What are these women’s story?

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 What are these women’s story?


I think a fairly interesting woman to look at in Secrets & Lies would be Monica. Whilst we are not given a huge amount of backstory for her, we can sort of work out their story from a feminist perspective from her actions and thoughts. The main issue that Monica has in life is the fact that she can’t have children, and this clearly upsets her. However from this notion, we can assume that the feminist wave that we can compare her with would be the 1960’s wave. The 1960’s wave of feminism tackled the huge illusion that women need to have children, not work, and take care of the home. You can see massive contrasts between this ideology and Monica. Firstly, as said before, Monica is very clearly upset by the fact that she can’t have children. Whilst this isn’t a complete contradiction, her behaviour towards the subject for a while made it seem she wasn’t going to be content without a child which completely goes against the 1960’s wave ideology.  However, Maurice still loved her either way, which made it seem like a want more than a need. Similarly, Monica is seen to not work, as far as we can tell, and also work on the house with interior decoration. This contradicts the 1960’s ideology further, as she’s complying to all the old patriarchal stereotypes of being an obedient woman and wife. However throughout all of this, Maurice still loves for her regardless of what she can and what she can’t do which most likely wouldn’t of been the case further in the past. You should also consider the fact that Monica is middle class, and so its not like she has to work, and she can afford to do all of this with the house. So for Monica its more of a choice than a patriarchal requirement.

Comments

  1. Lisa SocratesMay 14, 2021 at 5:17 AM

    Ella, excellent ideas around patriarchy and ideologies, these are effectively applied in your discussion of Monica. You discuss a range of ideas which refer to her story as we see it on the screen. Even though it's the 1990s, Monica displays little inclination to pursue her own thing such as go out to work and have a career.

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