Frankenstein and His Bride: Mapping Maternal Absence

However, Whale challenges Shelley’s automatic association of the maternal with the absent female: the Bride’s rejection of Frankenstein’s monster shows that the maternal can be absent even when the woman is present, while the blind man’s nurturing care suggests that man can embody the noblest maternal impulse.

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As the daughter of pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley inherited radical ideas about the intellectual abilities and sexual freedoms of women. She learned these ideas from her mother’s books rather than her presence, however, because Wollstonecraft died soon after her birth. Anne Mellor points to compelling evidence that the undated events of Frankenstein are set over the nine months of Mary Shelley’s own gestation, in 1797, with the date of Victor Frankenstein’s climactic death coinciding almost exactly with Mary Wollstonecraft’s. Created lovelessly as a theoretical experiment, Frankenstein’s monster is the ultimate icon of the unmothered child. Mary’s own beloved father, philosopher William Godwin, would disown his teenaged daughter when she became pregnant by married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, a deeply personal betrayal that contradicted his theoretical conviction in anarchy, and motivated Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin to rename herself Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Mary Shelley was thus shaped by the trauma of parental rejection as a result of her sexuality, an experience common to girls of the 19th century and queer youth of the 20th.

How appropriate, then, that the greatest screen adaptation of Frankenstein should be the work of a gay man, James Whale, whose own identification with Shelley’s monster is explored in fictionalized biopic Gods and Monsters. Though there have been adaptations more technically faithful to the novel, none has been truer to its central pathos of maternal absence. It was because Whale acknowledged him as the film’s emotional core, that we now associate “Frankenstein” with the abandoned monster rather than his egoistic creator. Where Mary Shelley’s monster rapidly acquires educated speech, while his stigma is a physically undefined “ghastliness,” Whale’s monster evokes intellectual disability by his realistically slow learning, and his distorted physique equally provokes the audience’s ableism, luring them into complicity with the persecuting mob and challenging them with their own temptation to reject the “monster.” In sequel Bride of Frankenstein (whose very title suggests the monster as “Frankenstein”), Whale demonstrates his sympathetic understanding of Shelley’s emotional identification with her monster, by casting Elsa Lanchester in the dual role of Mary Shelley and the monstrous Bride. However, Whale challenges Shelley’s automatic association of the maternal with the absent female: the Bride’s rejection of Frankenstein’s monster shows that the maternal can be absent even when the woman is present, while the blind man’s nurturing care suggests that man can embody the noblest maternal impulse.

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Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley and as Bride

 

The Body,” the acclaimed episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer‘s fifth season that portrays the death of Buffy’s mother, features a symbolic art class in which Dawn is instructed to draw the negative space around an object, rather than the object itself. In art teaching, drawing negative space is a recognized technique for breaking preconceptions and allowing the viewer to perceive with fresh accuracy. In a society that chronically undervalues the labor of motherhood, drawing its negative space is one technique for reassessing its worth. Opening with the narrative of a polar explorer who has abandoned his loving sister for territorial conquest, Frankenstein portrays the execution of a girl falsely accused of infanticide, the destruction of the monster’s bride and the murder of Victor Frankenstein’s own bride in vengeance. It may well be claimed that Shelley’s entire novel is a mapping of the negative space surrounding female nurture.

By choosing to bring forth the Bride (in the novel, Victor destroys the Bride before she’s completed), Whale develops Shelley’s theme from woman’s absence into her rejection, touching on painful legacies of maternally rejected queer and disabled youth. Frankenstein’s monster is created with a brain labelled “abnormal,” raising issues of inborn and predestined sinfulness, yet his violence is always directly provoked by cruel treatment and maternal absence. In Bride of Frankenstein, Whale conflates Mary Shelley with her monster through their joint embodiment in Elsa Lanchester, insightfully converting the Bride’s climactic rejection of Frankenstein’s monster into the author’s rejection of herself. To become adult is to assume responsibility for self-parenting. Because adults instinctively base their self-care on the model of their own parents, many suffer for life from absent nurture in youth. Frankenstein’s monster seeks a Bride-mother-lover to supply his lack of parenting, but the new monster is as lacking as himself. Though women are often imagined as unlimited sources of nurture, rather than humans wrestling their own psychologies, James Whale allows his Bride to be broken. Those to whom nothing is given, have nothing to give. Bride of Frankenstein should be celebrated for powerfully reclaiming the maternal as a learned capacity and a voluntary commitment, rather than an automatic quality of womanhood.

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Elizabeth (Mae Clarke) rejects Boris Karloff’s “monster”

 

From its eerie opening of grave-robbing, Frankenstein cuts straight to the rejection of the female, as Henry Frankenstein (Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein is renamed Henry, while friend Henry is inexplicably Victor) writes to his fiancé Elizabeth, instructing her to wait for him: “My work must come first, even before you. At night the winds howl in the mountains. There is no one here.” In its howling winds, the film evokes Shelley’s endless polar wastes, visualizing fields of masculine achievement as deserts of desolation. Though his own father assumes that Henry must have abandoned Elizabeth for another woman, his scientific research is a substitute for all women, perhaps echoing William Godwin’s substitution of philosophical theories of liberation for personal support of his daughter’s freedom. As Henry successfully animates the monster, he cries out, “In the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God!” As Christianity teaches that we are sons and daughters of God, so Henry’s assumption of the divine role is surely the ultimate assuming of responsibility for self-parenting, leading to catastrophe precisely because of the deep flaws in his internalized parental model. Boris Karloff’s monster is justly iconic, his sinister appearance contrasted with the mute yearning in his eyes, his palms spread and beseeching for warmth, whether of companionship or simple sunlight. The instant that his monster becomes burdensome, Henry’s first impulse is abandonment: “Leave it alone! Leave it alone!,” displaying an assumed freedom to disengage that is typical of society’s model of fatherhood.

Shelley and Whaley question whether a man who has abandoned family for science can successfully parent his scientific creations, as Shelley’s prologue describes herself parenting the novel Frankenstein. Where Dr. Frankenstein understands public work and domesticity to be in opposition to each other, a patriarchal logic that segregates male and female, Shelley and Whale suggest rather that maternal care is demanded inseparably of both public and domestic spheres. It is Henry Frankenstein’s assistant Fritz, a hunchbacked “dwarf,” who viciously torments the monster with a burning torch, perhaps acting out his own parental model of hostility and rejection. Unlike Shelley’s novel, in which the monster kills as calculated punishment for Victor Frankenstein’s abandonment, Whale presents the monster’s first killings as justifiable self defense. Escaping the tortures of Frankenstein’s laboratory, the monster encounters Little Maria, a young girl who accepts him as a playmate. Through Little Maria’s moving acceptance, in the absence of parental supervision, Whale implies that intolerance must be learned from parental models. Little Maria shows the monster how flowers float, and he accidentally drowns her in compliment to her flower-like beauty. Meanwhile, Henry Frankenstein is driven back to his fiancée by revulsion at what he has created. Leaving Elizabeth at the monster’s mercy, by protectively locking her into her room, illustrates how counterproductive Henry’s efforts to control life have become. The film ends with the iconic image of a mob with burning torches, united to persecute the outsider and avenge the death of Little Maria. As the mob sets fire to Frankenstein’s windmill, Whale dwells on the monster’s agonized screams, panic and isolated death. He then cuts to Henry Frankenstein’s being tenderly nursed by a flock of maids and his loving fiancée, ending his masterpiece with harsh contrast between the abandoned and the cherished.

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Meeting the maternal man: “Alone: bad. Friend: good!”

 

Bride of Frankenstein opens with Mary Shelley narrating the sequel to her tale to Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, in a setting of elegant luxury–a choice that foregrounds the story’s female authorship. Marvelling at Mary Shelley’s youth and femininity, Byron booms: “Can you believe that bland and lovely brow conceived of Frankenstein?” Yet, though Byron postures in his grinning celebrity as “England’s greatest sinner,” it is the woman, Mary Shelley, who has truly suffered for unsanctioned love. When Byron brands her “angel,” she smiles enigmatically: “You think so?” Whale’s portrait of Mary Shelley revels in her dainty, feminine appearance and twinkling grin, before unveiling her secret kinship with the monster through her reincarnation as his Bride. Fading from Shelley’s luxury to Frankenstein’s burning windmill, from which the monster makes his improbable escape, we witness two women in the persecuting mob: one who weeps at the “terrible” sight, and another who gloats that she is “glad to see the monster roasted to death.” What sharper illustration that woman is “naturally” neither merciful nor cruel, but individual? Henry Frankenstein is lured back to science by the amoral Dr. Pretorius, who has grown life “from seed” to create a menagerie of shrunken authority figures. In this empowerment fantasy, the overbearing, lecherous king can be plucked from his targets with tongs, while the squeakily disapproving bishop may be bottled in a jar. By shrinking authority figures to ludicrous insignificance, Dr. Pretorius is giddily liberated from the constraints of social conditioning: “Sometimes I have wondered whether life wouldn’t be much more amusing if we were all devils, with no nonsense about angels and being good,” recalling Elsa Lanchester’s skepticism, as Mary Shelley, when described as an angel.

By introducing a second creator figure rebelling against nature (Dr. Pretorius and his menagerie are not in the novel), Whale allows the procreation of two men: “Together, we will create his mate!” Meanwhile, the wandering monster shows self-loathing inability to nurture himself, by attacking his own reflection in a pond, before finding kinship with a compassionate, blind man in the forest. The blind man welcomes the monster, assuming a maternal role: “I shall look after you, and you will comfort me.” Through the excellence of his care, and the rapid progress of the monster under his tutoring, we understand that the maternal is a nurturing quality independent of sex. Men like Dr. Frankenstein do not lack maternal nurture as a fact of their maleness; they willfully reject it in their pursuit of fortune and glory, the social rewards for masculine achievement. In Whale’s ending, it is those who have found mutual nurture – Henry Frankenstein and his fiancée Elizabeth – that Frankenstein’s monster chooses to spare, while those who are unable to care for others – Dr. Pretorius, Frankenstein’s monster and the Bride – “belong dead.” Though they center male characters, Shelley’s novel and Whale’s films reverse male priorities, elevating the maternal to reign supreme.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is credited with inventing science fiction, while her follow-up, The Last Man, founded sci-fi dystopia.  After more than a century of male-dominated authorship, science fiction continues to obsessively echo Shelley’s themes of fatherly inadequacy and the vain hubris of the inhumanely over-rationalizing man. Like the persistence of Ann Radcliffe and Lois Weber’s Final Girl in the male-dominated horror genre, or the inability of female creators like Kathryn Bigelow to rewrite the masculine conventions of action film, this persistence of female themes in male-dominated sci-fi demonstrates the power of a genre’s original creators to fix its conventions and shape its expectations. The cultural contributions of female creators like Mary Shelley may be undervalued by society but, like mothers and maternal fathers, they’d leave one hell of an absence.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AkSbwiKP3mo”]

 


Brigit McCone covets the Bride of Frankenstein hairdo, writes and directs short films and radio dramas. Her hobbies include doodling and hanging out with her friends. Friends: good!

The Enemy: Race and Gender In Andrea Arnold’s ‘Wuthering Heights’

Heathcliff illustrates the brutalization of the non-white male; his every attempt to integrate is rejected, so he grows embittered and alienated, forced to exploit others to achieve his goals. If Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom is often criticized for being implausibly forgiving and accommodating to racist slave-owners, then surely Heathcliff is the anti-Tom, an openly angry and defiant agent of revenge against the racist patriarchy that has killed his love.

This is a guest post by Brigit McCone.

Heathcliff is not white. Though his exact race is never defined, racial stigma is used to mark him as a threatening, “dark-skinned” outsider throughout Wuthering Heights. It is significant that this interracial aspect of the novel’s passionate romance wasn’t addressed on screen until Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation, over 160 years after the book’s publication. Arnold foregrounds the issue of Heathcliff’s race by casting Black actors in the role, rather than the conventional “white-Anglo-Saxon-gypsy” dodge. The swearing, which was considered shocking by Brontë’s contemporaries, has been updated by Arnold to retain its impact for modern audiences, as has the racist language. Essentially, her film is a partial retelling of the novel, exclusively from Heathcliff’s perspective. Where Catherine makes a stray remark in the book about Heathcliff’s dull silence compared to Linton, Arnold’s film embodies that silence in wordless scenes on the Yorkshire moors. When Heathcliff is cast out of doors, Arnold’s camera forces us to share his exile and peer through windows at events within. When Heathcliff is beaten, we experience his pain in flinching close-up. When Heathcliff leaves in the middle of a dramatic speech, we are likewise denied its conclusion.

The result is fragmentary and sometimes frustrating, perhaps not satisfying as a standalone film. But it achieves what no previous adaptation has: to be a real enhancement to the book, rather than a pale reflection of it. Where Brontë’s novel filters our impression of Heathcliff through the narration of Lockwood’s smug, educated gentleman and Nelly’s commonsensical servant, each sometimes presenting him as incomprehensible, barbarous or threatening, Arnold flips this narrative to show us the incomprehensible barbarity and threatening cruelty of the dominant society itself, as seen through the outsider’s eyes. From this alienated perspective, Heathcliff’s descent into cruelty appears an inevitable and almost overdue reaction to the constant, painful brutality he suffers. Arnold’s interpretation might be compared to Steve McQueen’s approach to 12 Years A Slave, stripping away the rationalizing aimed at 19th century readers, to lay bare oppression in the most raw and physical way possible. In a world where an unarmed Black youth can be interpreted as more threatening than an armed representative of “mainstream” society, film’s potential to challenge our identification and flip our perspective is as timely as it is rarely used. By the time Mumford & Sons’ “The Enemy” plays over the film’s final moments, the song’s sentimental regret feels earned.

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I Am Not the Enemy; It Isn’t Me, the Enemy

The question is, does Arnold’s sympathetic portrait of Heathcliff reflect Brontë’s own view of the character, or does it re-imagine the original author’s racist view, as reflected in Wuthering Heights’ narration? Firstly, it must be said that the story Arnold unearths is taken straight from the original book, although there it is diluted by the perspectives and interpretations of others. Perhaps the book’s most crucial speech is Catherine Earnshaw’s “whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same… Nelly, I am Heathcliff,” placing Brontë’s white heroine in absolute solidarity with the non-white hero, which Arnold highlights by letting Cathy’s “I am Heathcliff” echo after her film’s end credits. This is more than a declaration of love; it is a radical declaration of interchangeability. The fundamental similarity of Heathcliff and Catherine allows the book to present their divergent outcomes as a product of divergent treatment, linking the actions of their adult selves to the experiences of their childhoods. Catherine is Heathcliff, therefore their pairing allows Brontë to explore how differently the same behavior is interpreted, rewarded or punished, when acted by different bodies.

Heathcliff illustrates the brutalization of the non-white male; his every attempt to integrate is rejected, so he grows embittered and alienated, forced to exploit others to achieve his goals. If Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom is often criticized for being implausibly forgiving and accommodating to racist slave-owners, then surely Heathcliff is the anti-Tom, an openly angry and defiant agent of revenge against the racist patriarchy that has killed his love. His interchangeability with Catherine undermines easy dismissal of that anger as “natural” barbarity, while Arnold’s focus on Heathcliff’s rejection presents his anger as justified response.

Catherine, by contrast, illustrates the psychological pressures of the pedestalization of white womanhood. She is harshly punished for rebelling, roaming the moors or obeying her instincts, being explicitly told by her beloved father that his love is conditional on her being a “good lass,” while that father hypocritically rewards adopted son Heathcliff for the behavior he rejects in Catherine. Catherine is, however, extravagantly rewarded with social approval for acting traditionally feminine. Her fear of suffering the same degradation as Heathcliff forces her to attempt to assimilate as Linton’s wife, where she suffocates and dies from the frustrations of that role. Through its image of an oak tree struggling to thrive in a flower pot, the book attributes Catherine’s suffering to her entrapment, in contrast to her natural strength and potency. The novel’s portrait of Catherine’s existential struggles is glimpsed in Arnold’s adaptation but cannot be explored; we are not permitted to understand her reasons for marrying Linton because Heathcliff does not understand them. But the roots of Heathcliff’s alienation, as the direct result of his treatment, are exposed by Arnold with more clarity than ever before.

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So Why Did You Choose to Lean on a Man You Knew Was Falling?

Wuthering Heights is a book intimately concerned with learned cycles of intergenerational abuse, a theme Arnold’s film captures by ending with the striking image of young Hareton hanging a dog in the same way Heathcliff did earlier in the film. The novel’s dainty and feminine Isabella and Catherine Linton become embittered and abusive in the dysfunctional environment of Wuthering Heights, just as Hindley, Hareton and Heathcliff do – Brontë rejects any limitation of abusive behavior to a single race or gender, attributing it rather to a toxic environment. The Isabella subplot in Wuthering Heights also offers a radical affirmation of a wife’s right to flee an abusive husband with her child, a century before the establishment of the first women’s shelters. This theme would be expanded in Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, where it caused a storm of controversy (it was possibly overlooked in Wuthering Heights because readers were distracted by the interracial necrophilia. Ellis Brontë: epic punk). To claim that Brontë’s portrait of Heathcliff romanticizes abusive behavior is to ignore the Isabella subplot’s explicit denial of a loving woman’s power to rescue an abusive man, which urges the reader to heed warning signs of cruelty (Heathcliff hanging Isabella’s dog) rather than satisfying their ego by struggling to redeem a lost soul. Heathcliff and Catherine share a profound love and affinity, but they are both too damaged to save each other; the novel demands the reader’s understanding of the roots of abusive behavior, and recognition of the human potential for love and unselfishness, but never demands approval of abuse itself.

The fundamental interchangeability of Heathcliff and Catherine Earnshaw also lends the novel to transmasculine readings, where Heathcliff’s racial stigma might symbolize Catherine’s stigmatized masculinity, without which she cannot thrive and which she must sacrifice to conform to a traditional, wifely role. Ellis is recorded by Charlotte as the only Brontë sibling to oppose being publicly assigned a female name; Ellis’ masculinity is also suggested in Charlotte’s biographical sketches and her fictionalized portrait of her sibling as Shirley. Wuthering Heights’ potential as lesbian closeting drama may also be demonstrated by comparison with Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, dedicated to Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West. Orlando asserts the interchangeability of the womanizing male Orlando and his female alter-ego (whose male lover Shelmerdine is distinctly feminized, and encountered while Orlando pledges herself to 19th century moors in an apparent nod to Wuthering Heights), allowing Orlando to maintain superficial heterosexuality while being both woman and lover of women. Wuthering Heights is preoccupied with Catherine Earnshaw’s interchangeability with both Heathcliff and Hareton Earnshaw, while her feminized lover Edgar Linton is variously incarnated as Heathcliff’s lover Isabella and Hareton’s lover Catherine Linton. The novel’s final reconciliation is only achieved by divorcing Catherine Earnshaw and Heathcliff from society, through death and ghostly dematerialization, and by whitewashing and re-gendering them as happy couple Hareton Earnshaw and Catherine Linton; this “happy ending” upholds its heroes’ ultimate incompatibility with a racist, sexist and heterosexist society, ending by contemplating their “unquiet slumbers.” As a heterosexual tomboy, however, I also found Wuthering Heights fully expressed my own teenaged frustrations and craving for passionate equality with a male lover (Heathcliff represents the primary love object in most heterosexual interpretations, but alter-ego in lesbian and transmasculine readings); Ellis’ recorded wish for an ungendered name might equally reflect perceived prejudice against female writing, rather than transmasculine identity. This multiplicity of meaning is one of the book’s enduring fascinations, indicating how deeply Brontë cuts to the universal, metaphysical bone of the struggle to love ourselves through the mirror of another. Arnold’s film must sacrifice some of this multiplicity; Heathcliff’s racial stigma might represent the stigma of female masculinity or lesbian sexuality, but the visceral impact of a Black body brutalized onscreen can represent only itself.

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Give Me Hope in Silence; It’s Easier, It’s Kinder

Wuthering Heights is one of the greatest novels in the English language: enigmatic, passionately sincere, spare, and magnificently disregarding of social convention. It is also cunning in its use of the educated Lockwood to voice dominant ideology and disarm rationalizing criticism, and plainspoken Nelly to disarm common-sense objections. In resisting the judgments of these narrators, readers reach out towards Catherine and Heathcliff’s perspectives rather than defending against them. The fact that this is a first novel, by a writer not yet thirty, is mind-blowing. The book’s confrontation of racist and sexist ideologies feels incredibly modern; its unflinching portrait of the psychology of abuse retains its impact. Andrea Arnold’s brutal, stripped-down take on Wuthering Heights does justice to these elements, rather than fossilizing the book into a cozy classic or tamed romance.

Just as we must mentally resist the book’s judging narrators, so Wuthering Heights resists depicting Heathcliff and Catherine on the moors, allowing that image to haunt through suggestion alone. Arnold cannot avoid directly depicting the moors; rather, she complements the book by boldly visualizing the submerged spaces of Brontë’s novel. Arnold’s moors are an expressionist landscape, filled with the tumult of wind and rain like a storm of passions, and the harsh poetry of sex and death in animal life; the oppressively amplified sound resembles a cross between The Piano and Das Boot. In any other 19th century novel, the reader would demand whether Catherine and Heathcliff had sex during their unchaperoned time on the moors; it is one of Brontë’s achievements that Wuthering Heights makes this question simply irrelevant. It is a drama of love and being, not of sex and marriage. Arnold’s film follows the same oblique model; suggestive shots leave Catherine and Heathcliff’s physical relationship open-ended. The leap between child and adult actors is jarring (especially as it represents a gap of only three years), but it satisfyingly reflects the novel’s conceptual leap: Heathcliff and Catherine are victims of circumstance before Heathcliff’s departure; when he returns, they are adults who must wrestle with their childhoods’ legacy and suffer the consequences of their choices.

Nineteenth century writers used their romantic plots to explore diverse philosophical and political concerns. Just as Wuthering Heights confronts sexism, racism, and intergenerational abuse through a central love story, so Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South uses its love plot to propose a progressive model of industrial revolution, combining libertarian profit incentive with social welfare investment, with women as equal business partners and strikes averted through bilateral negotiation between masters and union leaders, while pioneering African-American writer Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy flips the trope of the “tragic mulatto” by using a love plot to affirm Iola’s positive choice of Black identity.

Andrea Arnold’s 2011 adaptation of Wuthering Heights points the way for more challenging and political exploration of the female canon’s classic authors, revitalizing them by blowing the cobwebs from safe romantic cliché. Bravo.

[youtube_sc url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=30XKzxnTYK8″]

 


Brigit McCone refuses to be embarrassed by the emo associations of Wuthering Heights fandom, writes and directs short films, radio dramas, and The Erotic Adventures of Vivica (as cabaret pseudonym Voluptua von Temptitillatrix). Her hobbies include doodling and eating sushi.

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: 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.

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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: How BBC’s ‘Pride & Prejudice’ Illustrates Why The Regency Period Sucked For Women

How BBC’s ‘Pride & Prejudice’ Illustrates Why The Regency Period Sucked For Women

By Myrna Waldron

Pride & Prejudice DVD Cover (Source: Wikipedia)

 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that those in pursuit of an English degree must be familiar with the works of Jane Austen. Fortunately for me, she is one of my favourite authors, and Pride & Prejudice is one of my favourite books. (And that’s saying something, as I read a lot.) It is one of the great novels of English Literature that can be utterly boring with the wrong teacher. Many times people fail to pick up on the social satire woven throughout the novel, especially since the language and culture is so different now that it’s 200 years later. Once you understand the social context in which the novel was written/published, and get used to Austen’s subtle brand of sarcasm, one can understand why Pride & Prejudice has endured so long. It doesn’t hurt that Mr. Darcy is one of the quintessential Byronic heroes too.
The 1995 BBC miniseries adaptation is by far the most popular, and the reason why can be summed up in two words: Colin. Firth. I first watched the miniseries when I was 10, and read the novel for the first time at 15. I can say quite confidently that the miniseries strongly helped me to understand the novel better, but…that’s not the only reason why it was memorable for me. Puberty already had its iron grip on me at that time, and when I saw Mr. Firth as Mr. Darcy for the first time…let’s just say I realized I liked boys. Colin Firth has had a wonderful sense of humour about his signature role, more-or-less reprising it in the Bridget Jones series (Side note: Colin Firth is an actual character in the 2nd novel.) and in an interview with a French magazine that asked him who the women in his life were, he answered, “My mother, my wife, and Jane Austen.” Unusually for a western media production, the makers knew their audience, and presented the miniseries for the female gaze. Firth is shown bathing, fencing, and, most famously, swimming in the pond near Pemberley and emerging from it with a wet white shirt.
Regretfully leaving Mr. Firth’s impact aside, he is not the only reason why the BBC adaptation is culturally important. 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.
The Bennet Sisters, From Left To Right: Lydia, Jane, Mary, Kitty, Lizzy (Source: http://ladylavinia1932.wordpress.com/)
The protagonist of Pride & Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet, usually called Lizzy, is the 2nd of 5 sisters and the favourite of her father because she is witty, intelligent, and well-read. Her older sister Jane is sweet natured and the most beautiful, middle sister Mary is plain, sanctimonious and withdrawn, and youngest sisters Kitty and Lydia are boy crazy and impulsive. Lydia most closely resembles her mother in personality and is thus her favourite. Mrs. Bennet is absolutely obsessed with the idea of marrying off her 5 daughters as soon as possible, and to rich men if they can manage it. The girls must endure their mother’s constant conspiring to marry them off – the elder sisters are resigned to their mother’s obsession, but the teenage youngest sisters are thoroughly swept up in their mother’s enthusiasm.
The major issue the Bennets face is that none of the daughters can inherit their father’s estate. They are confined to an entailment, which is a legal inheritance document stipulating that a hereditary estate can only be passed on to a certain person, usually the eldest living male relative. Unfortunately, the closest male relative to Mr. Bennet is Mr. Collins, a minister who is insufferably smug while pretending to be caring. When he suddenly descends on them for a visit, he is met with a certain degree of resentment, for when Mr. Bennet dies, Mr. Collins is fully within his rights to immediately throw out the grieving widow and daughters onto the streets. Thus, there is a practicality to Mrs. Bennet’s obsession – if her girls do not marry, they will be helpless and homeless.
Mr. Collins in this adaptation is utterly revolting. Greasy and simpering, he constantly brags about his rich patroness, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, (who is also Mr. Darcy’s maternal aunt) fawning about her even while miles away. He has visited with a mission – Lady Catherine thinks he should marry, so he figures he might as well choose from one of the Bennet sisters. Vainly, he sets his sights on Jane first as she is the most beautiful, but after being persuaded that Jane has another suitor (more on him later) he instead moves on to Lizzy, the next prettiest daughter. His attempts to woo Lizzy are incredibly repulsive and shortsighted, for he has chosen the worst possible match for him out of the 5 sisters. A bootlicking and hypocritical minister could not possibly be happy with a headstrong and brutally honest intellectual. It’s kind of sad he never noticed Mary and tried to court the sisters solely based on their looks, for although she’s plain she would have been a far better match for him.
Pemberley (Source: austenprose.wordpress.com)
Lizzy rejects his proposal with disgust, and he quickly moves on to proposing to the next closest target – her best friend Charlotte Lucas. She accepts, not out of even remote attraction, but because she felt she had no better option. At 27, she is already considered an old maid. She is not wealthy, she has no wealthy relatives, and she is not considered beautiful. So Charlotte explains to Lizzy, with a heartbreaking look of resignation, that she took all that she could get, and that she’d at least live in relative comfort. Later, when Lizzy visits her, she admits that she encourages her husband to spend as little time as possible with her. The social commentary exhibited here is staggering – I could not help but feel desperately hopeless and sympathetic for Charlotte’s situation. How awful to have to agree to marry such a repulsive man in order to prevent a future of poverty.
Jane and Lizzy fortunately have other potential suitors. Jane falls in love with Mr. Bingley, a relatively wealthy young man who has bought a manor nearby to their home. He is charming and amiable, contrasting sharply with his best friend, the brooding and proud (and even wealthier) Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy. They meet the Bennets at a ball, where Mr. Darcy offends the others by refusing to dance with anyone. He later reveals that he was feeling more socially awkward than disdainful, but he has already done the damage of appearing arrogant and snobbish, and Lizzy immediately develops a bad opinion of him (she is the “Prejudice” to his “Pride”). Jane and Bingley are very well matched, but their presumed engagement is for a time derailed due to societal restraints. At a ball held at Bingley’s manor, Mrs. Bennet brags loudly about Jane’s not yet confirmed engagement, Mary monopolizes the piano and performs poorly, Mr. Bennet publicly admonishes her for it, and Kitty and Lydia loudly and childishly flirt with the visiting soldiers. Jane is also shy and emotionally reserved, and so Mr. Darcy concludes that she is not especially interested in Bingley. He thus uses these excuses to convince Bingley not to propose to her, which is the first of many plot points where an individual is unfairly judged by the actions of her family.
Although at first Mr. Darcy is not particularly impressed with Lizzy, he quickly grows an attraction to her. At subsequent balls he asks to dance with her, compliments her to others, and will not hear any criticisms against her. Bingley’s younger sister Caroline hopes to gain Mr. Darcy’s affections by putting Lizzy down, and thus tries to find as many physical faults with her as possible. This is a commentary on how there is societal pressure for women to compete with each other, and to only value their physical attractiveness – not much has changed in 200 years. Nevertheless, Darcy proposes to Lizzy, and it is an infamous disaster. He begins by expressing his ardent love for her, but then starts ranting about how his love goes against his character, upbringing, and will. He also states that his social status is likely to take a hit since she is neither wealthy nor well-connected. Unsurprisingly, Lizzy rejects his proposal with anger and disgust. She criticizes his arrogance and pride, and condemns him for what she believes is a particularly heartless act – the cold treatment and cutting off of his childhood friend Mr. Wickham.
Mr. Darcy and Lizzy (Source: bbc.co.uk)
Mr. Wickham is one of the local soldiers, and catches Lizzy’s attention because he is of similar intellect to her and is charming. She already has a poor opinion of Mr. Darcy, so she readily believes Wickham’s sob story about how Mr. Darcy stopped his ambitions of becoming a minister, denied the small inheritance that Darcy Sr. had promised for him  (Wickham’s father was Darcy’s father’s steward), and forced him to live in poverty, despite them having grown up together. Although Darcy cannot deny that he has acted arrogantly, he defends his actions regarding Wickham in a letter to her. In a flashback, we see Mr. Darcy at Cambridge walking in on Wickham fooling around with a young woman. Mr. Darcy explains that Wickham then left university, and requested a lump sum of 3000 pounds rather than an annual stipend. He thought they had then parted ways for good, but then found out the depths of which Wickham could descend.
Wickham likes to prey on teenage girls. He locates Darcy’s much younger sister Georgiana and seduces her, promising to elope with her. Darcy was never sure if Wickham’s aim was to get at Georgiana’s fortune, or to get revenge on Darcy. Fortunately, Darcy discovers the elopement in time to prevent it (and prevent Georgiana’s being sexually exploited) but both siblings would remain traumatized by the memory of how close she came to ruin. Lizzy is forced to believe Darcy’s story since it involves his younger sister, but she and Jane resolve to keep the truth of Wickham’s behaviour quiet since they have not been authorized to reveal the details, nor do they want to damage Georgiana’s reputation. Yes, Georgiana would be the one who would suffer from this, not the grown man who preyed on a teenage girl. This decision to keep quiet would come back to haunt the Bennets in the worst of ways, for it was not just Lizzy whose attention was caught by Wickham…but Lydia’s as well.
Lydia is given permission to follow the soldiers’ regiment to Brighton and stay with a friend of hers (much to Lizzy’s reluctance). She is not supervised at all, and Wickham convinces her to run away with him one night. She believes he is going to marry her, and is excited and anticipates how jealous her elder sisters will be that she has married first. (There’s that competing between women for male affections again.) We get short vignettes of her exile with Wickham – they are staying in a small room in a disreputable part of London. Lydia is shown wearing her dressing gown, but it is never directly implied nor stated whether she had premarital sex with him. Most likely she has, as since she is not wealthy there was only one thing about her Wickham would be interested in. Notably, none of the characters even dare to directly mention the worst-case scenario of Lydia’s behaviour, but Mary sanctimoniously summarizes the inequality of gender dynamics of the time: “The loss of virtue in a woman is irretrievable … A woman’s reputation is no less brittle than it is beautiful, and therefore we cannot be too guarded in our behaviour towards the undeserving of the other sex.”
 

 

We interrupt this essay to bring you some fanservice. (Source: telegraph.co.uk)
The other sisters believe their chances of making a good marriage are now nonexistent, as the news of Lydia’s “loss of virtue” have tainted her family by association. The best that they can hope for is that Lydia and Wickham have at least married, preferably before his bedding her. Mr. Collins even smugly states that it would have been preferable if Lydia had died. It is very damning that a family has to hope that a possibly sexually exploited teenager has married her seducer. Nowadays there would at least be an attempt to arrest Wickham for statutory rape, but society has not changed so much that there wouldn’t still be shaming of Lydia for being a sexually active teenage girl. We can look to the recent tragic case of Amanda Todd, a very young teen enticed by an adult into posing topless on a webcam, blackmailed, and driven to suicide by the public shaming of her actions.
Mr. Darcy, humbled by Lizzy’s dismissal of him as arrogant and feeling responsible for not exposing Wickham’s character, decides to intervene. He locates the pair (Lydia is foolishly amused by this, Wickham angered), and makes Wickham agree to marry Lydia by offering to pay off his many debts. They are married with only Mr. Darcy and Lydia’s maternal aunt and uncle, the Gardiners, in attendance. Mr. Darcy insists on letting the Gardiners take the credit, and swears them to secrecy. They return home and are enthusiastically welcomed by Mrs. Bennet (whose opinion of people tends to revert back and forth to opposite extremes depending on whether they are useful to her regarding marrying off her daughters). Lydia brags about her marriage to her sisters, and never learns just how close she came to permanently ruining her reputation and her family’s as well. But she lets it slip that Darcy was involved in arranging her marriage.
These altruistic actions, and a visit to Mr. Darcy’s manor Pemberley, where he is adored and praised by his servants, gradually change Lizzy’s opinion of him. Eventually, a rumour spreads to Lady Catherine de Bourgh that Lizzy and Mr. Darcy, her nephew, are engaged. In a fury she comes to the Bennets’ home and verbally abuses Lizzy, adamant in her belief in her social superiority. She vehemently objects to the engagement as Lizzy is far beneath her nephew in both social status, familial connections and wealth, not to mention that she believes that her daughter Anne and Mr. Darcy have been betrothed since childhood. Lizzy is headstrong and defiant, however, and counters all of Lady Catherine’s insults. In reference to their social status she she states, “He is a gentleman. I am a gentleman’s daughter. So far we are equal.” Not only has Lizzie skewered the ridiculous standards of class distinction in her era, she has made a subtle feminist statement as well. She also refuses to promise not to become engaged to Mr. Darcy, which is a solid social commentary on not letting the upper classes use their status to bully others.
The Double Wedding (Source: blogspot.com)
In the meantime, Mr. Darcy has told Mr. Bingley that he was mistaken in thinking that Jane Bennet did not return Bingley’s affections, and gives his blessing to their engagement. Bingley then takes the earliest opportunity he can to propose to Jane, which makes the normally reserved girl deliriously happy. When Mr. Darcy and Lizzy next meet, she reveals she knows who saved Lydia’s and her family’s reputations, and thanks him profusely. He tells her that he was only thinking of her happiness, and restates his love for her, promising never to bring it up again if she still feels the same way she did before. She has since realized that she has gradually fallen in love with him ever since visiting Pemberley, and accepts his proposal this time. There are many interpretations of the implications of this famous ending, but this time I’m going to do a feminist one: We know that Lizzy is progressive and headstrong, and likely as feminist as her creator. She could then possibly see Mr. Darcy’s actions as feminist ones, as he has directly prevented the fallout of a misogynistic society’s double standards. He has also demonstrated generosity and a willingness to help the most vulnerable. So she and Jane have a double wedding with Bingley and Darcy – all pairs as inseparable as they have always been.
As a whole, Pride & Prejudice and its miniseries adaptation strongly posit some feminist criticisms and subtly satirize the social standards of the time. Most notably, the story condemns entailments/inheritances that favour only male relatives instead of more direct (and equally rightful) female relatives, viewing relatively young women as old maids, forcing women into unwanted marriages to avoid homelessness and poverty, judging entire families on the basis of an individual’s actions (or judging an individual on the basis of their family’s actions), encouraging women to compete with each other for the affection of men, putting a woman’s entire worth on her virginity, allowing grown men to prey on teenage girls, and condemning a young woman for having premarital sex instead of her exploiter. Whew. It really sucked to be a woman during the Regency Period. For a 200-year-old book…that’s a whole lot of feminism. Bless you, Jane Austen. (And bless you, Colin Firth.)
Full disclosure: I recognize that this is more of a literature essay than a television review. My only excuse is that throughout high school and university I have written more essays about Pride & Prejudice than I can remember. Good habits are hard to break.
 
Myrna Waldron is a feminist writer/blogger with a particular emphasis on all things nerdy. She lives in Toronto and has studied English and Film at York University. Myrna has a particular interest in the animation medium, having written extensively on American, Canadian and Japanese animation. She also has a passion for Sci-Fi & Fantasy literature, pop culture literature such as cartoons/comics, and the gaming subculture. She maintains a personal collection of blog posts, rants, essays and musings at The Soapboxing Geek, and tweets with reckless pottymouthed abandon at @SoapboxingGeek.

 

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.

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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: ‘The Uninvited’ (1944) and Dorothy Macardle’s Feminism

Movie poster for The Uninvited
This is a guest post by Nadia Smith.
[contains spoilers]
When I told a horror-fan friend in his early twenties that I was writing about The Uninvited, he said he had seen it. This came as a surprise, since it’s mostly older viewers and film historians who are aware of it. It turned out that he thought I was referring to the recent Korean film The Uninvited: A Tale of Two Sisters, and not the classic haunted house movie that had audiences screaming in the 1940s and drew comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940).
The Uninvited (1944), directed by Lewis Allen and released by Paramount Pictures, is an adaptation of a popular Gothic novel by the Irish writer Dorothy Macardle (1889-1958), also a playwright, historian, journalist, and prominent feminist campaigner. It was adapted for the screen by the British writer Dodie Smith, best known for 101 Dalmatians. The Uninvited, which easily passes the Bechdel Test, features some sexist characterizations and a conventional ending, stemming from Macardle’s complex views on gender as well as the demands of commercial romantic fiction and film production. Nevertheless, the film opens itself up to alternative readings and valuations of the characters.
In the film, siblings Rick, played by Ray Milland, and Pamela Fitzgerald, played by Ruth Hussey (who might at first be mistaken for a married couple), learn that the old house in Cornwall they have just purchased is haunted by two ghosts, one warm and benevolent and one cold and dangerous, and investigate the mystery surrounding the house’s previous residents in an attempt to end the hauntings. Rick falls for the much younger Stella Meredith (Gail Russell), whose parents, artist Llewellyn and his wife Mary, had once lived in the house with Carmel, an artist’s model from Spain who had an affair with Llewellyn. The Merediths and Carmel died when Stella was a small child, Mary by falling off a nearby cliff, and the shy, repressed, immature Stella, who idolizes her late mother, lives an isolated existence in the village with Commander Beech (Donald Crisp), her stern, morbid maternal grandfather. The Commander has an unhealthy obsession with his daughter’s memory, and Stella is virtually imprisoned in the house as the Commander tries to mold her in Mary’s image. So far, so Gothic. Local informants, as well as Mary’s friend Miss Holloway (Cornelia Otis Skinner), praise Mary’s virtue and angelic beauty to the Fitzgeralds, and denounce Carmel’s depravity. Rick’s frustration grows as he worries that Stella’s intense emotional investment in her mother’s ghost will lead to a psychological breakdown and prevent her from ever caring for him.
The Fitzgeralds initially think that Mary is the warm ghost, and Carmel the cold ghost endangering Stella, but a séance proves them wrong. Carmel, the warm ghost and Stella’s biological mother, refused to be silenced and unfairly maligned, instead returning to tell the truth, while Mary, the cold malevolent ghost, tried to prevent the exposure of family secrets about her true nature and adoption of Stella after Carmel gave birth in secret. In life, Carmel had been a nurturing mother who truly loved Stella, and Mary had been cold and uncaring, as well as asexual. Rick symbolically kills the “evil mother” Mary, banishing her ghost through ridicule, while Stella’s acceptance of the truth about her biological mother’s identity allows her to move forward and ensures that Carmel will no longer haunt the house. Commander Beech dies, and the film concludes with Rick announcing that he and Stella will marry, while Pamela will marry a local doctor who helped solve the mystery. The final frame shows the two couples together in the drawing room; Stella appears rather uncomfortable, with a forced smile, recalling her discomfort when Rick forcefully kissed her earlier in the film. Whether this was a directorial decision or simply reflective of the limitations of the young Gail Russell’s acting remains uncertain, but it opens up the happy ending to alternative interpretations, as is often the case in Gothic romances.
Dorothy Macardle used a ghost-story plot and Gothic conventions to frame a narrative about troubled marriages and mother-daughter relationships, family secrets that haunt the present, and transgressive sexuality, thereby setting up a critique of domestic ideology. The unsettling implications of such a critique in Gothic romances, though, are foreclosed by conventional endings in which the heroine embraces marriage and domesticity. While the novel refers to several alternative relationships and domestic arrangements, these are closed off at the end in favor of “normalization.” Although Stella has been traumatized by her upbringing—her grandfather was overbearing and repressive and her parents’ marriage was characterized by hatred and power struggles—her impending marriage to Rick is a foregone conclusion that meets the narrative demands of the Gothic romance. However, some readers and viewers of Gothic romances find the endings unconvincing and read beyond the ending, and may imagine that the naïve, inexperienced Stella, like the nameless narrator of Rebecca, will find that her real problems begin with her marriage to an older man she hardly knows, leading to a new Gothic narrative in the formerly haunted house they intend to live in. 
Dorothy Macardle
The Production Code affecting films in the 1940s meant that homosexuality, extramarital affairs, and out-of-wedlock births were referred to cryptically in The Uninvited to meet the imperatives of censorship. Viewers learn that Mary “feared and refused motherhood,” and is therefore blamed for her husband’s affair with Carmel. Mary, Carmel, and Miss Holloway are all punished for their respective sexual transgressions – asexuality, heterosexual promiscuity, and lesbianism – with death or, in Miss Holloway’s case, a mental breakdown. The character of Miss Holloway was recognized as a lesbian by the Legion of Decency, whose (male) leaders complained to Paramount executives about the scenes in which she speaks romantically to Mary’s portrait. Lesbian audiences in the 1940s also grasped the inferences and characterizations in The Uninvited, and film scholars note that it became a cult hit with lesbian communities in wartime America. Mary is depicted as asexual or possibly a lesbian by being non-maternal and too close to Miss Holloway, and the novel describes her as “unnatural,” tying in with discourses about motherhood and gender essentialism. Later film scholars have seen even more lesbian connotations, suggesting that the mother-daughter trope in the film can be a cover for lesbianism, since Stella has been in love with another woman, Mary, her whole life, much to Rick’s frustration.
Dorothy Macardle’s views on gender roles and motherhood were crucially shaped by her own family dynamics, and reflected in her Gothic novels. She perceived her English mother, Minnie, as a classic late-Victorian hysteric, or fake invalid, who used her fragility as a weapon to prevail in marital power struggles and prioritize her own needs, and viewed her Irish father, Thomas, as Minnie’s helpless and long-suffering victim. Her fiction is inattentive to alternative power dynamics in marriage; husbands are depicted as generally chivalrous figures vulnerable to abuse by manipulative women feigning fragility, rather than subjecting fragile, vulnerable women to abuse. Her novels all end with the metaphorical destruction of a malevolent maternal figure and her baleful power, suggesting that Minnie, like the vampires to whom a prominent Victorian doctor compared hysterical women, took a lot of killing. Macardle’s fiction overturned sentimental and politically useful Victorian notions of the mother’s gentle influence in the home, as her feminist convictions stemmed from the belief that women’s exercise of power should be transparent and directed outside the home. It enraged her that outwardly conformist women like her mother and the fictional Mary Meredith were praised for their virtue, and she tried to show the transgression and complexity behind simplistic notions of good and bad women in a novel in which an icon of conventional womanhood is exposed as a fraud.
The tensions and limitations of Macardle’s feminism and her use of hostile sexist tropes about predatory lesbians, frigid wives, and bad mothers in her fiction seem to stem not only from her understanding of her family dynamics, but also from her sense of herself as an Exceptional Woman, informed by social class privilege. She never married and spent years living alone or with other women, and spent some of her early life in female institutions, including an all-girls school and a women’s prison (for her Irish republican activism). While she enjoyed being a university-educated, professionally successful unmarried woman with no children, she thought most women should be wives and mothers, with their sexuality safely contained within marriage, a view shared by many interwar-era “maternal feminists” in Europe and the United States.
The two main (living) female characters in The Uninvited are Pamela Fitzgerald and Stella Meredith. Pamela demonstrates wit, assertiveness, and intelligence, especially when she solves the mystery of the two ghosts that had confounded the others. Stella is fragile and childlike, which greatly appeals to the older Rick. The circumstances of her upbringing have created a repressed, insecure personality who idealizes the vague memory of a loving mother. Despite Stella’s timidity, she demonstrates courage at the novel’s end when she confronts and reassures Carmel’s ghost. While normative heterosexuality is restored in the conclusion with plans for marriage, Rick’s love for Stella in the novel is unsettling, as he has constantly infantilized her and describes her as a child.
Miss Holloway, an “unfeminine” single woman and nurse who had been infatuated with her friend Mary and still worships her memory, is significant as a lesbian character in the days of the Production Code. Her name recalls London’s Holloway Prison, where suffragists were incarcerated earlier in the century, and the convalescent home she operates is a prison of sorts where female patients lose agency and autonomy. While Miss Holloway’s narrative seeks to contrast Mary’s moral perfection with Carmel’s depravity, the Fitzgeralds are so put off by this stereotypical sinister lesbian that they begin to think that things were not all that they seemed. The character of Miss Holloway shows The Uninvited’s indebtedness to Daphne du Maurier’s popular Gothic novel, Rebecca (1938; released as a film in 1940), as she bears a strong resemblance to Mrs. Danvers. Both are portrayed as sinister lesbians who idolize the dead woman at the center of the mystery and play a key role in reinforcing her iconization.
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. Now that it’s finally available on DVD, maybe it will become at least as well known as The Uninvited: A Tale of Two Sisters.

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Nadia Smith is a historian and writer based in the Boston area. She is the author of Dorothy Macardle: A Life.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: ‘Their Eyes Were Watching God’ by Zora Neale Hurston

Zora Neale Hurston
  

This is a guest post by Martyna Przybysz.

Hurston’s novel has found a huge following not only amongst African-American readers and writers, such as Alice Walker, but ever since being brought into the spotlight back in the 1970s, it has had a growing female readership. It is not an easy novel to get through – the use of local dialects, and the ever changing narrative styles, make it an almost laborious read. As noted by a Black British writer, Zadie Smith, in the introduction to the novel from 2007 “Hurston rejected the ‘neutral universal’ for her novels – she wrote unapologetically in the black-inflected dialect in which she was raised.””Unapologetic” is the key word here – Zora, as the writer, and a woman, went against the grain, just like her character, Janie. That is what makes the novel compelling and draws the reader in. Similarly so, the character potrayed by Halle Berry is driving the film’s narrative.

Janie and Tea Cake
Janie Crawford is a survivor. In the opening scene of the film, just like in the novel, she has just come back from burying the dead – the only love of her life, a light-hearted slacker, Tea Cake. The first sentence signals the narrative that will later dominate the entire movie. It could be argued that film, being a visual medium, has an advantage over the written word in establishing the mood, and here it does so with the jittery camera movements, and extreme close-ups of Janie’s body. “There’s two things everybody got to find out for theyselves, they got to find out about love, and they got to find out about living” she says, as she stumbles through a village path, in nothing but dirty overalls.

Isn’t it a powerful, universal statement? It is indeed; however, as the film progresses, we lose the sense of identity search that is so prevalent in the novel. We are instead invited to a roller-coaster ride that are Halle Berry’s… wait, Janie Crawford’s romantic endeavours. Because yes, as aptly pointed out by one of the reviewers, “she’s Halle Berry – and the movie never lets you forget it.”

Halle Berry as Janie
Perhaps because I got to watch the film prior to reading the novel, it was easier for me to accept Halle’s interpretation of Janie. I couldn’t, however, shake off the feeling that a multilayered novel has been reduced to a Harlequin-esque epic drama. Having Oprah Winfrey summarise the film in the trailer only made that impression stronger. What the film fails to do is adapt the strong visual imagination of the writer that built a much more complex identity for Janie.
Whilst the novel slowly introduces us to Janie, and goes as far back as her childhood, in the film we are immediately transported back to that unlucky afternoon when her Gran spots her kissing a regular farm boy and decides to give her away to a rich land-owner. Logan Killicks is a non-invasive older man, who places Janie in the role of a housewife. It is by his side that she grows into a woman and realizes that her romantic dreams of love may not be fulfilled. It isn’t long, however, until she meets a handsome gentleman called Joe Starks (played by Ruben Santiago-Hudson) and runs away with him. And here again, the search for her own identity as a female seems rather futile. Janie becomes an accessory and feels restricted by her relationship and the social role (being the Mayor’s wife) that she has to fulfill. “I think it keep us in a kinda strain,” she says. She’s just there to stay by her man’s side and should not have any further expectations, as according to Janie’s granmother “de nigger woman is de mule uh de world.” Janie, however, will not rest until she finds happiness in a relationship.
DVD cover
Without fail, Halle Berry conveys her character’s search with utmost sensitivity and attention to detail – it is all in the small gestures that we learn about Janie and her heart’s desires. She wants to feel and love and share that feeling with the world, but most importantly, she adapts this approach to life and the world in order to find her own sacred place in the arms of a caring man. That, for her, is the destination. As a contemporary woman, I find this concept a beautiful one in itself, but not quite liberating, and based on a presumption that a woman cannot be whole without a man. The search for female identity through the romantic love of a man emanates from the character of Janie throughout the film. She loves nature, and she loves God; she’s curious, and open, and somewhat free and wild. Through the camera work and sentimental music, Their Eyes Were Watching God explores that aspect of Janie’s personality, and when oppressed by her second marriage, she confesses to the audience that she is not “petal-open anymore.” What a striking, if slightly sentimental, analogy that brings to mind one of my favourite quotes from Anais Nin: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

What the film, as well as the novel, are suggesting is not only that small town mentality is something that Janie has long outgrown, but by building her identity as a female in her own right, she is also going against the stale racial and gender stereotypes that enslave her community. When she finally meets “the love of her life,” Tea Cake (played by Michael Ealy), the passion between the two is undeniable, and so is everyone’s harsh judgment about their romance. But Janie is not a rebel; she simply follows her heart and is not afraid of being herself. Sexuality is an important aspect of her identity as a woman, and she is way ahead of her time with her natural and unconstrained ability to explore it.

However controversial or open-minded its description of sexual scenes was at the time when the novel was published (perhaps less when it was later read and fully acknowledged), Darnell Martin, the director of the TV movie, has made the scenes almost poetically erotic. The main sex scene between Halle and Michael brings us to a finale of the passion that has been building up between their protagonists – Janie looks and acts twenty years younger, just like a woman who has found herself by finding love in another. “I felt for the very first time like I was living my life – I had love, and it was real. Tea Cake gave me the whole world, every day.” That concludes Janie’s search for love, as well as her search for identity.

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.

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Martyna Przybysz is a Pole who resides in London, UK. She works in film production. This is her blog: http://martynaprzybysz.tumblr.com.

Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: Titus the Tight-Ass: Julie Taymor’s Depictions of the Virgin and Whore

Written by Amanda Rodriguez

Trigger warning: frank discussion of rape & PTSD

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. 

The only two women of note in the film are the captured Goth queen turned Roman empress, Tamora, portrayed by Jessica Lange and Lavinia, the gang-raped and dismembered virgin daughter of Titus, played by Laura Fraser.

First, there’s Tamora, the barbaric queen of excess and unnatural sexual appetites.

Tamora: all-around orgy party gal
In college, I wrote a psychoanalytic paper on her called, “The Earth and Tamora: The Cannibalistic Vagina in Titus Andronicus (Or Chomp, Chomp: The Little Vagina that Could)”. Though it was a lot of fun to write, it focused on the unhappy subject of the demonizing of the Goth queen for her sexuality. Neither the play nor the film seem particularly concerned with sympathetically portraying a woman who’s lost her country, her eldest son, and been forced to marry the odious emperor who conquered and colonized her land and people. Instead, Tamora is exoticized and condemned as a bad mother who uses her boundless sexuality as her power. She uses this power to seduce the emperor, which opens the door for her to inflict her revenge on the Andronici.
Tamora is the unnatural mother with unnatural appetites, which is literalized at the climax of the film when Titus feeds her a meat pie filled with her murdered sons. Taymor shows Tamora’s relationship with her two surviving sons as bizarre and borderline incestuous. Her sons are wild, over-indulged, and psychotic. We see them knife fight each other all around the palace, bickering over which one of them will get to rape the virginal Lavinia. Tamora caresses and shares lingering kisses with them. Not only that, but she lounges in bed naked with them. Her sexuality is so gross and excess that it spills over onto her sons, which Taymor implies warps them into narcissistic mama’s boys who go around raping and dismembering girls for funsies.
This would be an awkward scene to walk in on.

Tamora lacks an appropriate maternal instinct. She’s either too overbearing and clingy with her children, which reveals itself in her sexual attitude toward them, or she is a cold and immoral figure as is evinced by her desire to murder the infant son born from her affair with Aaron the Moor. (Even her relationship with Aaron, her black lover, is meant to be another example of her unnatural appetites, which is hella racist and could be the topic of a whole other post.) Lavinia pleads for Tamora to just kill her without letting her sons rape her, but Tamora is unmoved. This is another lost opportunity to show Tamora as having complex, compassionate, or even conflicted feelings at the sight of another woman begging for mercy in a mirror image of Tamora kneeling at Titus’ feet, weeping that he spare her son. Lavinia says to the sons, “The milk thou suck’dst from her did turn to marble,” and, at that point, the audience is inclined to agree, especially since Tamora is apparently so turned on by all this raping and murdering that she declares she’s going to find Aaron and have sex with him. 

Then there’s Lavinia, the dutiful, virgin daughter.
Lavinia: post-rape with her arms cut off then stuffed with branches and her tongue cut out
Taymor hammers home Lavinia’s obedience by showing her meekly, willingly switching her betrothal from one brother (Bassianus) to the other (Saturninus) upon Titus’ instruction. This is another missed opportunity to complicate the personhood of a woman who is not treated as human, who is always depicted as a piece of her father’s property and a reflection of his honor.

Lavinia is raped, her arms hacked off then cruelly stuffed full of tree branches and her tongue cut out so that she can’t name her assailants. There is so much that a director could do to articulate the inhuman atrocity that’s been inflicted upon Lavinia. It is the epitome of victim silencing, literalizing the struggle many survivors face after their attack. Unfortunately, Taymor renders the rape of Lavinia in the same lavish, stylized manner as everything else. When Lavinia sees her attackers for the first time after her rape, Taymor uses an abstract hallucination sequence to symbolize the rape. Lavinia is wearing a deer head atop her own as two tigers leap towards her from either side.

W…T…F

The sequence is bizarre, trippy, and kind of pretty, but it in no way expresses the horror of rape (not to mention the unimaginable horror of being dismembered). With all the stylizing and symbolizing Taymor’s doing, Lavinia’s rape is effectively trivialized.

When Titus first sees Lavinia after the attack, he says, “My grief was at the height before thou camest,
And now like Nilus, it disdaineth bounds.” Her father monologues about how her attack hurts him.  Even Lavinia’s grief and her rape are not her own because Titus egotistically can only fathom his own pain, pride, and outrage. Throughout this scene and the rest of the film, Lavinia is a background adornment. As Titus bemoans his plight, Lavinia stands there without emoting or interrupting. The camera only shows her as meek and solemn. The only exception is a strange scene in which she is given a long stick in order to write the names of her attackers in the sand. Lavinia moves to put the tip of the stick in her mouth, and the audience recoils at the image that echoes fellatio (nobody wants to see a rape survivor performing simulated fellatio). Instead of putting the stick in her mouth, though, Lavinia frantically carves out the names as she is accompanied by discordant music. Instead of documenting her reaction to writing out the names (relieved? angry? exhausted?), the names themselves are focused on in an overhead shot, once again removing Lavinia’s agency and subjectivity.

Lavinia’s life and her death are both symbols. Her life is symbolic of her father’s honor, and after she’s raped, her lost chastity (puke) is symbolic of his shame. Her chastity, Titus insists, is more precious than her hands or tongue (projectile puke). In his mind, Titus must kill her in order to alleviate his own shame. Even Lavinia’s death at her father’s hands is meek and willing. The logic is that she’s so shamed, so “martyred” that death is preferable. It’s true that survivors may go through a host of emotions following their attack, and thoughts of suicide are not uncommon. Lavinia behaves as a doll, though, being positioned placidly for Titus to snap her neck. One could even defend her lack of emotions as PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), but I contest that Lavinia doesn’t have any real emotions because Taymor gave her very little depth of character, and Lavinia’s docile nature is more for convenience that to articulate the range of responses a survivor might have.

What’s the saying? “Like a lamb to the slaughter.”

 Tamora and Lavinia fit solidly into opposite camps of the virgin/whore dichotomy. Tamora = whore. Lavinia = virgin. The beauty of working from a play as source material is that a director has such incredible freedom to interpret character and setting appearance as well as character tone of voice, emotions, and actions. Though Taymor’s reboot is flashy and gritty, it doesn’t do much work to creatively re-imagine the inner life of its characters. In fact, it doesn’t appear to give much inner life to its female characters at all. In Taymor’s defense, the Shakespearean play does cast its women as virgin and whore, not allowing for much in the way of range. I just can’t accept a contemporary filmmaker (especially a woman) so cavalierly putting her only female characters in the same box as a 16th century white man, a box out of which women still struggle to climb today.

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Classic Literature Film Adaptations Week: Hellraisers in Hoop Skirts: Gillian Armstrong’s Proudly Feminist ‘Little Women’

This is a guest post by Jessica Freeman-Slade.

When I think of the inspiring women in the books I read as a kid, I don’t think of the girls my age like Ramona Quimby or Harriet Welsh. No, when I was 10 years old, I wanted, more than anything, to be Josephine “Jo” March, the central character in Louisa May Alcott’s extraordinary 1868 novel, Little Women. While some little girls would bristle at the hoop skirts and Civil War hardship and use of such offensive curses as “Christopher Columbus!” I adored it…in part because I saw the March girls as out of their time, rambunctious, admirable, and most clearly modern. There have been many film adaptations of Alcott’s story, but in Gillian Armstrong’s 1994 version, you feel the modernity first and foremost, as the brilliant screenplay and even more brilliant performances of Winona Ryder, Susan Sarandon, and the other girls show you what you’ve always suspected: that Little Women is a full-on feminist narrative.
March girls in bed
True, sometimes Little Women looks like “chick lit”—and certainly if it were published today, its cover would telegraph it as such, in curlicue text, pink background, and lacy border. But it was a truly subversive thing to have a female-centric novel in the late 1800s: a book in which the first half is without a wedding, where women talk to each other without needing a man to talk about, and where women rail against the limitations set upon them. Little Women was an extraordinary achievement and a commercial success, and it made Louisa May Alcott a literary icon equal to Jane Austen (who wrote about the rocky road to successful marriages) and the Bronte sisters (who wrote about the tragic consequences of failed romance). If you really want to hate on the “chick lit” classification of Little Women, just remember: before you could be a Hannah/Marnie/Jessa/Shoshanna, or even a Carrie/Miranda/Samantha/Charlotte, you had the much richer pantheon of Jo, Amy, Meg, and Beth to choose from. 
Winona Ryder as Jo
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. 
Laurie (Christian Bale) and Jo
Jo’s impulse, in every situation, is to express her true opinions, which makes it difficult for her to imagine conventional love with any kind of traditional man. Her friendship with Theodore “Laurie” Laurence (a smoking hot Christian Bale), the rich boy next door, is grounded in an appreciation of each other’s good humor, intelligence, and kindness. When Laurie and Jo first meet, sparks fly not from physical attraction, but a heady, hilarious exchange of wits. Their relationship is rooted in mutual respect, and a mutual desire to cast off societal expectations for proper behavior. (No coincidence that they both go by nicknames.) Neither of them fit a mold, and so they fit perfectly together. “If only I were the swooning type,” jokes Jo after a night at the theater. “If only I were the catching type,” Laurie retorts playfully. When Jo insists the girls include Laurie in their theatrical enterprises, he’s only allowed to do so by volunteering a means of communication—a mailbox stationed between their two houses, to encourage “the baring of our souls, and the telling of our most appalling secrets.” Because the girls hold the power, they are the ones who decide whether Laurie can be trusted. They are the rulers of their own government, and so, Jo narrates, “And so Laurie was admitted as an equal into our society, and we March girls could enjoy the daily novelty of having a brother of our very own.”

But Laurie, however sibling-like, never gets a relationship as intense as that between the sisters: the girls are fiercely loyal to each other and collaborative in bringing life, culture, and comforts to their home. They write plays and newspapers, sing songs, and rally in times of great poverty and conflict. The first half of the film, focused on their childhood years during the War, brings each girl’s dreams and frustrations into focus, and establishes the characteristics that will follow them into adulthood. 
Claire Danes as Beth
A 14-year-old Claire Danes, perfectly suited to her role as a less moody Angela Chase dressed up in gingham, plays Beth. During a recent viewing, I found myself muttering, “Ugh, Beth sucks,” a reaction provoked by her demure, stick-in-the-mud, Mary Bennett-like status. But Beth is daunted by the prospect of having to grow up—and so, she never truly does, remaining housebound by a childhood illness. “I never saw myself as anything much,” Beth says, soft-spoken and sweet even on her deathbed. “Why does everyone want to go away? I love being home.” (Beth’s death scene, a tearjerker by any standard, is especially poignant when you realize that, though Beth’s adventures had a smaller sphere, they were no less wonderful to her.) 
Kirsten Dunst as Amy
The youngest March sister, Amy (played, in the first half, by a wonderfully petulant 12-year-old Kirsten Dunst) is constantly looking ahead, making proud declarations about how she plans to reshape her nose and marry someone “disgustingly rich.” “We’ll all grow up someday,” Amy says, “We might as well know what we want.” Amy’s vanity and flightiness are often, but Dunst brings a tender longing to her growing pains, giving real weight to the scene where she reveals that her schoolteacher beat her for trading limes at recess. When Amy tells her family “Mr. Davis said it was as useful to educate a woman as to educate a female cat,” they unite against him. Amy may be frivolous at times, but she has the same sense of outrage as her sisters.
But these girls are not always lovely in dealing with their problems: they get to have real conflicts, fully violent confrontations, and true arguments. No moment is more frightening than that of Amy’s revenge on Jo after a night out, an attack so specifically crafted that it could only result in a dramatic fight. “Your young ladies are unusually active,” says Mr. Brooke to Marmee (Sarandon), and she smiles coyly in response. These girls are unconventionally free, far from the “gentling influence” that others expect them to be—for better or for worse.
What drives the film, and what shows its strengths as a female-directed, written-, and produced endeavor, is addressing the complexities of female life even as the film pivots into the March girls’ adult lives. The oldest March sister, Meg (Trini Alvarado) chooses love over fortune when she marries Laurie’s former tutor, John Brooke (Eric Stoltz). Amy (now played by Samantha Mathis, far less feisty in adulthood) travels with Aunt March (Mary Wickes) to France, where she develops her talents as an artist and reassesses her ideas of romantic love. And Jo, when confronted with an unexpected proposal from Laurie, surprises even herself when she declines his offer—not because she doesn’t love him, but because she cannot envision herself as a wife.

Laurie’s proposal is full of admiration for Jo’s specific virtues (“I swear I’ll be a saint,” he pleads. “I’ll let you win every argument”), but Jo cannot see her dearest friend as any kind of conventional beau. Frustrated with herself, with her inability to change and become a traditional woman, Jo breaks down in tears, but soon charges forward on a challenge from Marmee: “Go and embrace your liberty, and see what wonderful things come of it.” The movie shifts to focus squarely on Jo on her own in New York, pursuing any chance to set her writing free, and to find someone who will love her as she is. 
Jo and Bhaer (Gabriel Byrne)
While shopping her writing to disdainful publishers, she meets Friedrich Bhaer (Gabriel Byrne), a professor who bonds with her first by intellect (they exchange lines of Goethe and Walt Whitman) and then by love. Bhaer encourages her to speak her mind, to take and defend her political stances, and to be bold in her writing and in her life. Jo is pushed to go far beyond her fantastical thrillers and to uncover something she truly wants to talk about, to deepen and shape her childhood fancies into real art. Jo finds herself able to love only when she can be loved for herself as she is. “Jo…” Bhaer says, tenderly embracing her at the film’s close. “Such a little name for such a person.” 
Meg played by Trini Alvarado
You can see Jo’s journey as the heart of Little Women, and that’s fine. But my admiration for Armstrong’s film truly crystallized when you look at how the movie treats Meg March. Though she possesses great compassion and intelligence, Meg is constantly appraised as a beautiful, eligible young woman ready for a proper beau. Her conflicts with Jo primarily arise over how much she should follow other girls’ examples in proper behavior at parties and balls, and the constant refrain from her Aunt March is that the “one hope for [the] family is for [Meg] to marry well.” However, Meg constantly questions how she’ll negotiate the world when she will always be seen as a pretty girl, whether she must play the part at every turn or strike out on her own. But there is a reason that you have Marmee played by the actress formerly known as Louise Sawyer: in her response to Meg’s questions, Marmee’s message about a woman’s place becomes not just bold, but revolutionary.
Marmee: Nothing provokes speculation more than the sight of a woman enjoying herself.

Meg: Why is it Laurie may do as he likes, and flirt and tipple champagne…

Marmee: … And no one thinks the less of him? Well, I suppose, for one practical reason: Laurie is a man. And as such, he may vote and hold property and pursue any profession he pleases. And so he is not so easily demeaned.

Meg: […] it’s nice to be praised and admired; I couldn’t help but like it.

Marmee: Of course not. I only care what you think of yourself. If you feel your value lies in being merely decorative, I fear that someday you might find yourself believing that that’s all you really are. Time erodes all such beauty—but what it cannot diminish is the wonderful workings of your mind. Your humor, your kindness, and your moral courage—these are the things I cherish so in you…. I so wish I could give my girls a more just world.

In this brief scene, Little Women’s focus shifts from being a story about a cozy band of sisters to an examination of where women have been, and where they might take themselves. Marmee says the world is unjust, but that the girls will strive to set it right, and in pursuing love and art in each of their lives, the March sisters manage to redefine, on every level, what kind of stories women might tell.

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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: "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?”

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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.