somewhere else than stay and become the topic of office gossip, or be tormented at the sight of Finch every day.

It could be said she’s also a rather obsessive character. While her bouts of outrage at Finch’s behavior can either be seen as justified or unnecessary, it’s clear that she gets most upset when her plan is not going her way. She has a goal, and she knows exactly what she has to do in order to achieve it, so when things go wrong, it’s detrimental to her. An example of this is when she gets very upset when Finch refuses to kiss her and behave in the romantic way she wants after their engagement. Another is when Hedy is made Finch’s secretary - what with the common office behaviour of the time (that being business executives having affairs with their secretary), Hedy is in a better position to get closer to Finch than Rosemary is, and if Finch is going to have a romantic or sexual affair with anyone in the office, Rosemary wants it to be her!

What I like about her character:

Despite the fact that I personally would never pursue a romantic interest with the same relentlessness as her, I like that Rosemary is someone who knows exactly what she wants. She is wholly a woman of her time: she is happy with her place in the patriarchal system of the 60s, and is happy to make the best of that situation. And I mean the best. She wants to live in a lovely big mansion in a beautiful area, with a tenaciously ambitious man who will allow her to live a life of luxury and high social standing. And she gets it. She’s in no way a hero, but she gets a hero’s happy ending by achieving it herself.

I also like that she is not afraid to speak her mind. When she’s unhappy with Ponty, she makes sure he knows it. She shouts at him, tells him how she feels (though doesn’t necessarily make it clear that he is the one making her feel that way) and doesn’t worry about the consequences of doing so. There’s also a particular moment with Mr Gatch that I really like: she brushes him off when he makes another pass at her, and continues on her beeline to Ponty as if it never happens.

What I dislike about her character:

All of what I like about her, I also very much dislike. It’s easy to flip the positives over to negatives. She is obsessed with Finch and how the situation between she and him must look from the outside. While I can’t help but believe that by the end of the piece she has genuinely grown affection for Finch, I am also sure that she could have become just as infatuated with any other young businessmen carrying the same scent of success he does. I’ll go on to discuss the intricacies of their relationship later on, but on the surface, I was almost embarrassed by how keen she was to be with him. I don’t respect people who make a spectacle of themselves in real life, and Rosemary certainly does this more than once.

I also don’t like how one-dimensional her character is. Beside the fact that this musical is a period piece, set very closely to how things were in the 1960s, she is still a character who only serves one purpose: to act as an example of one of the two ways women were seen in that time (well-to-do and dreaming of being a wife and mother, while Hedy represent the other purpose - sex). In no way does Rosemary challenge anyone or force them to think differently about themselves. She cannot think for herself, and only follows what other characters tell her she should do. A strong example of this is after the song ‘Cinderella, Darling’: before the song, she had made her mind up about quitting her job and leaving Finch, but five minutes of moaning from the other secretaries, about how they want nothing more than to live vicariously through Rosemary, is enough to change her mind. Another example occurs straight after this, when she confronts Finch about how he made her feel “humiliated, ignored, upset”, he tells her that can’t be true because he hasn’t said a word to her recently, and she agrees with him! He completely invalidates her feelings, and she just goes along with it.

All in all, I see Rosemary as a character who does not present herself to be someone of much depth, and that just got on my nerves!

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