AP Literature 12: 3rd Quarter College-bound Essay
Prompt focus: How narrative informs (enforces/challenges) gender roles. • This is a documented essay (in-text citations/Works Cited page) o 4-6 pages in MLA-8 standard with a Works Cited page o Premised on two narratives (novel/film) of Literary Merit o In-text citations from both narratives o In-text citations from at least 3 additional sources (articles provided, researched on your own, narratives from AP English 11 or AP Literature 12) o Works Cited page must have a minimum of 7 entries that you either cite or consider • Some ideas to consider: o 21st Century portrayal of gender in literature and/or film (compared to another era) – is gender becoming more fluid, or are the universal archetypes holding? o The roles of gender in storytelling (what male protagonists think/believe/act versus female protagonists think/believe/act) – traditional archetypes, new patterns? o How women write versus how men write? (about each other, life, etc…) o When big players in the industry take a stand – Marvel, DC, Disney, J.K. Rowling, Margaret Atwood, (there are lots!) – looking at their significant choices and how it affects the audience’s view of gender roles. o The modern protagonist – is the Hero’s Journey evolving? Finding Joe documentary. • Some angles to consider: o Jane Eyre as the avatar of female protagonist – revolutionary yet traditional – compare her to a modern female protagonist, also written by a woman. o F. Scott Fitzgerald’s portrayal of women in The Great Gatsby – sympathetic yet confined – compare to a modern male writer like John Green’s portrayal of women. o Frankenstein as the first acclaimed novel written by a woman, who wrote about male characters. How do women write male characters differently than male writers? Compare to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Consider A Room of One’s Own, V. Woolf. o Why/how modern female writers like J.K. Rowling, V.E. Schwab, Sarah Maas and Cassandra Clare still give prominence to male protagonists? How they write them. o Disney’s transformation of the princess trope – Sleeping Beauty to Merida, Cinderella to Tangled, Snow White to Tiana, and Jasmine to Mulan. Speculate and support a plausible motive to engage modern audiences. Consider A Room of One’s Own, V. Woolf. o The ratio of female superheroes to male superheroes in any given universe and their roles/significance in that universe. o The role of humor/satire in challenging gender roles – “The Importance of Being Earnest,” Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Crazy Rich Asians, Love Simon, Perks of Being a Wallflower, John Green, John Mulaney, Ali Wong. • Timeline Review – one day a week will be dedicated in class for peer sharing and conferencing. o Week 1: dedicate time to observe gender roles in storytelling, social media, school, family, work, etc… Journal in your notebook about your observations and opinions. o Week 2: consider a premise for your thesis and jot down several iterations of broad ideas for a potential thesis. Select your two narratives and locate 2 articles online that support your developing thesis. Format your Works Cited page by the end of Week 2. o Week 3: outline your paper, while allowing your thesis to remain fairly fluid and come into focus as you align the moving parts: thesis, supporting points/arguments, citations that support your ideas, conclusion (Where are you headed with this paper?). o Week 4: draft your paper and dedicate time to conference with a reliable peer writer or Mrs. Miller. You need to be able to articulate your paper at this point. o Week 5: finalize your paper by giving it several editing sessions. Zero errors. o DUE: ______printed copy in class, Turnitin.com submission AP Literature 12: 3rd Quarter College-bound Essay
This section contains three articles related to this project. At least one of them must be cited/considered in your paper. Works Citation entries provided.
“Study finds huge gender imbalance in children’s literature” Allison Flood 6 May 2011
From The Very Hungry Caterpillar to the Cat in the Hat, Peter Rabbit to Babar, children's books are dominated by male central characters, new research has found, with the gender disparity sending children a message that "women and girls occupy a less important role in society than men or boys".
Looking at almost 6,000 children's books published between 1900 and 2000, the study, led by Janice McCabe, a professor of sociology at Florida State University, found that males are central characters in 57% of children's books published each year, with just 31% having female central characters. Male animals are central characters in 23% of books per year, the study found, while female animals star in only 7.5%.
Published in the April issue of Gender & Society, the study, Gender in Twentieth-Century Children's Books, looked at Caldecott award-winning books, the well-known US book series Little Golden Books and extensive book listing the Children's Catalog. Just one Caldecott winner (1985's Have You Seen My Duckling? following a mother duck on a search for her baby) has had a standalone female character since the award was established in 1938. Books with male animals were more than two-and-a- half times more common across the century than those with female animals, the authors said.
Although the gender disparity came close to disappearing by the 1990s for human characters in children's books, with a ratio of 0.9 to 1 for child characters and 1.2 to 1 for adult characters, it remained for animal characters, with a "significant disparity" of nearly two to one. The study found that the 1930s to 1960s, the period between waves of feminist activism, "exhibits greater disparities than earlier and later periods".
"The messages conveyed through representation of males and females in books contribute to children's ideas of what it means to be a boy, girl, man, or woman. The disparities we find point to the symbolic annihilation of women and girls, and particularly female animals, in 20th-century children's literature, suggesting to children that these characters are less important than their male counterparts," write the authors. "The disproportionate numbers of males in central roles may encourage children to accept the invisibility of women and girls and to believe they are less important than men and boys, thereby reinforcing the gender system."
The authors of the study said that even gender-neutral animal characters are frequently labelled as male by mothers reading to their children, which only "exaggerates the pattern of female underrepresentation". "These characters could be particularly powerful, and potentially overlooked, conduits for gendered messages," they said. "The persistent pattern of disparity among animal characters may reveal a subtle kind of symbolic annihilation of women disguised through animal imagery."
The Carnegie medal-winning children's author Melvin Burgess, whose own novels regularly feature female central characters, pointed to the "truism in publishing that girls will read books that have boy heroes, whereas boys won't read books that have girl heroes".
"Boys are far more gender-specific," he said. "I guess the challenge is to write books for boys that have female characters in, that the boys will relate to. It's a sad fact that books written for boys do tend to fall rapidly into the old stereotypes, and the action figures, baddies etc are generally male, and very AP Literature 12: 3rd Quarter College-bound Essay straightforward males as well. I try to get away from that. It's a been a while since I wrote an action-type book, but I am working on one now and it does involve four young people – two girls, two boys – and I always try to make my girls really stand out."
But it's not only an absence of female central characters which is a problem in children's books, believes former children's laureate Anne Fine: it's how the women are represented when they do appear. "Publishers rightly take care to put in positive images of a mix of races, but seem not to even notice when they use stereotypical and way out-of-date images of women," she said. "In modern classics such as Owl Babies and Hooray for Fish! it's always the mother, never the dad, whom the child ends up wanting and needing. God forbid each book should try to cover all the 'issues'; but we do need a bit of balance. Children's authors should make an effort to do a bit of role widening. I try. You wouldn't notice, but in every single one of my books, the male can cook. In The Country Pancake, my farmer just happens to be a female. And on and on."
The notion, meanwhile, that boys only read books by and about males does "become a self-fulfilling prophecy", Fine said. "More worryingly, in these new lists of recommended books for boys, there's a heap of fantasy and violence, very little humour (except for the poo and bum sort), and almost no family novels at all. If you offer boys such a narrow view of the world, and don't offer them novels that show them dealing with normal family feelings, they will begin to think this sort of stuff is not for them."
Fine believes that "women should be giving a much beadier eye to the books they share with children ... It's important to balance much loved old-fashioned classics with stuff that evens things up a bit and reflects women's current role in the world," she said.
But Carnegie medal winner Frank Cottrell Boyce feels that "women have an influence in children's literature that belies the numbers".
"I'm sure this is because brilliant women like Edith Nesbitt, who in a fairer society might have gone into politics or science, have instead poured all their brilliance into writing. The result is that over several years, women have produced really important – really, really important – children's fiction that has helped define eras and people," he said. "I'm thinking right back to Little Women – which has provided women with a roadmap of identity for generations– and Anne of Green Gables. But also of the way women from Enid Blyton and Richmal Crompton – incomparably our best prose stylist and paradoxically the writer who defined boyhood – to JK Rowling, Jacqueline Wilson and Stephenie Meyer, have totally dominated popular narrative culture. So never mind the quantity, feel the quality."
------
“Is feminism relevant to 21st Century Fiction?” Arifa Akbar 13 May 2011
The year that feminism entered British literary fiction is a debatable one: some refer to the watershed moment in 1962, when Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook dramatised women's interior conflict between work, motherhood, love and sex as well as the hitherto taboo drama of the menstrual cycle. It broke such new ground that its author was labelled an Angry Young Man, in line with the literary movement of the day. It was, in fact, a prototype feminist novel at the vanguard of the Angry Young Women's wave of fiction that drew on centuries of unrecorded domestic servitude.
AP Literature 12: 3rd Quarter College-bound Essay
It is harder to pin down the year feminism left the field of fiction. Somewhere along the line, it was tacitly agreed that novelists had outgrown the narrative with its uneasy marriage between fiction and polemic.
Revisiting the debate on women's writing and feminism might now be considered a redundant exercise in an age where books written by women extend across genres and jostle for literary prizes and front-of- store positioning. The 1970s dictum of "writing by women, about women, for women" is certainly a historical anachronism. Philosophical arguments about writing the body are unfashionable with critical theorists and the question of whether women write as gendered beings is dismissed for failing to appreciate the governing role of the imagination in the writing process.
Yet questions, and imbalances, persist. Just when the annual debate over whether we need a women's literary award comes around again as the Orange Prize prepares to announce its winner next month, so Australia, ironically, begins to consider establishing a prize based on the Orange model, such is the lack of recognition for Antipodean women's fiction.
Against this backdrop, Granta magazine will publish The F Word (£12.99) next Thursday: an issue dedicated to reflections on gender, power and feminism, in which Lydia Davis, Rachel Cusk, Jeanette Winterson, AS Byatt, Helen Simpson and Téa Obreht, among others, write wide-ranging pieces on women's places in the world, the place of feminism within storytelling and shortfalls of the Women's Movement of the 1970s. John Freeman, editor of Granta, feels this latter aspect is a positive outcome: "I think political movements must always critique their own legacies - otherwise they become cults. Writers in the issue are doing what's natural after decades of believing in a cause - they are observing the victories and defeats, and taking stock of how this idea has infiltrated life and culture."
They also show, from the gulf between the issues that concern these writers and those that vexed their 1970s elders, how far women have come, in life and in fiction. Davis's short story, "The Dreadful Mucamas", is told from the perspective of a wealthy American who regards her foreign domestic help with concern but also bigoted suspicion. Winterson, reflecting on the love affair between Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, bemoans the loss of romance in our post-feminist age. Helen Simpson draws a satire of a husband reflecting on the grievances of a reversed society in which men are the second sex in "Night Thoughts".
Yet even as Granta brings this issue to the fore, its title - The F Word - makes reference to a contemporary aversion to the term feminism. Many now regard it as problematic, limiting. Joyce Carol Oates is a writer constantly cited for her excellence in creating (often marginalised) female voices: her latest short-story collection, Give Me Your Heart (Corvus, £16.99), provides a perfect example. She says that she mines material from her imagination, not politics, and that the best literature endures beyond its political outlook: "Though I have been told by younger women - in fact, sometimes by men - that I have been a 'model' for them, of an imaginative sort, I had not felt this way about myself.
"In the short run, something like a 'political' vision seems essential; in the long run, it is probably irrelevant. One can sense, for instance, from a reading of Jane Eyre, that the author is both a revolutionary - (in the very trajectory of her tale of a young, disenfranchised orphan-girl's rise to the most extraordinary social position) - and a traditionalist - (the triumphant rise is by way of romantic love and its outward sign is a marriage in the Church of England): that is, Charlotte Brontë transcends both, in her literary genius. How many other women writers struggled to express these same goals, with limited literary success - their names unknown to us, now? A revolutionary political vision will attract attention - initially. But if the literary work is not enduring, the politics will soon become dated. That is why the most seemingly apolitical of American women poets, Emily Dickinson, reads as if she were our contemporary, while the feminist polemics of women writers of the 1970s and 1980s have lost their audiences."
AP Literature 12: 3rd Quarter College-bound Essay
The viewpoint is not dissimilar to Virginia Woolf's ideal of literary androgyny outlined in her 1929 essay, A Room of One's Own. "It is fatal," she wrote, "for anyone who writes to think of their sex." The essay suggested that women write as women, but not as women conscious of being women!
In contemporary terms, her androgyny might translate into a universality in subject, genre and tone that many writers, even those whose fiction was once allied to old-style feminism, now speak of as their guiding principle over a conscious political agenda. Margaret Atwood (Handmaid’s Tale), for one, recently distanced herself from the 1970s literary feminism, of which she became an unofficial standard- bearer.
The Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen compares the politicised fiction of the 1970s to the removal of the Iron Curtain dividing Eastern and Western Europe, after which the former played a cultural catch-up. A necessary, if transitional moment, she suggests: "My mother was born in Soviet Estonia where speech was limited and when the Iron Curtain came down, the people from Eastern Europe wanted to catch up with the West. It [free speech] was new for them. If you are living behind the wall, it takes a while for you to catch up. It may have been the same for women writers of the 1970s."
Kate Mosse (Labyrinth), founder of the Orange Prize, reckons that an older generation of women felt the burden to be standard-bearers in a way that the new generation does not. Their imaginations are "freed up" she says, to write fiction that goes beyond the social realism of the kitchen sink. "I know there are many black writers who have spoken of the burden. Andrea Levy, after winning the Orange Prize, felt people would be surprised if she started writing about the fairies at the end of her garden."
Toril Moi, a professor of literature at Duke University and author of the feminist classic, Sexual/Textual Politics, strongly disagrees. The imagination is not magically liberated now, and neither was it retarded by politics then. These arguments just testify to the great unease around the question of women's writing: "I completely understand that some women can feel cornered by the question 'are you a woman writer?' People hardly ever ask that question of men."
The statement "I am not a woman writer" need not be anti-feminist either, she says. It is, in many cases informed by the desire to escape from the "other" enclave.
Perhaps in refusing the label, the desire is to enter what is seen as universal territory in fiction. For Woolf, the domestic novel was an extension of women's limited lives: "All the literary training that a woman had in the early 19th century was training in observation of character, in the analysis of emotion. Her sensibility had been educated for centuries by the influences of the common sitting-room."
Yet there is a double standard. Novels by men - John Updike, Philip Roth - on marriage, family, domesticity are seen as both original and universal. There are no question-marks over the imagination. Mosse has seen, over the life of the Orange Prize at least, a marked increase in male writers dealing with domesticity and emotion. "There is a sense of the domestic becoming an area of literary concern. Yet when men write about domesticity, it's seen as great literature. When women do it, it's seen as women's issues."
Moi adds: "Roth writes as a male Jew from New Jersey, but no one calls his work domestic. It's the great American novel. The same for Jonathan Franzen's Freedom. Men's experiences are seen as universal."
There are still those who want to make a stand as "women" writers. Urvashi Butalia, who writes of the transgender hijra subculture in India in The F Word, says: "Whether you like it or not, your politics and gender follow you into the world of the imagination". Manju Kapur, whose latest novel Custody focuses AP Literature 12: 3rd Quarter College-bound Essay on the effect of divorce on children, similarly positions herself against Oates's standpoint. She mines her stories from the world around her. Imagination comes into play in the development of that story.
Margaret Drabble, whose collection A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman (Penguin Classics, £20) is published in June and brings together short stories of women's struggles across four decades, chooses to write about women because "I write about what is important to me... I haven't felt a duty or a responsibility to write fiction about women, and nobody has imposed this on me. I have written about women because their lives are important to me. But so is social inequality and poverty. Women's lives have moved on, expectations have changed, our horizons are wider, but not so much wider. My daughter's life is [yet] more free."
Perhaps this younger generation's approach to gender is reflected by Oksanen, 33. Her third novel, Purge (Atlantic, £12.99), straddles themes of sex trafficking, Estonian independence and the legacy of Stalin's gulag. She feels the debate on feminism in fiction need not be so strained. Some, if not all, of feminism's ideals have been ingested by authors, male and female, so that they are part of a "universal" outlook. "I certainly have feminist intentions in my novels, even though they are just one part of the whole novel. Many feminist values are universal values in the West now."
Taiye Selasi, whose novel in progress Ghana Must Go has already impressed Salman Rushdie and Toni Morrison, dramatises the powerless position of the women in a middle-class Ghanaian household in her F Word story, "The Sex Lives of African Girls". Selasi says that she has not made a conscious effort to create strong women characters. They just emerge on the page that way.
"I suspect [my mother's] feminism expresses itself in my work: my female characters speak their minds, their truths, however quietly. This always just sort of happens: the women appear on the page with a wisdom of their own. I'm not aware of writing with a political agenda, however obvious it is that I've inherited one. I write to write."
Emma Donoghue, whose latest novel, Room, is short-listed for the Orange and the Commonwealth Writers' prizes, says that she feels no obligation to represent women's lives. Yet a feminist consciousness remains: "I suppose to me a feminist novelist (of any gender) is one who notices gender.
"So you might say I am an obviously feminist writer in that my work often focuses on women's lives; I try to tell neglected stories and many of them are women's. But I would argue that I'm being just as feminist when I write about my male characters, because I just am as interested in how notions of manhood shape (and in many cases cage) them... I certainly don't feel as if I'm working within a distinct tradition of women's writing."
And, of course, there is no one single tradition. Ellah Allfrey, deputy editor of Granta, feels the diverse writings in The F Word testify to the relative definitions of feminism. "It means different things depending on the time and place in which a woman finds herself. Feminism has to be as complicated as women themselves are."
Asking the writers: Writing as a woman – or a feminist?
Emma Donoghue I know what it means to be a feminist in my private life and my political life. But as for my writing life... I'm less sure. Not that I'll ever reject the F word, but to say 'I am a feminist writer' sounds somehow as if I have a manifesto, as I begin writing a story, when in fact all I have are questions... There's a curious optical illusion when we read the work of someone from a 'minority' (including women); we notice the 'minority' aspects more. So we probably pay more attention to the black characters than to the equally AP Literature 12: 3rd Quarter College-bound Essay brilliantly written white ones in Levy's 'Small Island'. I find that although I've had important male point- of-view characters in many of my novels and short stories, that doesn't get noticed because I'm seen as a woman-focused writer. The stories I tell are often very concerned with women, but just as much with the men in their lives: the grieving fathers, one-legged tailors, frustrated earls and bumptious boys. You could say I like to write about freaks and nobodies.
Joyce Carol Oates Though I have been told by younger women – in fact, sometimes by men – that I have been a "model" for them, of an imaginative sort, I had not felt this way about myself. Each work of "art" is such a leap of faith, such a risk-taking, such an experiment... In the short run, something like a "political" vision seems essential (to writing fiction); in the long run, it is probably irrelevant. A revolutionary political vision will attract attention – initially. But if the literary work is not enduring, the politics will soon become dated. That is why the most seemingly apolitical of American women poets, Emily Dickinson, reads as if she were our contemporary, while the feminist polemics of women writers of the 1970s and 1980s have lost their audiences.
Taiye Selasi I'm not aware of writing with a political agenda, however obvious it is that I've inherited one. I write to write. And the only "responsibility" I feel I have is to write about human beings beautifully and truthfully, whether those human beings be male or female, black or white. I know this can sound like a cop-out – another African woman writer refusing to accept responsibility for telling the African Woman's Truth - but I suppose that's why I'm in poetry, not in politics: my sense of truth isn't nearly so limited.
Jeanette Winterson Women still have little power in the decision-making processes of government and industry. And the culture is punishing women as never before. We have to be smart, pretty, sexy, good in the kitchen, good at the office, good with the kids. Good in bed. Good at handling men. It is impossible. Older women are written off and teenagers feel they have to be sexually available all of the time. There is so little in the culture that helps us to love well, either ourselves or our partners. Love is a casualty of the upgrade culture but women just don't have time anymore to be in charge of love and that is everybody's loss.
Margaret Drabble I write about what is important to me, and of course this has involved writing about women's lives. Many years ago I said my primary moral concern and interest was equality, and this includes but is not confined to feminism. This is still true. I haven't felt a duty or a responsibility to write fiction about women, and nobody has ever tried to impose this on me, I have written about women because their lives are important to me. But so is social inequality and poverty. Women's lives have moved on, expectations have changed, our horizons are wider, but not so much wider.
Manju Kapur To look at women's lives from a feminist perspective is something I have been doing in my life for many years. I have been doing this in my novels, too, although I have approached the latter differently – there are the dilemmas of living in Delhi, concerns and constraints. I consciously set out to highlight these concerns. That's why I deal with the family to set my story. It reflects society, gender, patriarchal values, many in a big way. All my stories come from around me. There will be the people around me or my own extended family, so that's already 200 people! I could hear a story that would literally take one paragraph to tell, and I think how to tease it out, the cause and effect. That's when imagination comes into it. Jane Austen is using a small microcosm to reflect every issue under the sun. Often, women's fiction is called domestic or family-focused. It is a label that is not derogatory but a bit condescending.
AP Literature 12: 3rd Quarter College-bound Essay
“Sugar, Spice and Guts” A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis 03 September 2014
Girls grow up on big and little screens, and sometimes the thinking about girls and girlhood grows, too. Inspired by Richard Linklater’s Boyhood — a magnificent film that tells the story of a boy’s life from 6 to 18 — we are taking a look at how girls are growing up in the movies. American mainstream cinema, a timid enterprise dependent on formulas and genres, can be mind-blowingly retrograde when it comes to women and girls. And while an occasional woman or girl rules the box office, too many of their on-screen sisters are sidelined or just left out of the picture.
Characters like Katniss Everdeen are changing girlhood and challenging tired stereotypes by not waiting for some guy to save the day: They’re saving themselves and their worlds, too. Yet Katniss, her screen sisters and the industry have a very long way to go. In one study the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media looked at 5,554 “distinct speaking characters” in 122 family movies rated G, PG or PG-13 that were released between 2006 and 2009. The institute discovered that only 29.2 percent of those roles were female, while a whopping 70.8 percent were male. In other words, there were 2.42 male characters for every female one. Put another way, there was Harry and Ron and then there was Hermione, the smartest girl in the class. Hermione ruled, but not nearly enough.
In the past, some actresses had a measure of power or at least staying power in Hollywood, but too many more were typecast as bratty sisters, dutiful daughters or sexpots, and then cast aside. And some of their most memorable characters were, like their adult counterparts, defined by hypersexuality or asexuality. Such was the case in 1962, when Dolores Haze, better known as Lolita, was the barely pubescent object of her stepfather’s lust in Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the notorious Nabokov novel. That same year, Scout Finch was the object of her father’s moral instruction in the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird. A year later, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique rocked the country, becoming a best- selling portent of second-wave feminism.
What has changed in the years since? Quite a lot off screen, if not nearly enough on: Nymphets and tomboys still show up, as do brainy, funny, scary and tough girls. The picture of girlhood at the movies has become an increasingly diverse, sometimes contradictory array of identities, including bold revisions of age-old archetypes and brave new heroines. That said, the faces of these girls remain exasperatingly monochromatic. So all hail Quvenzhané Wallis, who after leading the charge (and earning an Oscar nod) in Beasts of the Southern Wild, appears in December as Little Orphan Annie in a remake of the 1982 movie musical. The sun will come out tomorrow — but this time so will the daughter. Here, we take a look at some of the other pixies and powerhouses who are also changing movie girlhood.
THE WARRIORS – A.O. Scott Katniss Everdeen, who returns this fall in Mockingjay — Part 1, the third installment in the Hunger Games franchise, is so cool, so capable, so focused, with her archer’s eye, on the task in front of her that it’s easy to lose sight of just how revolutionary she is. Not only in the dystopian fictional universe she inhabits, where she has been radicalized by the cruelty of the Hunger Games and the iniquity of the society that supports them. In the world of mass entertainment, too, Katniss is a transformative figure: a solitary warrior, a heroine whose personal struggles for survival and dignity are joined to a larger fight for justice. And also, as played by Jennifer Lawrence, a potent force at the global box office — a blockbuster Joan of Arc.
On the movie landscape, Katniss is not entirely alone, though she is still very much outnumbered. In recent years, there have been a handful of movies about young women who can throw a punch, land a kick and run like the wind, girls who are more than sidekicks or pneumatic eye candy. Shailene Woodley’s Tris Prior in Divergent — another crossover from the fertile world of young-adult dystopian AP Literature 12: 3rd Quarter College-bound Essay literature — is, like Katniss, a fighter against corrupt authority. In Joe Wright’s Hanna (2011), Saoirse Ronan is a big-eyed, sweet-faced killer, trained in combat by her father. In the culty Kick-Ass movies, Chloë Grace Moretz portrays the fearless Hit Girl with a foul mouth and an appetite for combat.
The violence there was played partly for laughs and shock value, making the most of the incongruity between the cuteness of the actress and the viciousness of the character, but it also tapped into a deep reservoir of restlessness and rage. For most of movie history — from the old westerns to Thelma & Louise by way of exploitation gore-fests like I Spit on Your Grave — women’s violence could be justified by narrowly defined motives of self-defense or revenge. The broader battle between right and wrong — and also the pleasure of action for its own sake — have typically been male prerogatives, handed down over the decades from gunslingers to superheroes.
The comic-book fraternity has been slow to admit women as full members. Ms. Lawrence has made an impression as the blue-skinned, shape-shifting Mystique (a role originated by Rebecca Romijn-Stamos), but her team is still called the X-Men for a reason. And if women can fight their way toward parity, it will be Katniss who blazed the trail.
THE NEW SEARCHERS – Manohla Dargis Journey is one of the most overused words in movie-speak. One reason are guides like Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting That You’ll Ever Need! that borrow heavily from Joseph Campbell, who wrote that whether the hero is “ridiculous or sublime, Greek or barbarian, gentile or Jew, his journey varies little in essential plan.” Too bad that in Campbell’s “monomyth” that journey is also unequivocally male: “The woman is life, the hero its knower and master.” The classic trip has been so historically male that one critic, Eric Leed, gave it a biological spin, labeling it a “spermatic journey.” Never mind that every so often a girl or woman — Dorothy, Thelma, Louise or Hushpuppy — hits the road. She gets out of the house and, like a footloose Penelope, weaves an adventure instead of a shroud.
The truth is that women were on the move in movies before talkies, in serials like The Perils of Pauline (1914) and westerns like The Covered Wagon (1923). Although girls tend to experience more domestic exploits, a few second-wave feminist girls did get out and about, including in Paper Moon (1973) and the original True Grit (1969). In recent decades, the movie industry hasn’t been much interested in women and girls, so it hasn’t created all that many female-driven escapades. Yet the emergence of new peripatetic girls and women who voyage with purpose and goals — in the latest True Grit, Winter’s Bone, Beasts of the Southern Wild and the coming Tracks (Sept. 19) — suggests that our movies may be finally catching up to female Americans on the move.
SCREAM TEENS – Manohla Dargis Movies have long embraced young freaks and ghouls, those teenage werewolves and other children of the damned, and, in recent years, the young adult book market has helped pump fresh hot blood into the screen. The horror genre goes so well with the adolescent body, after all, both fertile sites churning with strange liquids, violent passions and seemingly inexplicable, terrifying changes. “I want to be normal,” says the spectacularly paranormal Carrie (Chloë Grace Moretz) in the recent remake of the 1976 Brian De Palma freak-out. There’s no chance of normal for Carrie, no matter her era, or for the title character in Life After Beth, a young zombie (Aubrey Plaza) whose morbid resurrection turns her into the ultimate clingy girlfriend. “I kind of wish she’d stay dead,” her boyfriend says with a sigh.
Having a monster for a boyfriend has metaphoric potential, but it’s also true that these days it’s harder for a white girl to hook up with a black guy than it is to get serious with a super-white vampire (Twilight) or suck face with a deadly white zombie (Warm Bodies). The Production Code’s ban on “sex relationships between the white and black races” ended in 1956, but in today’s neo-segregationist cinema, blacks and AP Literature 12: 3rd Quarter College-bound Essay whites rarely mix romantically. So while Twilight introduced a Native American heartthrob with Jacob the wolf boy, Bella was always destined to remain on Team Edward. Given our black-and-white obsession with race, it’s no wonder that in the 2013 Southern gothic Beautiful Creatures a teenage witch who learns that “no good could come from us loving a mortal.”
ONCE UPON A TIME RIGHT NOW – Manohla Dargis Disney has been banking on princesses since Snow White warbled “Someday My Prince Will Come” in 1937. Decades later, its sagging fortunes were lifted in 1989 by the animated Ariel, a.k.a. the Little Mermaid, an undersea princess who paved the way for the tiara-wearing likes of Belle, Jasmine and Tiana. In 2000, the company created Disney Princess, what it called a “young girls’ lifestyle brand” that brought together eight of its actual and honorary princesses under one “marketing umbrella.” Since then more princesses have been gathered under that parasol, including Merida from Pixar’s first female-driven movie, Brave (2012). Disney bought Pixar in 2006, and it’s hard not to wonder if Pixar’s run of male- driven hits didn’t play into Disney’s fleeting concerns about the whole princess thing.
Some of that unease was apparent in Disney’s titling of Rapunzel, which it renamed Tangled because, according to a 2010 article in The Los Angeles Times, company suits believed — after the disappointing box office returns of The Princess and the Frog (2009) — that boys didn’t want to see a movie with “princess” in the title. Maybe not, but to judge by that billion-dollar juggernaut called Frozen, everyone wants to see a good princess movie with an ear-worming song. Critics debated whether the movie repackaged stereotypes or was a continuation of the slow-moving revolution that had begun with the introduction of minority princesses. Frozen, of course, splits the difference with two royals: one who kisses a guy and one who, smiling and skating, emphatically does not.
With two shorn wings and an astonishing maternal kiss, the recent Maleficent demolishes stereotypes that were only tweaked in Frozen. So it’s a surprise that Maleficent — a fascinating live-action origin story about the mean, green fairy in Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty — hasn’t inspired all that much critical thumb sucking. It stars Angelina Jolie as the titular fairy whose path to villainy is directly traced to the catastrophic moment when her old childhood friend, Stefan, cuts off her wings in a power grab. It’s a shock of violence that’s been read as a rape, and more than one observer has seen allusions to Ms. Jolie’s double mastectomy. In retaliation, Maleficent curses Stefan’s daughter, Aurora (the future slumbering beauty), only to gradually, and with great feeling, fall for the girl.
The scenes of the emotionally chilled Maleficent melting while she watches Aurora grow up are flecked with comedy. But they also chip away at the cliché of the beautiful evil woman whose power is inseparable from her narcissism, and who invariably sees a younger woman as a competitor. Maleficent only threatens to lash out at Aurora — the girl loves her in turn — saving her fury for Stefan. By the time Aurora slips into her curse-induced sleep, there’s a prince hovering at the story’s edge. Yet his kiss doesn’t awaken Aurora. Instead, Maleficent stands over this girl and, with a tender, motherly kiss on the head, wakes both this beauty and movie genre, ushering the Disney fairy tale into the 21st century.
GIRLS GONE WILD – A.O. Scott American popular culture has always indulged male rebellion in various forms, from James Dean and Holden Caulfield to Adam Sandler and the overgrown man-children who have followed in his wake. Girls have played by different rules, and their acting out is more likely to be viewed with disapproval or prurience, and to turn on the defiance of sexual taboos.
At first glance, the four college friends in Spring Breakers (2012), who set out on a hedonistic crime spree in the Florida sunshine, seem to belong to this tradition, which often blurs the line between liberation and exploitation. But Candy, Cotty, Faith and Brit are not looking primarily for male attention, or even for AP Literature 12: 3rd Quarter College-bound Essay sex. They are American dreamers acting out of a sense of constitutional entitlement: They want money, stuff, fun and freedom, and above all the thrill of raising a middle finger at the world’s expectations.
This kind of rebellion has its dangers, and movies about young women in revolt frequently carry a cautionary, moralistic charge. The bored suburbanites in Gia Coppola’s recent debut, Palo Alto, risk being taken advantage of by creepy older men or callous male peers; the privileged housebreakers in her aunt Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring (2013) risk jail and disgrace.
But often the thrill of recklessness outweighs such perils. There is pleasure in asserting yourself against the world’s indifference or censure, and power, too, especially in the company of friends. For boys, rock ‘n’ roll has been a perpetually renewable source of that power, and girls have been tapping into that for themselves, breaking out of the traditional roles of groupie or girlfriend. Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart were awesome in The Runaways, Floria Sigismondi’s underrated movie about the 1970s hard- rock band of that name. So were Elle Fanning and Alice Englert in Sally Potter’s Ginger & Rosa (2012), at least until the selfishness and hypocrisy of certain adults spoiled their trip through the ‘60s. (…)
LOVE AND DEATH – A.O. Scott According to Edgar Allan Poe, “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.” Alfred Hitchcock had a perverse respect for this idea, as did the makers of Love Story (1970), which asked, “What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who died?”
Why not ask the girl herself? The nexus of romance and mortality has been given, as it were, a new lease on life by a crop of teenage melodramas, many of them based on young adult novels, that explore the nexus between love and death from the point of view of brave, serious, smart teenage girls. The summer of 2014 began with The Fault in Our Stars and wrapped up with If I Stay, both drawn from young-adult best sellers and both starring formidable and already seasoned young actresses. Shailene Woodley, in Stars, and Chloë Grace Moretz, in Stay, each played artistically minded adolescents whose first experiences of love are shadowed by mortality.
But these characters are more resilient than tragic. Unlike, say, Bella Swan of the Twilight books and movies, they are not consumed and paralyzed by romantic longing. They prove themselves capable of juggling their dream boys with other dreams and ambitions, of suffering the pangs of love and loss with discipline and humor. What they project, even when faced with the disruptive forces of passion and calamity, is common sense, kindness and responsibility.
Remove the specter of fatal illness or accident, and you see that they are romantic real girls. Ms. Woodley’s character in The Spectacular Now (2013) is an especially vivid example of this type, a girl who might once have been sidelined as a nerd or a wallflower but who now can now be seen as a heroine in her own right.
AP Literature 12: 3rd Quarter College-bound Essay
Works Cited
Akbar, Arifa. “Is feminism relevant to 21st-century fiction?” Independent:
Culture>Books>Features. 13 May 2011. independent.co.uk/arts
entertainment/books/features/is-feminism-relevant-to-21st-century-fiction-2283009.html.
Accessed 31 December 2018.
Flood, Allison. “Study finds huge gender imbalance in children’s literature.” The Guardian:
Culture, Children and Teenagers. 6 May 2011.
theguardian.com/books/2011/may/06/gender. Accessed 31 December 2018.
Scott, A.O. and Manohla Dargis. “Sugar, Spice and Guts.” The New York Times: Movies. 03
September 2014. nytimes.com/2014/09/07/movies/fall-arts-preview-representation-of
female-characters-in-movies-is-improving.html. Accessed 31 December 2018.
Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. London: Hogarth Press 1st Edition, 1929.
AP Literature 12: 3rd Quarter College-bound Essay