I recently took a class on Writing Antagonists at The Muse Writers Center.I’m writing a short story called “Better Dead than Married,” about a woman trying to escape an unfulfilling, potentially abusive marriage to a slugabed husband.The instructor encouraged me to watch Mona Lisa Smile.I cited this as a pro-single film in How to be a Happy Bachelor, yet I didn’t own it.I had to rectify the situation (I still collect DVDs).
Mona Lisa Smile takes place in 1953 at Wellesley College.Julia Roberts plays Katherine Watson, a woman who begins teaching art history at Wellesley College; in theory, this school educates the minds of young women, but realistically, they just want to give them their MRS degrees.
At first, she struggles. Her students have basically memorized the entire textbook and syllabus, so she knows she has to outflank them.And she does - by introducing modern art and encouraging them to follow their dreams, not just the dreams their parents and tradition have set up for them (i.e., getting married, making babies).
This movie has pro-single written all over it.That said, it is 1953, and Katherine has a tough row to hoe.The conservative female President and trustees are horrified to learn about Katherine’s methods.And, during that time period, it was accepted and encouraged for students to marry while they were in school.This embodiment is reflected in the film’s major antagonist, Betty.She does get married and naturally expects leeway when it comes to attendance.She’s a matrimaniac throughout the movie (“No man would want Prof. Watson” “Don’t give me a hard time because you’re not married”), right until she learns her husband is cheating.By the end, she’s openly defied her mother by divorcing the man and moving to Greenwich Village with Gisselle, whose plot function is to serve as the feminist mirror.By today’s standards, she’d be considered a solo polyamorist.
And now let’s go to Katherine.When asked why she isn’t married, she tells the story of a fiancé who went to war and came back to be with another woman and start a family.She has a boyfriend at the film’s beginning, but she rejects his marriage proposal because, well, I think she just might be a single at heart.She also becomes involved with Bill, a professor of Italian who’s known for sleeping with students.He regales classes with his tales of fighting in Italy, but it’s revealed he’s been lying about it. They break up soon after that.
The Singles Studies work I do is intersectional with feminism, and I’ll point an obvious double standard in the film, which is, sadly, true to life.Giselle is condemned as a “whore" and Katherine disciplined for telling women to think beyond the roles of a simple “wife and mother”. Yet it’s accepted that Bill can sleep around with students.Whthe file it’s much more vilified these days, there was an open secret that one revered professor was known for doing the same thing, so much so that he was ordered to keep his door open during office hours (to me, that’s just common sense, though).
The film is a bit overplotted and a bit hokey, but I have a soft spot for it.It’s academic and embraces the idea of doing your own thing, no matter what it looks like.