Role Models Reconsidered

Recently, I have been fed up with people criticizing the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer for providing young girls with a poor female role model. I love those books without shame, and I feel like I’ve learned some good things about life from them. Maybe if all those indignant feminists took a step back from their Bella Swan bashing, they’d realize that maybe it’s time we redefine what makes a character a Strong Female Role Model.
Feminism no longer means rebelling against your husband and getting a secretarial job. Women today compete in the world as equals to men. It took a revolution to get us to where we are, and it’s something we deserve to be proud of. But the battle to free American women of the tyranny of men is largely behind us. While the Strong Female Role Models of the past were the Mary Tyler Moores and other characters who stepped out into the workforce, female characters in our modern stories should demonstrate self-reflection and the ability to choose what is right for them in their own life. This extends far beyond the decision to put career first or family first.
The film Girl, Interrupted is narrated by the character of Susanna Kaysen, a young woman who has just attempted suicide and is placed in a mental institution. She is promiscuous, has a bad attitude, and looks at the world in a very dark way. She’s not a character you would want your little girl to encounter. However, she deserves some credit for the huge decisions she makes over the course of the movie. While she is in the mental hospital, you can tell Susanna is tempted to sink into the oblivion of life in an institution. She says she wants to go, but her refusal to make progress during therapy shows how she struggles with the decision to stay in that never-a-dull-moment hospital or to go out into the big, scary world. For many people, to go through life as a happy person is a proactive decision they must make. I learned that for myself at thirteen, and Susanna learned that after a difficult year in a mental institution. This is a life lesson that we are often unaware of. Susanna’s decision to get better, which she makes in a time of deep inner turmoil, shows maturity and responsibility that any young woman would benefit from seeing.
Carolyn, from Pumpkin, if not for her evolution over the course of the film, is an example of a disastrous modern role model. The irony is that she is presented as a young woman who is going somewhere in this world, someone who has got it together. She has a perfect tennis-star boyfriend, is the most beloved sister in her sorority, and always wears a pleasant expression. It is only after her poetry professor reveals Carolyn’s naiveté to her classmates and the film’s audience that we realize she is actually a very weak person. In her whole life, she has never made a real decision for herself. She is only a happy person because she has never really considered what will make her happy, only what should make her happy. Once her eyes are opened to this, Carolyn decides the only thing that will make her happy is dating a sweet-natured mentally-handicapped boy. Though the community is thrown into a frenzy over this, she is not actually harming the boy, but making him happy as well. After more self-reflection, Carolyn drops out of school and becomes a very different person. While I can’t condone academic negligence and slightly inappropriate romances, it is undeniable that Carolyn’s evolution shows how careful self-reflection can lead to a more fulfilling life.
Shopgirl presents us with a very normal, timid girl named Mirabelle, who longs for a real romance just like every young woman does. This is harmful to her though, since she falls very easily under the spell of a man whose feelings for her are lukewarm. Ray wins her over quickly by buying her nice things and giving the lonely girl attention. It is a painful thing to watch as she slowly gets her heart broken by his apathy, but her humanity in dealing with the situation makes her into a good, solid role model, if not a great one. She forces herself to snap out of her delusion and face the harsh reality that he doesn’t love her. Mirabelle deliberately pushes through the pain in order to get to the other side of the break-up. This is something every girl will deal with in her life, and it is an impressively big move for such a quiet girl.
Shanté , in Two Can Play That Game, is a character specifically written to be a good role model for other women. She is independently wealthy, she is happy and well-adjusted, and she is a powerful businesswoman. She even states in the film that her friends look up to her when it comes to dealing with relationships. She claims to know every rule in the book when it comes to keeping your man in line. When she catches her perfect boyfriend at a club with another woman, she calmly enacts a step-by-step process to win him back. Things go awry very quickly, though, when her boyfriend’s friend gets involved and starts scheming against her. The game gets tangled up, and soon Shanté is wishing it would all just disappear and she could get back together with her boyfriend. Though she is cool and confident, her main quality throughout the film is how insincere she is. She thinks she knows what she wants: to teach her man a lesson. But what she really, truly wants is for them to be happily in love again. If she were only honest with herself, she would see that talking to him in a sincere way is the best way to get what she really wants. All this time, she is narrating directly to the camera all these confident little rules that are failing left and right. This woman is a bad role model. If she could just take a step back and see that overpowering men is not what being a strong woman means, Shanté could get what she wants and be happy again. This is another case of knowing yourself and being honest with what you want.
In Twilight, Bella Swan has made a proactive decision in deciding her own future. How can that be called weak? Choosing vampirism over college in order to spend eternity with your soul mate might have been considered a poor career move back in the sixties, but hello, it is a new era and it is up to us to define what a woman’s life should be like. Feminism has evolved from “you’re strong if you do” to “you’re weak if you don’t.” The millions of choices in a woman’s life should be her choices to make. Instead of being what the world thinks she should be, she needs to become what she feels she should be. These characters, apart from Shanté , each dug into their own souls to find out what they want from life. Instead of judging women for the choices they make, we should just cherish the fact that we have all these options. Well, except vampirism, I guess. Unfortunately. [1239 words]


Works Cited

Girl, Interrupted. Dir. James Mangold. Perf. Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie. DVD. Columbia Pictures, 1999.

Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight. Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. 2005.

Pumpkin. Dir. Anthony Abrams and Adam Larson Broder. Perf. Christinna Ricci, Hank Harris. DVD. United Artists, 2002.

Shopgirl. Dir. Anand Tucker. Perf. Claire Danes, Steve Martin. DVD. Touchstone Pictures, 2005.
Two Can Play That Game. Dir. Mark Brown. Perf. Vivica A. Fox, Morris Chestnut. DVD. Scr