The Myth of Woman

With the re-release of Titanic, I figured blogging about the Myth of Woman would be a great thing to do.

In the movie, Rose is being forced to live a high society life all because her mother can't let go of her upper-class lifestyle. Rose's fiancé, Cal, is the biggest jerk ever, her mother is a selfish and cold woman, the people they entertain themselves with are snobby and fake, and Rose feels as if her life is "an endless parade of parties and cotillions." At one point Rose's mother remarks, "The purpose of university is to find a suitable husband. Rose has already done that." Rose, who is an articulate, bright, determined young woman, is denied freedom and an education... she's being forced into a mold that 1912 society as placed upon women in her position. Anyway, I digress...
  
[According to the Myth of Woman] Women Are:

• inscrutable
• mysterious
• "natural"
• silent
• irrational, instinctive
• beautiful

I'm no feminist, but women do not need men to steer them in life. We aren't irrational or silent... at least not silent anymore. Rose certainly is not. For example, when the men at her table are talking about how they're so happy that Titanic is so gigantic, Rose retorts with something along the lines of "Are you aware of the theories of Freud, Mr. Ismay? His theories about the male preoccupation with size may be of particular interest to you." As it turns out, Ismay has no idea who Freud is, so the insult is totally lost on him. Like I said, Rose is smart. And witty. Also, we are only as mysterious as men want us to be. Maybe they don't/didn't find us important enough to really contemplate, or maybe they didn't see us as anything complex enough to have dimensions. The fact is, the myth that Simone de Beauvoir proposes really is true. I think it is especially clear in movies/books about women's insecurities/unhappiness/disillusionment in the 50s and 60s. Although Richard Yates's book Revolutionary Road is about the disillusionment of an entire family, I think it's an important book and movie about the fragility and complexity of the female mind (although April, in my opinion, isn't exactly sane...)

As for the Sleeping Beauty myth, I think that April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road and for Rose DuWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet chooses the best roles!) in Titanic did wake up from a dream when they were kissed. I think their dreams were nightmares though. Just because a woman finds out that a man loves her, it doesn't mean that all of life's problems go away, that she is going to devote herself body and soul to her new beau, that all of her previous hopes and dreams are now invalid. I think that used to be the male mentality, and it probably still is to a certain extent because that's what we girls tend to swoon over in movies. It's unrealistic unless the girl's a total pushover. I think it's important to remember that a woman is made of layers, not unlike Shrek, and she isn't going to magically be whole when a man steps into the picture and carries her over the threshold. We have our own logical reasons for doing things, even if men think they're stupid or "irrational." Really, though, if we're so irrational, why can't a man just stop and ask for directions instead of driving around for hours? If that's not illogical, I don't know what is. Especially since gas is nearing $4 a gallon.

The Author Isn't Dead...

I think Roland Bathes's idea that the author is dead and context shouldn't matter is completely and utterly idiotic. No disrespect to Mr. Barthes as I do understand from where his ideas on this topic come from, but I think reading a piece without any knowledge about the author or context would make an accurate reading nearly impossible... unless, of course, the author had written the piece to be read without such knowledge.

Take for example... The Bell Jar, one of my favorites. While one is certainly able to just pick up The Bell Jar at random and begin reading it, it wouldn't be possible to fully understand the meaning of it without at least considering the historical context of the novel. Why would Esther be so hesitant to get married? Why is she so eager to rebel, to release her sexual tension? If the reader didn't know anything about life for women in the 1950s-60s, that women who were often the ideal housewives were unhappy and trapped, how would they fully comprehend Esther's need to break through the social constructs that (help to) encase her in the bell jar? Also, Sylvia Plath's life itself is an important contextual factor. The Bell Jar is autobiographical, and full appreciation/comprehension of the novel is definitely dependent upon Sylvia's struggle with her inner demons and depression.

 Oh, Animal Farm... what on earth is that about? Without knowing something about George Orwell or the time in which he lived, Animal Farm would seem totally ridiculous. Talking pigs? Animals overtaking a farm? The pigs becoming the leaders of the entire farm? What?

And then there's Picasso's "Guernica." To the naked eye, "Guernica" looks like a bunch of mangled images. A horse, an eye with a lightbulb pupil, an arm with a broken sword, a floating ghostly head. It's a lot more than that, of course, but who would know unless you did a little research?

So, Roland Barthes... what were you thinking? Yeah, books standing alone may have their own meanings (and sometimes the wrong ones), but the meanings are so much stronger with all the background information.


Context... it's important.

Saussure

It's true: the words we assign to objects have nothing to do with the objects. I've often wondered why we call a candle "a candle," but Spanish-speakers call it "una vela" and French-speakers call it "une bougie." Obviously none of these are cognates to each other, and honestly the real reasons why they are called what they are probably has something to do with etymology, but we aren't getting into that. Saussure's point is:

Signifier (Sound-Image)

+Signified (Concept)

Sign

Postmodernism

"According to Billy Corgan, Postmodernism is whatever the f--- you want it to be."

Postmodernism emerged after WWII. In Literature, it's often characterized by questionable narrators, paradoxes, fragments, etc. It's pretty much the opposite of Modernism and its ideals. Ishmael Reed fits into the Postmodernism category because his work definitely rejects and, really, spits in the face of our definition of modernity. In his poem "I Pray to Chevron" he makes fun of the fact that while most people pray to their deities, the speaker, a rich guy, prays to Chevron, which as far as I could tell is a metaphor for wealth. He owns a Mercedes for every day of the week, eats caviar all the time, and sends his kids to Switzerland for no reason other than for recreation. Reed rejects the Rich & Famous's mentality that they can do whatever it is they want while the rest of us go on living our mundane little lives. His poetry reminded me a lot of Kurt Vonnegut and Chuck Palahniuk, who we all know rejects pretty much every value we as a society hold dear.

 

Okay, I'm going to break the rule and talk about Fight Club for a second. As everyone knows, Fight Club is about this weasel of a guy who buys expensive furniture from catalogs in an effort to make some sort of statement. "I'd flip through catalogs and wonder, 'What kind of dining set defines me as a person?'" The Narrator is pushed around by his jerk of a boss and lives a pretty normal life until one fateful night when the mysterious and headstrong Tyler Durdan tells him to punch him in the face. As it turns out of course (SPOILER ALERT!), Fight Club's big plan is to blow up all the major credit card companies, so all the debt goes away... everyone's back at zero. What could be more postmodern than that?

T.S. Eliot: Tradition and Individual Talent

T.S. Eliot believed that a poet's significance is measured in relation to dead poets and artists. This is true. When a new grunge-type band comes along, magazines will compare them to Nirvana. When a band emerges that seems to break new ground and becomes an overnight worldwide sensation, they're compared to the Beatles. But that's not exactly what Eliot was getting at. He believed that tradition may indeed define the contemporary, but that the contemporary changes the essence of tradition that itself owns. Apparently Hollywood has lost its originality because lately all they've been spitting out is remakes. Bewitched, superhero movies, 21 Jump Street, all those awful horror movies that Rob Zombie feels compelled to direct, et cetera, et cetera, ET CETERA.

For example, let's compare The Shop Around the Corner, the 1940 movie starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan, and 1998's You've Got Mail starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan.

 

The Shop Around the Corner is about two coworkers at a small shop who can't stand each other but are falling in love with each other through the mail, as each other's pen pals. The girl, of course, has no idea who her pen pal is but is falling harder for him with each stroke of the pen while the ever-suave and most romantic Jimmy Stewart finds out that he's fallen for his hated coworker. In You've Got Mail it's pretty much the same except Kathleen Kelley (it's so nice to hear Tom Hanks say my name!) and Joe Fox are rival bookstore owners. They have been communicating via e-mail and Joe finds out that Kathleen is his e-mail friend. It's a perfect movie. The point is, though, that You've Got Mail takes a very familiar storyline from a classic movie made 50 years before and puts a modern twist on it by using e-mail instead of snail mail. Defined by tradition, yes. Modern twist, yes. 

 

And as much as I HATE Across the Universe, I can't help but love what they did to "She's So Heavy." Across the Universe took Beatles' songs from yesteryears and put them in a context relevant to when the Beatles were writing and performing them, transforming the world's youth from a "Leave It to Beaver" kind of perfect to rebels who wouldn't hesitate to "stick it to the man" but they also re-recorded all the songs and had the actors sing them and they messed with the instruments. All in all a very individual move using one of the most prolific bands in the history of music.

Androgyny

Tilda Swinton was one of the first people I thought of when I found out what androgyny is. Of course Virginia Woolf and Samuel Coleridge weren't talking about physical androgyny, but Tilda's androgynous all the same. It's eerie. 

Virginia Woolf was convinced that Coleridge was right: a creative mind should be androgynous. A writer shouldn't just write from the point of view from which they have always biologically seen.

I think Nicholas Sparks's writing is DEFINITELY androgynous. Let's think about it for a second: who goes to see his movies? Women. Who reads his books obsessively? Women. Who swoons over the male lead in the stories? Women. What is Nicholas Sparks? A man. For a man to write in such a way that women spend oodles of money going to the Friday night premieres for his movies and buying hardcover copies of his books, he must be pretty in-touch with his feminine side.

The Notebook was Sparks's BIG break (even bigger than the movie Message in a Bottle, which came out in 1999) was 2004's The Notebook, which is still a movie that girls freak out about. For Nicholas Sparks to appeal to women on such a deep level, and for him to have written so passionately about a young couple is amazing. Noah is every girl's DREAM, and Allie acts just like most of us girls would have. 

Even though Sparks doesn't possess the kind of androgyny that Virginia Woolf would've approved of (she probably would have found him mediocre at best...I know I do), it is definitely a kind of androgyny that strikes a chord with women everywhere and with many men's feminine sides.... If Sparks wasn't an androgynous writer, none of his books would have become the sensations that they are.

WEB Du Bois and Art

WEB Du Bois wasn't an idealist. He lived his life fighting for equal rights for African Americans, but, from the very beginning, he knew the fight would be long and hard. He knew that even after the African Americans achieved their equal civil rights that life wouldn't be all rainbows and sunshine, that they would still have to deal with "the inevitable suffering that always comes with life" (p. 871). I like this about Du Bois; idealism always has its costs to a person's morale... idealism is having reality up on a high pedestal.

Because Du Bois was so dedicated to his cause and because he knew that the journey was going to be very strenuous, he wanted to make sure that nothing was pointless. "[A]ll art is propaganda," he says, "and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent."

Du Bois was an early member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but later became disillusioned with the NAACP's motives as well as with American society in general. He was very opposed to Booker T. Washington's pacifistic attitude (as seen in Washington's Atlanta Compromise Address in which he was willing to sacrifice equality for economic opportunity) and was a strong voice in the Civil Rights Movement. Du Bois was certainly not willing to make any compromises in this battle for equality, and he was willing to take big strides in order to reach the goal.

Du Bois's history and his ardent feelings about African American rights explain in no uncertain terms why he "doesn't give a damn" about art that doesn't serve a purpose other than being aesthetically pleasing. To Du Bois, art that doesn't serve any constructive purpose is wasted... it's stupid for an African American to paint pictures if the pictures don't say something. As my favorite dead guy, F. Scott Fitzgerald, once said, "You don't write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say."