Further Thoughts on The Wife

In my review for The Wife, I only touched briefly on the flashbacks (mostly just to say that they were great,) but I want to revisit them today.  For me, they add so much to the story, to understanding the characters and their dynamic.  There’s just one in particular that I’m going to look at here, but watching the film, it knocked me out (spoilers.)

One of the most defining scenes in the movie for me is in an early flashback, when Joan is sitting in Joe’s class as he describes what an author is.  It’s much the usual “heart of a creative” type stuff, “I write because I must, writing is in my soul,” that sort of thing.  That right there shows us something about Joe off the bat:  his best ideas aren’t original.  In this same scene, we get our first sighting of his go-to charm-the-ladies-with-prose line, and it’s not even his.  When he wants a woman to sigh, he consistently uses the same James Joyce quote, and when he wants to impress his students, he uses the same flowery description of creative work that countless artists have used before him.

But here’s something else this scene tells us about Joe.  Sure, his speech is basic, but it works, and he knows that.  He has those students eating out of the palm of his hand, including Joan, and she has more creative talent than he ever will.  Just like that James Joyce line keeps paying off for him, Joe’s big achievement is creating the story of his life.  This portrait of himself, first as a soulful professor and then as a brilliant author, has been so manufactured, and when you see him telling his stupid anecdotes at Nobel functions later in the movie, it all seems so transparent and pathetic, but he still gets results with it!  Watching Joan watch him captivate a room, it just turns my stomach.  But that’s what Joe’s good at, and that’s why he gets away with masquerading as the literary genius for so long.  The strings are there, obvious for all to see, but he makes people believe it anyway.

Another interesting note about this little speech is that, for all its poetry, it lacks real-world application.  When Joe introduces Joan to authoress Elaine Mozell in another flashback, the older woman almost instantly tries to discourage Joan from pursuing a career as a writer.  She points to her own work, sitting on the alumni shelf where it’s never been opened, and when Joan offers her Joe’s “a writer must write” sentiment, Elaine counters, “No, honey:  a writer must be read.”  And in Elaine’s experience, ground down by publishers and critics who refuse to take her seriously because of her gender, that noble idea doesn’t mean much when the gatekeepers are never even going to give you a chance to prove your worth to them.  (Obviously, there have been many female authors across the years who’ve defied those gatekeepers, but they’re still there – would Joe’s books be as hailed for their brilliance if Joan’s name was rightly on them?)

But getting back to the classroom scene, what really pulls me in is Joe’s unfaltering use of male pronouns.  “He writes because he must,” and so forth, over the course of a speech that probably goes on for more than a minute.  Seeing it, I was instantly reminded of the opening scene of On the Basis of Sex, in which the dean welcomes the new law students with a speech asking, “What makes a Harvard man?”  In both, you feel the presumptuous sexism smack you in the face, but it’s even more egregious in The Wife.  With On the Basis of Sex, there are nine female students in a sea of men.  Here, Joe’s entire class is female, and he doesn’t think anything of repeatedly referring to his proverbial author as “he.”  Yes, this shows the dismissiveness, the way sexism permeates everything, but it also shows us one more important thing about Joe.  Here, in this scene, speaking about writing in front of his all-female writing students, he never once thinks of them as writers, or even potential writers.  This speech, this lecture, isn’t about them at all.  It’s about him, returning to the “soulful professor” portrait.  Although he’ll gladly critique their work and tell them what’s wrong with it, he’s not there to teach them.  This whole thing is in service of his image, this ideal he wants to instill in them of their teacher as a tortured artist who writes because he cannot choose not to.  That is Joe all over, and it’s just vile.