rip bea arthur

Sadness! It is a fact that to feminists of my age, Arthur's character "Maude" was the popular face of feminism (sorry, Gloria Steinem, but it's true): smart, sarcastic, single, independent, older, and not the least bit interested in placating the Archie Bunkers of the world. And yeah, that character is completely bound up with our view of her, which she both acknowledged and seemed perfectly okay with.

As Dorothy Zbornak, Arthur seemed as caustic and domineering as Maude. She was unconcerned about the similarity of the two roles. "Look — I'm 5-feet-9, I have a deep voice and I have a way with a line," she told an interviewer. "What can I do about it? I can't stay home waiting for something different. I think it's a total waste of energy worrying about typecasting."

That "yeah, whatever, I'm getting paid" attitude was part of her appeal and persona, too, tapping into the pragmatic and economic foundations of second-wave feminism and, again, striking a real chord with our admiration of women who were ready to give the finger to the moralistic tsk-tsking of women who "selfishly" saw right through the bullshit self-sacrificing feminine ideal.

Which--and god help me I'm going to use this word again--is also, of course, part of why Arthur (like Coulter today) was derided, by those who didn't like her persona, as "mannish" and unfeminine. So far I think we're all on the same page: calling a woman a man is supposedly an insult. The difference, though, is that inasmuch as feminism (at least my version of it) is partly aimed at deconstructing those binary gender roles, there's "mannish" and then there's "mannish." Ideology is full of self-contradictions: "men" are admirably practical, independent, and unmanipulable, and "men" are selfish, winner-take-all, scorched-earth assholes. ("Women," in contrast, are dependent, emotional and selfless, and when they're practical it's usually in a self-sacrificing "the kids gotta eat first" rather than a self-aggrandizing "hey, I'm getting paid" way.)

So sometimes being "mannish" or "masculine" is a compliment, and sometimes it's an insult, depending on which qualities are being emphasized. Yes, blah blah, both interpretations continue to traffic in sexist stereotypes inasmuch as we're still dealing with "masculine" v. "feminine" dichotomies. But, to wrench Arthur's statement about typecasting out of context, what can we do about it? That's the language we've got, and the only way to avoid it is to constantly explain that women can too be independent and practical and admirable and that those are not nuh-uh "masculine" values.

Which is, of course, true. But the dichotomy remains, nonetheless, and sometimes one gets tired of being the critic and wants to be the artist instead--which is to say, one uses, rather than interrogating, existing symbols. (Just to snarl the clarity of all this even further, critic/artist, like male/female, aren't "real" dichotomies either, although they do do real symbolic work.) Hopefully when we operate in the world of the symbolic the result is complicated enough that an attentive audience can discern (however dimly) facets and reflections rather than simple blacks and whites.*

So yeah. RIP Bea Arthur. I have no idea what you were really like, but boy did you mean a lot to me.



*And don't you miss how those 70s shows were willing to reflect on race, too? Sigh. That Jerry Seinfeld needs to get off my lawn.