In our culture, men are almost always applauded for being ambitious, but women don’t always receive the same kudos; in fact, enterprising women are often depicted as being overly ambitious. While reading reviews of two of my favorite shows, The Comeback and Getting On, I’ve been surprised and saddened by how many reviewers buy into the notion that the lead characters — hungry, high-reaching, inspired women — are manipulative and career-driven in the worst possible sense. For while it’s true that both lead characters desire prestige, that’s no reason to castigate them for pursuing their artistic and scientific passions (in both cases, male characters voice these criticisms). The flapper-era poet Edna St. Vincent Millay also battled the notion that women must lead tame, unfulfilled lives.
In the second season of The Comeback, the main character, actress Valerie Cherish, is cast on an HBO series created by her former nemesis, the TV writer Paulie G. The role she’s playing is an unflattering, loosely fictionalized version of herself, but Cherish is too enamored by the the challenging work and her eventual Emmy nomination to care.
Unfortunately, the strain of filming drives a wedge between Valerie and her husband Mark over the course of the season. They separate and go into couples’ counseling. One night they get into a huge fight outside a restaurant over who supported who:
Mark: I’ve been there for you Valerie. When no one believed in you. I have been there for you.
Valerie: No one? Not no one, Mark. Because I believed in me. I’m not no one. That’s not nice. Maybe you don’t think I’m someone, but I have a birth certificate that says I am.
Mark: You know what? Do you even care about me anymore? Do you care about anyone anymore? [Pointing at cameras] You care about that, and that, and everyone else, including me, is in the back seat.
Valerie: That’s right. You’re not in the front seat this time. That’s right. Sorry little boy, you have to sit in the back seat now. Just this one time, though.
Mark: I hope you win. That’s all that you care about.
Valerie: That’s not true, Mark.
Mark underestimates Valerie’s talent and heart. Earlier in the season, when she referred to herself as an artist, he corrected her, saying “You’re an actress.” “Actresses are artists” was her rejoinder.
In the show Getting On, Dr. Jenna James strains a professional relationship to stand up for the importance of her research on fecal incontinence, an issue that primarily affects women due to complications from childbirth. In the fourth episode of season two, Dr. James describes this affliction as the “crazy old aunt in the attic” for which she has found an easy solution: collagen injections. In the following argument with the hospital’s director of medicine, Dr. Paul Stickley, Dr. James fights for funding (which is currently going toward in-room flat-screen TVs) and is met with condescension:
Dr. Stickley: It’s not unreasonable, Jenna, to put TVs in patient rooms.
Dr. James: Paul, it’s not fair, I made that money.
Dr. Stickley: Yes, but there is a greater common good and your fecal incontinence… maybe it’s is all just a bit too ambitious, maybe you should just stick to geriatrics.
Dr. James: We can no longer sweep female fecal incontinence under the rug… what about that greater good, what about the untold lives, the millions who are affected, the embarrassment, the self isolation, worrying for 20 years over its onset, considering invasive colostomies to prevent it, sitting in one own’s filth! It’s quality of life, Paul! Mental health!
Dr. Stickley: All right, all right, don’t go to the barricades.
Dr. James: We plump up our lips with collagen to… make ourselves more kissable, but for us to use that same material in tissue that is infinitely more meaningful to us…. is to live out our lives with dignity instead of discarded, dirty dolls.
The actress Laurie Metcalf, who plays Dr. James, delivers this argument with increasing passion, getting into Dr. Stickley’s face and punctuating all her points with controlled yet vehement inflections. He walks away while she’s still talking.
The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay came of age during the 1910s and 1920s, and her biographer Nancy Milford dubbed her “the herald of the New Woman.” Millay embraced the new opportunities available to women in terms of education, career, and romance — and grappled with the backlash. In this short, four-line poem she defends her artistic lifestyle by arguing that a fully-lived life makes up for in dynamism what it lacks in durability:
First Fig
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends–
It gives a lovely light!
In Betsy Priolet’s brilliant book Seductresses, she points out that the establishment often trivializes and vilifies “alpha plus women, ladies of strut and accomplishment” for being “a little too powerful for patriarchal consumption.” Priolet encourages women to embrace their “brains, autonomy, integrity, and high swank” — and these characters and speakers are role models for that journey.