Wednesday, January 2, 2013

Elizabeth Scalia today offers two opposing feminine perspectives on Les Mis and cites what's wrong with both of them.  She also includes Deacon Greg Kandra's thoughts on the feminist critique of Les Mis

Scalia writes:
"As Deacon Greg writes earlier, if this is what we’ve come to, something is wrong. If our avenues to humanity are going to be detoured via one-way-streets of gender-obsession; if our access to God is going to be limited to art that conforms to an idea of virtue so strict as to eliminate depictions of beauty (or ugliness) for fear of temptation, then we are going to diminish our thinking, and therefore our understanding of both God and humanity, until our world and our souls become very, very small."

This is increasingly the division between secular and religious life.  Religion presents a view of virtue that is so strict as to force out reality on the one hand, and the secular view wants so badly for reality to be just that it does the exact same thing.

Update

I went back and read Stacy Wolf's feminist critique on the Washington Post's website and came away with the following impression.

Wolf's position is a response to the injustice of the position of women in the Paris of Les Mis.  She objects to the victimization of women in the movie, and their being saved by men.  But the problem is that these things happen in real life.  Women have been victimized and sometimes they have been saved by men. 

Wolf contrasts the women Les Mis to other types of female characters.  She writes of powerful female protagonists in other movies:
"They’re human. They struggle. They take action. The plot isn’t just what happens to them but what they make happen. These women have lives."
Victimized women are human.  They struggle and take action and have lives.  Not every woman is The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  In fact, most women who have been victimized do not find themselves in the kind of empowered position portrayed in the movies Wolf cites.  Do they not deserve to have their lives portrayed in art?

Must it always be a problem when female roles in art don't support our modern ideas of how one should empower women?  Les Mis inspires compassion.  Valjean's response to Fantine is exceptional and it provides a model for how anyone should respond to such situations in the real world.  Should we not show that because it doesn't offer a narrative that supports feminism? 

This is the kind of attitude I had in mind when I wrote about secular viewpoints forcing out reality.  It seems that it is more important to Wolf that a movie present an empowering view of femininity than that it reflect reality and compassionate responses to reality.  This is a sacrifice of reality and compassion to ideology.  It also compromises good art if art must always be subservient to ideological allegiance.


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