The "Woman Professor" Mythologem Created By Artistic Cinema

Abstract

The article examines on-screen methods of mythologizing and stereotyping the image of a woman professor on the example of several films depicting non-historical women, university and college teachers, whose characters have incorporated the main mass perceptions. The connection of all stereotypical characteristics is made on the model of the Jungian archetype of the trickster: the ability to go beyond the boundaries of the generally accepted, the ability to equally interact with opposing forces. A number of mythological features of the image of a woman professor in artistic cinema are singled out and analyzed: superpowers; seductive appearance, external attractiveness, active eroticization; deliberate opposition to the surrounding majority, reaching the level of social phobia (traits of a special heroine); feminist heroization (super-heroine, wonder woman). The article shows the value dynamics in the structure of the social image of a woman – a university professor. The techniques of hermeneutics are used for the purpose of multilevel diagnostics of the creation of the image of a woman professor: social, political, educational, aesthetic. The emphasis is placed on the on-screen methods of forming a special social mythologeme "woman-professor", special attention is paid to the musical component of building an image in cinema. The specific protean character of the image of a woman professor is noted, corresponding to the fluid state of postmodernity. It is shown how the named mythologeme is embedded in the third and fourth waves of feminism.

Keywords: Cinema, feminism, gender role, image of a woman, proteism

Introduction

Fiction cinematography effectively creates mythologemes and supports neo-mythologism. This happens because cinema operates in a synthetic image, fusing in itself the languages of painting, architecture, music, theater and literature, which forms the soil of syncretism, which is a prerequisite for the development of mythology. Researchers rightly draw attention to the fact that the texts of modern mass culture perform the function of a myth and are archetypal in content (Galanina & Baturin, 2019; Galanina & Samoylova, 2020), therefore they choose Jungianism as a method of describing and analyzing mass cinema. It is distinguished by the orientation and content of socio-cultural phenomena, the essence of which is considered in the context of the interaction of social and archetypal meanings of life of man and society, as well as allows one to identify latent unconscious trends in the emergence and functioning of social institutions (Malenko & Nekita, 2018). The genre system of cinematography ensures the repetition of plot and scenario moves, which also characterizes archaic and folklore texts (Shdankina & Shipulina, 2018). The physical rigid fixity and the possibility of endless accurate reproduction (duplication, replication) of the same text provide the cinema with the cultural function of the carrier or mediator of the myth. Finally, cinema, being a work of fiction (a distant descendant of a magical ritual), has a high degree of suggestion.

One of the most popular genres of modern cinema is the biographical picture (biopic). The main character of a biopic can be a real famous person, as well as an invented or collective personality. The image is endowed with the features of mythological gods or heroes. In such films, a project of a person of a particular cultural era is built.

Our attention is drawn to the image of a woman professor, which is systematically created by the cinema of the second half of the 20th century and today (See Table 1).

In addition, we use the directorial work of Angela Robinson "Professor Marston and his Wonder Women" (USA, 2017) as illustrative and empirical material.

Problem Statement

The stable asymmetry in favor of the female gender community and the process of stable feminization in the whole list of professional spheres, primarily in education, noted by sociologists (see, for example, the article on lecturing at a modern university (Shatunova, 2015)), have become the empirical foundation of the formulation of the problem of the article. But it is important for us to see the aesthetic shell of these processes and to identify the layer of mythologemes associated with the declared processes of gender asymmetry.

Research Questions

We answer the following research questions:

What artistic techniques are used to create mythologemes of a woman professor?

What are the social expectations and political conditions that shape the myths about female high school teachers?

How has the content of the myth about a woman professor changed during the second half of the 20th century and today, and does this dynamic correlate with the changes in the stages of feminism?

Purpose of the Study

We are faced with the research necessity of revealing the structure of the social myth of a woman professor, generated by art cinematography, as well as describing the social effects of this mythologeme. In this regard, the article fundamentally and deliberately examines heroines who have no prototypes in the history of science. Since we want to analyze the stereotyping and mythologization of the image of a woman professor, we chose the texts of mass cinema.

Research Methods

We use the analytical method of C. G. Jung (as cited in Abramovitch, 2020): it is necessary to reveal the deep meanings of the collective unconscious in an artistic image, to reveal archetypes.

The second methodological aspect of our research is the concept of proteism by Epstein (2003) (in all meanings and senses, which the author names five, including methodological). “Proteism as a humanitarian methodology studies emerging, not yet formed phenomena in the embryonic, fluid stage of their development, when they more portend and signify than they are in the proper sense” (Epstein, 2003, p. 331).

We use the term "mythologeme" in an extended meaning after Pushkareva (2016): "... a stable complex of signs reproduced by the collective consciousness in various cultural texts, playing the role of a universal pattern and determining both the content and design of various cultural phenomena" (p. 56).

The articles of the philosophers-researchers Malenko and Nekita (2018) propose the author's strategy for the analysis of cinema, complementing the theoretical potential of Jungianism with the methodological developments of Marxism and neo-Marxism, which the authors call "Jungomarxism" (Malenko, 2019; Nekita, 2019). This has become a methodological model in the search for archetypes.

Findings

The films selected for analysis depict three historical and cultural types of mythologemes of a woman professor at a university.

1. "The ugly duckling", in which the resources of swan beauty are accumulated, and the mind and courage are being realized now.

2. "Runaway Bride", "Amazon".

3. "Proteus".

It should be noted that the cinema stereotypically emphasizes the feminist traits and characteristics of the heroines, whoever they are. A male hero is just a hero, he is a person as such. The heroine is a woman at the first place, only then someone by social and professional status. However, delving deeper into the image of the heroine, the cinema of the twentieth century reveals the archetypal layers of the image, which we named conditionally above.

Starting from her "femininity" as from a springboard, each of the heroines we have chosen for analysis realizes a phenomenon that we conventionally call proteism (in all meanings and senses, which Epstein (2003) calls five, including methodological). “Proteism as a humanitarian methodology studies emerging, not yet formed phenomena in the embryonic, fluid stage of their development, when they more portend and signify than they are in the proper sense” (Epstein, 2003, p. 331).

Cinema, being a form of sensuality, in many ways intuitively determines (“gropes”) the future of the world, which is associated with permanent transformation, the so-called “proteism”. Defining proteism as a type of worldview that had developed by the beginning of the 21st century, Epstein (2003) writes:

…this is a humble realization that we live at the very beginning of an unknown civilization; that we have touched some unknown sources of strength, energy, knowledge that can ultimately destroy us; that all our glorious achievements are only weak prototypes, timid beginnings of what both info- and biotechnologies of the future are fraught with. (pp. 330-331)

Art cinema has been broadcasting this humble awareness or premonition for several decades, which, in our opinion, is connected with the emergence of biopics about significant women. Art senses the exhaustion of the male type of culture manifested in politics, economics, science and education. We are not talking exclusively about the emergence of women in the sphere of male activity, it seems to us more significant a deep transformation — the spread in the XX century of the female type of worldview, and in the XXI — androgynous, characterized precisely by proteism.

Therefore, fictional cinema initially depicts a woman professor as a woman, but gradually this image becomes a sign of future ethics, not male and not female, but protean.

The third wave of feminism, which paradoxically included criticism of the first two, gave rise to the complex concept of a free woman who possesses all the characteristics of a suffragist of the late 19th century and a feminist of the 60s of the 20th century. Since modern feminism has dissolved in the values generally accepted today and is not a vivid protest movement, we hear its sound in popular culture, including in fictional cinema. Therefore, the heroines of films about women teachers are bright freedom-loving personalities, seemingly obliged to be self-sufficient, but in the image of the cinema of the XX century — suffering from loneliness, jealousy, parting, underestimation and other troubles — components of women's drama, and in the image of the cinema of the XXI century — experiencing tragedies devoid of a gender character.

Rose Morgan ("The Mirror Has Two Faces") is an excellent lecturer, deep thinker (it is noteworthy that she teaches literature using the Jungian method of archetypes). But Rose's personal life is not ideal: the plot implements the motive of a despotic beauty mother. Rose craves love, seeks to build a harmonious union with a man. The idea of the film is that a mind without a heart is flawed.

Katherine Watson ("Mona Lisa Smile") is on the verge: she will soon receive a PhD; soon she will get married. We think this image perfectly shows what has changed at the beginning of the 21st century in the mass understanding of the character of a woman professor at a university. She changes her gender role in an accelerated mode (refuses to marry, takes a principled position in college). Freedom, self-sufficiency, scientific creativity – this is the slogan of this "amazon".

Professor Howland is the most complicated character. It is difficult to analyze it, since it is a product of the present day. This heroine is Proteus, she has many forms (a beautiful wife, an empathetic mother of three children, a talented scientist, a beautiful attractive woman), and none is her true one. The plot is quite symptomatic for modern culture and contains the tragedy of early Alzheimer's: the heroine has everything, but reveals her true self, only losing everything that was most important to her before – intellect and memory.

Taking into account the fact that cinema is a synthesis of words, images and music, let us dwell on the musical component of the film text. The fact that the strong position of the film “The Mirror Has Two Faces” is the aria of Prince Calaf from the opera “Turandot” – the so-called “Chinese” opera of the Italian composer G. Pucini, does not seem accidental, as well as the fact that, in addition to the indicated fragment in the film, the duet of Malliki and Lakme from the "Indian" opera of the Frenchman Leo Delibes sounds. The fact is that Kortunov (2017) refers non-verbalism to a specific feature of the East, arguing his position with words written in the Indian Lankavatara Sutra and once uttered by the Chinese sage Lao Tzu:

... verbal constructions are not able to describe the highest reality, because external objects with all their many individual qualities do not exist, but only, as signs, arise from the depths of the Mind. Therefore, Mahamati, you must avoid any kind of verbal constructions ... (p. 141)

“The wise <...> is guided by knowledge without words”.

In other words, in both cases, we are talking about the need to see with the heart, which is possible only when emotional and aesthetic experience dominates intellectual contemplation, since “the limitedness of words and conclusions, their conventionality can mislead a person” (Kortunov, 2017, p. 141) (In parentheses, we recall that the heroine of the film "Mona Lisa Smile", analyzing the work of Van Gogh, focused the attention of her pupils on the following point: "He portrayed what he felt, not what he saw").

In our opinion, such an attitude provides the viewer with the opportunity to realize the thirst for physical intimacy of the characters as a spiritual experience of love. It is no coincidence that the kiss gives rise to the music of being, a touch to which both Rose and Gregory feel at the same time. Moreover, the fact that at the moment when the character of Jeff Bridges is in despair from separation from Rose, played brilliantly by Barbara Streisand, the duet known as "The Duet of Flowers" sounds, testifies to the blurring of the line between man and nature, overcoming the dualism of the subject and an object as a sign of ascent to absolute truth. Likewise, the inclusion of Sergei Rachmaninoff's music into the film text, a fragment of the Second Concerto of which sounds in a love scene watched by Rose on the TV screen, as well as the instrumental treatment of "Shchedrovka" – a Christmas-tree folk song performed in Ukraine, Belarus and southern regions of Russia, usually under the New year (Shchedrovka – Generous evening), only emphasizes the priority of emotion over ratio, which is typical for the Slavic soul. No less interesting is the fact that a number of researchers connect the history of the origin of generosity with praise to the gods (Dragomanov, 1991) and general joy (Shane, 1902).

No less remarkable is the fact that the musical fabric of the film text is intertwined with the name of Socrates, whose words are quoted by the protagonist at a lecture on mathematics. “Notice the elegance of the proof - such beauty. This reminds me of one passage from Socrates: “if the composition does not have the necessary degree of alignment and symmetry, then the composition itself and its constituent parts are in for a complete collapse. Confidence and symmetry are always beauty and dignity”. Realizing that the categories mentioned by the mathematician from the words of Socrates turn out to be side by side with harmony as the experience of reconciling contradictions, the thought of another philosopher becomes clear: “philosophy, mathematics and music are one and the same” (Losev, 2010). Moreover, it is the symmetry that turns out to be significant for the symphonic drama Socrates, the authorship of which belongs to the French composer Eric Satie. Interestingly, her performance was intended for four female voices, including two sopranos and two mezzo-sopranos. At the same time, no one else but women – the singer Jeanne Bathory and Vinaretta de Polignac initiated the creation of this work (Huang Zehuan, 2021).

The film “Mona Lisa Smile” draws attention to the fact that the title of Mike Newell's cinematic work sounds in unison with the lyrics of the song "Mona Lisa" (Jay Livingston, Ray Evans). The viewer hears the same song at one of the parties, where the character of Julia Roberts comes. Accordingly, being a strong position of the film text, such a name determines the special musicality of the film, as a result of which a creative attitude to life, an incessant spiritual comprehension of one's own I in the intricacies of events taking place with girls and the people around them – far and near – all this in reality turns out to be a search for harmony with oneself and with the world as the highest point of being, accessible only to children. It is not by chance, therefore, that we recognize the Trio for 2 flutes and harp from Hector Berlioz's Childhood of Christ, as well as the chorus “Raise Your Eyes” from the oratorio Elijah by Felix Mendelssohn, among the classics that sound in the space of the cinema text. Let us especially note that the composer himself said the following words about this oratorio: I imagine Elijah as a real prophet, who we would need now, strong, hot, nervous and gloomy, even unkind, fighting against the court rabble, with almost the whole world (Königsberg, n.d.).

As the researchers write, the composer may have had direct associations with his own stubborn struggle for high ideals in art with the court circles in Berlin and with the German public – a philistine swamp, content with unassuming but fashionable music. It is no accident that Mendelssohn himself was later seen in Elijah with his deep faith in true art, the eternal laws and values of music (Königsberg, n.d.). Obviously, there is an analogy here with the attitude of Catherine Ann Watson, who refused to compromise with the college board. In our opinion, a sign of the main character's spiritual victory is the fact that both the beginning of the film and its final part take place against the background of a solo flute, accompanied by a string group. Since the flute is a wind instrument, it is understandable that the moral principles of a teacher lecturing on art history are unshakable.

In turn, in a film about a linguistic scientist – meaning "Still Alice" by Richard Glatzer – the composer Ilan Eshkeri minimizes the use of the musical component of the film text, represented by the interaction of keyboards and strings. Occasionally accompanying Jenny Moore, the leading performer, appearing in the frame, the author's music turns out to be akin to silence, which, according to Mandelstam (2010), who speaks about himself with the words "I am Chinese - no one understands me ..." (p. 350), is the highest music. The constancy of the sound palette against the background of the rapid transformations taking place with Alice is a symbol of eternity, the presence of which is recognized in the silent ellipsis that follows the word love – the last word uttered by Alice. As a result, the silence is likened to the most sincere feelings, with frankness shown by close-ups of Alice's face, her eyes, her hands, her back bent under the weight of the catastrophe that has fallen on her, and her lowered shoulders – all these are the components of her silent monologues unfolding in the space of the cinema text. And it is precisely through this ellipsis and such inexpressibility that the director reveals to the viewer “the curtain over the great mysteries of life” (Kortunov, 2017, p. 145). It would seem that the marked incompleteness of the utterance mediated by the word is akin to the culture of the East striving into space, “where there is no and cannot be an end; ... where the meanings of words dissolve and the laws of the notorious "common sense" are not valid (Kortunov, 2017, p. 145). Nevertheless, while agreeing that “in this wordlessness we find ourselves and God” (Kortunov, 2017, p. 145), we specially emphasize: this God is Love. The circle is complete. East and West converged on a single point, which marks the enduring value of art as an act of self-awareness. And here the art of cinematography is a subjective-philosophical process of comprehension of culture, analogous to music.

Sociocultural dynamics has accelerated so much that the 90s of the twentieth century, noughties and modernity are seen by us as distinctly different cultural epochs. The researchers Fyodorova and Romanova (2020), write about the difference between collective perceptions and historical memory in different cultural epochs. Each of the mythologemes we are considering ("the ugly duckling", "Amazon", "Proteus”) has features of proteism: they dilute the solid tradition, carry out a shift unexpected for the layman (they get married under a contract, and then they themselves violate this contract; refuse a successful marriage, to torment doubts; courageously fight against the irresistible force of the disease, making it the subject of scientific analysis and a means of rapprochement with the family) (Romanova, 2020). It is important that cinema, in its search for a type for depicting proteistic phenomena in culture, confidently arrives at the image of a female university teacher. The mass consciousness already before the development of the plot has a formed stereotype of character: an inquiring mind, a willingness to break boundaries, the ability to combine unconnected, unstoppable movement, fluidity and permanent change (see Table 2).

The collective unconscious feeds on a number of many phenomena, for example, comic book plots (a formal manifestation of modern mythology) (Akim et al., 2019). The heroine of the comic book "Wonder Woman", which has existed since 1947, has a prototype – the author's spouse (Elizabeth Holloway Marston (February 20, 1893 - March 27, 1993) received her BA in Psychology from Mount Holyoke College in 1915 and her BA in Law from Boston University Law School in 1918, becoming one of three women to graduate from Law School that year. Elizabeth married William Moulton Marston in 1915. She first gave birth at the age of 35, then returned to work, lecturing on law, ethics and psychology at several American universities.) .

Conclusion

We believe that fictional cinema has a powerful influence on the construction of stereotypes and mythologemes. Archaic worldview and modern mythology are mixed here; such mixing is possible thanks to the techniques of the artistic space of the screen (suggestion of musical accompaniment, editing, genre eclecticism, generic syncretism of cinema).

Revealing a set of characteristics that belong to a female high school teacher in the collective representations that are broadcast in motion pictures allows for a dual research vision: 1) analysis of the cultural era to which the heroine belonged; 2) diagnostics of the culture that created the cinematic portrait of a woman professor. We hypothesize that the image of women professors is proteistic. Proteism (permanent changeability, fluidity, incompleteness, uncertainty, fundamental inexpressibility) is found by film artists as the main characteristic of a woman professor. Proteism, coinciding with the features of postmodernity as such, makes the female professor an attractive type. The authors conclude that by choosing women professors to portray, cinema reveals another of its functions – futurological, and predicts the development of culture.

Despite the obvious feminist nature of both the plots themselves and the ideas transmitted by them (a woman is free, self-sufficient, not inferior to a man in intellectual activity, and sometimes even surpasses him), we consider the main value of these plots to reveal the proteistic essence of a woman freed from the social role imposed on her. The woman professor in the cinema is not a man's mind inside a pretty head; this is not a woman who has chosen a rigid, rational type of building a scientific career. It is something neither masculine nor feminine, but supergender and superhuman in the Nietzschean sense.

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