June 30, 2010

film version of “The Yellow Wallpaper”: the narrative of motherhood is too strong

So I often read “The Yellow Wallpaper” with my students and I just read it again this quarter. I’m always amazed at how it’s structured and how Gilman reveals subtle clues throughout the story. On this last reading, I noticed more closely how the descriptions of the room the narrator is in change. I don’t mean the descriptions of the wallpaper itself, but the other things in the room. For instance, the bed gets more gnawed as the story progresses, a sign that she’s been chewing on it long before she mentions doing so. But one of the amazing things about the story is that it’s still shocking today. Students are often confused at the mention the baby. I sometimes have to tell them outright that the narrator is a mother. Then the students are confused as to why she would abandon her child. Their narrative is that mothers just don’t do that. So they retreat to the easy answer that “she’s just crazy.” I try to get my students to entertain the idea that maybe taking care of the baby contributed to her going crazy. But post-partum depression is a difficult concept. Partly this is due to the fact that most of my students have never had to take care of a child. But part of it is the old narrative that being a mother completes a woman. “Women naturally long to be mothers and they are naturally good at it,” the narrative tells us. And since there aren’t many narratives that contradict this idea (partly because of shame on the part of the women who could tell us otherwise), most people accept the narrative.

All this is a long preamble to say that a film of “The Yellow Wallpaper” is in production. It may turn out to be a good movie in and of itself. Yet it’s hard for me not to see the changes that have been made to the story and shake my head.

I don’t care that they changed the narrator’s name to Charlotte (a nod to the fact that the story fits closely to Gilman’s own experience, I assume). I don’t care that Jennie is now the narrator’s sister and not the narrator’s husband’s sister. I’m not too upset about the couple being destitute, either. What really annoys me is what they’ve done with the baby. The baby is dead. She died in the fire that made the family destitute. So Charlotte’s madness is motherly grief at the loss of her child. Yes, parents lose children. Yes, it is probably the worst grief a person can face. I have a friend who lost her eleven-year-old son, so I’ve seen some of this first-hand. It is not the subject matter itself that I object to, but from that which it was changed.

You see, a mother grieving the loss of her child conforms to narrative of motherhood I mentioned above. In this movie, madness is caused by a woman not being allowed to be a mother, her “true” role. So the movie refuses to challenge the common narrative of motherhood. Which means that this movie isn’t as brave as Gilman’s story. Her story doesn’t only explore the feelings of a woman feeling trapped by conforming to the narrative of motherhood, but also trapped by a patriarchal system that governs marriage and medicine. The story attempts to challenge and deconstruct the many assumptions that pervade the narrative of femininity.  What this film version shows us is that 118 years later, challenging this narrative is still taboo.  How far have we really come?

May 19, 2010

the economy is not economic

Some things just hit you. Not that they are new or deep insights, but all of a sudden they feel tangible. My mother calls this the blinding flash of the obvious. So here’s my recent one.

I’m not a big fan of Thoreau; I find him to be a self-centered blowhard who lacks healthy self-criticism. Still, his writing contains so many little jewels that he’s worth it. In Walden, Thoreau defines economy as the easiest way to get one’s basic needs met. This is a broader definition than the one we tend to use. He isn’t concerned just with money, but all the resources used in doing something. And not just physical resources, but labor as well. So by this definition, he sees his society as lacking in economy. Take a bottle of milk for instance. The simplest way to get milk, the most economic in Thoreau’s sense, would be to have a cow. Instead of this, someone else owns the cow. The someone else ships the milk (another person may be involved with pasteurizing it). Then there is someone else, like a man I talked with on a plane once, who maintains refrigerated buildings to keep the milk cold along its route. Then someone stocks the milk in a store. Someone else takes your money for it. Then you take it home and drink it. According to Thoreau, these steps in the process make the whole thing uneconomic. Again, it has nothing to do with money.

And that’s the problem that hit me the other day. There are two examples that brought this to my attention.

Plastic water bottles. I was listening to Fresh Air and there was a discussion about what happened to the plastic water bottles that were actually recycled (most never are recycled, by the way). Well, the plastic is then put on a boat and shipped to China. Then that plastic is rendered into goods, such as toys and polyester suits. Then those goods are put back on a boat and shipped back to the U.S. Basically, the same hunk of plastic is shipped across the ocean twice. Terri Gross asked why they couldn’t just use the recycled plastic to make new water bottles. In Thoreau’s sense, that would be more economic. But of course, in the modern sense, it wouldn’t. There’s more profit in shipping a bunch of plastic half way around the world two times. The economy of the market has nothing to do with economy.

Sardines. I live on the west coast of the United States and there are sardines swimming a few miles from where I sit now. Yet if I go to the store to buy sardines they come from either Nova Scotia (the Brunswick sardines distributed by Bumble Bee) or Portugal (the Trader Joe’s sardines). Don’t we have people fishing sardines in California? Yes, we do. So why can’t I buy local sardines? Because California sardines are shipped to Japan. Then fed to tuna. Which are then shipped back to California. Halfway around the world twice yet again.

Now business owners aren’t constantly shipping things around the world over and over again simply because they can. They do this because it’s profitable. They make more money this way. Therefor, we have a world economic system that does not reward economy. In fact, we have a system that rewards this excessive use of resources. On the positive side, this creates more jobs. The more uneconomic the whole business is, the more fingers there are in the pie. Some argue that this is not sustainable. Some say that our dependence on oil will cause this system to come crashing down. There is evidence for this and it’s a very practical argument. My argument is more about principles. Like Thoreau, I’m disgusted by the lack of economy in the whole thing. What I see now is that the problem is not greedy business owners, but the system itself.

Again, this insight isn’t new, but the craziness of it finally became more real to me.

May 10, 2010

Obama in Mount Pleasant, Iowa

Mount Pleasant, Iowa is my mom’s hometown and the inspiration for the setting of “My Grandmother’s Funeral.” It’s also where my grandmother and grandfather are buried. Well, President Obama was there on April 27th. Just that is remarkable. At least to me. Mount Pleasant isn’t a big place and I’ve always associated it with the past, though that has to do more with my grandmother’s reality, which I entered every time I was there, than the place itself. The other remarkable thing is where he ate lunch: Jerry’s Family Restaurant. Now there aren’t a lot of good restaurants in Mount Pleasant to be sure, but I always went to the worst of them because my grandmother hated to spend money. So I know whereof I speak when I say that Jerry’s is the worst restaurant in Mount Pleasant. I still recall with a shudder the runny, undercooked eggs that my wife was served there once. And this, this… place is where Obama chose to stop? If Michelle had been with him maybe she would have advised him better.

October 11, 2009

comics as propaganda: “Pettigrew For President”

As the story about Wonder Woman and Marston shows, people have often used comics as a means to influence the minds of American youth. The idea that media influenced behavior was taken as a given by many. For me, this puts Wertham into context. His idea that comics were influential was not unique to him. What he added was a level of professional gravitas to the claim that comics were harmful.

But what I’m interested in is the strong belief in the influence. We still hear about it today when people blame teenage killings on video games or music, but you don’t hear it so much from the creators themselves. Marston believed that Wonder Woman could change the minds of young men and influence the hopes of young women. I think what is partially so fascinating for me is that he chose comics as the medium to do this. To me this shows how popular comics were at one time in U.S. history.

The fact that other people tried to use comics to influence youth supports this. Jack Chick is an obvious example. But I recently discovered a Catholic comic anthology that began publication in 1946: The Treasure Chest. True to its culture and time period “The Treasure Chest was intended as a remedy to the sensationalism of traditional comics: it contained educational features, narrated the lives of saints, and presented adventure stories featuring realistic characters with what were considered wholesome values, like patriotism, equality, faith, and anti-communism.”

Interestingly, especially today, in 1964 the comic began running a story called “Pettigrew For President.” This was during the midst of the Civil Rights Movement and after the assassination of President Kennedy. The story tried to deal with the turmoil of the times while advocating solutions based on Catholic values. Yet while the reader is shown Pettigrew’s race for president, he is never fully shown; his own “race” is hidden until the last panel. In the end, it is finally revealed that Pettigrew is black and becomes the first black president in 1976.

I haven’t read the entire story yet, so I don’t have much to say about it. Still, I find it interesting that a Catholic magazine in the 1960s published a story about an African-American man becoming president. You can download a pdf of the full story here.

February 18, 2009

What the #!@% ?

In a knee-jerk sort of way, I like to defend artists, especially cartoonists. I believe in the freedom of expression, the need to push people’s boundaries, the need to state an uncomfortable truth, blah, blah, blah…

BUT DEAR MOTHER OF GOD MAKE THE BAD OBAMA CARTOONS STOP!!!!!

Obama is like a gangsta? Why? A. Because of the way he dresses. B. Because of the way he talks. C. Because he’s a black man. D. None of the above, because the artist makes no sense and he can’t draw.

 

Obama has made us drink the Kool-Aid? Obama is a mass murderer? What sense does this even make?
 

Chimps wrote the stimulus bill? Obama is a chimp? Does no-one at The New York Post know anything about how African-Americans have been historically depicted in this country?
 

Just to liven things up: I’ve lived long enough to laugh at the 80s.

November 4, 2008

I’m giggling like a schoolgirl


We have a black man named Barack Hussein Obama as president of the United States. The tale of this country is about to start another chapter.

Leaving race aside, Obama is the first actual adult we’ve had in the White House in a long time. Maybe in my lifetime. Was Carter an adult? I was too young to know.

March 8, 2007

The Democratic Party Sucks

So the Democrats will boldly…

leave troops in Iraq. Why?

Because the Democrats are boldly…

going to wait till August to see if a four-year-old failed war can suddenly be won. This is their daring new time table that they are putting before Bush.

The time table boldly…

leaves things as they are. Till August.

Here’s the kicker though, the Democrats are planning to boldly…

approve Bush’s $428 billion spending bill. Not only is the bill ridiculously expensive and will only prolong this failed war, it also plans to cut medical benefits for veterans. In other words, ir could make things like the Walter Reed fiasco even worse.

Yeah, Democratic party!

We voted for change and all we got were some sound bites and a maintenance of the status quo! Hooray! Pragmatic politics strikes again!

Yet once more, the Democratic Party proves that its only redeeming feature is that it isn’t the Republican Party. Not an inspiring platform.

March 4, 2007

Simplicissimus

Ho-lee ker-ap! All of the poltical magazine Simplicissmus has been put on-line. Every issue. PDFs. Ready to download. Sometimes I just want to kiss the internet.

I had encountered some of the artists in Simplicissimus in various pen-and-ink books that I had bought. But I didn’t learn about the magazine itself until I saw the images that Coconino World had put up. Quite simply, Simplicissimus was one of the greatest magazines of all time. They published writers like Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke. They had comics and art by artists like George Grosz, Kathe Kollwitz, Olaf Gulbransson, Bruno Paul, and Karl Arnold. They took on (with varying success and resolve) the political leaders in Germany before and during both world wars.

Simplicissimus was a political magazine, but I can’t read German. For me, the real inspiration in the magazine is the art. The art has a German expressionist style that is much more loose and biting than the stuff that was coming out in the States at the same time. Simplicissimus didn’t just run political cartoons though; they also had full-fledged short comic narratives occasionally as well. Can you see why I love this magazine?

Here’s the Wikipedia entry.