Blog

The rose and the sword: Laurel Gouveia, an appreciation

The arrival in movie theaters of the film “Maleficent” marks the return of the archetype – cliché might be a better word – of the Wicked Stepmother but with a twist. 

Post-feminist Hollywood is no dummy. It knows in the 21st-century that its filmmakers cannot afford to reinforce the sexist notion of the older woman out to get the Pretty Young Thing, which is the basis of “Cinderella,” “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty.” So there has to be a subplot about how the Pretty Young Thing’s daddy did Maleficent wrong when she was a pretty young thing.

You can revise a fairy tale to make the villain more of an antiheroine. You cannot, however, change history. The classic fairy tales, like much of culture, were created by men, who have feared the power of women, particularly the power of older women.

As they age, women develop a certain wisdom, a sophisticated, fluid sexuality – to say nothing of a disposable income. They’re no longer waiting to be rescued or impregnated by men, if indeed they ever were. They are free, and that’s powerful and frightening, particularly to the sex that has always held all the toys in the sandbox.

Because of their bodily cycles, women remain, though, the more visible reminder that we are all, if we’re lucky, going to get old. And we’re all going to die. Men don’t like that. With the Pretty Young Thing, they can pretend to be virile forever. With the powerful Crone archetype, eh, not so much.

I’ve been thinking a lot about stepmothers and female archetypes this past weekend with the passing of my own stepmother, Laurel Gouveia, after a long illness.

Read more...

 

Read More

Does this (pants) role make me look fat?

“I hate looksism,” I told my friends the other night at dinner, though truth be told, I’m as guilty of it as the next person.

I was reminded of this while reading an article in the May 24 edition of The New York Times’ Arts section titled, “What Matters More, the Singer’s Shape, or Her Sound?”, in which critics Anthony Tommasini and Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim spoke with reporter Michael Cooper about the brouhaha over Tara Erraught’s appearance – emphasis on the word “appearance” – as Octavian in the Glyndebourne music festival’s production of Richard Strauss’ “Der Rosenkavalier.”

For the uninitiated, “Der Rosenkavalier” is an easy-on–the-eyes-and -ears opera about an older woman learning to let go of her young lover. (It has a justly famous waltz that makes gorgeous use of sequential phrases, played by the orchestra’s string section, which George Balanchine used to cap off his glittering ballet “Vienna Waltzes.”)

The older woman, called the Marschallin, is one of those glamorous soprano roles, sung by the likes of Renee Fleming.  At Glyndebourne, it was filled fetchingly by Kate Royal. The lover, Octavian, is a pants role in which a mezzo has to pretend to be a handsome youth. Erraught, who apparently sang gloriously, is a woman with a classic pear shape, which neither lends itself to pants nor suggests slim-hipped James Deans. And the (male) critics let her have it, signaling out her “puppy fat.”

Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim’s analysis got to the heart of the problem for those critics...

Read more...

 

Read More