[ SECRET POST #2245

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2245 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 098 secrets from Secret Submission Post #321.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ], [ 1 2 3 4 - come on, troll with a little more subtlety ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[cbrachyrhynchos]

I'm just boggling at the idea of Mattie as masculine when she's the archetypal frontier spinster right down to the regional, political, and religious grudges. Her virtues are that she's pious, smart, literate, numerate, thrifty, persuasive, and assertively loyal to her family (even if novel-Mattie is harshly critical of the faults of her siblings.) To the extent that she is masculine in taking control of the family business as a teenager, that decision is driven by the incompetence of her slightly older brother, and the emotional wreck of her mother. Women taking control in order to prevent a decline into poverty is a theme as old as Jane Austen.

Certainly that's not the model of second- and third-wave feminism, but it certainly isn't what I call "masculine" either. A central theme of True Grit is that Mattie and Cogburn are both products of their time and sit uneasily in it. Cogburn is a moral monster, a terrorist of Bloody Kansas who becomes a Federal Marshal primarily by virtue of American indifference to "Indiana Territory," who has a short career as a hired thug in a range war before becoming a sideshow freak.

Mattie, in contrast is a woman ahead of her time. She successfully takes over her family's business, and earns a reputation as an old maid and opinionated woman. Her culture and time doesn't know how to deal with women who do that who are not wives.

Saying that either the Coens or Portis are engaged in a celebration of masculinity ignores the fact that the central male character of both movie and novel is a deeply disturbed and amoral anti-hero.