Tag: Domesticity

Gender and Food Week: Trophy Kitchens in Two Nancy Meyers’ Films, ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ and ‘It’s Complicated’

Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give
Guest post written by Emily Contois, originally published at her blog. Cross-posted with permission.
Nancy Meyers’ “older bird” chick flicks, Something’s Gotta Give (2003) and It’s Complicated (2009), provide both escape and hope to middle-aged female audiences, whose views on love, sex, and relationships are both informed and complicated by life experience — including marriage, motherhood, and divorce — and the stereotypes that accompany being middle-aged.
Something’s Gotta Give is the story of fifty-three-year-old Erica (Diane Keaton), the successful, divorced playwright who in the setting of her luxurious Hampton beach house falls in love with both her daughter’s sixty-three year old boyfriend, Harry (Jack Nicholson) and a handsome thirty-something doctor, Julian, (Keanu Reeves). It’s Complicated also tells the story of an accomplished, divorced woman in her fifties, Jane (Meryl Streep), but in this version of the story, she is caught not between a man her own age and a younger man, but between her ex-husband, Jake (Alec Baldwin), and her new boyfriend, Adam (Steve Martin), the architect she has hired to build her dream home.
Food and cooking serve as symbols and narrative devices in these two films, representing and communicating the multidimensional nature of middle-aged women in not only the traditionally feminine roles of mother and housewife, but also the pro-feminist roles of career woman and lover. These different roles need not be in conflict within Meyer’s leading women, however. The “older bird” genre tells stories of sexual reawakening, a process that thus shifts the balance and requires ongoing negotiation of the self within the characters’ heretofore established identities.

Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated
In a delightfully palatable twist, this process is played out through the sub-text of food. In scene after scene, food, cooking, eating, feeding, and food-centered settings progress each film’s narrative and provide depth to the exploration of middle-aged female identity. Kitchens in particular serve as both symbols of identity transformation and meaningful settings for significant narrative action, specifically as spaces for romantic relationships to progress. The kitchen in each film personifies the female lead, transcends the screen to capture the aspirational hearts of viewers — and the professional eye of designers and bloggers — and finally, embodies Meyers own life experience and trademark visual style.
Kitchens that Personify Female Leads 
When surveying sets for Something’s Gotta Give, Meyers noted that homes in the Hamptons all featured “blowout kitchens” — large kitchens equipped with commercial appliances, custom cabinetry, granite countertops, and other high-end, expensive features. Thus, Erica’s magnificent kitchen is realistic for her character. Beyond fact-checking realism, however, Meyers also says, “The house had to reflect Diane’s character, who is a very successful, accomplished New York playwright in her mid-50s” (Collins 2003). Meyers describes the kitchen itself, saying, “It was a cook’s kitchen, a bountiful kitchen” (Green and Baldwin 2006) and “a little too big” (Collins 2003).
Kitchen from Something’s Gotta Give
Just as Meyers herself finished her dream home following her divorce from Charles Shyer, Meyers outfits both Erica in Something’s Gotta Give and Jane in It’s Complicated with their own “blowout kitchens” that serve as self-gifts for achieving professional success and surviving divorce. In addition, while some individuals furnish lavish kitchens for show, both Erica and Jane love to cook, making the kitchen a space where what is a domestic chore for some women, is elevated as a hobby and creative endeavor for Erica and Jane.
Beyond markers of status and functional spaces for cooking, Scott Rudin, a producer of It’s Complicated, suggests that Meyers’ sets also reveal meaning and further develop characters. He says, “Everything — the silverware, the food in the fridge — is part of the narrative” (quoted in Merkin 2009). Indeed, Meyers represents and negotiates character identity within kitchen spaces. For example, while Erica’s preference for all white clothing and white stones are construed as part of her controlling personality, her gleaming white kitchen bursting with sunlight is an ideal representation of who she is. As she negotiates her newfound sexual self, she is always comfortable and in control within her kitchen.
Rudin also discusses the set design for It’s Complicated, saying, “We had a lot of conversation about the size of Jane’s house. Her bedroom is a small bedroom and her kitchen is a small kitchen that’s falling apart. She’s saved for 10 years to change it. Nancy’s worked hard to [create a kitchen that would] justify the plot” (Merkin 2009). Jane takes a longer road than Erica to establish her identity and develop self-worth after her divorce. This state of prolonged negotiation and struggle is personified in her “small kitchen that’s falling apart.”
Kitchen from It’s Complicated
Kitchens that Transcend Film: Viewer and Blog Attention 
These two set kitchens not only progress the narrative and support character development, but also provide fecund fodder for design enthusiasts and aspirational viewers. The kitchens in both films garnered significant attention from viewers, home décor magazines, blogs, and designers alike. The attention garnered by the It’s Complicated kitchen reveals that Meyers may have missed the mark creating Jane’s “before kitchen,” which many viewers actually enjoy and aspired to as it appears. For example, the design website, Remodelista, highlighted the kitchen in its “Steal This Look” feature, applauding it for its attention to detail. Following the blog entry are 122 comments that have been posted since it was published on December 22, 2009 that share a desire to copy the look and feel of Jane’s kitchen, which Meyers tries to portray as too small and requiring renovation.
While some viewers desired Jane’s “before” kitchen, the gleaming white English Colonial kitchen in Something’s Gotta Give all but revolutionized kitchen design. The Fran Jacoberger blog describes it as, “flooded with milky white hues, soft finishes and subtle detailing, its clean design packs universal appeal.” Erica’s kitchen is called the “most copied kitchen of all time” (Killam 2010) and Lee J. Stahl, president of the Renovated Home, a design-and-build company serving Manhattan’s most posh ZIP codes, confirms, “It’s the No. 1 requested style” (quoted in Green and Baldwin 2006). “Julia” the blogger responsible for Hooked on Houses, agrees, saying, “I copied as much of it as I could! I later found out I wasn’t the only one inspired by it. Every home show I went to the following year seemed to have its own version of this look.”
The set home, including the kitchen, was even featured in an issue of Architectural Digest, after which the set’s kitchen became one of the most searched features on ArchitecturalDigest.com (Friends of the Kitchen…). Meyers claims to have been annoyed by this set-centric press, saying:
“It got to the point where I started to resent the whole house. It seemed like people were giving it more attention than the movie (quoted in Green and Baldwin, 2006).”

Unpacking the Meyers Mark 
But perhaps Meyers ought not to have been surprised by this attention. In her New York Times cover story, Daphne Merkin chronicles the evolution of Meyers’ “trademark aspirational interiors,” which take center stage in both of these films. This Meyers mark has also been termed “architecture porn,” the “gracious home aesthetic,” and “the cashmere world of Nancy Meyers” (Merkin 2009). Merkin concludes that Meyers “prefers for her movies — for life itself — to have a rosy, unconflicted presentation. My sense is that whatever warts exist, she airbrushes out, the better to come away with a happy ending” (2009).
Living room in Something’s Gotta Give
And this is indeed part of the fantasy that Meyers creates within the “older bird” chick flick genre in which she is building a monopoly. Meyers creates not only romantic fantasies, but also magazine-worthy dream homes in which these fantasies unfurl. Even Harry utters, “Wow, it’s the perfect beach house,” when he first arrives at Erica’s home in Something’s Gotta Give. Merkin’s word choice is interesting, however, as she attempts to pin point what it is about Meyers’ films that appeal to “older bird” audiences, saying:
“But in the end she’s dipping deep into the bourgeois mainstream, with its longing for Oprah-like ‘closure,’ its peculiarly American belief in personality makeovers and its abiding love for granite kitchen counters (2009).”
The symbol of the trophy kitchen and the luxe life that Meyers incorporates into her films are certainly part of the equation.
Conclusion
As Meyers creates fantasies in which older women have it all — including career, family, financial success, love, and sexual fulfillment — this state of fantastical bliss is manifested within the film sets, particularly within the kitchens, which her viewers love as much, if not more so, than the films themselves. With so much emphasis placed on the kitchens, these two films function as food films where food is far more than a prop, but rather an element of characterization, plot development, and social critique. Through food — and juxtaposed with food — socio-cultural beliefs about middle-aged love and sexuality are explored in new ways. While Nancy Meyers’ packaging of middle-aged love includes considerable fantasy, it also reveals and affirms the very real conditions, desires, and hopes of a growing demographic of American women. As foodie culture and food films also continue to garner increasing attention, food-centered narratives provide unique sub-text to explore the multidimensionality of women of a certain age.
References
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Emily Contois works in the field of worksite wellness and is a graduate student in the MLA in Gastronomy Program at Boston University. She researches all things food in popular culture and blogs on food studies, nutrition, and public health at emilycontois.com.

Horror Week 2012: Patriarchy in Crisis: Power and Gender in ‘The Stepfather’

This is a guest review by Allison Maria Rodriguez.

“Wait a minute . . . who am I here?” is the central question posed by Jerry Blake in the 1987 slasher film, The Stepfather. It is a story of patriarchy in crisis. In a world in which “traditional” and “old fashioned” (both characteristics attributed to Jerry) notions of male dominance and the nuclear family are thoroughly challenged, the patriarchal order is undergoing a desperate identity crisis. The film is about a man who marries into a family that eventually disappoints him by not living up to his expectations of the perfect family, so he kills them and moves on to another town and another family. In The Stepfather, it is patriarchy that is broken and unable to find a reality in which its conceptualization of self exists. Without the structural order “the father” is accustomed to, he simply does not know who he is, and rather than deal with this and evolve, he chooses to deny reality, destroy it, and recreate it in his own image, which, ultimately, always fails.

“Am I Jerry, or Henry, or Bill?” — patriarchal schizophrenia in The Stepfather
The Stepfather (the 1987 version) is not like most slasher films; it is a uniquely feminist horror film. Carol J. Clover’s theory of the “final girl”*, the trope in horror cinema that leaves one unique girl as the sole survivor, is brilliant and generally accurate. But our heroine, Stephanie, is not like other final girls. For one, she is one of the ONLY girls in the film. The film is full of empty, impotent signifiers of male power: the male lieutenant, the male therapist, the male high school teacher, the male hero/amateur detective, the male reporter and, of course, Stephanie’s dead father. More importantly, throughout the duration of this film no women are killed. Let me repeat that: NO women are killed. It may not be obvious to some viewers, but it is strikingly obvious to me, a feminist who loves horror films. When the film opens, Jerry (or Henry Morrison, his identity before Jerry) has already killed his previous family, which we know contained a wife and at least one daughter, but during the film only men are slaughtered. They are men who attempt to rescue Stephanie and her mother Susan, but the only person who actually rescues Stephanie is Stephanie.

Stephanie’s character is portrayed as a strikingly healthy, good-natured, 16-year-old girl. The first time we see Stephanie, she is riding her bicycle toward the camera, over hills, the wind in her hair; she is strong and independent. She arrives home to have a playful autumn leaf battle with her mother in the backyard. Both are vibrant and laughing, and the bond they share is evident: these women genuinely like one another and enjoy each other’s company. When Jerry arrives home and Stephanie’s mother, Susan, runs off to greet him, Stephanie is blatantly disappointed. She tells her (male) therapist, “If he wasn’t there, Mom and I’d be alright.” It is important to note that Stephanie is not portrayed as a damaged child who will not permit anyone to replace the unmarred memory of her dead father. Though she misses her father, she knows there is something fundamentally wrong with Jerry, and every time he refers to the three of them as a family or himself as her father, it feels intensely creepy and inappropriate.

The American family, weird and creepy

In Clover’s “final girl” theory, she states that the final girl is identified early on in the film as different from her peers: she is more intelligent and perceptive than her friends, and, among other attributes, she has sexual hang-ups. In fact, these sexual hang-ups are the key to the final girl’s power in that they allow her to identify enough with the killer to overpower him. There are many examples of this in the slasher genre (Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Scream, etc.), but Stephanie isn’t one of them. Stephanie’s awakening sexuality is portrayed as natural, romantic and exciting. Stephanie knows she likes boys and she knows that is perfectly normal, a fact her mother reinforces on the porch after Jerry accuses Paul, Stephanie’s new boyfriend, of attempted rape. “He just kissed me goodnight Mom, and I wanted him to,” Stephanie says. “Of course you did,” her mother responds reassuringly, confirming that, despite what Jerry thinks, female sexuality is completely normal. Though Susan later slaps Stephanie when Stephanie says of Jerry “He’s a creep, how can you let him touch you,” it is also the first time Susan reprimands Jerry, and it is the beginning of the end. She slaps Stephanie out of defensiveness of her own sexual desire for Jerry. The only sex scene in The Stepfather is instigated by Susan and focuses on her pleasure, emphasizing her moaning and showing her face in close-up. In fact, when the camera cuts to Jerry’s face, we can see he is not really enjoying himself at all. He is doing what a man is supposed to do, and obviously has severe issues with sex that the women in the film do not have. In fact, other than Stephanie’s lackluster friend Karen, the only other woman we really engage with is Annie, the records desk clerk who assists our pseudo-hero Jim because she doesn’t like her male boss (patriarchal figure), and she is somewhat attracted to Jim. Though we only see her for less than a minute, it is significant that within 60 seconds her sexuality and rebelliousness are highlighted.

Jerry starts looking for a new family after the confrontation over Stephanie’s sexuality

In his current identity in the film, Jerry Blake is a real estate agent – he sells houses. The audience is given no opportunity to miss this metaphor when, at a family barbeque comprised of the first five families Jerry sold houses to in the neighborhood, Jerry declares “I don’t just sell houses. I sell the American Dream.” The film is basically about the nuclear family, the American Dream, and a dying patriarch trying to force everyone to “play house” with him. The actual physical structure of the house functions visually in the film to illustrate the psychological space of the characters’ power struggles. The basement is relegated as Jerry’s safe space; Freud would call it his unconscious, where he blows off steam by throwing on a flannel shirt and playing with his gender appropriate toys – construction tools, hammer, saws, etc., – implements used to build and create structures, to create order, to fix things. Oh, and he also periodically yells at himself, violently. Stephanie enters this space during the barbeque and witnesses one of Jerry’s rants. Symbolically it demonstrates Stephanie’s ability to see through Jerry’s facade and his promise of familial love and security. The staircase is rendered as an iconic image utilized over and over in the film, usually featuring Jerry at the top via a low camera angle looking up. There are multiple staircases in the film, but they all function the same way, to demonstrate Jerry’s positioning of himself in dominion over the domestic space. The climax of the film is on the staircase, with Jerry trying desperately to climb to the top to reach and kill Stephanie.

Jerry finds Stephanie in the basement witnessing his freak-out session

Both of the murders in the film also feature a house structure. The first is when Jerry kills Stephanie’s therapist who, posing as a potential client, is beaten to death with a wooden beam from the construction of the house Jerry is showing him. The second is Jim, poor Jim, the stereotypical ruggedly good-looking pseudo-hero. Jim’s sister was Jerry’s last victim (when Jerry was Henry), and throughout the film we watch Jim playing amateur detective, hot on Jerry’s trail. He finally figures out where Jerry is right at the end of the film and rushes over to save Susan and Stephanie. He walks in after Susan has been pushed down the basement stairs, right when Jerry is climbing the main staircase to kill Stephanie. Though Jim has been preparing for this moment with firearms training, he is ridiculously ineffective when he cannot even get the gun out of his jacket pocket before Jerry stabs him to death at the bottom of the staircase.

Though Stephanie has not been training for several months to kill Jerry, and does not have a gun, she is quick and resourceful. She picks up a piece of glass with a towel and stabs Jerry in the arm. She then leads him into the attic where, while pursuing her, he falls through the ceiling. This is significant because it is the actual structure of the house that protects Stephanie. During the climax on the staircase, Susan has survived her fall. She retrieves Jim’s gun, crawls to the bottom of the staircase and shoots Jerry twice (misses once) before the bullets in the gun run out (why Jim goes to kill Jerry without a fully loaded gun nobody knows; he doesn’t seem like the over-confident type). Jerry continues to climb the stairs. In the final moment, Jerry’s hand and Stephanie’s hand are both on the knife, the symbol of phallic power. Stephanie stabs Jerry and he falls down the staircase. The last shot of the scene is Stephanie standing at the top of the staircase, a low camera angle looking up. But rather than looking down triumphantly, she calmly sits down on the top step. She seems to be analyzing the scene, and we look at her looking and feel the power of her gaze.

Stephanie is her own hero

Throughout the film, Jerry has been making a birdhouse – a miniature version of his idea of the perfect home. Susan and Stephanie help Jerry erect it mid-way through the film, and we are given a distorted shot from the top of the birdhouse, looking down, emphasizing how high and unreachable Jerry’s idea of family really is. In the closing scene of the film, Stephanie cuts the birdhouse down. We see it lying in the foreground while Stephanie and her mother walk arm-in-arm, happy and complete, back into their home. They do not relocate as many families in horror films do after tragedy because of the symbolic significance of reclaiming their house, their structure. The film shows us that these two women are a complete family. They do not need a patriarch, and they do not need the conventional notion of the nuclear family to be happy – in fact, they are better off without it.

Stephanie and Susan, happy without the “American Dream”

The Stepfather is not only about the collapse of the traditional patriarchal social order, but it is also about the strength of alternative notions of family. You do not only see “evil” destroyed, but you see something positive replace it. I really like Stephanie as our heroine, not only because she is strong and smart and resourceful, but also because she is not represented as an anomaly, as most final girls are. She is a normal, likable, regular teenage girl that takes down the patriarchy. A strong message like this cannot help but be subversive.

*For more on the final girl theory, see Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film by Carol J. Clover. It rocks.

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Allison Maria Rodriguez is a visual artist and a writer. She received her BA from Antioch College and her MFA is studio art from Tufts University and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Some of her art work, and her contact information, can be found on her website: http://allisonmariarodriguez.com/

Feminist Flashback: ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’

Written by Megan Kearns.

When I was young, my mom raised me on classic films: Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, The Great Escape, Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I fondly remember watching Elizabeth Taylor on-screen. Hollywood royalty, we often think of her arresting beauty, numerous marriages, struggle with alcohol, philanthropy and perfume commercials. It’s easy to forget she was an amazing actor; a stellar artist who fluidly exuded strength, sensuality, vitality, passion and pain.Starring in over 50 films, Taylor often chose feminist roles.  In National Velvet, she plays a young girl disguising herself as a male jockey to compete. In Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, she’s a fiery survivor embracing her sexuality. And in the Texas saga Giant, she plays an educated and outspoken woman, challenging sexism. So after years of my mother urging me, I finally watched Taylor’s legendary performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Based on Edward Albee’s Tony Award-winning play (it also won the Pulitzer although it wasn’t awarded it due to its vulgarity and sexual themes), the 1966 film follows Martha (Elizabeth Taylor) and George (Richard Burton), a middle-aged married couple. He’s an assistant professor at a New England college and she’s his wife who happens to be the college president’s daughter. Through their vitriolic and bitter alcohol-fueled feuding, they lash out at each other. When a young couple, new professor Nick (George Segal) and his wife Honey (Sandy Dennis), visit their house after a late-night party, Martha and George continue their battle of wits, interchangeably attacking their guests and using them as ammunition, to further lash out at one another.
Director Mike Nichols wanted to have real-life married couple Taylor and Burton star in the film, a celebrity couple famous for their off-screen turbulent relationship. Known for its acerbic dialogue, Martha and George sling verbal barbs throughout the movie. Martha continually insults George calling him a “dumbbell,” saying he makes her want to “puke.” Critics often focus on Martha’s vicious verbal attacks but George equals her venom. He says she makes him “sick” and equates her voice to “animal noises.” Their guests Nick and Honey initially appear to be the quintessential couple, contrasting Martha and George in appearance, age and demeanor.  But as the night wears on and more alcohol is consumed, the problems both couples face come to the surface.
I’ve read that Who’s Afraid of a Virginia Woolf? is a feminist film.  But when I started watching, I initially thought, what the hell? There’s no way this is feminist as it’s mired in misogyny!  The film follows George’s perspective as there are scenes with just George and Martha, George and Nick, or George and Honey.  George is almost omnipresent. Also, there a few violent scenes in which George attempts to strangle Martha, pushes her, shoves her against a car and pretends to shoot her with a gun (an umbrella pops out instead of a bullet).  But when you begin to peel back the layers, you realize that while it might not be an overtly feminist film, feminist tendencies emerge nonetheless.
In the 1960s, the domesticity paradigm for women reigned.  In the beginning of the film, Martha tells George about a Bette Davis movie she’s trying to remember the name of.  She says, “She [Bette Davis] comes home from a hard day at the grocery store.”  George snidely and skeptically replies, “At the grocery store?” to which she retorts, “Yes, the grocery store. She’s a housewife, she buys things.”  Women were expected to be docile, obedient wives and mothers tending the home. Yet this revealing exchange shows the disdain for domestic duties women in the 60s faced.

Policing of sexuality also appears.  When Martha calls George a floozy in one scene, Honey jovially and drunkenly retorts,  

“He can’t be a floozy.  You’re a floozy!”

The film makes a subtle commentary of the double standard in sexual conduct between women and men.  Men could sleep with whomever they pleased while women who did the same were branded as “sluts.”

A role that earned Taylor her second Oscar, she considered the role of Martha her “personal best.”  A bravura performance, Taylor seamlessly sinks into the part; it’s difficult to ascertain where she begins and the character ends.  A college-educated woman, Martha perpetually humiliates her husband for his lack of ambition and professional failures:

Martha: I hope that was an empty bottle, George! You can’t afford to waste good liquor, not on your salary, not on an associate professor’s salary!

She pushed George to be the head of the History Department and the head of the university.  But why couldn’t she do those things herself?  In an exchange with Nick:

Nick: To you, everybody’s a flop. Your husband’s a flop, I’m a flop.
Martha: You’re all flops. I am the Earth Mother, and you are all flops.

In a time when women weren’t supposed to have jobs beyond wife and mother, perhaps Martha wanted her own career.  As she came from a wealthy family, Martha had money so she didn’t need George to succeed for fiscal security. It seems as if Martha lived vicariously through her husband and his capacity for success which would explain why his lack of ambition was such a blow.
While the play was written a year before the publication of feminist Betty Friedan’s ground-breaking The Feminine Mystique, the play explores the same issues Friedan railed against.  Friedan writes about the “feminine mystique,” where the highest value for women is embracing and maintaining their femininity, and the “problem that has no name,” the unhappiness women faced in the 50s and 60s and their yearning for fulfillment beyond being a housewife and a mother.  Friedan argues:
“They [women] learned that truly feminine women do not want careers, higher education, political rights – the independence and the opportunities that the old-fashioned feminists fought for…All they had to do was devote their lives from earliest girlhood to finding a husband and bearing children.” (58)

“Self-esteem in woman, as well as in man, can only be based on real capacity, competence, and achievement; on deserved respect from others rather than unwarranted adulation. Despite the glorification of “Occupation: housewife,” if that occupation does not demand, or permit, realization of women’s full abilities, it cannot provide adequate self-esteem, much less pave the way to a higher level of self-realization…But women in America are no encouraged, or expected, to use their full capacities. In the name of femininity, they are encouraged to evade human growth.” (435-437)

[Warning: Spoilers ahead!!] Motherhood, a reoccurring theme in the film, comprised one of the few ways society allowed fulfillment for women. Both women don’t have children, Martha is unable to and Honey, whose “hysterical pregnancy” led to her marriage with Nick, takes pills to eliminate any pregnancies as she’s scared to conceive. As women were supposed to be good wives and mothers, society viewed reproduction as one of their vital duties.  If a woman didn’t have children, ultimately she was a failure.  Friedan writes:

“Over and over again, stories in women’s magazines insist that woman can know fulfillment only at the moment of giving birth to a child…In the feminine mystique, there is no other way she can even dream about herself, except as her children’s mother, her husband’s wife.” (115)
As someone in their 30s who doesn’t have children (and isn’t even sure I ever want them), even in this day and age, people often act as if there’s something fundamentally wrong with you if you don’t have or want children. Martha invented the story of a son probably because she genuinely wanted one.  But I think she also did it to make it easier for her to fit into society. As a woman, I often feel I don’t fit the stereotypical mold of what a woman “should” be. Perhaps Martha, with her abrasive, obnoxious persona, wanted at least one component of her life to fit. While I genuinely believe Martha wanted a child, her yearning may be tempered by the fact that society views her as an inadequate woman. It’s as if she can handle being a non-conformist woman in every way possible except this one.
What makes Martha so interesting is that she’s not merely a bawdy, angry woman.  Taylor imbues the complicated character with fleeting moments of agony and vulnerability.  In a tender rather than simply rage-filled moment, Martha refutes George’s accusation that she’s a “monster.”  She asserts,

Martha: I’m loud and I’m vulgar, and I wear the pants in the house because somebody’s got to, but I am not a monster. I’m not.

George: You’re a spoiled, self-indulgent, willful, dirty-minded, liquor-ridden…
Martha: SNAP! It went SNAP! I’m not gonna try to get through to you any more. There was a second back there, yeah, there was a second, just a second when I could have gotten through to you, when maybe we could have cut through all this, this CRAP. But it’s past, and I’m not gonna try.
To me, this is such a pivotal scene.  Women are supposed to be, especially during that era, docile, proper and well-mannered; the epitome of femininity.  Blond, thin, meek Honey appears to be the perfect wife while bawdy, brash, raven-haired, curvy Martha stands as the complete opposite.  In the equally ground-breaking The Second Sex published in 1949, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote about the treatment and oppression of women.  In her tome, she argues that society teaches us that passivity is “the essential characteristic of the ‘feminine’ woman.”  Society encourages men and boys to explore their freedom while women and girls are taught to embrace femininity, turning their back on what they themselves want. She asserts:

“In woman, on the contrary, there is from the beginning a conflict between her autonomous existence and her objective self, her “being-the-other;” she is taught that to please she must try to please, she must make herself object; she should therefore renounce her autonomy. She is treated like a live doll and is refused liberty.” (280)

 

Wives were supposed to support their husbands, echoing their desires.  While Martha eventually admits that George is the only man who has ever made her happy, she refuses to silence herself. She is loud, vulgar, shrewd, intelligent, assertive, sexual and outspoken; the antithesis to femininity. And in many ways, society punishes Martha and women like her for it. Yet she rails against constraints, struggling to navigate the sexist terrain on her own terms.

The title of the play and film comes from a riff of “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” with the wordplay on Virginia Woolf.  It was a quote that playwright Albee saw scrawled on a bathroom mirror in a bar.  It’s also an allusion to show that people concoct imaginary scenarios and personas in order to cope with their lives, a theme that runs throughout the entire film.  The audience is never quite sure what is fact and what is fiction, the line often blurred.After the pivotal climax and shocking revelations, in the penultimate line of the film, George asks Martha, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” to which she replies, “I am, George, I am.”  Some scholars assert that this alludes to being able to live without illusions, which both George and Martha, with their web of lies and treacherous games, clearly find difficult.  But the play/film’s title is also an accidental feminist reference as feminist author and writer Virginia Woolf famously advocated for women to be able to possess their own money and space to be creative and ultimately themselves.

Captivating yet uncomfortable to watch, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? depicts the brutal deterioration of a marriage and the crumbling of hopes, ambitions and illusions.  Through their cruel taunts and insults, the film exposes the illusory facades people create, while challenging stifling gender roles.In the 60s (and to a large extent still today), society demanded men act assertively and women behave passively. As men wield a disproportionate amount of power over women, people often fear female empowerment.  Despite her brazen outspokenness, Martha might be afraid too — afraid of her own power in a society that doesn’t embrace or accept powerful women.

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Megan Kearns is a blogger, freelance writer and activist. A feminist vegan, Megan blogs at The Opinioness of the World.  In addition to Bitch Flicks, her work has appeared at Arts & Opinion, Italianieuropei, Open Letters Monthly and A Safe World for Women. Megan earned her B.A. in Anthropology and Sociology and a Graduate Certificate in Women and Politics and Public Policy. She currently lives in Boston. She previously contributed reviews of The Kids Are All Right, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest and Something Borrowed to Bitch Flicks.