Via mediafury @ Flickr
Big Love, whose fourth season is airing Sunday nights on HBO right now, took awhile to grow on me. Y’all should be watching it, in my humble opinion, if you’re interested in feminism. When the show first premiered back in 2004, I was skeptical. The sunny colour palette of the promotional material made me wonder if the creators of the series were taking their subject very seriously.
What I suppose I was worried about was a “lighthearted” approach to the practice of polygamy. Now, I’m not going to start listing clichés about true love being between two people only. As a feminist I just can’t get it up for an unequivocal defense of traditional monogamous marriage/relationships per se. But I don’t kid myself that polygamy is challenging traditional notions of marriage. Any notion of marriage in which there is a dominant and a subservient partner is, to me, a priori patriarchal. And the polygamy practiced by the FLDS and various splinter sects of Mormonism is a relationship of unequals. One type of genitalia is heavily valued over another, vaginas apparently being relatively interchangeable but penii divinely called to penetrate as many of the former as possible. Lord help me, indeed.
My fears have largely not been borne out by the way the show has progressed. Much like Mad Men, this story about what I think of as High Patriarchy (which is to say, wholly unapologetic patriarchy) has revealed that the way women struggle to express and assert themselves with men’s feet on their necks holds far more dramatic interest than the actions of their oppressors.
Ta-Nehisi recently wrote, intelligently and thoughtfully as usual, about his personal response to these men (though I can’t get on board with his admiration of the sniveling Don Embry, who often is the mouthpiece for some of the male polygamists’ more misogynist attitudes towards women):
One of the consequences of feminism is not simply redefining roles for women–an unquestioned good–but redefining roles for men. I think that will be a good in the long-term too, but right now a lot of us are in this space of trying to figure out who we are and what we should be. Bill Hendrickson is a guy inventing manhood in this new world–all of his wives want to work, for instance… as he constructs new definitions, he can’t escape the root of the old, of the ancient and all its questions and conundrums. I’m a modern man, and the child of a 60s radical… but even as I try to remake myself, hoping not to repeat the mistakes of those who came before me, old magic is at work, and ancient identities, that we thought we’d shed, call us back home.
There’s a part of me that thinks this gives Bill too much credit. Bill may be full of words and commonplaces about how much he values his family. But it’s Barb, the polygamy doubting-Thomas of the lot, who seems to be making all the real sacrifices. She left her church, her family, her job and she has to accept second and third and mayhap fourth wives who are not the products of divine fate to her in the same way they are to her husband. It’s Nicki who is incandescent in her defense when her brother threatens the safety of the whole family, at the expense of the connection to the FLDS splinter-sect community that was the only life she knew before marrying Bill. It’s Margene who takes the “Principle” of polygamy to a new place when she actively recruits and “dates” a potential fourth wife, and shocks herself when she actually enjoys having a life and existence outside the confined roles of “wife” and “mother.” In short, while I think Bill cares about his family, he is not redefining manhood. He is clinging, often tenuously, to what he thinks it means, at the expense of his wives’ emotional well-beings, and at the expense of proper attention to his children, like Sarah, who are feeling morally adrift in the way he has defined “family” for them.
The show is no less interesting or accurate for this, of course. But if you are watching Big Love – and, as I said, I think you should be – do it for the women, not for the men. It’s the former who have the more interesting things to say about redefining gender roles.
I only watched the first season, but I think your analysis is still accurate/applicable. I lost interest after the first season because I absolutely could not relate to the religious aspects of the show. I couldn’t force myself to care about these people’s troubles week after week when so many of those troubles were self-imposed. I must confess: As a non-believer, I struggle to truly respect the notion (and practice) of faith in higher power(s).
But hey, maybe I’ll watch it on DVD someday, if only for the feminist aspects of the story!
I was amazed in the second season by who seduced I had been by their marriage arrangement. My spuse and I — two largely irreligious people — were both a bit weepy when Margene decided to be baptized in the backyard pool. I think the show is an interesting apologia for fully consensual polygamy — with all of the complications that would produce for everyone involved.
“High Patriarchy (which is to say, wholly unapologetic patriarchy) has revealed that the way women struggle to express and assert themselves with men’s feet on their necks holds far more dramatic interest than the actions of their oppressors.”
Jesus, marry me.
I watched the first two seasons while I was sick last week. The show IS about those women, not just the main three, but all of them. It’s endlessly fascinating. I find Nicki and Barb to be especially interesting. At the end of the first season, when they were outed and Barb sat down with the two other wives and said “I got what I deserved,” I totally lost my shit. The tenuous relationship between sex as pleasure and for the sole purpose of procreation is a theme I am hoping will implode on itself.
I’ve only seen a couple episodes here and there, but it’ll go on my list. I’m in the middle of watching all of Deadwood. So it’ll take awhile, but I’ll get there.
What I saw I liked, I just, pretend I have other things to do… Or actually do have other things to do, which I wind up not doing because I’m constantly reading PS’s and Penny’s posts…
Yeah…
@Kivrin: Yeah, I haven’t been able to put my finger on why I can’t get into this, but I think the religion angle may be a factor. I watched the first couple of episodes of the first season, and the opening one of this season, and it just doesn’t grab me. Having said that, Jon Krakauer’s book on Mormonism, Under The Banner Of Heaven, is definitely one of the best books I read last year.
I don’t have cable, so I can’t comment personally about Big Love, but Pilgy, you seem to have something in common with one Stanley Fish, albeit for different reasons: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/
Oh, PhD, but I don’t gloss over the misogyny like Fish does. So gross, to me, when critics don’t talk about their subjects… well, critically.
Yeah, you’d think that would be part of the job description…I guess he’s criticizing how mean and nasty other characters are?
Wait, that’s not how that works! Shenanigans, Prof. Fish!
@Claire – actually, some people suspect it has less to do with plural marriages than with other “non-traditional” marriages.
I wrote a paper a couple years back on the way the creators may or may not have been using polygamy as a possible way of making gay marriage more acceptable. The creators refuse to say if they are; however, some critics assume that since the creators are in fact a gay couple, that perhaps there is some underlying pro-gay marriage arguments in the show.
Of course this was when the season first began, and in fact they do reference this argument when Roman is misquoted as saying “we’re just like homosexuals” in an interview. Since this is the third season, it has outgrown this theory and become it’s own show, but I don’t think it’s truly about polygamy as it is about normalizing non traditional/heterosexual families.
And one more note: the reason I love this show, is that I go back and forth all the time. I hate the woman for feeding into it and I hate the double standard, but at the same time I do feel perhaps they shouldn’t be judged for their choices. It makes me think about the bigger picture, and that’s the kind of media I like.
ok shutting up now.