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I am Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, hear me roar

Susan Isaacs' ludicrous search for politically correct heroines in movies, TV and books shows what happens when you reduce art to messages.

BRAVE DAMES AND WIMPETTES: WHAT WOMEN ARE REALLY DOING ON PAGE AND SCREEN | BY SUSAN ISAACS | BALLANTINE LIBRARY OF CONTEMPORARY THOUGHT | 112 PAGES

BY CHARLES TAYLOR
Return with us now to the thrilling days of the early 1990s. "Ice, Ice Baby" is on the charts, George Bush is in the White House. And the Backlash and the Beauty Myth are all the chatter. Reading Susan Isaacs' "Brave Dames and Wimpettes: What Women Are Really Doing on Page and Screen" is like finding yourself stuck in some recently -- but definitely -- passed era with only a cheap watch to tell you the real time: Whack it occasionally and it speeds up to the present before sputtering out.

Within the pamphlet structure of Ballantine's Library of -- you should pardon the expression -- Contemporary Thought, Isaacs surveys what she sees as the state of female representation in movies and popular novels right now. She's not entirely off-base. Isaacs starts out by saying, "Too many of today's female protagonists are still the tremulous, the willfully naive, the self-absorbed and self-pitying, the queens of passive aggression ... and too many of us are accepting them as feminist heroes." And she doesn't fall for paranoid explanations: "Clearly, there is no conspiracy of writers, actors, directors and studio and network executives scheming to keep females in their place by slipping subliminal messages into books, TV and movies."

If Isaacs had plunged into the question of why female passivity is still such a big sell to women, why women moviegoers and readers embrace drivel like "The Piano" or any of the string of mad-woman novels and memoirs that have descended from "The Bell Jar," she might have come up with a thorny, volatile tract. But you can't tell unpleasant truths when your bottom line is promoting role models. In "Brave Dames and Wimpettes" Isaacs has devised lists of the qualities that separate the former from the latter, and like some post-feminist Santa Claus deciding who's been naughty and who's been nice, Isaacs wades through a slew of recent female characters telling them they can't hide from her judgment. She sees if you've been whining, she sees if you've been strong.

Isaacs is right that pop culture does send messages. But like any ideologue, she gets the messages all wrong. What makes her unique is that the ideologues who are usually clueless when it comes to pop culture are intellectuals and academics, people who are careful to maintain their studied distance. Isaacs, though, is a pop novelist. She's honest enough to admit that "what pleases me may disappoint me or even anger me." Rather than explore that contradiction, though, Isaacs has relegated pleasure to the above sentence in her summing up. It seems to have no place in the nearly 90 pages that precede it, and thus she falls right into the trap that awaits most ideologically based surveys: What she's written bears very little relation to the way most of us experience books and movies.

Does anybody who has laughed at "The Simpsons" think of Marge as "the lone voice of decency speaking out against her town's and her husband's stupidity"? Is there anybody who has enjoyed "Gone With the Wind" because Scarlett, while lacking in the "ethics department," shows "devotion to the land" and "incredible tenaciousness"? (Isn't Scarlett such a great character because her cunning, deviousness and just plain bitchiness make her a relief from Olivia de Havilland's noble sop, Melanie?) But as much as Isaacs claims to have had it with saintly nobility, she's a sucker for it. Her example of a good, strong male character, one who may be a husband and father but is "rarely defined by those roles," is boring old Gregory Peck in "To Kill a Mockingbird." She loves "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" not because it's a frontier soaper but because "when she isn't healing the sick or caring for her children, she supports Indian rights, seeks equality for blacks in Colorado Springs, and sympathizes with the barmaids/prostitutes who work in the local saloon/brothel."

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