My mother, who is ill with this same virus that has swooped through the town, stopped by today bearing Kipp’s birthday present. She didn’t stay, and asked if I had any good videos she could borrow. Videos, not DVDs.
Her request sent me to the basement, to rummage around in a box and I pulled two films, half at random, that I thought she might enjoy: Green Card and Mrs. Miniver. She said she’d already seen Green Card, but had never seen Mrs. Miniver.
“You’ve never seen, Mrs. Miniver?” I asked, incredulously. "Greer Garson? Best Actress?"
“No, nope. I don’t think so.”
I think she has. I think she just doesn’t remember.
After she left I realized that those two movies I pulled from the box hardly reflected a random choice. I had offered up to her the two strongest cinematic ideals of my young womanhood. I never questioned why these ideals appealed to me; they just did and I let them, more than once.
When I was single, living on my own, (age 25-30) what I adored, even more than the Green Card love story involving the glorious Gerard Depardieu, was the film's image of an independent woman, surviving by doing something she loved and having a beautiful, private, quiet space to come home to, where she could, quite literally “tend her own garden”, even in her pajamas. To drink coffee in one’s kitchen and listen to the rain, seemed to me, then, the height of romance. As for the man/woman thing, well, life must go on.
As did mine. So fast forward a few years later.
I had become a new mother, not yet a wife, but that hardly seemed to mar whatever domestic ideal that was percolating in my brain. One evening, while nursing Kipp, I happened upon a PBS broadcast of the 1942 movie Mrs. Miniver. I know I’d seen it before, but suddenly it had new relevance. Kay Miniver seemed the picture of contentment. She had time to dress beautifully and shop in London for pretty hats, time to speak graciously and kindly with the stationmaster (who ended up naming a rose after her). She had plenty of time to be gentle, indulgent and loving towards her husband, children and servants—because, of course, she had servants—a cook, a maid, and a gardener, I think. And when WWII finally tested her mettle, she had endless reserves of moral courage.
Mrs. Miniver, the veritable angel of the house, was probably an unsuitable ideal for me to have had, given that Virginia Woolf had long since slain the angel I was never raised to be. (And man, did Pearl S. Buck stick a fork in her as well, but I only found that out this summer.) I was clued in quite early, though, that if I was going to avoid being the bitch in the house, it was going to take a little part-time help.
Angels and bitches aside, what I haven’t managed to run across is any sort of cinematic ideal that appeals to the woman I am right now. Is it because women’s stories have become such an impoverished cinematic genre that such an ideal doesn’t exist, or is it because I have become so much more complex that an ideal could never suffice?
Or have I just not seen any really good movies lately?
Regardless, I’m not immune from needing other women as role models. In fact, I have stumbled across one I’m about to investigate further, but she’s entirely real-life. Her name is Riane Eisler and I did not know she existed until the other day in my sickbed when I happened to read her chapter in Cathleen Rountree's On Women Turning 60. I was absolutely galvanized by some of what she had to say and I'm anxious to blog more about her once I do further research.
6:54:29 PM 
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