The
following article is a departure from my usual column about my bumbling,
clumsy life. I had hoped to have it accepted for publication in a
magazine, but so far, I haven't had any luck. If you have any
suggestions on where I might place this article, please let me know.
Enjoy!
In a February 2010 Chronicle of Higher Education article
entitled, “The Thrill is Gone: Recent films portray the malaise of
academic life,” Jeffrey Williams describes the prosaic lifestyle of the
professoriate portrayed in recent films The Visitor, Smart People, and Elegy.
Uninspired in the classroom or by their research, these aging
professors belie the popular stereotype of the beloved tweedy professor
pontificating to groups of adoring students.
Though much of Williams’ article focuses on
recent portrayals of the professoriate, the author claims “The
professor has long been a staple in film” and briefly outlines the
popularity of the professor character in films such as Horse Feathers (1932), The Absent-Minded Professor (1961), and Animal House (1978).
Do you see a trend here?
Williams’ film selections only feature white, male professors.
Unfortunately, not only does Williams
neglect to mention women, but also he assumes his audience is male: “We
are overachievers who can only wistfully imagine the days of the
relaxed, leisurely pipe-smoking professor.” We are? Certainly pipe
smoking isn’t limited to men, but the gendered stereotype is clear.
Professors are male.
At first, I reasoned that Williams refers
only to male professors because few films depict women as college
professors. I quickly discovered that this isn’t true. In fact, I found
several films that portray women as professors. Recent statistics
showing the rise in the female professoriate also bear out this trend in
films. According to a study conducted by the Association of American
Colleges and Universities in 2005, women constitute 41% of all
full-time, tenure-track faculty members in all ranks.
Even though the number of women in the
professoriate continues to trend upward (from a paltry 19% in 1970),
there are several films as far back as 1941 that feature female
professors. In Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941), Martha Scott plays
the protagonist, Ella Bishop, an English professor at the fictional
Midwestern University. In 1943, Greer Garson played Madame Curie in a
film of the same name, and she shows a Paris academy what it means to be
both a woman and a scientist.
However, no matter the time period in which
films are produced, balance is the overarching theme that emerges from
most all films in which women are portrayed as professors. Several films
portray women as enjoying successful academic careers with disastrous
personal lives while others show only one small facet of a female
professor’s life.
In The Mirror Has Two Faces (1996),
Rose Morgan (Barbra Streisand) is a popular professor at Columbia
University. Her students listen with rapt attention as she discusses the
nature of love in medieval texts such as The Art of Courtly Love.
She encourages students’ participation, calls on them by name, and
moves around the classroom with ease and grace. Outside of the
classroom, Rose schlumps around in ill-fitting clothes, fakes colds to
cancel dates, and capitulates (at first) to her mother’s and sister’s
advice to change her eating habits.
More tragically in Wit (2001),
Vivian Bearing (Emma Thompson) is a brilliant scholar dying of cancer.
She refers to herself as having made an “immeasurable contribution” to
her field (the study of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets). Her former student
(and her current doctor) describes her in the classroom: “She gave a
hell of a lecture. No notes. Not a word out of place. It was
impressive.” However, as Vivian endures endless chemotherapy treatments,
she, for the most part, suffers alone. Only one person other than the
medical staff visits her. Ironically, Vivian’s visitor is a female
professor, one of Vivian’s mentors, who encouraged Vivian as a student
to “go out. Enjoy being with friends.” Instead, Vivian went to the
library and says later, “I thought being extremely smart would take care
of it.”
Interestingly, in Wit and The Mirror Has Two Faces,
neither characters’ work life seems to be adversely affected by her
personal life. Both Vivian and Rose are accomplished teachers and
scholars despite their isolation and loneliness, and neither let these
parts of their personal lives into their classrooms. Not so in Mona Lisa Smile
(2003). Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts) is deeply affected by a
student’s editorial about Katherine’s decision to encourage a student to
attend law school. Following the publication of the editorial,
Katherine shows ads to her art history class depicting “the perfect
housewife.” These ads from the 1950s depict women cheerfully vacuuming
and ironing to please their husbands and families. Katherine asks the
students, “What will the future scholars see when they study us?” When
the students fail to respond, Katherine exclaims with great
disappointment, “I didn’t realize that by demanding excellence that I
would be challenging the roles you were ‘born to fill.’ My mistake.” She
storms from the classroom shouting, “Class dismissed!”
Similarly, Elaine Miller’s (Frances McDormand) outburst in Almost Famous
(2000) in her classroom shows her personal life seeping into her
professional life. After a few months of sporadic phone calls from her
teenage son on the road with fictional band Stillwater, Elaine, in the
middle of a lecture about Carl Jung, blurts out, “Rock stars have
kidnapped my son!” and she flees from the classroom.
In other films, female professors’ personal rather than professional lives are almost entirely the focus of the film. In Desert Hearts
(1985), Helen Shaver’s character, Vivian Bell, is never shown in the
classroom or in an office (though at one point she is shown leafing
through several books and discusses preparing some lectures). Desert Hearts
certainly explores the stereotype of what a literature professor should
look like (prim) and be (prudish), but the focus of the film is Bell’s
exploration of her sexuality in light of her budding relationship with a
young, female artist.
Likewise, in Away We Go (2009),
Maggie Gyllanhaal’s LN Fisher-Hirren, is only shown once in her office
where she is breastfeeding her two children simultaneously. LN, in fact,
is completely defined by her role as a mother, and though she refers
briefly to Simone de Beauvior, LN never reveals what she studies or
teaches.
LN isn’t the only female professor
character to be defined or characterized by her gender. There are a few
films that sexualize the female professoriate. In Bickford Schmeckler’s Cool Ideas
(2006), Cheryl Hines plays Professor Adams, a cosmology professor.
While discussing Bickford’s cool ideas, she loosens her hair from its
tight bun and says to Bickford, “You penetrate me.” Later, as she reads
Bickford’s book, she receives oral sex in a hot tub and orgasms,
gripping his book tightly.
In Back to School (1986), Diane
Turner (Sally Kellerman) enters the classroom to a wolf whistle. She
then reads Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Joyce’s Ulysses and after
Rodney Dangerfield’s orgasmic agreement with her reading, she thanks
him and tells the class that she’ll describe the reading list to “see
what else turns you on.”
On the other hand, some films show female professors only as professionals. In The Sure Thing
(1985), Professor Taubs (Viveca Lindfors) is only shown in the
classroom where she has a profound effect on students Walter Gibson
(John Cusack) and Alison Bradbury (Daphne Zuniga). Her writing
assignments (“Life’s the ultimate experience,” she exclaims) encourage
the students’ romance from the beginning to the end of the film. Though
it’s clear from Professor Taubs’ advice that her life outside the
academy influences her pedagogy, we are never privy to that life.
In Madame Curie (1943), Marie Curie
spends the majority of the film in her lab at Municipal School of
Industrial Physics and Chemistry in Paris. Though we do see her interact
with her children these interactions take place off school grounds and
discussion in her lab doesn’t include her children. On the other hand,
many of her interactions with her husband take place in the lab though
the discussions are mostly professional in nature. Though the film shows
Marie as having achieved somewhat of a balance between her personal and
professional lives the most powerful images of Marie are of her in her
lab by herself or on stage receiving awards.
Despite these numerous one-sided portrayals
of the life of a female professor, there are two movies that show a
successful female academic who has found a sense of balance.
In Cheers for Miss Bishop (1941),
Ella Bishop is a student-cum-professor at Midwestern University in 1883.
Ella is an excellent teacher who demands excellence in the classroom
while supporting and mentoring her students outside the classroom.
Respected by her colleagues and loved by her small family (her mother
and cousin), Ella enjoys her life. She is, however, disappointed in
love. She becomes engaged only to find her fiancé bedding her cousin
Amy. When Amy and the fiancé leave for New York, Ella is upset, but she
is comforted by her long-time friend, Sam (who tried to propose marriage
to her in the past). Amy returns in a few months, pregnant and
abandoned. After Amy dies in labor, Ella happily takes care of the baby.
Many years later, Ella falls in love again, but the man’s wife refuses
to give him a divorce. After rejecting his offer to go abroad where no
one will know them, Ella looks in a mirror and spits out: “You’re a
teacher. You set yourself up to carry a beacon for boys and girls to see
by. Well carry it!” This is really the only point at which Ella seems
utterly exasperated by her life. Though she is disappointed, Ella
continues to teach. In the final scenes of the film, the university
gives her a retirement party in which several of her former students, a
U.S. Senator and a Nobel prize-winning astronomer among them, thank Ella
for her mentorship. After the party, she dies at home with her faithful
friend Sam by her side.
Cheers for Miss Bishop is the only film that shows a university
professor from the beginning of her career until its end. It shows us
someone who doesn’t achieve all that she had wished in her early days (a
husband and her own children), but she does appear to be happy with her
life and values her role as an educator in and outside the classroom.
In one scene, Ella gives advice to her grandniece about not running off
with a married man. Ella discourages her, not to save her reputation,
but because it would be a missed chance to become a mother.
In Teacher’s Pet (1958), Doris Day plays Erica Stone, a journalism instructor at an unnamed city university. As in Desert Hearts,
stereotypes abound, but they are quickly debunked and thrown out. When
Clark Gable as newspaperman James Gannon marches into Erica’s classroom
to tell her why journalism can’t be taught in a classroom, he begins to
lecture a frumpy brunette with glasses. She looks at him confusedly and
indicates that she’s not the teacher. When Doris Day enters the
classroom as Erica, James stares at her blonde coiffure and his face
registers surprise and then delight that she is the teacher. Later in
the class, Erica reads a letter from James turning down her request for
him to speak to her class about journalism. She dismisses the letter and
paints a portrait of what this hardnosed journalist probably looks like
for the class. She gives him a smirk, a cigarette, a wrinkled suit, and
a great disdain for formal education. “But,” she says, “Education
teaches you how to spell experience.” James stays on in the class
(though he changes his name) to prove her wrong. As he gets to know her,
he sees that she is smart and honest in her drive to educate her
students about journalism. When he asks her why she teaches, she tells
him, “Occasionally, a musician wants to be a conductor. He wants a
hundred musicians play music the way he hears it. If I can influence a
few students who might some day become reporters and eventually editors,
well, I think it’s worth a try. You see, I have my own ideas about what
newspapers should be, and I know they can be a great deal better than
they are.” When she discovers who James really is, she doesn’t lash out
but is merely disappointed by him. She tells him that he’s been unfair
to the other students in the class who have worked hard to be there. He
grabs her in a kiss, but she doesn’t respond physically and only says
after he releases her, “Are you finished now?”
This is unlike a similar scene in Mona Lisa Smile
when Katherine Watson complains bitterly to a colleague, Italian
professor Bill Dunbar (Dominic West), about Wellesley women who want
little more than a finishing school education. When she leaves his
office, he runs after with a gift and catches her in a kiss. From that
point in the film until she discovers that he’s been lying to her, she
seemingly forgets about her anger toward Wellesley.
Conversely, in Teacher’s Pet, both
James and Erica are changed by their intellectual relationship to one
another. James begins to believe that she’s right about education being
more important than experience. After all, Erica is an educated woman
who worked on her father’s newspaper (her father won a Pulitzer Prize in
journalism). However, James changes his mind when he reads one of her
father’s articles and discovers that her father’s newspaper is little
more than a small town gossip rag. James tells Erica to take off her
rose-colored glasses where her father is concerned, and she too reads
her father’s work with a critical eye, seeing it for what it really is.
By the film’s end, James and Erica have reached an interesting balance.
James has accepted her invitation to be a guest lecturer in her class,
and Erica has convinced him to run fewer blood and gut stories in favor
of a few “think” pieces.
What I like about Teacher’s Pet is
that Erica Jones doesn’t appear to be unhappy or dissatisfied with
either her personal or professional life. She’s single, employed, and
ambitious. She has reached a balance in her own life and thus is able to
achieve another one with a future colleague whom she educates and who
educates her.
It’s unfortunate that the only two films
which depict the female professor as fulfilled both personally and
professionally are more than fifty years old. As women continue to enter
the professoriate in the U.S. in growing numbers, we need more big
screen portrayals that complicate rather than simplify the life of the
female professor. Instead of the lapsing into the personal/professional
dichotomy, films could show how this dichotomy exists to keep female
professors from meaningful promotion within the academy (i.e. women are
fulfilled at work or at home, never both). Though such dichotomies are
certainly not limited to professions inside the academy, I would argue
that because teaching is one of the most visible professions portrayed
on film these dichotomies are strikingly prescient for women in this
traditionally male field . Debunking such dichotomies is important for
the ever-rising population of students entering college today. According
to a survey conducted by National Center for Education Statistics,
enrollment in degree-granting institutions has grown from 7.4 million in
1970 to 15.6 million in 2007. Of these students, over 50% are women.
These women need to be exposed to their professors’ lives as ones that
are rich, complex, and oftentimes, deeply satisfying both inside and
outside the classroom. Unlike Williams’ claim that “The thrill is gone”
for male academics on the big screen, for women, the thrill has just
begun.
