Women Are Getting Out of Hand

By Roger Rosenblatt

Strife be unto him who in enlightened times is fool enough to suggest that women are getting too big for their britches, but evidence abounds. There has now appeared on television The Sins of Dorian Gray, a modernized perversion of Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the famous senescent canvas became a filmed screen test, and Dorian was played by a woman. A remake of the 1946 movie It's a Wonderful Life cast Mario Thomas in the role established by Jimmy Stewart and Cloris Leachman as the once male angel. Mary Tyler Moore made her Broadway debut in 1980 with Whose Life Is It Anyway? in a part originally written for a man. Joan Rivers and Nancy Walker pressed Neil Simon to permit them to play the leads in a female rendering of The Odd Couple.

The mind heaves with possibilities: The Sisters Karamazov? Twelve Angry Ladies'? Young Girl with a Cornet? Mrs. Roberts? How long before the world is treated to a revival of Moby Dick, starring Victoria Principal as Captain Alice and ubiquitous Meryl Streep as the passionate yet complex crew? Or Steven Spielberg's E.T.T.E.? Or Richard Attenborough's epic film biography of the Indian pacifist Blandhi?

Naturally, one is told not to worry about these things. Such transformations do but signify the newly liberated consciousness wherein the contemporary male and female are learning to exchange and fuse their too long separate and restrictive identities. Thus in the past year alone have audiences been instructed and entertained by movies like Victor/Victoria, in which a woman impersonates a man in order to impersonate a woman; and The World According to Garp, featuring John Lithgow as the transsexual ex-pro-football player with a heart of gold; and Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman, decked out as the soap-opera heroine Dorothy Michaels, both receives and delivers his revelation: "I was a better man as a woman with a woman than I've ever been as a man with a woman." That, of course, is the essential message in these bottles: when a man assumes the role of a woman, or when a woman assumes a role formerly occupied by a man, it is the man who gains immeasurably from the virtues thus acquired.

The cultural goal of these exchanges would seem to be the creation of an androgynous ideal, a male hero with certain indispensable facets of his masculinity intact but displaying in great and blatant measure the desirable female attributes of gentleness forbearance and sensitivity. This is not at all the menacing androgyny of a Mick Jagger, whose odd dual nature appears to find its roots in the bowels of Greek mythology. Rather, it is represented by a fellow like Alan Alda, a man's man but wearing pastel sweaters. In fact, this heroic vision was realized long ago (minus the pastel sweaters) in such figures as Henry Fonda and the recently usurped Jimmy Stewart. What seems to be sought nowadays is a Californiated version of the former types, men who have achieved their "softness" specifically because of their therapeutic and ennobling association with women.

Underlying and supporting this image is the assumption that while women possess a superabundance of qualities that would, if transplanted to men, bring peace and glory to the lesser sex, men do not possess a comparable set of gifts to bestow on their opposites. Evidently such standard male characteristics as aggressiveness, forthrightness, companionability are thought not to travel well, or not to be worth adopting. Yet, if women can seize male roles in works of art in order to improve them, turnabout ought to be fair play. Could we not have the story of Monsieur Bovary, with George Segal as the love-starved Eddie? Or Harry Karenina? Or Dick Eyre? Would one ever forget the haunting mystery-cum-melody Larry, with Richard Gere in the part made memorable by Gene Tierney? Or Coal Miner's Son-in-Law, starring Sylvester Stallone as the boy who starts out with nothing but a guitar and barbells and works his way up to become the heaviest singer in Philadelphia?

To be sure, there are a few female roles that in fact could just as easily have been played by men. Any of Joan Crawford's parts, for instance, if one could have found a man sufficiently frightening. Barbara Stanwyck, possibly. Ava Gardner, no. Conversely, it is highly unlikely that an actress could have succeeded in roles assigned to Peter Lorre or Sydney Greenstreet, but the imagination is not stretched beyond tolerance to envision women in several of Gary Grant's roles, or in Humphrey Bogart's ("Here's looking at you, mister"). An argument might even be made that certain dramatic works would have been better off had male and female parts been exchanged at the start. Hamlet, which has often starred women, might appropriately have been conceived as Hamlette, the tragedy of a princess who could not make up her mind. Such decisions are history, however, and ought to lie beyond reversal. The sole purpose of changing Hamlet at this point would be to make the social statement that our hero would have been a nicer person as a female, that he never would have stooped to seek revenge by the sword but instead would have cleansed Denmark wholly by his demure and delightful example.

As applied to the real world, this sort of wishful revisionism is nonsense, to say the least, as anyone who has suffered under women in power knows amply. One of the melancholy rediscoveries of the late 20th century is that the fair sex, given the opportunities of the unfair, behave no better. Last spring Anne Burford resigned from the Environmental Protection Agency amid charges of gross mismanagement, which has always been considered an all-male province. Similarly, Mrs. Gandhi has the habit of revoking civil liberties from time to time--man's work most definitely. Not for nothing has Margaret Thatcher been branded "Attila the Hen" by her enemies, suggesting that in public life, as in art, not even a Hun is safe from female encroachments. Beside the crudeness of such impositions, the question of equal rights enters here as well. Clearly the future belongs to women. Have men no rights to the past?

Still, one must admit that it tickles the fancy to picture the great moments of revised classics, with transformed characters uttering new sets of lines. There is the doorway to the mansion. There are the hallway and the stairs. Arthur O'Hara is about to plead with Margaret Butler to give him one more chance and not to leave.

He cries out, distraught: "Oh, my darling, if you go, what shall I do?"

She faces him squarely. "Frankly, my dear, I don t give a damn what others may think. I'm going to swallow my pride and stay here forever."

--By Roger Rosenblatt This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.