‘The Host’: Less Anti-Feminist Than ‘Twilight’, but Hardly a Sisterhood Manifesta

The Host posters

This guest post by Dr. Natalie Wilson is cross-posted with permission from Ms. Magazine.

I readily admit I did not read The Host. I couldn’t face it after immersing myself in all things Twilight while researching my book Seduced by Twilight. I started it, but less than 20 pages in I couldn’t stomach any more of Stephenie Meyer’s purple, flaccid prose. No, I agree with Nicki Gerlach—that “Meyer is not a particularly concise or elegant writer, never saying in one sentence what she could hammer at for three.”
As such, I went into the film of The Host with low expectations, presuming I would hate it and be bored to tears. I was prepared for a sappy ode to sparkly true love and immortal families. And while the narrative does indeed ultimately celebrate these things, it does so in a way far more engaging than its Twilight predecessor. This is largely due to a stronger lead—a fierce young Melanie Stryder (Saoirse Ronan), who resists the occupation by the alien known as Wanderer (later called Wanda). Early in the movie, after Wanderer is implanted into her neck, she informs her alien occupier through interior dialogue, “I’m still here. Don’t think this is yours. This body is mine.”
Max Irons as Jared and Saoirse Ronan as Melanie in The Host

While I would have been thrilled had this refusal of bodily occupation turned into a sci-fi version of “my body, my choice,” I am familiar enough with Meyer to know this would not be the case, despite her recent claims to being an uber-feminist. Yet while Melanie may not be more bell hooks than Bella Swan, she at least is not the passive sap that led us through thousands of pages and four films of not doing much more than ogling Edward the vampire in Twilight. No, Melanie jumps out of windows, steals cars, survives a trek through the dessert and fends off various humans and alien foes. Alas, she is, like Bella, anchored to the world of patriarchal heteronormativity and gender conformity via her positioning as nurturing sister to her younger brother Jamie, and love interest to first Jarad (Max Irons), then Ian (Jake Abel).
But I was pleasantly surprised when the film didn’t make me grimace through painful odes to abstinence or groan at a genuflection to the mighty power of patriarchs. Instead, I quite liked Melanie, a female character who could not only walk without tripping, seemed to have a mind of her own, chutzpah and, gasp, didn’t deny her sexual urges.
Meyer claimed she intended to “portray a positive relationship between the two women at the center of the story,” and, indeed, she does. Melanie fights Wanderer’s occupation of her body, but they ultimately become close allies, referring to each other as “sister” by film’s end. Is this the sisterhood manifesto Meyer’s recent “I am a feminist” claims suggest she supports? If so, it seems her brand of feminism involves women uniting in their love for men. Que feministe!
Saoirse Ronan in The Host

Admittedly, Melanie and Wanda also love one another by the end of the film, but they are still ultimately defined by their male love interests. (Ah, if only THEY could have become lovers, a la the fanfiction that has Bella  and Alice as the Twilight couple rather than Bella and Edward.)
Granted,  Melanie is far more of a Hermione type than a Bella one.  She is cognizant that the opening claim of the film that  “The Earth is at peace. There is no hunger. There is no violence. The environment is healed. Our world has never been more perfect” is false. When we first see her, she is fighting off the alien invaders of her planet and then willfully jumping from a window, choosing potential death over an alien-occupation of her body. (If only Bella had resisted wolf/vampire takeover with anything like such resistance!) But, alas, Melanie’s identity is also mired in a love triangle—well, more of a quadrangle, actually, wherein her reason to live is fueled not only by her filial love for her little brother but also romantic love for Jared/Ian.  This “unusually crowded romantic triangle—with four aching hearts but only three bodies to play for” (as CNN put it) results in a narrative that is less feminist utopia, more sci-fi romance.
While Melanie gets a feminist gold star for refusing to play the controlled virgin (in fact, she takes the sexual lead, insisting she and Jared should have sex given the apocalyptic alien invasion of the world), things become less copacetic when Wanda and Ian fall for each other—a narrative thread that makes the fight for body/self less between she and Wanderer and more of a question whether she “belongs” to Jared or Ian. While there are certainly queer possibilities in this love triangle of three bodies and four lovers, this is Meyer-world, so of course no such queery-ing happens. Instead, an alien who could have been genderless is decidedly feminized, and an inter-species romance that could have been queer/polyamorous is decidedly hetero-ized.
Movie still from The Host

In the scenes where the Wanda-occupied Melanie desires to kiss Ian, the internal dialogue delivered by Melanie has creepy undertones that smack of valuing only certain kinds of love. When Melanie tells Wanda “this is so wrong … you’re not even from the same planet…” she could just as readily be arguing against same-sex love and/or any romantic formations that do not accord with heterosexual monogamy.
Nevertheless, when Wanda informs Ian that even though “this body loves him” (meaning Melanie’s body) but “I also have feeling of my own,” there is the slightest suggestion that maybe, just maybe, hetero-monogomy is not the only option. Wanda, noting “this is very complicated,” can be read here as arguing for the possibility of polyamory/queer romance, while Melanie’s later insistence she and Wanda can both live in the one body similarly questions the notion of singular, fixed identity.
Regrettably, the ending of the film (spoiler alert!) fails to champion any such queer/feminist notions. No, instead of occupying the same body and loving both Jared and Ian, Wanda is implanted into another human body—a female one, of course—and one that is also white and traditionally attractive. You didn’t think this alien-human love could transcend gender or white privilege, did you? Of course not. This is Meyer-world, after all.
Chandler Canterbury as Jamie in The Host

Though The Host is more feminist-friendly than Twilight in ways, it is no feminist ode. Along the way to its happy-ever-after for the two central couples (Melanie and Jared and Wanda and Ian), it also takes some worrying forays into the violence-is-sexy meme and has undercurrents of pro-life messaging. In one scene, Wanda says “kiss me like you wanna get slapped,” and in others her discovery that the human holdouts are killing aliens can be read as a pro-life message wrapped in an alien invasion package— especially if we consider that some of the first words said of Melanie in the film are “this one wants to live.” Later, Wanda’s character continues this anti-abortion meme, telling the humans, after discovering embryo-sized aliens surrounded by blood on an operating table, “I can’t stay here, not with you slaughtering my family in the next room.”
Alas, while some laud “the significance of one of the most popular authors in the world standing up to say she’s a feminist,” I concur with Jezebel’s Madeleine Davis, who queries Meyer as follows: “If the world’s a better place when women are in charge, why not give them a little bit of agency between the covers of your books?” Admittedly, The Host gives female characters more agency than Twilight, but it is still mired (Meyer-ed?) in traditional romance, normative gender roles, hetero-monogamy as the happy ending and pro-life sentiment. It is more feminist-friendly than Twilight, but is that really a win for feminism when we have to argue the merit of stories that are not as rabidly anti-feminist as that four-book ode to patriarchal romance?


Natalie Wilson, PhD is a literature and women’s studies scholar, blogger, and author. She teaches at Cal State San Marcos and specializes in areas of gender studies, feminism, feminist theory, girl studies, militarism, body studies, boy culture and masculinity, contemporary literature, and popular culture. She is author of the blogs Professor, what if …? and Seduced by Twilight. She is a proud feminist mom of two feminist kids (one daughter, one son) and is an admitted pop-culture junkie. Her favorite food is chocolate.

Travel Films Week: In Defense of ‘Eat, Pray, Love’

Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love
Written by Megan Kearns. A version of this article was originally published at The Opinioness of the World. Cross-posted with permission.

I had been looking forward to watching Eat, Pray, Love ever since I saw the trailer. I read the book a few ago, its popularity piqued my curiosity. The prospect of leaving life behind to travel for a year intrigued the armchair traveler in me. I picked the book up…and couldn’t put it down. I loved it. Author Elizabeth Gilbert drew me in with her honesty, humor and raw vulnerability. So I was eager to see the film adaptation.

The film follows Elizabeth “Liz” Gilbert, a successful writer with a seemingly perfect husband and home. Yet as she attains more and more of what she thinks she wants, Liz’s unhappiness grows and her world begins to crumble. Liz endures a devastating divorce followed by a fling with an actor. When that relationship falls apart, her pain consumes her and she’s unsure where to turn. Yearning to reignite her passion for life, Liz decides to travel, living abroad for one year. She chooses to live for four months in Italy to focus on pleasure (“eat”), then India to connect with her spirituality (“pray”) and finally Bali to learn how to balance the two and ultimately lead a life in harmony (“love”).

Julia Roberts eating pizza in Eat, Pray, Love

Lush and gorgeous, the film exhibits breathtaking vistas. It spurs you to want to pick up, leave everything behind and move to Italy, India or Bali. And megastar Julia Roberts is likable, capturing Gilbert’s curiosity about the unfolding world around her. My inner foodie enjoyed the decadent food scenes, which are a big part of the book, reminiscent of those in Julie and Julia. The film boasts a stellar supporting cast, particularly Viola Davis (love her), Mike O’Malley and Richard Jenkins. However, Javier Bardem’s talents are wasted here.

In the book, we have the pleasure of Gilbert’s humorous and vulnerable voice to guide us. While it’s sort of present in the film, it’s somehow diluted. One of the most heartbreaking yet touching moments for me in the book is when Gilbert sobs on her bathroom floor, begging god for help, as she doesn’t know what else to do. She prays that she’s not pregnant, even though she thinks a baby is what she’s supposed to want. Although the film sadly erases her pregnancy scare. I never felt, as much as she tried, that Roberts captures Gilbert’s depression and how she hit rock bottom.

I’m glad the movie retains the female friendship between Liz and Wayan as well as Wayan’s struggle to buy a house in Bali after she leaves her abusive marriage. But in the book, Gilbert spends far more time with Wayan and her daughter Tutti than the movie would lead you to believe, preferring to focus instead on the romance between Liz and Felipe, a Brazilian businessman in Bali.

Gilbert, with the help of friends and teachers along the way, finds the answers she seeks. Yet she also finds them within herself. But the film ignores this important distinction. Especially at the end, it’s as if Liz needs others to tell her what to do, rather than coming to decisions on her own accord. The book, while ending on a fairy-tale ending, focuses on Gilbert’s self-transformation, shifting from always revolving around a man to finding herself and what she wants. She realizes that you have to truly love yourself before you can love another. Gilbert learns to forgive herself, lets go of her unhappiness and embraces life.

Eat, Pray, Love
The movie makes interesting commentaries on gender. When Liz eats dinner with Felipe, he tells her how he stayed at home with his kids while his wife worked. Liz calls him “a good feminist husband.” In Italy, there’s a great scene where Liz and her friends celebrate an American Thanksgiving dinner to say goodbye. Her Italian tutor’s mother asks if she’s married. When she replies no, the mother declares that she doesn’t understand why a woman would go off and travel by herself. Her friend Sophie comes to her defense saying that no one would say that to her if she were a man and calls her brave for traveling alone. Another woman at the dinner comments on the difficulty of women’s choices.

There’s a pervasive notion that women will go see movies in the theatre about men as well as films about women, while men will only go see films starring men. Women and Hollywood’s Melissa Silverstein writes about Eat Pray Love and how “if women like it, it must be stupid” all about how women’s stories and interests are devalued and treated as less important than men’s interests. Silverstein writes:

“Why is it that things that appeal to women are made to seem trivial, stupid and less than? Is it about the fact that large groups of women are embracing something? Is it a fear that if enough women like something we’ll figure out how screwed we’ve been on so many issues that we will all just come together and revolt? Pleeze. Newflash — we aren’t that organized. Shit, we buy more books and see more films, yet stuff that appeals to women is constantly demeaned. Aren’t our dollars as green as the guys?”

Eat, Pray, Love

In her articulate and fascinating Bitch Media article, “Eat Pray Spend”, Joshunda Sanders Diana Barnes-Brown look at the gender theme of Eat Pray Love in a different light. Talking about the book, they write about the pervasive problem of privileged literature (“priv-lit”), asserting that women like Gilbert, Oprah and other self-help gurus tell women to buy their way to happiness. She writes:

“Priv-lit perpetuates several negative assumptions about women and their relationship to money and responsibility. The first is that women can or should be willing to spend extravagantly, leave our families, or abandon our jobs in order to fit ill-defined notions of what it is to be “whole.” Another is the infantilizing notion that we need guides—often strangers who don’t know the specifics of our financial, spiritual, or emotional histories—to tell us the best way forward. The most problematic assumption, and the one that ties it most closely to current, mainstream forms of misogyny, is that women are inherently and deeply flawed, in need of consistent improvement throughout their lives, and those who don’t invest in addressing those flaws are ultimately doomed to making themselves, if not others, miserable.”

Sanders and Barnes-Brown raise many valid points on sexism and consumerism. There’s something to be said for how our capitalist culture continually purports money and possessions as the path to happiness. If we buy this skin cream that erases wrinkles…if we lose weight…if we buy new clothes…we’ll fix ourselves, shed all our problems and finally attain happiness. But in all their Eat Pray Love criticism, Sanders and Barnes-Brown fail to mention Gilbert was able to travel in the first place due to an advance on a book deal from her publisher. So technically, she was still working. Of course this crucial piece of information IS woefully absent from the film. And the Eat Pray Lovemerchandising machine” certainly works to undercut existential messages in the film. Regardless of how Liz funded her trip, it doesn’t invalidate the lessons she learned. Gilbert didn’t intentionally write a self-help manual — she shared her individual experiences. Rather, she wrote a manifesto to let go of fear and follow your dreams, whatever they may be.

Now, I’m no fan of director Ryan Murphy. Too often he erases bisexuality, perpetuates racist stereotypes and reinforcing misogyny in his TV series. But I don’t think the film perpetuates the misogynistic idea that all women are flawed and must be fixed. Liz was incredibly depressed and unhappy in her marriage. She struggled to get pregnant only to realize she didn’t want to have children. She wanted to finally stop putting off learning Italian and embrace her love of yoga. Although it could certainly be because I read the book which shares Liz’s background and her internal monologue, many details which the film glosses over or eliminates. “But if all you have to go on is Movie Liz, she seems like kind of a selfish jerk, and that makes her voyage to better self-care very hard to care about.”

Eat, Pray, Love

While most people can’t jet off to Europe and Asia on a year-long trip (um, I sure as hell can’t afford that), I still think there are aspects of the film and Liz’s journey people can relate to. In addition to being eye candy, Eat Pray Love raises interesting questions about gender and expectations. Women are supposed to want marriage and babies. And yet what we want may differ from societal standards. Society rigidly dictates what women are supposed to want but may feel disillusioned when they achieve those goals and still aren’t happy. Too many women sacrifice their own happiness for others. There’s nothing wrong with putting yourself and your needs first.

Many people often let things hold them back from going after what they want. If people want to go back to school to earn their degree, they think they’re too old. If they want to travel, they think they don’t have the money or the time. As someone raised in a financially-struggling, working class household, who’s often worked two jobs to make ends meet, I’m well aware of the fiscal and time constraints in people’s lives. Yet I think Liz’s story is a testament to seize the moment, to pursue your passions. Walking away from the life you have always known to dare to try something different, to push yourself out of your comfort zone is not only daunting but incredibly brave.

Many will bemoan that Liz is a wealthy privileged white woman who could afford to take a year out of her life. And she is. But would anyone utter this complaint if she were a man? Gilbert emphasizes that you don’t need to travel around the world to find happiness. Despite its flaws, the film (and book) reminds us to chart our own course, no matter what anyone tells us. And that lesson is priceless.

Bitch Flicks’ Weekly Picks

Network TV is Broken. So How Does Shonda Rhimes Keep Making Hits? by Willa Paskin via The New York Times

Girls on Film: The Danger of the ‘Female Filmmaker’ Label by Monica Bartyzel via The Week 

The Onion Can Go to Hell [Trigger warning: on their “joke” over Chris Brown beating Rihanna to death] by Melissa McEwan via Shakesville

YA Author Takes on Gendered Book Covers with the Coverflip Challenge by Rebecca Pahle via The Mary Sue 

The Gender Coverup by Maureen Johnson via The Huffington Post

This 17-Year-Old Coder Is Saving Twitter from TV Spoilers (Spoiler: She’s a Girl) by Dana Liebelson via Mother Jones

The Women of Mad Men Kick Ass in Season 6 by Nicole Aragi via Buzzfeed

What have you been reading or writing this week?? Tell us in the comments!

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: The Roundup

“The Depiction of Women in Three Films Based on the Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen” by Alisande Fitzsimons

I rather like this ending to a film because despite not sticking to the original story, it offers viewers a chance to see something that is still relatively unusual on-screen: a successful male character giving up his life for the woman (mermaid) he loves. He sacrifices everything for her, with no real guarantee that he’ll be happy, and absolutely no way back. In that way, the male lead (Tom Hanks) is more like the little mermaid of HCA’s original story, who gave up her life below the sea for the human she loved, than Daryl Hannah’s character.

Ballet Shoes by Max Thornton

Much of the story’s genius lies in the characterization of the three sisters. Beautiful Pauline is a talented actress who feels the responsibility of being the eldest sibling; dreamy, waifish Posy thinks of nothing but dancing, to the point of complete otherworldliness; Petrova is the tomboy, the middle child, and the odd one out, who loathes being onstage and is happiest around engines. This set-up creates a lovely interplay of strong, distinct personalities who are united by the loyal bonds of sisterhood, which is really the heart of the story.

For Colored Girls Reveals Power of Sisterly Solidarity & Women Finding Their Voice” by Megan Kearns

The theme of a woman’s voice echoes throughout the film. Women being silenced…by shame, fear, abuse, their mothers, the men in their lives, society…is threaded throughout. Shange’s play and Perry’s film testify the power of women finding solace, self-acceptance and strength in themselves and reclaiming their voice. It’s time we listened to women’s voices and hear what they have to say.


Farewell My Concubine by René Kluge

A gender conscious reading of Farewell hence raises a question that seems to play a big role in many contributions on Bitch Flicks: In light of a film history that has in big part either ignored women or made them the objects of the male gaze, is the sheer visibility of women and/or trans* people already a step forward, or must we pay closer attention to the substance of the representation? This is a question that is not easy to answer, especially for me being a white heterosexual male with no shortage of role models and media idols. Maybe this question is actually very personal and revokes an abstract theoretical analysis. Maybe every female, trans* and/or homosexual person has to choose for her/himself. If they can relate to Dieyi or Juxian, identify with them and understand their personal emancipation and empowerment through them, then no detached scholarly interpretation could argue with that.

“A New Jane in Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre (2011)” by Rhea Daniel

The central story of the complex lone woman, unloved and unwanted–matched with the world-weary hero set in a background that’s far from sumptuous–is in great danger of turning into a great depressing drag of a tale, so it’s incredibly important for that spark and pull between them to work. The script by Moira Buffini aids this, taking only the relevant bits from the novel and chipping away at them so that they shine at the significant parts of the movie, avoiding the verbal diarrhea that can come with being loyal to a classic novel.

“‘John Would Think It Absurd’: How ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ Fails in Translation to the Screen” by Marcia Herring

One of the many lessons here is that literature, like history, has become another commodity in which the male perspective and experience is privileged. In case it was left to doubt, I do not recommend “The Yellow Wallpaper;” in fact, the scariest thing about Thomas’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is that two men apparently read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story and thought: “But what about the husband? What about the men?”


“Hellraisers in Hoop Skirts: Gillian Armstrong’s Proudly Feminist Little Women by Jessica Freeman-Slade

These young women talk openly about money, politics, education, love, and above all, the expectations set upon them. Jo (Ryder) drives the movie, narrates and controls its pace, and she gives the perfect period performance by a contemporary actress—in part because she doesn’t hide just how modern and unnatural she is in the heavy skirts she’s obligated to wear. She seems genuinely uncomfortable, just as Jo would be, slouching, hunching, galumphing about, talking with her mouth full, stomping her feet in the snow. Jo has bigger ambitions than to be pretty or charming: she has a bright mind, a passion for writing, and a dream of sharing her stories with the world. Ryder’s passion, the gusto with which she delivers every line, sings out, and makes this one of her best performances.


“A Love Letter to Anne of Green Gables by Megan Kearns

Children need role models. But girls especially need strong female role models because of the inundation of sexist and misogynistic media. Children’s (and adults’) movies and TV shows too often suffer from the Smurfette Principle, revolving around boys. In our pink sea of princess culture saturating girlhood, it’s refreshing to watch and read a bold, intelligent and unique – and feminist – character like Anne.


“Titus the Tight-Ass: Julie Taymor’s Depictions of the Virgin and Whore” by Amanda Rodriguez

Julie Taymor’s Titus (based on Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus) is a highly stylized production, involving elaborate costumes, body markings, choreography, era prop mash-ups, and extravagant violence. I tip my hat to Taymor for the scope and splendor of her vision, and I also applaud her for paving the way for other talented female directors in Hollywood. Though Taymor updates much of the Shakespeare play (using cars, guns, and pool tables alongside swords, Roman robes, and Shakespearean language), Taymor does little to re-interpret the female roles in an effort to make them more progressive and complex.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston” by Martyna Przybysz

Although I find it thin and slow in places, I struggle to dislike Darnell Martin’s adaptation of Hurston’s novel. After all, it manages to carry a powerful message, despite it not being in favour of the current feminist perception of gender roles and female identity. Yet remembering that it is set in the early 20th century reality of African-Americans, one has to admit that it does a fair job at depicting a woman who goes beyond her time. Even if it does so not without pretense, and in a more simplistic way than Hurston’s beautiful novel.

The Uninvited (1944) and Dorothy Macardle’s Feminism” by Nadia Smith

Overall, The Uninvited reflects a range of tensions and negotiations that intersected with contemporary discourses about gender, sexuality, feminism, and film censorship. While it falls prey to some hostile and stereotypical female characterizations common in the 1940s and later, it is complex and multilayered enough to allow for a range of readings and interpretations as it attempted to speak the unspeakable and represent the unrepresentable.


“Helen Mirren Stars in Julie Taymor’s Gender-Bent The Tempest by Amber Leab

Mirren embodies Prospera with fierceness and control, sort of like she does in every role she plays–or at least in all of her performances I’ve seen. Her books, her learning, is the source of her power. Perhaps her people in Milan had a real fear of such an educated and powerful woman, and their only way to deal with her was to get rid of her. Our society still has trouble with smart and powerful women, after all.


“Slut-Shaming in the 1700s: Dangerous Liaisons and Cruel Intentions by Jessica Freeman-Slade

The stakes in each of these dramas are not only sexual, but obsessed with honor, power, and who gets to claim it. And in both adaptations, the performances by Close and Gellar show that it’s Merteuil’s grudges (and not Valmont’s impulses) that lay the groundwork for the sexual manipulation. It’s less than ideal to have women as such villains, but Laclos left us one of the strongest and most complex female characters in all of literature—for better or for worse—and these ladies sink their teeth into all of Merteuil’s depravity.

“How BBC’s Pride & Prejudice Illustrates Why the Regency Period Sucked for Women” by Myrna Waldron

The 6 episodes of the miniseries grant far more lenience in terms of time constraints, and thus one of the most important themes of Austen’s novel is retained: Her feminism. The protagonists in her novels were all women, and she wrote them for a mostly female audience. Her primary goal was to create sympathy for the status of women and the little rights they retained. Reminder: This is an era where women could not vote, had no bodily autonomy, could not freely marry whomever they chose, were restricted to domestic spheres, and, in some cases, could not even inherit their father’s estate.  Pride & Prejudice, and the BBC adaptation, touch on several of these issues, subtly and sometimes directly condemning them from a feminist outlook. In addition to this feminist subtext, part of Austen’s social satire is pointing out the ridiculous class restraints in which the characters had to endure.

“Comparing Two Versions of Pride and Prejudice by Lady T

I had a bad feeling about the 2005 adaptation even before I saw it, because Keira Knightley said something in an interview comparing Darcy and Elizabeth to two teenagers who don’t realize how much they actually like each other…and that’s exactly how she plays it. It’s such a disservice to both characters, especially Elizabeth, to describe them in that way. Elizabeth’s problem is not that she’s SEKRITLY IN LUUV with Darcy from the very beginning but in denial about her feelings. Her problem is that she’s almost as arrogant as Darcy is, so impressed with herself for being a wonderful judge of character, that she doesn’t revise her opinion of him until given evidence that she’s wrong.


“Gendered Values and Women in Middle Earth” by Barrett Vann

The value system in Tolkien’s Middle Earth consistently favours “softer” strengths, putting emphasis on gentleness, scholarliness, empathy, and patience as qualities that heroes possess. Indeed, it’s written into the very mythology of the legendarium. In The Silmarillion, one of the mighty of the gods of Middle Earth is Nienna, who “is acquainted with grief, and mourns for every wound that Arda has suffered in the marring of Melkor. … But she does not weep for herself; and those who hearken to her learn pity, and endurance in hope” (Tolkien, p. 19). Gandalf in his younger days is described as having learned pity and patience from her. This value placed upon empathy, of sorrow as a virtue, endurance of the spirit rather than the body, resonates throughout all of Tolkien’s works.


“Shades of Feminism in Othello by Leigh Kolb

As for the feminist themes of Othello, they are clear from the very beginning. Desdemona goes behind her father’s back to marry Othello–a celebrated general but not a native Venetian (he is a “Moor,” a black man of African/Muslim descent). She goes before the senate to prove Othello didn’t win her by “witchcraft” (see: racism) and she requests to travel with him to Cyprus. She stands up to her father convincingly, and while she is dutiful to the men in her life, she clearly has an independent spirit. Parker’s Desdemona is also sexual (he includes a sex scene between Othello and Desdemona, and shows flashbacks of their courtship and intimate relationship).

“The Tragedy of Masculinity in Romeo + Juliet by Leigh Kolb

Juliet is continuously more mature than Romeo. While she falls for him as he does for her, she wants to know that he’s serious. Romeo stumbles, he’s clearly much more juvenile than Juliet is. They represent youth, yes, but also a departure from not only their fathers’ patriarchal social order, but also the gendered expectations placed upon them. Juliet’s world is protected and arranged for her; she’s expected to have a life like her mother’s (arranged and out of her control). Romeo’s effeminate nature goes against his father’s powerful corporate position and his cousins’ violent outbursts.

“Mrs. Danvers, or: Rebecca by Amanda Civitello

These perplexing editorial choices in the novel’s adaptation for the screen make for a viewing experience which leaves audiences with a distinctly different perception of the characters and the story. The viewers are denied the absolutely disquieting story of the novel. What’s so disturbing – and so Gothic – about Rebecca isn’t Rebecca herself, and not even the image of Rebecca, the spectre of her, that the different characters construct, but the moral ambiguity surrounding the characters we’re supposed to like and dislike. If a novel – or a screenplay – is meant to be a constructed world, one that functions according to its own rules, then du Maurier’s Rebecca wreaks havoc with that framework.


We Need to Talk About Kevin by Amanda Lyons

And this is what was so terrifying to me about Kevin—its worst-case scenario of motherhood. The woman enslaved, powerless, first by the very presence of the baby growing inside her and then trapped in the four walls of the home, slave to a psychopathic child who is the ultimate tyrant. Disbelieved by her partner, having to cope alone, cut off from the socially accepted positive experience of motherhood. Forced to nurture a child that has nothing but hate and contempt for you.


Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: ‘We Need to Talk About Kevin’

Official movie poster for We Need to Talk About Kevin
This is a guest post by Amanda Lyons and is cross-posted with permission from her blog Mrs Meow Says.

You know how I said in my review of Into the Wild that it was one of the most recent books I’ve read that disturbed me? We Need to Talk About Kevin is the most recent book I’ve read that disturbed me.

The reason for this (apart from the obvious fact that it’s about a child psychopath that you know is going to do something very, very bad, thus every event, every word is soaked in a weighty, dull dread) is that if you are a woman who is ambivalent about having children, Kevin represents your absolute worst nightmare, the zero sum of all your fears of what could happen once you’ve heaved a child from your bloody body.

Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly in We Need to Talk About Kevin

It’s a fascinating and minutely detailed account from Eva Katchadourian of her mothering of Kevin. It’s also an examination of her own soul and an attempt to parse what she may and may not be responsible for during the long build up to the ultimate flowering of Kevin’s violence.

Eva is a very cerebral person, and accordingly Kevin is a very cerebral book, following Eva’s long monologue (confession?) to her absent husband as she makes a hard and painful analysis of what has happened. In a wider sense, it is also an examination of the cultural notion of a mother’s guilt for the actions of her children—Eva is punished by her community for the crimes of her son and ends up living almost as a fugitive from her old life. She is wracked by guilt and horror, analysing events and their lead-up with painful clarity.

But it is soon very clear that though Eva is aware very early on that something is “wrong” with Kevin, she is isolated both by Kevin’s insidious nature and her very role as a mother—and is utterly powerless to do anything about it. Her All-American, trad values-craving husband Franklin coerces her into moving away from her beloved New York to an extravagantly ugly house in the suburbs for the sake of their “family.” Every time she tries to raise her concerns about Kevin, he is disbelieving, and disapproving—he is easily manipulated by his savvy child; because he is not Kevin’s primary caregiver, he only sees what Kevin wants him to see. On top of this, he is a devotee at the shrine of the inviolable nuclear family and refuses to acknowledge anything that could endanger this dream. Instead, he equates Eva’s misgivings with what he perceives as her untrustworthy wanderlust which he fears will take her away from him.

Tilda Swinton glaring

And this is what was so terrifying to me about Kevin—its worst-case scenario of motherhood. The woman enslaved, powerless, first by the very presence of the baby growing inside her and then trapped in the four walls of the home, slave to a psychopathic child who is the ultimate tyrant. Disbelieved by her partner, having to cope alone, cut off from the socially accepted positive experience of motherhood. Forced to nurture a child that has nothing but hate and contempt for you.

And yet, in a lot of ways Eva and Kevin are very alike. This is why Kevin knows it’s easier to get around Dad, but not around Mum—because she understands him in a way Dad never can. Kevin embodies the darker elements of Eva that she herself is unaware of until she starts her minute analysis in the aftermath of his arrest. This feeds her sense of guilt—but also her understanding of him, and her eventual coming to terms with his nature.

Shriver has obviously done her homework. Her construction of Kevin’s childhood reminded me very much of undiagnosed schizophrenic Nancy Spungen’s in her mother’s memoir And I Don’t Want to Live This Life. And when I read this NY Times article about child psychopaths, I thought right away of Kevin and how much the behaviour of the children in it echoed his. It also made me think of Lionel Dahmer’s memoir and how he searched for the answer to Jeffrey’s crimes in his parenting, the dark twists in his own personality and the ways in which he and his son were alike.

Tilda Swinton looking uneasy

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a dark and disturbing, dread-filled book. It consumed my thoughts while I was reading it and terrorised my brain. There are imperfections that mar its surface, the main one being some narrative trickery that I won’t reveal as it’s something of a spoiler. But I will say that I thought it was a bit gimmicky and a slight betrayal of the reader.

This aside, though, it’s an amazing book: painful, scary, intelligent, and unforgettable.

So when I heard there was a film coming out, I thought, “Crikey! Good luck!”

This is because, as with The Hunger Games, We Need to Talk About Kevin is narrated as an internal monologue. Recreating the same effect in a film is very difficult, if not impossible, to do. But the distinctive voice of Eva Katchadourian is essential to the story, is the story.

However, there was one very positive factor—the film was directed by Lynne Ramsay, who is absolutely fantastic. Her films are always creative, individual, and beautifully made.

Tilda Swinton and tomato soup

But hearing about the casting of Tilda Swinton gave me some pause. Don’t get me wrong—I love me some SWINTON. She is astonishingly awesome. I also really liked her interview with W Magazine about the film, in which she said:

It’s every pregnant woman’s nightmare to give birth to the devil. And every mother worries that she won’t connect to her children. When I had my children, my manager asked me what project I wanted to work on next. I said, “Something Greek, perhaps Medea.” Nobody quite understood what I meant, what I was feeling…

You have twins, who are now 13. Did you worry about becoming a mother?

When I first saw the twins, I really liked them. And, at the same time, there was a ghost over my shoulder saying, What if I hadn’t liked them? Kevin spoke to that feeling. It is that nightmare scenario: What if you don’t feel that connection to your children? There’s no preparation for having children. In Kevin, the woman I play is in mourning for her past life, and yet she looks at this dark, nihilistic kid and knows exactly where he comes from. He isn’t foreign to her; she sees herself. And that is, quite literally, revolting to her.

Predictably the gossip rags were like, “WTF! Bitch be crazy!” but I thought she nailed the hammer on the head (or whatever that saying is). She understood the book perfectly, and it was obvious that Eva Katchadourian was in safe hands.

And of course, she is fantastic in the film. She is such a great actress, so lacking in vanity and unafraid to plunge into whatever is needed for a role. It’s just, that … well, Eva is of Armenian descent. And this is quite important in the books. She’s olivey and dark, and Swinton is a long cool glass of milk.

Tilda Swinton and John C. Reilly and balloons in We Need to Talk About Kevin

Obviously these things can be rectified by certain techniques, and duly Swinton’s hair was dyed, and I’m pretty sure they made her wear dark contacts, an attention to detail which I appreciate.

This might have been okay, if I didn’t feel so uneasy about the casting of the other central characters as well. John C. Reilly, I love you, so please forgive me for this, but I imagined Franklin as handsome (I think he’s actually described as such in the book)—albeit in a ruddy, slightly chunky sort of way, but handsome nonetheless. Not only did Reilly not at all correspond with how I thought Franklin should look, but I just completely could not buy he and Swinton as a couple, no matter how hard I tried. He didn’t do a bad job, but I just did not believe it. And there wasn’t a lot of chemistry between them to help the situation out, either.

And then we arrive at the titular Kevin himself. With Kevin, I had the opposite problem: he is described as being quite good-looking in the books. But movie-Kevin goes beyond this; he looks like an underwear model. Ladies and gentlemen I present to you, Ezra Miller:

Ezra Miller, star of We Need to Talk About Kevin
Once again, though, I must praise their attention to detail. Kevin clearly has zits in some of the shots, and he is wearing the too-small clothes that Shriver describes in the books. But he is just so ridiculously gorgeous that I couldn’t help snorting in the theatre at the sight of him. It’s also impossible to believe that he sprung from the loins of John C. Reilly and Tilda Swinton. So some suspension of disbelief issues there.
These issues aside, however, Ramsay makes a solid effort of adapting this story for film. She doesn’t try to oversimplify the story, nor does she bang you over the head with detailed explanation, which I really appreciated. The attention to detail that I’ve mentioned several times earlier shows respect for and a real dedication to the source material. Her technique is as exquisite as her previous films, and I love that the movie isn’t overly shiny looking like so many American movies—she doesn’t try to gloss over the ugly bits.

However, it’s impossible to overcome the central problem—the way the story is told in the book just can’t be replicated in a film. But I also found that having read the book, there was just no tension in the story and the characters didn’t quite gel enough for me to get pulled into their story anyway. It’s a well-made film, but I’ll have to declare the winner unequivocally: BOOK.

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Amanda Lyons is a writer from Middle Earth (AKA New Zealand). By day she writes on finance, by night whatever takes her fancy at http://mrsmeowssays.blogspot.co.nz/.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: Mrs. Danvers, or: ‘Rebecca’

Movie poster for Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca
This is a guest post by Amanda Civitello.

There is a trio of women at the heart of Rebecca. There’s a male love interest, to be sure – the dashing, wealthy, ostensibly noble Maxim de Winter – but at its most essential, Rebecca is a story of women: the unnamed protagonist, the second Mrs. de Winter; Rebecca de Winter, Maxim’s first wife, whose seeming omnipresence at the de Winters’ country seat, Manderley, haunts her replacement; and Mrs. Danvers, Manderley’s housekeeper, and Rebecca’s personal maid, devoted to her mistress even after death. The narrator of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel and Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 film adaptation might be the second Mrs. de Winter, but Rebecca – particularly the novel – doesn’t belong to her in the slightest. Despite a script which departs from the novel in several crucial instances and the talent of Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, the story is Mrs. Danvers’s, and the film is Judith Anderson’s.

Rebecca recounts the story of the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine), the new bride of the wealthy widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), who married him after a whirlwind courtship. Though not especially acquainted with her frequently secretive, moody husband, she nevertheless adores him and, despite her modest upbringings, resolves to do her best as lady of the manor at Manderley. She meets with resistance, of course, from a likely corner, the housekeeper Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), as well as from a more unlikely one, Maxim’s late wife Rebecca de Winter, who drowned tragically but whose ghost seems to haunt Manderley and its inhabitants in more ways than one. The second Mrs. de Winter finds herself at odds with Mrs. Danvers, who is by turns cruel and falsely sweet, and utterly bent on removing Mrs. de Winter from Manderley, at one point attempting to coax her into suicide. The film is something of a thriller, and so of course there are questions surrounding Rebecca’s mysterious drowning – particularly about Maxim’s part in it. Fortunately for our heroine and her romantic lead, Maxim is miraculously exonerated, in a disappointing departure from the novel, and Mr. and Mrs. de Winter, it is presumed, enjoy something of a happy retirement after the closing titles, despite a final act of revenge.

Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) and the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine)
Rebecca is frequently described as Joan Fontaine’s film, and while she’s excellent in her role, and clearly has the most screen time, her role is not, by far, the most interesting of the film. Her character, the second Mrs. de Winter, is never allowed to grow up: in spite of everything, by the close of the film, she’s much the same frustratingly childlike shrinking violet she was at the beginning. Fontaine carries off the ingénue type very well, and it’s not her fault that her character has bursts of growth – short-lived instances in which she takes her staff in hand, or speaks her mind to her husband – but then, inevitably, regresses. She’s beautiful and even sympathetic in her persistent naïveté, at least to a point, but as a woman, the second Mrs. de Winter is ultimately disappointing. Part of the problem lies in the fact that she’s consistently portrayed as the opposite of Rebecca de Winter, who is never seen and never speaks for herself, in the film or the novel. She is the sweetness and light to Rebecca’s coldly Machiavellian, sinister calculation. The second Mrs. de Winter is innocent, concerned only for her husband, and perpetually unsure of herself, which makes her rather nice, but somewhat simpering, and sadly, not especially interesting. Rebecca de Winter is not, by anyone’s account, nice, but she’s certainly more interesting than her wide-eyed replacement, and hers is the silenced voice.

Rebecca, Hitchcock’s first Hollywood film, is beautifully shot and wonderfully acted, but it’s also caught, somewhat uncomfortably, between genres. It doesn’t quite want to be a true Gothic thriller, because it shies from the moral ambiguity that makes the novel such a rich book, but nor is it a straightforward romance, for nothing is ever straightforward with Alfred Hitchcock. Unfortunately, the major casualty of this uncertainty is the novel’s most interesting female character: the housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, a brilliant turn by Judith Anderson. In the novel, Mrs. Danvers haunts each page just as much as the ghost of Rebecca de Winter. In Hitchcock’s hands, Rebecca becomes a cross between a Gothic thriller and a mannered romance, ultimately tending towards the latter, but even this does not fully temper Mrs. Danvers’s omnipresence: she is the link between the unnamed protagonist and the unseen antagonist, not the husband they share in common. However, the novel is full of contradictions in its characterization of Mrs. Danvers which the film does not address. Through the second Mrs. de Winter’s eyes we see Mrs. Danvers as “tall and gaunt,” with “great, hollow eyes,” a “skull’s face set on a skeleton’s frame,” and possessing of “limp and heavy, deathly cold” hands. While Judith Anderson’s costuming is not, perhaps, as skeletal as du Maurier intended, she nevertheless embodies the chilly lifelessness of her character. Her Mrs. Danvers is ghostly in her carriage, but terrifyingly real in her interactions with her new mistress. Yet in the film adaptation, the other-worldliness never leaves her, and Anderson plays it masterfully, creating a character who is deeply unsettling and deliciously spooky. But du Maurier’s novel tempers this description; the Danvers of the novel is not always an evil, unbalanced ice queen. She’s desperate and half-mad with grief, still living in the past and passionate about her mistress.

Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) in Rebecca de Winter’s bedroom
In the film, Danvers is well written, but nevertheless tends towards one-dimensional in the part the script allows her to play; in the book, Danvers’s complexity is far more difficult to ignore. A novel of Rebecca‘s length must necessarily be condensed; the kind of explicated description possible in page upon page of prose is simply untranslatable for the screen. Much of Mrs. Danvers’s complexity in the novel, therefore, is sacrificed so as to streamline the narrative. Where the film paints Danvers as more sadistic than anything else, the Mrs. Danvers of du Maurier’s novel is significantly more multifaceted. She becomes the definite antagonist in the film, the cruelly calculated, disconcertingly creepy nemesis of the wide-eyed ingénue. This is necessary: the viewer needs to believe that, not only would Danvers definitely set fire to Manderley, but that she would perish in Rebecca’s bedroom and deserve it. (On this point, the novel says very, very little, and it’s only one possibility among many that it’s Danvers who torches the great estate, and no mention is made of her fate.)

Hitchcock, however, is a director unafraid of ambiguity and a master of great subtlety, and he addresses the Rebecca-Danvers relationship most decisively in the pivotal bedroom scene, which prompts the second Mrs. de Winter into assuming more control of her household. Throughout, Judith Anderson keeps her delivery crisp and preternaturally calm, conveying Mrs. Danvers’s madness only with her eyes and movement, to great effect. The scene is as utterly disquieting on screen as it is in the novel, perhaps even more so, given the refinement of Judith Anderson’s performance. Danvers catches the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca’s closed-off bedroom in the west wing, and then proceeds to show her new mistress Rebecca’s personal things: her furs, still hanging pristinely in the armoire; her hairbrush, laid in exactly the same place; her nightdress, still laid out for the mistress who won’t return. It’s very easy to make it entirely Gothic in character – a bit of ghostly theatre to unsettle the new bride – but really, there’s much more at play. Again, however, the film and the novel are at odds: in the novel, there’s an undercurrent of grief for the late Rebecca that cuts through Danvers’s cruelty, such that the housekeeper is mad with grief, and motivated by love for her mistress. Death has not relinquished the hold Rebecca had on Mrs. Danvers; in fact, it’s intensified it. Judith Anderson is frighteningly convincing as she caresses Rebecca’s lace underwear, such that the scene is laced with an almost palpable degree of sexual tension and lesbian subtext. Mrs. Danvers’s passion for her mistress is undeniable, and the nature of that passion is left unspecified. The question of a lesbian subtext to the Danvers-Rebecca relationship is one to which the novel alludes as well, and it gives a layer of richness to Mrs. Danvers’s character. If there was a degree of romantic passion on Mrs. Danvers’s part, her grief becomes more sympathetic; her madness, more understandable. But in Rebecca, the scene must be viewed within the context of the film as a whole. Where, in the novel, the reader ultimately feels a degree of pity and sympathy for Mrs. Danvers, despite the assessment of the narrator, on screen, it’s simply, in the end, a briefly penetrating look into an unbalanced, hostile, malicious woman’s madness.

Mrs. Danvers showing Rebecca’s furs to the second Mrs. de Winter, part of the subtext-laden bedroom scene
These perplexing editorial choices in the novel’s adaptation for the screen make for a viewing experience which leaves audiences with a distinctly different perception of the characters and the story. The viewers are denied the absolutely disquieting story of the novel. What’s so disturbing – and so Gothic – about Rebecca isn’t Rebecca herself, and not even the image of Rebecca, the spectre of her, that the different characters construct, but the moral ambiguity surrounding the characters we’re supposed to like and dislike. If a novel – or a screenplay – is meant to be a constructed world, one that functions according to its own rules, then du Maurier’s Rebecca wreaks havoc with that framework. The reader is guided to like certain characters, to dislike others, only to find those perceptions entirely spun on their heads: by the last few pages, the reader realizes that the romantic hero she’s come to like and defend is a murderer. Changing the ending removes the ambiguity around Maxim, and turns Rebecca into a Gothic-tinged romance, and casting Mrs. Danvers as, for the most part, the cruelly sinister, unsympathetic antagonist paradoxically makes Rebecca spookier but far less disquieting, far less unsettling, than the novel. 
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Amanda Civitello is a Chicago-based freelance writer and Northwestern grad with an interest in arts and literary criticism. She has recently written on Jacques Derrida and feminist philosopher Sarah Kofman for The Ellipses Project and has contributed reviews of Sleep Hollow, Downton Abbey and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to Bitch Flicks. You can find her online at amandacivitello.com.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: Gendered Values and Women in Middle Earth

This is a guest post by Barrett Vann.

Several weeks ago, I was trawling the internet for reviews of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, when I came across this one, by Rhiannon at Feminist Fiction. In it, she says:

The film was … a retelling of one of the oldest, most classic, and so most male and white modern fantasy tales we have. And in that context, the film was actually quite an interesting achievement.

I’m not going to try to argue that The Hobbit was a feminist movie — with only one female character in the whole film, that feels a bit of a stretch. I’m not even going to claim that the film was perfectly executed, because I think it had many flaws. But I think it presented the all-male fantasy adventure in a somewhat new way, valuing strengths other than sheer might and blunt, obvious bravery.

… I’m not going to claim that these are “feminine” strengths. But I think they are traits that many other adventure movies would brush over, or present as weaknesses, a lack of proper, adventurous masculinity. The fact that the Hobbit focuses on these traits and integrates them into its adventure is admirable.

The fact that Rhiannon drew attention to this gave me pause, not because it’s not truequite the contraryor because I hadn’t noticed it myself, but because that is something so consistently true of Tolkien’s works that it would never have occurred to me to mention it. The value system in Tolkien’s Middle Earth consistently favours “softer” strengths, putting emphasis on gentleness, scholarliness, empathy, and patience as qualities that heroes possess. Indeed, it’s written into the very mythology of the legendarium. In The Silmarillion, one of the mighty of the gods of Middle Earth is Nienna, who “is acquainted with grief, and mourns for every wound that Arda has suffered in the marring of Melkor. … But she does not weep for herself; and those who hearken to her learn pity, and endurance in hope” (Tolkien, p. 19). Gandalf in his younger days is described as having learned pity and patience from her. This value placed upon empathy, of sorrow as a virtue, endurance of the spirit rather than the body, resonates throughout all of Tolkien’s works.

In The Lord of the Rings, whilst there is a war to be fought, and manly men like Aragorn and Éomer to fight it, the true heroes of the story are Frodo and Sama scholar and a gardener. In Fellowship, Frodo and Gandalf have this telling exchange in the Mines of Moria:

Frodo: It’s a pity Bilbo didn’t kill him when he had the chance!

Gandalf: Pity? It was pity that stayed Bilbo’s hand. Many that live deserve death, and some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them, Frodo? Do not be too eager to deal out death in judgment. Even the very wise cannot see all ends. My heart tells me that Gollum has some part to play yet, for good or evil before this is over. The pity of Bilbo may rule the fate of many. [1]

Indeed, characters who embody more traditionally masculine values are more often the ones at moral fault, more apt to fall prey to the deceptions of evil or act rashly and in pride. To take things back to The Silmarillion once more, Fëanor, the Noldorin prince and gemsmith, is “the mightiest in all parts of body and mind: in valour, in endurance, in beauty, in understanding, in skill, in strength and subtlety alike: of all the Children of Ilúvatar” (Tolkien, p. 109). Fëanor is characterised by his might, but he is also rash, prideful, selfish, quick to wrath, and heedless of consequences. His actions result in horrific civil war and centuries of bloodshed and pain.

In The Lord of the Rings, a lesser example is Boromir, who is Captain of the Tower of Guard, and widely regarded as a great warrior among men; large and strong, doughty in battle, and fiercely patriotic. In The Two Towers and Return of the King, he is posthumously contrasted to his brother Faramir, who is the more gentle and scholarly of the two, and who, it is said, is “more Númenórean” than his brother. Boromir possesses many “masculine” virtues, but it is he who first of the Fellowship falls prey to the Ring, as it plays on both his fears for his city and his pride in his own skill. [2]

So, if we’re looking at traditionally gendered values and strengths, Tolkien’s works (and subsequently Jackson’s movies) often subvert them. Which is great! But what about the actual women of Middle Earth? Here, for those readers less geeky about Tolkien than I, I shall cease reference to The Silmarillion, and focus solely on The Lord of the Rings, and the differences between women in the books and the movies.

The Lord of the Rings books are not exactly overflowing with women; Galadriel, Éowyn, Arwen, Goldberry, Rosie Cotton, and a few bit players like Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, and Ioreth the Gondorian healer. The three most significant of these, and those who survive into the movies, are Galadriel, Arwen, and Éowyn. The first two have their roles expanded for the movies, sometimes with more success than others.

Galadriel is the character who stays closest to her book incarnation, and is, let’s make no bones, awesome. The Queen of Lothlorien, Galadriel is one of the oldest Elves in Middle Earth, and a powerful sorceress who bears one of the three Elf-rings. In the book, she appears only once, when the Fellowship stops in Lothlorien after losing Gandalf in Moria. She is a reader of thoughts, and speaks to the hearts and minds of each member of the Fellowship, testing their weaknesses. She also possesses the Mirror of Galadriel, in which can be seen “things that are, things that were, and some things that have not yet come to pass.” She invites Frodo and Sam to look into the Mirror, something which foreshadows events to come and helps to harden their resolve. She is tempted to take the Ring when Frodo offers it to her, envisioning a future in which “Instead of a Dark Lord you will set up a Queen. And I shall not be dark, but beautiful and terrible as the Morning and the Night! Fair as the Sea and the Sun and the Snow upon the Mountain! Dreadful as the Storm and the Lightning! Stronger than the foundations of the earth. All will love me and despair” (Tolkien, p. 356). The Ring tempts those of power, and as an immensely powerful woman, it is a hard test, but she overcomes it. She also gives gifts to the Fellowship, many of which are of immense use later, particularly the ones given to the Hobbits.

Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) is tempted by the Ring

It is of note, I think, that the Ring Galadriel bears is Nenya, the Ring of Adamant. Through her ring, she is characterised as a figure of strength.

The movie’s Galadriel is little changed, but her role is expanded. She provides the voiceover at the beginning of Fellowship, as one who was there and remembers the events of ages past, and in Two Towers, she and Elrond converse on the subject of the rising evil of Sauron and Saruman, and how best to subdue it. She also sends a host of warriors to the battle at Helm’s Deep. In Return of the King, Frodo imagines he sees her as he struggles through Cirith Ungol, and her reminder, “Even the smallest person can change the course of the future,” serves as a sort of tagline for the trilogy. She embodies strength, wisdom, and experience, and is seen frequently in a role of support for other, more obviously active characters.

“Will you look into the Mirror?”
It can be said without much argument, I think, that Galadriel is an excellent feminist character. Though she is married, it is she who is the leader of the galadhrim; she is powerful, compassionate, and wise, but she is not without flaws; temptation, and a certain withdrawal from the events of the world which Tolkien implies is the result of mistakes made when she was younger.

Arwen is a different case. Aragorn’s love, she is the daughter of Elrond, and in the books is more or less a nonentity. Frodo sees her at dinner in Rivendell, and she is described as fair and wise, dark-haired and grey-eyed, and she appears again, at the end of Return of the King, to marry Aragorn. Her only dialogue is a short exchange with Frodo in which she gives him a pendant to wear, to draw strength from when his experiences are too hard to bear. She is meant to be an echo of Luthien, the elf-maid in the First Age who married a mortal man; Luthien was an enchantress who, among other things, glamoured herself to look like a vampire, snuck into the fortress of Angband and put the Dark Lord Morgoth into an enchanted sleep so she could snatch a Silmaril from his very crown. However strong and fabulous Luthien was, though, all the resemblance we see in her descendant is that Arwen also loves a mortal man. Her entire character centres around Aragorn.

Now, Peter Jackson knew, at least, that if you’re going to have a love story, the other half of that love story has to show up more than once before she gets hitched. The way he goes about that, however, doesn’t always work.

In Fellowship, she takes the role of Glorfindel from the books, showing up to bring a wounded Frodo to Rivendell, outrunning Black Riders and summoning the flood of the River Bruinen to drown them after she crosses it. She’s competent, fearless, she even teases Aragorn at one point. Later on, the two of them share a romantic moment, reminiscing about the moment they met; Arwen assures him that she has faith in him, and pledges to forsake immortality for him. All that is fine.

Arwen (Liv Tyler) faces off against the Ringwraiths

In Two Towers, things start getting a little wobbly. With the introduction of Éowyn, a pseudo-love triangle is formed, and Aragorn spends a lot of time being woeful and having flashbacks about Arwen, in one of which he gives her back her Evenstar pendant, the symbol of her choice to become mortal for his sake. Unfortunately, this memory serves only to show Aragorn completely ignoring the agency of the woman he loves and adopting a paternalistic role in which he knows what’s best for her. Never mind the fact that they both knew this was always in the cards. The one element of this scene which might salvage it is the perfect chill of Liv Tyler’s delivery of the line, “It was a gift. Keep it.”

There are also scenes of Arwen and Elrond, in which Elrond takes on this same role, attempting to convince Arwen that there is nothing for her in Middle Earth, and that she would do best to stay with her family and depart to Valinor. Again, Arwen’s agency is undermined, and further, though she is a mature womanindeed, over two-thousand years oldshe is made childlike, as she trembles and weeps in her father’s arms.

In Return of the King, she is on her way to the Grey Havens until she has a vision of the child she might one day have with Aragorn, and rushes back to accuse Elrond of keeping his foreknowledge from her. It is then that the weakest element of the Arwen subplot commences; her mortality has (apparently) taken a very immediate form, and her fate somehow tied to that of the Ring. She is reduced to lying on cushions and weeping whilst Elrond rides to tell Aragorn that she is dying, and will die unless Aragorn wins this war for them. It’s utterly illogical, and worse, practically turns Arwen into a Sleeping Beauty figure.

Like a Victorian consumptive, Arwen dies prettily

All in all, the movies’ version of Arwen is a curious thing. She is shown to be competent, wise and compassionate and loving, but all that is largely undermined by extraneous plot points which strip her agency from her and serve to make her into merely a motivation for Aragorn. This is unfortunate, as she has the potential to be so much moresomeone old and wise, strong and brave enough to willingly accept her own death, when death is something so alien to her.

The third of these women, Éowyn, is one of my favourite characters in The Lord of the Rings, because she is a mass of contradictions. She is a young woman, only twenty-three, whose parents have died, whose uncle has sunk slowly into dotage, whose country is being encroached on by enemies; she is fragile, injured, deeply sorrowfulindeed suicidalbut she responds to this by being as strong as she possibly canand the way she knows to be strong is the way men are strong. She is trained as a warrior, but because she is a woman (more likely, because she is a royal woman), she is not allowed to fight. And so she rages, furious at herself for her uselessness, and at everyone else for making her so. The metaphors through which she is described are of ice and steelbeautiful, but cold, sharp, distant. When she rides to war, hers is “the face who rides seeking death, having no hope.” She is at once strong and deeply vulnerable.

Though the movies do at least allow her a few rare moments of happiness

In the books, she appears to develop an infatuation with Aragorn, but it is clearly grounded more in the fact that Aragorn is someone she wishes to emulate; he symbolises strength, and also the possibility of escape. She would follow him, but as a soldier follows his captain, not a girl pining for love. This is one respect in which the movies misstep. Miranda Otto’s Éowyn is much tearier, more delicate, where the Éowyn of the books is stubborn and dignified, and in introducing the love triangle element, her feelings for Aragorn are depicted as more genuinely romantic, and therefore she also becomes jealous of Arwen. There is, of course, nothing wrong with a woman having romantic feelings for someone she cannot have, but I feel that in this case, it rather misses the point.

Éowyn (Miranda Otto) weeps over the death of her cousin and the treachery of Wormtongue

In the books, Éowyn is left to rule at Edoras when Aragorn, Theoden, and his men ride off to war, and in a touch I appreciate, is actually nominated for the position by one of Theoden’s guards when Theoden is left in doubt over whom he ought to entrust with the role. ‘‘’I said not Éomer,’ answered Háma. ‘And he is not the last [of the House of Eorl]. There is Éowyn, daughter of Éomund … She is fearless and high-hearted. All love her. Let her be as lord to the Eorlingas, while we are gone’” (Tolkien, p. 512). Though she is young, she is known by her uncle’s men to be strong and intelligent enough to command, to be entrusted with defending the capital of their realm. Éowyn, however, does not take it as such, and chafes that she is not allowed to ride with the men.

Concerning war, there are a few points to make concerning the movies’ depiction thereof. Éowyn tells Aragorn, “The women of this country learned long ago; those without swords can still die upon them.” The implication here ought to be that there are other shieldmaidens of Rohan; perhaps not in the court, but in the smaller hamlets away from Edoras, that Éowyn is not an anomaly. However, the only other women of Rohan we see seem to be either old women or young children, fleeing from burning settlements or cowering in the caves at Helm’s Deep. I was disappointed that they only nominally normalised the idea of women fighters, rather than actually showing it.

Éowyn after the defeat of the Witch King

Éowyn’s best known moment, understandably, is her defeat of the Witch King; riding to the battle of the Pelennor Fields disguised as a man, she faces off with an immortal creature so terrifying he can fell men with a mere scream, beheads his draconian mount, and then, with the assistance of Merry the hobbit, kills him. My personal preference is for the book’s version of that scene, but that’s only because I have an unabashed fondness for Éowyn’s speech before she beheads his steed.

But no living man am I! You look upon a woman. Éowyn I am, Éomund’s daughter. You stand between me and my lord and kin. Begone, if you be not deathless! For living or dark undead, I will smite you, if you touch him. (Tolkien, p. 823)

The movie, perhaps understandably, shortens that to “I am no man!,” but the point remains. Éowyn is strong here not because she’s trying to be a man, but because she is a woman. It’s a triumphant moment.

Overall, I would say women in the movies actually come off rather worse than they do in the books, if only by a little. While scenes like Lothlorien and the Battle of the Pelennor fields are truly excellent, the writers seem to struggle in knowing how to depict women who aren’t strong or powerful in obvious ways, as shown in the unfortunate choices made regarding Arwen, and the way Éowyn shines less than she does in the books when she’s not cutting the heads off monsters. Considering the books, Tolkien’s world, although it is not a feminist one by any stretch, does to some extent restructure a gendered value system, and does contain dynamic and thoughtfully written female characters. If only there were more of them.

[1] This is the movie’s version of this dialogue, though a similar one occurs in the book.

[2] Note: I am not hating on Boromir! I feel I have to point this out, because people so often do, but he is actually one of my favourite characters. All those delicious flaws and a redemptive death; I’m a sucker.

———-

Barrett Vann has just graduated from the University of Minnesota with degrees in English and Linguistics. An unabashed geek, she’s into cosplay, literary analysis, high fantasy, and queer theory. Now that she’s left school, she hopes to find a real job so in a few years she can tackle grad school for playwrighting or screenwriting, and become one of those starving artist types.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: Slut-Shaming in the 1700s: ‘Dangerous Liaisons’ and ‘Cruel Intentions’

Period dress
This is a guest post by Jessica Freeman-Slade.

Name more than five novels in which sex, and all its consequences, takes center stage. OK, you’ve got The Story of O, Justine (the infamous novel written by the Marquis de Sade), Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and of course, the juggernaut 50 Shades of Gray trilogy… but no matter what your previous reading list, Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses is in a class by itself when it comes to stories about sex. Better known by its 1985 English stage adaptation by Christopher Hampton, Laclos’s original tale is written in epistolary form, consisting of a series of letters sent between the Marquise de Merteuil and her friend the Vicomte de Valmont, as they scheme to seduce and ruin the virtuous Madame de Tourvel and the virginal schoolgirl Cécile de Volanges. Merteuil and Valmont’s wicked plots turn on the consequences of unbridled lust in a society where reputations are valued above all else—and, as Merteuil uses Valmont’s sexual escapades to her own advantage, it can be read as a Rococo master class on the consequences of gossip and “slut-shaming.”


Valmont and Merteuil
Sebastian and Kathryn

Dangerous Liaisons has had a number of film iterations (including a surprisingly steamy 2012 Chinese adaptation), but the most famous of these are as different and yet equally decadent as petit fours and dry martinis. In the Stephen Frears 1988 production of Dangerous Liaisons, Merteuil (Glenn Close) and Valmont (John Malkovich) strut in gilded costumes and powdered faces, their elegant trappings masking their cruel plots to destroy Tourvel (Michelle Pfeiffer) and Cécile (a barely legal Uma Thurman). In the second, the 1999 Roger Kumble adaptation, Cruel Intentions, drops us into modern-day New York, in which the wealthy stepsiblings Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Gellar) and Sebastian Valmont (Ryan Phillippe) plot to destroy the naïve Cecile (Selma Blair) and the proud Annette Hargrove (Reese Witherspoon). The stakes in each of these dramas are not only sexual, but obsessed with honor, power, and who gets to claim it. And in both adaptations, the performances by Close and Gellar show that it’s Merteuil’s grudges (and not Valmont’s impulses) that lay the groundwork for the sexual manipulation. It’s less than ideal to have women as such villains, but Laclos left us one of the strongest and most complex female characters in all of literature—for better or for worse—and these ladies sink their teeth into all of Merteuil’s depravity.
The opening sequence, as Merteuil and Valmont dress for the day, is enough to draw anyone into this period piece, but it also gives you an appreciation of how much artifice one might have carried about as a member of the aristocracy. The presentation of the aristocracy’s trappings serve as a visual parallel to Merteuil’s hypocrisy: because society considers her intelligent and full of social graces, she is able to advise (and manipulate) the just-out-of-the-convent Cécile, who is promised in marriage to Merteuil’s former lover (a man obsessed with Cécile’s purity).

Cecile and Merteuil

Merteuil entices Valmont, widely known for his many love affairs with women across Paris, to seduce Cécile because she knows just how much harm such a scandal will do to Cécile’s future. She delivers a great treatise on how she performs in society, how she practices deception and conceals her true desires, and it serves not just as a frightening defense of her own actions, but as a monologue on the required falsehoods that women must perform to be considered “good.”
The other women in the original tale, as Merteuil would explain it, have far less control over their own desires than she does—and so they must suffer for it. Cécile is, by any definition, raped by Valmont, yet she is persuaded that his seduction is all in the service of making her a better lover to her future husband and to her secret crush, her music teacher Danceny (a woefully outclassed Keanu Reeves.)

Cecile writes on Valmont

Meanwhile Tourvel rebuffs Valmont’s advances on her, pleading that instead of tempting her desires (a wickedness that supercedes any innate goodness he might pretend to have), he leave her alone to mourn their unrequited romance in peace.

Valmont and Tourvel

As Valmont, Malkovich does a wonderful job of preening and crafting his seductions to fit each victim, wooing Cécile with tutelage and Tourvel with overtures of passionate, virtuous love. He only persuades her to sleep with him once he declares that, if he cannot have her, he must kill himself instead. As Tourvel, Pfeiffer swoons prettily, and cries even better when Valmont abandons her. By the time he ultimately seduces her, Valmont has fallen utterly in love with Tourvel—what seems a promise to a happier ending. And yet, Merteuil had promised Valmont that he would get the chance to sleep with her after seducing Tourvel. Furious with his transferred affections, Merteuil whips Valmont into a frenzy by denying him his victory sex—and the allure of remaining forever entangled with him, in negotiations rather than in the sheets, leaves her with the upper hand. The downfall, it seems, is being ruled by your desires once more—and thus, Valmont abandons Tourvel with only one line of explanation: “It’s beyond my control.” This is the ultimate threat to his manhood, the ultimate assertion that he is, in fact, more than just sexual impulses.
In the modern-day adaptation, meanwhile, the wicked ways of the Merteuil-Valmont household get to be a little more openly declared, and the sexual escapades a little more explicit—more petty, perhaps, but just as fun to watch.

Sebastian and Kathryn

Kathryn and Sebastian now live in a townhouse and attend an elite boarding school—Kathryn’s desire to ruin Cecile comes when Cecile begins dating her former boyfriend, and Sebastian’s aims on Annette (aka the Tourvel figure) come when he spots her manifesto, “Why I Plan to Wait” in Seventeen. “Can you imagine, diddling the new headmaster’s daughter?… She’ll be my greatest victory,” Sebastian crows, and Kathryn ups the ante by turning it into a bet: if he fails to seduce Annette, Kathryn gets his vintage car, but if he succeeds, she’ll give him sex, a.k.a. “something you’ve been obsessing about ever since our parents got married.” In the modern version, Kathryn openly flirts with Sebastian, laying out the sexual terms as explicitly as she needs to entice him. But her explanation of her reputation is far less self-satisfied than Close’s period piece—Kathryn is openly resentful, in part because she’s entitled to her full self-expression and sexual knowledge. The modernity allows a more open Merteuil figure, but it makes it harder to feel sympathy and admiration for her. (Also tough to admire, the crucifix she fondles while espousing her Christian faith, later opening to serve as a coke spoon.)

Setting the film in modern dress changes the strict sexual mores, and thus makes their transgressions far less shocking or threatening than the period adaptation. Throughout the film, Kathryn makes several advances on Sebastian as she quizzes him about the progress of his various seductions.

Cecile

In addition, the shifting of all the characters to the same age group makes Cecile’s seduction a little less about the violation of a child, and more about sexual sophistication. Thus Cecile’s purity becomes more about her naivety, and Blair plays her for laughs, both in Kathryn’s kissing tutorial in the park and during Sebastian’s manipulations. It’s coerced, certainly, but it doesn’t have quite the same evil punch as that of the period film.
But, on the upside, the modern setting makes Witherspoon’s Annette more nuanced than that of Pfeiffer’s Tourvel. Sebastian’s vows of love to her sound false from the very start, and she’s much more self-aware and skeptical than he initially suspects. “What have you heard?” he asks. “That you promise girls the world in order to get them in bed with you,” she responds calmly. Instead of following Laclos’s template, Sebastian and Annette’s romance only develops once she believes that he is letting down his guard with her, that she sees the real him instead of his playboy alter-ego. He makes goofy faces with her, he laughs with her, and when they ultimately do have sex, it is shot in tight, tender close-up, an extremely different framing than that of his scenes with Kathryn. As a result of the sincerity of their romance, it becomes even more devastating when Sebastian flounders in trying to break up with Annette. “I’m completely fucked up,” he says. “I agree, you’re completely fucked up!” she yells back, slapping him and sending him out of the room.

But Laclos’s novel does not leave Merteuil consequence-free, and both films find a way to ultimately tie her fate back to that asset she prizes most highly: her reputation. In Frears’ adaptation, a guilt-ridden Valmont, despondent over having to abandon his beloved, dying Tourvel, allows himself to be killed in a duel with Danceny, but not before handing over his many letters of correspondence with Merteuil documenting all her plots and wicked devices. Merteuil is rendered senseless by grief at the loss of Valmont, and then finds her the outcast of Parisian society, booed at the opera after the revelation of her role in countless scandals. And so ultimately the scandal falls back on her—her reputation destroyed not by a few careless words, but by her own documented hand. Close’s exquisite performance ends as Merteuil wipes the powder and rouge from her face, showing her true colors at last.
The modern adaptation has a little more fun as well—and it may be ripe for an even more modern update, one that would take advantage of social media to ruin Merteuil’s reputation once and for all. Sebastian is hit by a car and dies, avowing his love, in Annette’s forgiving arms. At his memorial service, a grieving Kathryn finds the stairs of the school chapel plastered with Xeroxed pages from Sebastian’s diary, documenting all her lies and misdeeds. In a surprising restoral of agency, it is Annette who recovered the diary, and gets to drive off into the sunset unscathed (in Sebastian’s gorgeous car, no less.)
It seems, for both interpretations, that the cruelest punishment for a villain is to have a public face on their private crimes. As Kathryn and Merteuil no doubt discover, the scorn of society is enough to make any private victories feel insignificant, and in the end, the final reputation ruined is that of the first person to spread the wicked rumor. Les Liaisons Dangereuses was the source of the phrase, “Revenge is a dish best served cold,” and even reading from a modern perspective, you can relish this dish only as much as you can enjoy seeing women tear each other down over sexual escapades. A huge step forward for what female characters get to do in fiction, perhaps, but a mixed message in terms of women’s sexual expression.

———-

Jessica Freeman-Slade is a cookbook editor at Random House, and has written reviews for The Rumpus, The Millions, The TK Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Specter Magazine, among others. She lives in Morningside Heights, NY.
 
 
 

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: A Love Letter to ‘Anne of Green Gables’

Megan Follows as Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables (1985)
I’ve admired strong, intelligent and assertive women and girls for as long as I can remember.
When I was 3 years old, I danced to my mom’s Tina Turner albums while donning my Wonder Woman Underoos or my Princess Leia gown. I proudly asserted my female identity – even changing my name to “Girl” when I was a toddler. But my favorite pastime by far? Reading. Books transported me to another world, spiriting me away from my painful childhood. I was especially drawn to strong female protagonists: Karana in Island of the Blue Dolphins, Miyax in Julie of the Wolves, Jo March in Little Women, Meg Murray in A Wrinkle in Time, and of course Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables.
Anne of Green Gables was my favorite book growing up. Featuring one of my literary idols, Anne Shirley is a 13-year-old orphan sent to live with Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert on a farm on Prince Edward Island, Canada in the early 1900s. When I watch the 1985 mini-series based on Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved series, I relive that childhood love all over again. I usually prefer books to their film adaptations. But in this case, both versions complement each other perfectly. Megan Follows embodies Anne, capturing her feisty, intelligent, sensitive, compassionate and defiant personality.

I saw so much of myself in Anne. A loquacious and opinionated chatterbox, she talked too much which often got her into trouble. She devoured books, acting out her favorite scenes. She excelled at school and strived to be the top in her class. Stubborn and bold, Anne is a drama-queen – sometimes describing her situation as “the depths of despair” – with romantic dreams, a vivid imagination, quick temper and an insatiable curiosity.

Forever quirky, she asked to be called “Cordelia” and insisted people write her name with an “e,” as she swore her name without that crucial letter was just too plain. She loathed people making fun of her red hair, letting her fiery fury flare when she slammed a slate board over Gilbert Blythe’s head after he calls her “carrots”and pulls on her pigtails. (Hey, keep your hands to yourself Gilbert).

Anne is also vain. She’s obsessed with appearances, wearing fashionable puffy sleeves and laments the curse of her crimson mane, which she accidentally turns green after attempting to dye it raven black. She doesn’t grow out of her beauty obsession. Rather her hair eventually darkens to an “appealing” auburn and people begin to remark on her attractiveness.

Now Anne’s beauty obsession would seem to detract from her feminism. While this is annoying, I liked that she wasn’t a paragon of perfection. Also, while I’m not sure this was the intent, it seems as if the film and book are commenting on the toxicity of beauty culture. Despite Anne’s proclamations that she would “rather be pretty than smart,” Anne’s intellect, creativity, kindness and loyalty are what win people over. Her relationships and her aspirations are what bring her joy. Not her appearance.

Female relationships are highlighted in Anne of Green Gables, which is great to see in our male-centric media. Anne anoints the amicable Diana Barry her kindred spirit and “bosom” friend. The two female friends nurture and support one another. When Anne is about to recite a poem in public, Diana tells her, “You’ve never failed at anything, Anne Shirley.”

We witness an interesting display of gender with Anne’s guardians, Marilla and Mathew Cuthbert. Matthew was kind, gentle and nurturing while Marilla was strong, disciplined and stern – reversing stereotypical gender roles.

Boys often seem to be revered in media and culture. But Anne of Green Gables challenges that notion. The brother and sister wanted to adopt a boy who would help them on the farm. Instead they got Anne, a boisterous girl. Anne tells Matthew, “If I’d been the boy you sent for, I could have spared you in so many ways.” But he replies, “I never wanted a boy. I only wanted you from the first day. Don’t ever change. I love my little girl. I’m so proud of my little girl.” When Matthew says to Marilla it was “lucky mistake” they got Anne, Marilla replies, “It wasn’t luck; it was Providence. He knew we needed her.” My favorite author Margaret Atwood points out that it’s not Anne but Marilla who goes through the greatest transformation. Anne teaches her how to not only love but how to express love. A boy didn’t save them; a girl did.

While we merely see a blossoming friendship, Anne’s eventual romance with Gilbert Blythe in the following film (and books) Anne of Avonlea, is still my ideal to this day. Despite being written over 100 years ago, it’s still refreshing to see an egalitarian partnership. Gilbert is Anne’s intellectual and emotional equal. He supports, nurtures and challenges her, pushing her to be her best. How could a feminist not search for her own Gilbert Blythe?

Dedicated to her career, Anne relentlessly advances her education with the goal of becoming a teacher. Always independent, she wants to forge her own path and pursue her dreams. She also hopes to fall passionately in love. Yet her aspirations, career, family and female friendships matter equally.

While the word “feminist” is never uttered (or written) in Anne of Green Gables, I have no doubt in my mind that Anne is a feminist, albeit “a stealth feminist.” As Chloe Angyal so eloquently writes:

“On the surface, she adheres to all the requirements of turn early twentieth century Canadian womanhood. She’s domestic, as is expected. She’s feminine and elegant, as is expected. She’s polite and courteous, as is expected, except for those occasions on which her temper gets the better of her. But underneath all that, she’s quite a rebellious young woman. She’s determined to be as educated as she possibly can – as educated as a woman was permitted to be in those days. Anne is an opinionated young lady, and she isn’t afraid to voice her opinions out loud when so many of her girl friends defer to men and to tradition.”

But as Angyal points out, Anne is also “a model for those of us who work for social justice.” Anne struggled through her early childhood, living with a cruel family until she’s 13. Never knowing love at all, she recites, “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.” Yet despite her pain and loneliness – or perhaps because of it – she seeks to make the world a better place:

“Anne is capable of turning pain into beauty, and injustice into love. She is able to imagine a better world. More than that, she views it as her duty and her delight to create that better world, through teaching and learning or even, simple though it might sound, through treating people with kindness and empathy and love.”

Children need role models. But girls especially need strong female role models because of the inundation of sexist and misogynistic media. Children’s (and adults’) movies and TV shows too often suffer from the Smurfette Principle, revolving around boys. In our pink sea of princess culture saturating girlhood, it’s refreshing to watch and read a bold, intelligent and unique – and feminist – character like Anne.

Even though I wasn’t an orphan, I related to Anne. With my tumultuous childhood – my parents’ divorce, moving in with my grandparents and my mother struggling with mental illness – I was a lonely and opinionated only child, never feeling like I belonged, never feeling loved. I desperately yearned to find my place in the world, just as Anne did. It was comforting to see, even if only on-screen and in the pages of a novel, that I wasn’t alone after all. I had a kindred spirit in Anne.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: "John Would Think It Absurd": How ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ Fails in Translation to the Screen

“The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This is a guest post by Marcia Herring

“The Yellow Wallpaper” – the short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman – is almost universally recognized as a work of feminist horror. The nameless narrator, put on bed rest by her doctor husband, and perhaps suffering from post-partum depression, seeks release in the written word and eventually comes to believe that something is lying hidden behind the gaudy yellow wallpaper of her room. Fine fodder for a horror film, if you ask me. The tenuous line between a “true” haunting and the psyche of a woman treated less than human is a theme often explored within the horror genre, often pointing shakily toward the frailty of women lending to their traumatic supernatural experiences. It might have been nice to see an adaptation of “The Yellow Wallpaper” that addressed those themes and countered with themes of its own, offering that same supernatural phenomena as an escape or perhaps a savior from a traumatic real life. Unfortunately, 2011’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” co-written and directed by Logan Thomas, is not that film.
The film begins by introducing us to the three leads: John, his wife Charlotte (a nod, certainly, to Charlotte Perkins Gilman), and her sister Jennifer. They are moving to a new town after a fire took their house and young daughter Sara. This move comes prompted by an odd gentleman who seems to have sought them out as particular inhabitants: the house comes pre-furnished, and the 1900s realtor asks for nothing more than one month of rent to secure the property. The situation, while convenient (all too convenient, we horror veterans assume), is still less than ideal. All of the family’s money was lost in the fire, so John attempts to find work in town. Meanwhile, Charlotte turns to a strange room in the attic for inspiration while working on a short story. Then supernatural aspects begin to come into play.
When it seems like the presence of their daughter has followed them into this new lodging, Charlotte is comforted, and John increasingly and illogically distressed. (Perhaps, I guess, he is reacting to scenes that missed the final cut of the film.) Jennifer brings a medium friend to help attempt to figure out what is going on at the house, but whatever haunts the walls isn’t going to play nice. [Watch the trailer here.]
To call “The Yellow Wallpaper” an adaptation of the Gilman short story is a harsh overstatement – Director Thomas and co-writer (and star!) Aric Cushing have created a film that unfortunately both relies on the viewer’s familiarity with Gilman’s short story and sets itself up for failure because of its complete disregard for anything included in said story. Unless a viewer has read Gilman’s “Wallpaper,” they won’t understand the strange, wordless scenes in the wallpapered attic room (a room that isn’t given any other context), or the one or two throwaway lines from the story. And if indeed the viewer is familiar with the “source material,” Thomas’s “Wallpaper” will come off as something so bizarrely ignorant of its source text that viewing will be negatively affected.

 To look at the poster, one might guess that “Wallpaper” is a film about evil sisters! Perhaps rising up against poor, poor John.

That isn’t to suggest that “Wallpaper” might be a good film without the literary allusions. Far from it. “The Yellow Wallpaper” is muddied with grit and fog and overbearing crashes and bangs of director-composed score. By the time we start to sense where the story might be going, Thomas throws in a twist (or four) that are so far from rational that I actually spent time pausing the film to wonder if I had missed something in a previous scene or if I had mistakenly begun watching another film. “The Yellow Wallpaper” has it all: sloppy editing, a few attempts at CGI and a half-baked mythology all crammed into the last half-hour of the film. Ending with a predictable and expected wink-wink-nudge-nudge scene, the film rolled into the credits while I scratched my head and wondered what, exactly, I had just watched. Anything that might hint at the ending, or any real horror, is left off screen and only referenced as an addendum – not as premonition.
Even as straight horror without any implications of living up to an established narrative, “Wallpaper” plays against some traditional horror conventions – and not in a good way. The traditional horror female experiences the paranormal with a kind of jouissance in direct opposition to the linear/logical “male” perspective that does not allow for any presentation of reality beyond the norm. The story that seems to be building in Thomas’s “Wallpaper” is one of haunting, a missing presence (I say “seems” because [SPOILER: one of the final twists explains that everything is really about vampires].) Charlotte believes the spirit is a benevolent one, somehow connected to her daughter. She takes comfort in this, and she should.
But John, burdened not only with maintaining the household through means both monetary and sane, all without the moral support of his peers that Charlotte, as a woman, is afforded, but also with the fear that can come only from one so logical coming to understand that supernatural events, while completely illogical pass the “seeing is believing” litmus test. He perpetuates the same patriarchy he falls victim to. Perhaps, if he lived in a society where men were permitted – encouraged, even – to take advantage of the homosocial bond in times of grief and confusion, John would not fall so heavily into that linear/logical “male” role that is eventually his downfall.

Charlotte and the titular wallpaper. Only in this story, it has no relevance to the plot.
The film (and the path chosen by directors) reminded me of 2006’s adaptation of Wide Sargasso Sea. This adaptation of Jean Rhys’s classic novel (a feminist look at the Madwoman in the Attic of Jane Eyre) is also written and directed by men, redesigned to star a man, and sympathetic to the male’s plight at the expense of the original female protagonist. Both films go out of their way, in sympathizing with the linear/logical world of the male, to distance themselves from any logic or sympathy to be found in jouissance or explanations that are not predisposed.
One of the many lessons here is that literature, like history, has become another commodity in which the male perspective and experience is privileged. In case it was left to doubt, I do not recommend “The Yellow Wallpaper;” in fact, the scariest thing about Thomas’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” is that two men apparently read Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story and thought: “But what about the husband? What about the men?”

———-

Marcia Herring is a recently relocated writer from Missouri. She is still working on her graduate degree, working in retail, and writing freelance for ThoseTwoGuysOnline.com (one of the guys is her brother) and Lesbrary. She spends most of her free time watching television and movies. She wrote an analysis of Degrassi, Teens and Rape Apologism, contributed a review of X-Men First Class, and reviewed V/H/S, Atonement and Imagine Me & You for Bitch Flicks.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: A New Jane in Cary Fukunaga’s ‘Jane Eyre’ (2011)

Movie poster for Jane Eyre (2011)
This is a guest post by Rhea Daniel.

The ghosts of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë have suffered several film adaptations of their most famous works, and the problem with multiple film adaptations of the same novel, however well-meaning or loyal to the text, is that watching three versions of the same story before reading the book can numb one out to the brilliance of the original. I’ve seen this scene before, I’ve heard this dialogue before, I’ve had enough of this famous line because I got to see the three versions of Pride and Prejudice before I hit fifteen. Thankfully, Jane Eyre falls way below Pride and Prejudice in the best 100 books list, so its adaptations didn’t have as much reach or appeal of the latter. I did get to read articles and see films on the Brontës though and they were terribly interesting and creative people, their suffering contributing to the achey longing that filled their books. Lowood School with its pitiful conditions, for one, took its characteristics from the school where the writer lost two of her elder sisters.

The film uses a nonlinear timeline, choosing to begin with Jane’s long trek through the moors after she runs away from Thornfield Hall, her past played out as she is questioned by St. John, making her trudge down the unhappy path of memories again. This actually makes the film more interesting and we need that, because the story of a governess falling in love with her (much older) employer is one overdone in romance novels.

Mia Wasikowska awed us as Alice by blooming from an anxious young girl running away from an undesired proposal into a sword-wielding Jabberwock-killer. As Jane Eyre, she manages to convey the character of the (on the surface) insipid and sexless governess quite well. Blanche Ingram‘s blatant disrespect for her only reinforces the image of the dry governess, but the audience already knows that the deeply passionate Jane is more than that. As for Rochester, Brontë describes him as such: 

I traced the general points of middle height, and considerable breadth of chest. He had a dark face, with stern features, and a heavy brow; his eyes and gathered eyebrows looked ireful and thwarted just now; he was past youth, but had not reached middle age; perhaps he might be thirty-five.

As Byronic dudes go, Michael Fassbender is close with the stern features and heavy brow, but who are we kidding, both the stars have painfully good looks. Mia’s trademark furrowed brow only makes her more appealing. Michael Fassbender makes a great Byronic dude with his wrinkles. The match seems perfect. In fact the entire movie is terribly perfect; it lacked the rawness of the book, and that’s the only thing I could find wrong with it.

In the beginning, Adèle tells Jane the story of the vampire-woman haunting Thornfield hall, with Adèle’s doll pressed up against the window of a dollhouse in the background.

Jane Eyre (2011) screenshot
The doll represents the watchful presence of Bertha, not revealed as yet, keeping a close eye on the occupants of Thornfield Hall, whenever she manages to escape her prison at least.

Rochester assumes Jane is a bit of a weirdo after seeing her fanciful paintings, telling her as much. Her response, implying that she’s even weirder than he thinks, arouses his curiosity. Her gaze is direct, she is not cowed by him, she possibly hates his (initially) overbearing nature because she’s had her fill of men like him. In their second conversation he reaches out to her almost desperately, bringing his hidden vulnerabilities to light. He finds a kindred spirit in Jane and the inexperienced Jane is moved. We can tell because when she first arrives at Thornfield hall, she curiously glances at a nude painting and after her second conversation with Rochester, she dares examine it more closely. Jane is a decent artist; but for the prudery of the times, she would be practicing human anatomy, but she can’t of course. And considering the reactions to the presence of the painting in the film even in this day and age, one can have plenty of reasons to imagine why*. There’s is more to this painting: Jane’s latent sexuality is aroused, and the presence of the painting is a way of showing a fleshly desire for Rochester. I know this is obvious, but being an artist myself I tend to disagree about equating the two.

The kissing scene in the movie plays itself out exactly as I imagined in the book. Immersed as I was in the tale my reaction was in keeping with the times: what a little strumpet. She’s so enamored by the kiss that she barely notices Mrs. Fairfax’s horror, beaming happily from ear to ear before running off to her room. The insipid governess blooms; she is not so sexless after all. Suddenly she’s a biological creature, and it’s almost vulgar for the audience.

This is just a weak moment for Jane. She is stronger than Rochester. Rochester makes two wrong choices and pays dearly for them. He’s taken in by a profitable, loveless marriage. He falls for a woman’s charms before he is betrayed but he adopts her daughter; both choices stretch his misery yet Rochester is a man with a conscience. Jane has no money or physical charms to speak of, and he finds that simplicity “becoming.” He thinks she won’t cause him any problems. He doesn’t however, speak a word in the defense of Jane after Blanche’s acidic remarks about her profession. Is he spineless and afraid to mess up his courtship with Blanche, or is he trying to make Jane jealous? Would it be patronizing and tiresomely chivalrous of him to speak out on Jane’s behalf? Would Jane be insulted if he shushed Blanche and came to her rescue? We don’t get to see that resolved; all we have to settle for is his rejection of Blanche.

After Bertha’s presence is revealed, Jane refuses to go through with the illicit marriage. There is more for Jane to fear than loneliness with this decision. In Lowood school, there was one thing that kept her passions in check: physical chastisement. Later when Rochester begs her to stay, she is faced with her physical vulnerability again when he says “I could bend you with my finger and my thumb! A mere reed you feel in my hands.” Jane keeps her individualism intact at yet another level in spite of the memory and trauma of past physical violence. If she had said yes she would have to live with the specter of the first wife lurking in the background for the rest of Bertha’s life. As an unloved child, she is not lured into the comforts of heart and hearth, compromising the laws of societal convention that Rochester, who obviously has been burned by both love and marriage, is willing to put aside. Though Rochester’s revulsion for all manmade laws is understandable and his story worthy of pity, she does not hitch her fate to his, and for the abandoned child not to lunge at such an offer is surprising, for why should Jane worry about societal convention? In the book, it’s because it’s ethically wrong. In the movie it is because she must respect herself (thank you Cary, Moira). In spite of being confronted with the fear of loneliness once again, accentuated by her cold and the endless trek through the moors, Jane manages to make a decision well-balanced by intellect and intuition. She does it once again, refusing the offer of marriage from St. John, not giving in in spite of him berating her “lawless passion,” and in spite of owing him her life, because it would go against her nature and thus “kill” her. Jane is a classic proto-feminist**; she controls her passions enough to work out her priorities, but not at the expense of her deepest desires.

When Jane returns after the fire, she finds what remains of the painting is but the frame, the canvas burnt out and the half-burnt doll sitting inside it (symbolism much?). Jane has been jolted out of her brief experience with earthly pleasure (burnt nude painting), and her love for Rochester has matured. Bertha (the doll) is gone; no hurdles remain between Rochester and Jane’s union. Jane picks up the doll with some sadness when Mrs. Fairfax finds her. In spite of Bertha being Rochester’s ball and chain, neither of them blames her. Considering the lack of knowledge in the field of mental health, Rochester was being kind for the time by locking her up. She was still the madwoman in the attic though, standing like a rock between Jane’s and Rochester’s happiness, and once she was gone, they could all breathe a sigh of relief and move on. Perhaps she represents the wild, passionate part of Jane’s psyche that is now released, but I’m not going to stretch that one out…

The central story of the complex lone woman, unloved and unwanted–matched with the world-weary hero set in a background that’s far from sumptuous–is in great danger of turning into a great depressing drag of a tale, so it’s incredibly important for that spark and pull between them to work. The script by Moira Buffini aids this, taking only the relevant bits from the novel and chipping away at them so that they shine at the significant parts of the movie, avoiding the verbal diarrhea that can come with being loyal to a classic novel. The music too, soars lonesome and yearning to match the tormented souls of the main characters. The lighting is superbly planned, muted and misty in the day and full of deep flickering shadows in the night, the house dark and creaky just like the gothic Thornfield of the book. From what I saw of the deleted scenes (those are always interesting) Helen’s ghost arrives to guide Jane through the moors. This coupled with Jane’s hearing Rochester’s voices would have been clairvoyant overkill, so I’m glad that was edited out. Jamie Bell is amazing as St. John, a warmer version than the book. Judi Dench plays Mrs. Fairfax, sticking to the role of a secondary character and not pressing her presence, the trait of a self-assured and experienced actress***. The claim to the horror element by the crew though, I can’t really place. This movie wasn’t remotely nail-biting or scary.

Whether Jane Eyre purists agree with me or not, there’s little not to like about Jane Eyre (2011), and I eagerly anticipate the release of director Cary Fukunaga‘s next film.

*It’s art, barely pornographic, get over it people.

**Not sure if the term applies, but I love it so I’m using it!

***For who can forget the woman who called James Bond a sexist, misogynist dinosaur??

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Rhea Daniel got to see a lot of movies as a kid because her family members were obsessive movie-watchers. She frequently finds herself in a bind between her love for art and her feminist conscience. Meanwhile she is trying to be a better writer and artist and you can find her at http://rheadaniel.blogspot.com/.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: ‘Farewell My Concubine’

Official movie poster for Farewell My Concubine
 This is a guest post by René Kluge.
[Trigger Warning for rape and sexual violence.]
The protagonist in Farewell My Concubine (PR China, 1993) is a woman. Or is it? On the one hand the lead role is played by the famous male Hong Kong actor Leslie Cheung. On the other hand, since being a little boy in a Bejing Opera training school, Cheng Dieyi gives up his male identity and plays the female parts in renowned Beijing Operas. The rest of the movie shows him adapting femininity not only on stage but also in real life. In fact, he struggles with telling the Opera world and real life apart. Even his stage name – Dieyi, which loosely translates to Butterflydress – has a female connotation. His femininity is contrasted with the hyper masculinity of his stage partner Duan Xialou. Between him, Xialou and Xialou`s wife Juxian, a complex ménage à trois with changing relationships develops. According to some commentators[1] the asserted analytical solution to this scenario is to take Dieyi as a symbolic woman. Dieyi is male, but in the context of the movie, he performs the function of a woman.
Leslie Cheung as Cheng Dieyi
The interesting part is how he becomes that symbolic woman. It is not his own decision based on sexual preferences, as in known trans* movies like The Birdcage or Boys Don´t Cry; it is also not cross-dressing as in Some Like it Hot or Mulan. Instead, Dieyi suffers through a violent process, which forces him to adapt a female identity and give up his masculinity. Right in the beginning of the movie, Dieyi´s own mother cuts of his sixth finger with a butcher knife in order to make him acceptable for the opera school admission standards. Dieyi´s mother is a prostitute and even in the brothel there is no place for him. He has to go through this act of “straightening” to be fit for any kind of social community. While the sexual connotation of this brutal amputation is not outright obvious, the next initiation Dieyi has to endure has a clear symbolism. Dieyi starts training to become a Bejing Opera actor. It quickly transpires that he is exceptionally gifted in all the required skills and talents. The only problem is, when asked to recite a passage from a traditional play, he refuses to sing the correct line I am by nature a girl and not a boy and stubbornly sings, I am by nature a boy and not a girl. In the presence of an influential opera producer, this behaviour risks the future of the whole company. Consequently Xiaolou, who is by now Dieyi´s close friend, forces a pipe down his throat. He does this so vigorously that a small stream of (defloration) blood flows out of Dieyi´s mouth. As a result, Dieyi dutifully sings the role and uses the correct words: I am by nature a girl. Dieyi has to submit to this procedure in order to become a successfull Opera actor – a Dan, male actors who only play female roles. After Dieyi´s and Xiaolou´s first big and successful opera performance, the two get seperated. Dieyi is led to the chamber of an old eunuch who rapes the still very young boy. Right after this, Dieyi finds an abandoned baby on the street side, which he decides to take with him. Continuously disciplined with brutal beatings by the harsh opera teacher, Dieyi runs the gamut from castration, penetration rape, and accidental motherhood to complete his way to a female identity. The symbolic woman is not born, but the product of (violent) social conditions. It is therefore not completely absurd, as some commentators argue, to see Farewell as a filmic interpretation of the feminist philosophies of Judith Butler and Simone de Beauviour.
The young Deiyi after the penetration with a pipe
To get a broader view of the filmic representation of femininity in Farewell we have to take a closer look at Juxian, the other (biological) woman in this movie. Juxian is played by Gong Li. As with other movie stars, Gong Li brings with her the aura of her prior roles. She is particularly known for starring in Zhang Yimou’s so-called Red Movies. In Red Sorghum, Judou, and Raise the Red Lantern, she playes women who are unwilling to passively accept the rigid social roles that the traditional Chinese society reserved for them. Whether through deceit, protest, escape or inner refuge, all those female protagonists fight against the oppression of women by men. Juxian herself is proud and strong. She is a prostitute, but buys herself out of a brothel to marry Xialou. While Xialou is unemployed and suffers from depression, she runs the little inn they own by herself, and when Dieyi struggles to overcome an opium addiction, she is the one who brings up the emotional and physical strength to lead him through detoxification. In an enigmatic scene at her wedding, she takes the red veil – which serves as the symbol of domestic oppression in all the Red Movies – off herself, signaling that it is she who initiated the wedding and that she is no victim of an arranged marriage. But if we look closer, it becomes obvious that her goal is not independence, but rather seeking Xiaolou´s love and companionship. The women in the Red Movies were trapped by the social institution of marriage and struggled to get out. Juxian, on the other hand, is a social outcast and seeks to find her way into mainstream society and into marriage. She needs Xiaolou; she needs the male to accomplish this goal. The emancipatory impetus of Juxian is therefore a double-edged sword.

The same double-edgedness can be found in the portrayal of homosexuality in Farewell. There is no mention or depiction of homosexuality in Farewell, but the connotations are very clear. While there seems to be some underlying homoerotic tensions between Dieyi and Xiaolou, Dieyi engages in an escapade with an influential opera patron. Homosexuality was virtually absent from Chinese cinema up to that point, so having a homosexual protagonist in a big and expensive production movie seems like a big step forward. Sadly, this protagonist is teemed with homophobic stereotypes: he is timid, soft, and jealous. In contrast to A Lan, the protagonist in the Chinese independent movie East Palace West Palace, that premiered just three years later, Dieyi is not openly homosexual. He has no self-confident homosexual identity. Instead he hides his preferences from society and from himself. Most importantly, he plays the role of a woman. Probably the most common prejudice that gay men have to tackle is the imagined coherence between femininity and homosexuality. Dieyi becomes gay when he takes on the female identity. Masculinity and homosexuality still seem to be mutually exclusive phenomenons. Zhang Yuan, the director of East Palace West Palace is not a homosexual. In an interview, he explained that he still felt capable of identifying with the stigmatization and hardship that gay men in modern Chinese society have to endure because he himself, being an underground artist, often faces similar problems. On the other hand Chen Kaige, the director of Farewell is not an underground artist. The commercial and critical success of Farewell made him one of the most popular Chinese directors today, who seldom has problems with funding, obtaining filming permits, etc. One could argue that Zhang Yuan´s marginalized social position enabled him to show an attitude of solidarity toward homosexual men and create a filmic image of them, which is free of discriminating stereotypes. In contrast, Chen Kaige was incapable of obtaining this position of solidarity. Thus his portrayal of homosexuality is more abstract and artificially detached.

Gong Li as Juxian
A gender conscious reading of Farewell hence raises a question that seems to play a big role in many contributions on Bitch Flicks: In light of a film history that has in big part either ignored women or made them the objects of the male gaze, is the sheer visibility of women and/or trans* people already a step forward, or must we pay closer attention to the substance of the representation? This is a question that is not easy to answer, especially for me being a white heterosexual male with no shortage of role models and media idols. Maybe this question is actually very personal and revokes an abstract theoretical analysis. Maybe every female, trans* and/or homosexual person has to choose for her/himself. If they can relate to Dieyi or Juxian, identify with them and understand their personal emancipation and empowerment through them, then no detached scholarly interpretation could argue with that.
[1] For example Wendy Larson: The Concubine and the Figure of History. Chen Kaige´s Farewell my Concubine. In: Sheldon Lu: Transnational Chinese Cinema. Identity, Nationhood, Gender. Honolulu: 1997.

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René Kluge is a German PhD. student. He studied Philosophy and Chinese Studies in Berlin, Potsdam and Beijing. His main interests lie in questions of labour, gender and interculturality.