Girl Power - Then and Now
Or: Elena versus Sam.
I love I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched but there’s always a slight jarring element for me – particularly in Bewitched – with the way both female leads try so hard to please the male lead. Their lives revolve around making their men happy. The suggestion is that, as Darrin’s wife, it’s Sam’s duty to obey him and so if he doesn’t want her to use magic then she simply accepts this without question, and tries to live like a human for him, meaning that she’s cleaning floors on her hands and knees and pushing a hoover around by hand rather than simply snapping her fingers (or twitching her nose, as the case may be) and doing it all by magic. It’s a ludicrous premise and one that would surely make the hackles rise on any modern housewife. I don’t think such a show could be made today. In these post-Buffy years, people want strong heroines of the kick-ass variety rather than the housewife variety. Heroines have moved on and are now expected to be stronger, sexier and sassier than ever before.
Or, at least, that’s what I’ve always thought. But then I watched an episode of The Vampire Diaries soon after an episode of Bewitched and thought yikes, there’s no way that Elena is a better role model for women than Sam. I watch and enjoy Vampire Diaries but, Christ, Elena is one hell of a wet blanket. She doesn’t seem to really know what she wants, and she doesn’t appear to have any kind of life or personality beyond Stephen. If she has any career ambitions or plans for her future then the audience are left entirely unaware of them. There’s also a disturbing trend in YA heroines nowadays to drop friends, family and, indeed, their entire lives, in order to be with their boyfriends. It’s a single-minded devotion and obsession far beyond anything Sam or Jeannie ever displayed.
Plus, heroines of the likes of Elena and Bella are ordinary human girls constantly needing to be rescued by their powerful vampire boyfriends. In the 60s American sitcoms it was the other way around. Sam and Jeannie are both far more powerful than their men, and if anyone’s going to be doing any rescuing, it’s going to be the women. Sam and Jeannie both know what they want and go after it, whereas Bella and Elena spend most of their time dithering about trying to make up their minds and complaining about how ill used they are. Sam is strong and capable – cross her and you’ll be sorry for it. Darrin probably lost count of the number of times she turned him into an animal or an inanimate object of some kind. But cross Elena and what’s she going to do? Pout at you to death?
Of course, it should be acknowledged that these are two very different shows – one is a sitcom and one is a drama – so it’s not comparing like with like, but it’s still an interesting contrast between heroines considering the difference in decades, and how far women are supposed to have moved on since the 60s. Also, the Vampire Diaries is aimed predominantly at teenagers so maybe that partially explains the fact that Elena is a whiny teenager whereas Sam is a strong grown-up woman. The emphasis is on her being a smart and powerful witch who also happens to be classy and sexy, whereas with Bella and Elena the emphasis is very firmly on the fact that they’re pretty. Well, good for them, but what else have they really got going for them? They never seem to have any fun. They don’t study for exams. They don’t make plans for their future. They just moon over their boyfriends. Yuck, yuck, yuck! It makes me cringe.
So perhaps you don’t have to be some sort of kung-fu Buffy action hero to be a true heroine. Perhaps there is something to be said for the quiet strength, keen intelligence and no nonsense attitude of the housewife heroine who knows exactly what she wants and works hard to get it. Certainly that type of heroine has surely got to be infinitely preferable to a whining teenage girl who only gets by on her looks and whose main hobby – indeed, sole purpose in life – seems to be that of ‘being saved’ and/or ‘being ravished’.
Tags: Feminism
January 18th, 2011 at 2:33 pm
Alex,
I completely agree with you. Something has gone a bit wrong with these modern female characters. What interests me is that they’re written by women and have HUGE appeal to teen girls. Don’t understand it at all!
January 18th, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Have you ever seen the movie “The Prize Winner of Defiance Ohio?” It is a real eye-opener about feminine power structures in the 50′s and 60′s. It also covers tough choices and really made me think about different ways that women can be strong.
January 18th, 2011 at 4:50 pm
Sarwat - it is a bit frightening to think that these books are written by and for women.
Sandra - I haven’t seen that film but I will definitely look it up.
January 18th, 2011 at 5:29 pm
‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ was created, plotted and written by Joss Whedon (obviously with many co-writers over the years whom happen to be male and female). Ultimately, it was his vision to turn a genre stereotype - the young blonde girl who was always killed in horror movies into something more powerful.
I haven’t read Twilight or Vampire Diaries (I was forced to watch the first Twilight movie, which I hated with a passion) simply because I don’t think it’s for me but I am a major Buffy fan, always have been always will be. I simply don’t like what my friends rave about, especially the character of Bella whom I find whiny and annoying. Indeed, Buffy wouldn’t entertain Bella if the two met.
What is interesting to me is that the character of Buffy was very powerful physically but she was also at odds with a very patriarchal organisation with The Watchers’ Council. Also rather interestingly, The Slayer was the female product, and indeed weapon, of this ancient, patriarchal organisation. I could talk all day about the importance of Buffy and the need for strong female role models in media.
I think Buffy, both the show and the character changed the landscape of television (for many reasons) and I hope the impact is still on screen to this day, although not in Twilight or Vampire Diaries by the looks of things.
Are all of our hopes now resting on Sookie Stackhouse?
January 18th, 2011 at 7:47 pm
You need to go back further. A chickflick from the 30s or 40s usually featured an incredibly strong woman lead - look at movies featuring Bette Davies, Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Greer Garson.
Characters had careers, ran corporations, even countries. They were great scientists, spies, warriors, zealots.
And the industry loved them, because they inspired women who had to step up and manage families, businesses, and jobs during the Depression and later in the war.
After that, the Men came home. And wanted their jobs back, and peace and quiet, and women to have lots of babies and stay out of the way and make everything pretty. And the industry bought into this in a big way, and didn’t really drop the propaganda until the big shoulders era of the 80s.
Look at Jeannie and Sam again, as potentially great women who live in a totally masculine world. It isn’t just the husbands who don’t want them to have powers - neighbours, friends who are in on the secret, husband’s work colleagues. Female powers undermine everything, make men worthless, and devalue the women whose role it is to make the very ordinary dingy little man feel like a king in his own home. Fantasy comedy was one of the few places where women could indulge in a brief daydream of being able to fix stuff, get out of the day to day routine, have luxuries for themselves. I found the longterm message quite subversive - watching them as a child I learned that men are easy to fool, happy if they think they’re in charge even when they really aren’t, and that some women will destroy you to preserve the status quo. My role model in them was Sam’s Mum.
These shows fit into two family trees. In the sitcom, I’m not so concerned - there are many different portrayals of women and some of them are very strong and capable. Fantasy shows, however, as you say, not so good.
Charmed had promise,and the UK Misfits has very strong women. Being Human was quite realistic in its gender politics, it will be interesting to see if the US version maintains that.
January 18th, 2011 at 7:56 pm
There’s obviously something in the water that has us womenfolk fired up at the moment- funnily enough, I did my own blog entry on a similar topic last week! In my case, it was spurred on by watching the whole first season of The Vampire Diaries, and my interest in the changes that had been made during adaptation.
In terms of being a role-model, I do think Elena’s a better character than Bella. She is much more proactive (I accept that’s not hard to do) than The Mopey One, and becomes increasingly so as the series progresses. She still has her girlfail moments and I accept she’s not the ideal, but I find her more encouraging and positive: a step in the right direction, even if she’s not the destination.
However, the TV version is an infinite improvement on the book version, where she’s a classic-blonde-queen-of-the-high-school, who is actively described as using her looks and popularity to get what she wants (something “Buffy” covered so well in the relationship between Buffy & Cordelia). She has never met a boy who didn’t want her, and is determined to add the new boy, Stefan, to her collection. She’s not a particularly endearing character.
Of course, there are other changes and they all fit in together, but I’m still trying to work out whether they’ve been made because of the inevitable comparisons with “Twilight”, or because even by the alarming YA female role-model standards we’re seeing today, the *original* version of Elena would be seen as even flimsier - we are talking about a book that was originally published 20 years ago, and for characters like this, the landscape has seismically shifted in that time…
(It’s a little more tangenital, but my original post, if you’re interested, is here: http://loummorgan.wordpress.com/2011/01/13/vampire-diary/)
January 20th, 2011 at 1:38 pm
Ian - I agree. Buffy was a great role model. The only thing I don’t like about it is this kung-fu (or kick boxing or whatever) element that all female heroines must be great fighters as well now. In the new Robin Hood show, Maid Marion is suddenly this amazing warrior. Same for Morgana in Merlin and Alice in the new Wonderland film. It seems to be an all or nothing thing where the female character is either a warrior or a whining moper. It would be nice to see something inbetween!
Fran - I love Endora in Bewitched! She is definitely a force to be reckoned with. I liked Charmed too actually, and didn’t really get all the negativity I saw in the likes of SFX.
Lou - interesting post - thanks for the link. I’ve heard that Elena is very different in the books but I think that actually makes me more keen to read them. It depends how the character is done - I don’t mind bitchy, prom queen characters as long as they’re aware that that’s what they are. One of my favourite heroines of all time is Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind. She can be selfish and cruel and single minded at times but at least she feels things passionately and is proactive in going after what she wants. She’s tough and not above clawing her way to the top. I prefer that to a sweet, nicey-nice character like Elena who is just so vanilla and doesn’t seem to have any fire inside her at all.
January 23rd, 2011 at 8:29 pm
Hi Alex - your comment about women being portrayed as warriors or whiners is so true. There doesn’t seem to be a happy medium. I read the LJ Smith books (author of the Vampire Diaries) about 15 years ago when they first came out and she writes great female heroines. It makes me so mad that LJ Smith is enjoying a revival simply because of the success of the vastly inferior Twilight, but that’s another issue