Salon.com > Margot Mifflin

Mockingbird sings

Tue, 06 Jun 2006 12:00:00 +0000

The good news is that Harper Lee is alive, living with her sister in their hometown of Monroeville, Ala. She hasn't published a book since her Pulitzer Prize-winning "To Kill a Mockingbird" (1960), the most popular American novel of the 20th century (still beguiling nearly 1 million readers a year), which begat a film so true to its namesake that the two have merged in the public mind. The bad news is that she gave her last interview in 1964 and refused to cooperate with Charles Shields for this biography, which starts with a bang and ends with a desperate cry for help. Still, what "Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee" lacks in access, it makes up for in excellent timing and impressive research.

The real Calamity Jane

Tue, 06 Dec 2005 12:08:00 +0000

As author James D. McLaird confesses in his conclusion to "Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend," historians sure know how to ruin a good story. In this case, somebody had to do it. Calamity Jane -- 19th century gunslinger, drinker and cross-dresser -- was so barnacled over with myth that it had become impossible to see the lady for the lore. From dime-store novels of the 1870s and '80s chronicling her frontier fearlessness, to Doris Day's G-rated Jane in the 1953 musical "Calamity Jane," to Jane Alexander's feminist reanimation of her in a 1984 ABC special, to Robin Weigert's blowsy portrayal of her on the HBO series "Deadwood," Calamity Jane has served as a Rorschach blot for devotees of unconventional women for over a century. Then again there was Larry McMurtry's "Buffalo Girls" -- published in 1990 -- which trashed the myth altogether, casting her as a drunk, a liar and a hermaphrodite.

Dr. Dittohead

Thu, 08 Apr 2004 20:06:00 +0000

I was sitting in therapy describing an in-law I like, and quickly heading for a "but."

"He's a loving, caring, selfless man -- but his politics are all about hatred," I said. "He's not educated, and more significant, he's ignorant -- he actually listens to Rush Limbaugh."

I waited for a "Whoo boy!" or a sympathetic smile, but my shrink just stared at me, expressionless.

"I assume you're not a Limbaugh fan," I ventured, assured that this woman, so nuanced in her thinking, couldn't possibly be a Dittohead. She was so reasonable that I couldn't imagine her getting off on Rush's demented tirades. She didn't seem square enough for his politics, and I was certain no hate radio fan was capable of her intellectual sophistication. Besides, she was an educated urban Jewish professional, and Rush's audience consisted largely of white suburban males.

She held my gaze a few excruciating seconds longer. "Actually, I am," she said. My moral compass began spinning wildly. I was suddenly sitting with someone new. The levelheaded sage in whom I'd confided for nearly a year had been replaced by an off-the-rack ideologue.

“Shrek” is not Shrek!

Thu, 24 May 2001 19:36:00 +0000

The hallelujah chorus has begun. Since it opened last week, "Shrek" has become a box-office hit, with the second highest debut for an animated film after "Toy Story 2." Entertainment Weekly calls it "a feisty but good natured embrace of the inner ogre in everyone." Variety deems it "an instant animated classic." And the Washington Post says it's, well, "perdurable." There are dissenters: Some critics have chafed at the potty humor and the Disney-bashing industry in jokes, and in the New Yorker last week, Anthony Lane smartly questioned the merits of realism as "the Holy Grail" of computer animation, especially at the expense of genuine fairy tale charm.

But in this sea of media attention, one small detail seems to have gone unremarked: Has no William Steig fan noticed that "Shrek" is not Shrek? That the book on which the movie is based does not feature a sensitive hero, an incarcerated princess or a host of abused Disney characters fated for "resettlement"? That the directors have traded the subversive misanthropy of Steig's 1990 book for a Hollywood ending? That the animators jettisoned Steig's wonderfully loopy illustration style so they could join the digital race to realism? Or that the film doesn't feature a single line of Steig's crotchety dialogue? Not even Shrek's masterful ode to his blue-lipped mistress: "Your horny warts, your rosy wens/like slimy bogs and fusty fens/thrill me."

Who are you calling “Ms.”?

Thu, 27 Jul 2000 19:23:00 +0000

It started at a children's backyard birthday party when a little girl I'd never met ran up to tell me about a puppet show, stopping first to ask my name. I gave her my given name, but she said her mother wanted her to use people's "grown-up names -- like Mrs." When I told her she could call me "Ms. Mifflin," I saw by her confusion that this hadn't been offered as an option. So I found myself on my knees explaining it, secretly hoping that her mother wouldn't come after me with a garden hose for imparting this feminist fact of life to her 5-year-old daughter.

In the next few weeks, I became acutely aware of how often I was not addressed as Ms. socially. School officials, car mechanics and telemarketers all used Mrs. or Miss, hitching it arbitrarily to my surname or my husband's.

I began asking friends when and by whom they are called Ms. For most, it happens only at work. An administrator at my daughter's elementary school told me that although many teachers choose Ms. as a courtesy title, most students call them Mrs. whether they're married or not. And so it seems that Ms. -- popularized in the '70s and intended to elide marital status as Mr. does -- has become the norm in the professional world. But it hasn't stuck socially. Why?

Singing the pink blues

Mon, 13 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

Two years ago, for a few moments on Christmas morning, I was delightfully deluded. As my 2-year-old unwrapped her Little Tikes Wee Waffle farm set, I imagined we were in an idyllic, prelapsarian toddler phase in which children's toys were unisex.

At least this year, I thought, there will be no battles over whether Barbie and her wardrobe will inhabit our house, no pop-psych deconstructions of the Little Mermaid trading her voice for a husband. We won't debate whether Power Rangers provide badly needed female action heroes or equal opportunity violence. It will be all Duplos, Play Doh and Beanie Babies.

But I was wrong.

As we assembled the farm set, we found that the father plugged into a round hole in the driver's seat of the tractor but the mother -- literally a square peg in a round hole -- didn't. And so it began.

Thirty years of feminism notwithstanding, the mass-market toy industry has either slept through the women's movement or woefully misunderstood it. Nowhere is this more apparent than at the annual American International Toy Fair, where gender apartheid flowers freely in a hothouse of go-go commerce: girls get dolls, kitchen sets and makeup packaged in Pepto-Bismol pink; boys get weapons, action figures and vehicles in everything but pink. The color-coding starts at birth, and the role assignments kick in when children are still toddlers, barely able to keep their balance, much less process the demands of their gender.

Wake up, Sleeping Beauty!

Fri, 20 Aug 1999 16:00:00 +0000

Idealistic mothers like me should get a parental advisory before trying to raise junior feminists: Withhold Barbie at age 2, and you'll create Mattel's dream consumer by 3. Suggest to your child that Snow White might be more fun than Cinderella because she actually does something -- makes friends, finds a job, becomes a surrogate mother -- and you'll create a stubborn fashion victim who loves fairy tale heroines simply because they -- or their dresses -- are beautiful.

Indeed, Barbie and fairy tales induce parallel anxieties in
gender-conscious parents. But while Barbie, despite having taken
a critical beating, still dominates the toddler/preteen doll
market, an alternative fairy-tale culture has sprung up in recent
decades for families who don't like their princesses tricked out,
locked up or comatose.

This new genre, in which classic stories are revamped or fairy
tale-like narratives are given progressive twists, is not to be
confused with its adult counterpart, penned by authors such as
Anne Sexton, Angela Carter and Margaret Atwood. These are kids'
titles, yet they address adult concerns about fairy tales: that they pit women against each other in struggles for husbands and status; that they're filled with dead mothers and negligent fathers; that they equate virtue with youth and beauty
and promote a feminine ideal of purity and compliance.