- Watching: Mona Lisa Smile with Julia Roberts
In the film, Julia Stiles plays Joan Brandwyn, a bright young woman who dreams of becoming a lawyer and who is enrolled in pre-law. Katherine Watson, her art history teacher played by Julia Roberts, encourages her to apply to Yale, as they keep a spot open for a woman from Wellesley College. After she helps her fill the application form, Joan is accepted at Yale, but she is hesitant to tell Katherine Watson. Indeed, she hopes to get a proposal from her boyfriend, and she think mentioning her acceptation in a law course might jeopardise it (this idea is whispered to her by Betty Warren).
Katherine Watson learns of Joan’s acceptance at Yale while discussing with her boyfriend during a dance at Betty Warren’s wedding. There, the boy states that Joan will always have the acceptance letter as an achievement (as if she should be satisfied with just her potential); but that as he as been accepted to Penn University and they have become engaged, her attending Yale will not do. Indeed, how could she then make sure that he “has dinner on the table by five”? I rolled my eyes very hard at that point; Julia Roberts looked perfectly livid.
She goes to Joan’s home the next week, with different brochures about law courses she could attend closer to Penn University, so that she can both “bake her cake and eat it too”. But there, she finds Joan already married, having eloped during the week-end, and set on being a housewife. Realising that she has misjudged the situation, Katherine leaves the house but Joan follows her on the porch. The following discussion ensues (Julia Roberts’ lines are in parenthesis and italicized).
“It was my choice. Not to go. He would have supported it. (But you don’t have to choose.) No, I have to. I want a home, I want a family. It’s not something I’ll sacrifice. (No one’s asking you to sacrifice that, Joan. I just want you to understand that you can do both.) Do you think I’ll wake up one morning and regret not being a lawyer? (Yes, I’m afraid that you will.) Not as much as I’d regret not having a family. Not being there to raise them. I know exactly what I’m doing and it doesn’t make me any less smart. [pause] This must seem terrible to you. (I didn’t say that. I —) Sure you did. You always do. You stand in class and tell us to look beyond the image, but you don’t. To you a housewife is someone who sold her soul for a centre hall colonial. She has no depth, no intellect, no interests. [pause] You’re the one who said I could do anything I wanted. This is what I want.”
Katherine then smiles, hugs her and leaves her with a “Congratulations. Be happy.” I find several issues with the way this conversation goes and how it is framed.
First, the contents of Joan’s reasoning. She asserts that she wants a home and a family, and she’s not ready to sacrifice this dream for her own education or for the chance at a fulfilling occupation. On one hand, I admire her selflessness and commitment. I often find issue with women who think that they can ‘have it all’, not because they don’t deserve all, but because children are human beings that need constant attention and care to grow up healthy. I don’t agree that women should be able to toss their kids to a child-minder for the day while they work. If you want children, you should take care of them, and they require a lot of care. Can it seem like a prison then, this kind of commitment? Yes, but I have to reiterate, having children is a huge commitment. Do you want children or do you want a convenient token of your ‘success’ as a parent that will take care of you when you’re old and live your defunct dreams for you? Children, in an ideal world, would not get less than your all. I’m also not convinced that one person is enough, even working full-time at it, to raise a kid. If this was the case, women would have way less children and the world would surely be a better place.
However, as it is, and as it was, mothers were raising kids all alone with no break, no relief. Joan is bound to become that typical housewife described by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique. Dissatisfied by her life, intellectually idle even as she is always labouring away for her family, subservient to a husband. There is an enormous difference between realising that children-raising entails a specific sort of extremely time-consuming commitment, and boxing yourself in with a husband for which you will slave away and for kids who will not carry your name and treat you as a maid. Joan claims that “This is what I want”, but is it really? Or is it something that has been thrust upon her in a misogynistic society? If from your first breath on earth you are told that your only hope at respectability and happiness (no matter how fake that happiness is under the circumstances) is to marry and have kids, of course you internalise it. That message is reinforced at every turn, no doubt by Joan’s parents, her extended family, her friends, the men she dates, the staff at her college, almost all pieces of media that she is exposed to, the whole of history, how can she resist? How could she want anything different than that?
She’s saying that it’s her choice, but in the world she lives in, it’s no choice at all. She doesn’t seem to understand the framework in which she is making her ‘decision’. It’s not enough to wish for something to be true for it to actually be. Joan is buying acceptance and a sense of respectability from her family, peers and acquaintances, but she’s also stabbing any hope of independence for herself through the heart. She’s giving in and going with the flow.
Second, the way Katherine reacts. She smiles and leaves Joan as she is, as if convinced by her little spiel. There is nothing revolutionary or feminist in the road Joan has embarked on, nothing that suggests that she has understood a little of what Katherine was talking about when she spoke of independence of mind and autonomy for women. The way Julia Robert’s character’s response is scripted suggest that everything is fine with Joan, she has made her choice and as such there is no way that it can be criticised (because she is a woman and whatever women decide ‘for themselves’ is fine, yay!). Or, in an even more depressing lighting, Katherine understands then that there is nothing she can say to make Joan realise how she’s building a cage for herself, and so she’d rather abandon her to the empty comfort of the illusion of happiness for a time. Either way, there is little to rejoice about. A character that was advocating for women’s liberation and independence folds at the first resistance from an entrenched misogynistic ideology. There is little that she can do all alone, for sure; change needs consciousness-raising on some scale; but she renounces extremely easily and apparently pays it no more mind.
So what we have is a character touted as admirable and undertoned as feminist while extolling the virtues of ‘choice feminism’ (which is no feminism at all, because we don’t make our decisions in a vacuum and because there is no women’s liberation in it), and another who seems to accept it all at face value. This movie is pretending at female independence to paint a rosy picture of the past, but none of us should be fooled. It was written by men, so no wonder there is underlaying misogyny.
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