Fun with Art: An Education
Posted on | January 5, 2010 | 3 Comments
Any time I see a movie or read a story where a woman is enjoying sex or having a fun time in an ill-advised relationship, my mind reflexively jumps an hour / a hundred pages ahead in the plot… “I wonder what hideous misfortune the writer has planned for her?! Is she going to get cancer or go to jail forever or kill herself? I can’t wait to find out!” (I never worry when a character is having terrible sex or suffering through a lousy relationship. Being miserable is a sign of proper Victorian virtue and such people will be rewarded.)
Kate Winslet’s character in The Reader not only enjoyed having sex, but she was generous enough to share her enjoyment with a boy making his move into manhood, so she was hardly walking towards a happy ending.
Spoiler alert!
As I’d anticipated, she went to jail forever and killed herself. What a treat!
Many writers and English-professor types hold the opinion that that fiction represents reality better than any description of real events. As a writer, I wish this were true, but unfortunately, I think that most authors, even the best of them, tend to rewrite the same story over and over, tediously, but comfortingly, spoon-feeding us a weak gruel made from our already-held opinions and prejudices, and whether it’s The Reader or a hundred other examples, we seem never to get tired of hearing the story of Madame Bovary.
Spoiler alert!
Madame Bovary, the wife of a decent but boring country doctor, fantasizes so much about the romance novels she reads that she has two affairs, bankrupts her husband and, instead of asking his forgiveness, which he would readily have given, commits suicide by stuffing her mouth with arsenic powder.
Just as some man-hating women can’t understand that men don’t take porn literally, Gustave Flaubert, a woman-hating man, didn’t understand that the women of his day weren’t taking romance novels literally, so he constructed a hateful myth about a weak-minded bourgeois woman who does take them literally, let’s her desire carry her away, and ruins herself, her marriage, her husband and her literal, breathing life.
With all this in mind, you can imagine how happy I get when I see a movie that doesn’t meet out some draconian punishment to a woman for having enjoyable sex or engaging in a risky relationship, which brings us to the film An Education.
Spoiler alert!
In An Education, set in 1961, a bright, talented, studious high-school girl named Jenny has an affair with a con man and petty theft who wines and dines her and shows her a glamorous life that she has never seen from her bourgeois suburb. She gets engaged to marry him, gives him her virginity, gets kicked out of school, skips taking her Oxford exams and then finds out that her beau is married already, with kids.
At this point in the hack western plot, this character would get Bovarized. She’d kill herself or get killed or bankrupt her parents or become a prostitute or get put in the hospital or get cancer or get raped. All you have to do is go to the library and start reading if you want to learn the myriad ways that western writers have devised for punishing women who wickedly take advantage of their youth and beauty by enjoying sex or having an affair or letting a fancy man make her feel beautiful for two seconds by taking her to a nice nightclub or two.
But Jenny in An Education receives none of our collective hate. Her disappointment teaches her that life doesn’t have shortcuts. But she recovers her strength, spends a year studying privately for the Oxford exams, gets in, graduates and becomes the writer who wrote the memoir that the movie was based on, because, of course, this is not a piece of fiction. I do not believe that our literary tradition could possibly have pooped out a story that didn’t Bovarize a woman in this situation. This story is real.
Cheers and good on ya to Lynn Barber, who wrote the original memoir, and to Nick Hornby who scribed it (as Variety would say).
I find the continued fashion for memoirs to be a hopeful sign that we are finally getting tired of the same old stories. (Just like reality TV was a sign that we’d gotten sick of the same stupid sitcoms.) I was happy when James Frey got raked over the coals for bending the truth of his life story in A Million Little Pieces, not because a writer can’t have creative license, but because he bastardized the reality of his life not to tell a new story but to force it into the same, old, tired one.
The bad times that he faced as an addict were not bad enough for the literary tastes of his audience, so he lied to make them worse. That’s why he made millions, no doubt, and good for him. (He’s certainly not a Wall Street criminal or a war profiteer.) But you can’t change culture by telling the same old story. And it’s kind of sad to me that he garnered such a huge audience and then did nothing but weakly reinforce our old, hysterical, inherited ideas about addiction and redemption. Sad.
As I examined my life while writing How to Make Love to Adrian Colesberry, there were many turns I could have taken to make the character fit the comforting story of the sexual dog-man who takes and takes until he finds love or finds his pursuit of sex to be empty. I didn’t take those turns because they weren’t true in my case. I never was that guy. Plus, that story is old and dull. That story hates women, hates men even more, and I hate neither. I want to tell new stories and, like the writers of An Education, I will continue with the simple truth.
Tags: A Million Little Pieces > An Education > Flaubert > James Frey > Kate Winslet > Lynn Barber > Madame Bovary > memoir > movie review > Nick Hornby > sex negativity > The Reader > Victorianism
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3 Responses to “Fun with Art: An Education”
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My Book
January 21st, 2010 @ 1:40 pm
I was reading “A People’s History of the United States” and a passage reminded me of this post. The author’s talking about the disenfranchisement of women during and after the US Revolutionary War:
“It has been pointed out by women historians recently that the contributions of working-class women in the American Revolution have been mostly ignored, unlike the genteel wives of the leaders (Dolly Madison, Martha Washington, Abigail Adams). Margaret Corbin, called “Dirty Kate,” Deborah Sampson Garnet, and “Molly Pitcher” were rough, lower-class women, prettified into ladies by historians. While poor women, in the last years of the fighting, went to army encampments, helped, and fought, they were represented later as prostitutes, whereas Martha Washington was given a special place in history books for visiting her husband at Valley Forge.”
That last line reminded me quite a bit of what I learned about Mary Magdalene in Catholic school, and what I later un-learned about her from alternative historical sources and “The Davinci Code” (although I know that last one is fiction). Specifically, that far from being a prostitute, she may very well have been Jesus’ lover, girlfriend, or even his wife.
I much prefer thinking about her that way. I never liked the idea that people were taking advice on how to live their lives from someone like a celibate Jesus. That’s like virgin, celibate priests giving out marriage counseling or relationship advice (which they do all the time).
January 21st, 2010 @ 1:44 pm
*SPOILER ALERT*
I forgot to mention, the movie “The Informers” also kills the sexually active, promiscuous main female character, that seems to be a pretty good example of what you’re talking about here. She dies pretty graphically from AIDS but all her male partners are untouched by it when the movie ends (although one can assume they caught it too, the movie doesn’t actually make that certain).
January 21st, 2010 @ 5:32 pm
What a great history book. The class element of sexism is such an important element to keep in mind.
I join you in liking the more reasonable and humane idea that Magdalene was Jesus’ wife. The Bible leaves plenty of room for that interpretation.
The Informers is exactly the kind of movie I was talking about. That plotting is an egregious example of Bovarizing.