Depicting WOMEN
The role and place of women in texts is a fascinating journey through different societies and eras, writes Conor Murphy
There is, rightly, an increased focus on how women are portrayed in fiction today. This is also true for the English Course. Under the headings Cultural Context and Social Setting students look at gender roles in their comparative texts. This is usually focused on how women are portrayed in these texts. When we look down the list of films, novels, and plays, we see a world dominated by aggressive, domineering men. From the overtly masculine, oppressive world of ‘Children of Men’ to the social niceties of ‘Circle of Friends’ we see women being treated as objects, often objects to be used for breeding. Objects to be used and discarded. Sometimes objects to be protected, to show how strong the male protagonist is.
Antigone must die before she is taken seriously by a patriarch, in ‘Rear Window’ Lisa Freemont must risk her own life in the apartment of a murderer before her boyfriend will take her seriously. Michel Hazanavicius’s ‘The Artist’ centres around a male actor that seems unwilling to accept his female counterpart’s success. Instead of being a film that concentrates on her rise we are looking at his fall. Women can be successful, the film tells us, but the unlikely fall from grace of a man is more interesting.
Novels like The Fault in our Stars and Wuthering Heights create strong female characters in Hazel and Catherine. Both know their own minds, both do their own thing. Passionate, intelligent, independent women. But are they? Both seem to be restricted by the gender roles in fiction. Neither goes off to explore the world on their own, both require a man to either help them, in Hazel’s case, or to have already done the exploring for them in Catherine’s, she only goes away to become a lady.
John B. Keane’s ‘Big Maggie’ comes close to articulating the claustrophobia that female characters are experiencing. Maggie is slowly extricating herself from the very world that most writers would have her remain in. She doesn’t want to be the mother, the wife, the worker. She wants to escape, to live life, to finally have the agency of a man. We see elements of this in Ibsen’s ‘A Doll’s House’. Compare these women to the women of ‘Les Miserables’, women that need men to mind them, feed them, love them. A key scene in the film is the destruction of femininity on the docks. Orwell’s 1984 is dismissive of women. They aren’t to be trusted. Not even Julia. She is only interested in the here and now. She says she loves Winston, an example of the common position for women in fiction, to love the male protagonist, but does she? Do we ever really believe her?
Persepolis might be the strongest contender for an enlightened text. Here is a woman, Marjane Satrapi, in a man’s world. Seen as secondclass citizens, being watched by The Guardians of the Revolution, women have very little freedom. But Satrapi again and again demonstrates her rebellious side, the rebellious side of many Iranian women, including her grandmother, as they try to express themselves in any little way possible. The series of panels outlining how you can assert yourself through your style of veil is a case in point.
The texts may be leaning heavily on the male side, they may seem to depict women as being inferior, as being plot devices, but maybe we should look a little closer.
Rear Window ends with a shot caressing Grace Kelly’s legs as we come up to the book she is reading, a book obviously there to impress Jimmy Stewart. But she discards this book for a fashion magazine, a magazine she needs to read for her business. Underneath it all, we are being told, she will do what she wants.
Female characters are not always what we presume them to be.