CONTEMPORARY feminists are not faced with Nora's dilemma at all, because there have been other routes carved out. From the twenties suffragette reformists to the sixties radical collectivists the consciousness of female deprivation has steadily deepened. Marxist thinking revealed the socio-political contradictions inherent in patriarchal oppression; psychoanalysis uncovered the neurosis wrought by male domination; and recent feminists have recognized that the oppression of women is traceable to a particular form of society.
Unlike Nora, a contemporary feminist realizes the larger dimensions of her rebellion. Unlike Nora, she is not alone in her struggle and not an individualist idealist. She has the force of a history of public outcry to fire her collective faith. And because of this, she can dismiss Nora's dilemma without too much agonizing.
The movie, of course, ignores all this. And in doing so, it obfuscates the radical lesson of the seventies: that the women's problem is rooted in the most profound structures of the social order. The movie appeases the national trauma about women with a sophisticated sleight-of-hand. Not only does it couch its message in 19th century terms, but it refuses even to define Nora in relation to them. It thus disguises the problem and allays it by spreading a veneer of euphoria over it. The ending of the movie is an affirmation of individual female liberation that denies collective liberation. It overlooks the fact that the fight for human equality in the face of a sexist system threatens the substructure of that system. Denying this insight, the movie denies the grounds for women's rejection of the dominant vision of society. Whatever potential bombshells germinate in Nora are hidden when she slips away without ever defining her relationship to her society. And the audience who identifies with her denies decades of change.
The movie conceals more than it reveals. It solicits your empathy with a predicament that most feminists have long since understood as superficial. And then it congratulates your dated insight upon its universality. It indulges in a form of fingerpointing liberalism that stops short of doing anything about the state of being it describes.
The audience who applauds the movie claps for a world which their own situation has rendered irrelevant. It is finally a highly conservative applause. For the message that romanticizes the female rebel, but balks before the women's rebellion, is anathema to any committed feminist. It feeds nothing but a counter-revolutionary fervor, one barren of relevance, one that lowers rather than raises consciousness.
The movie about a woman worth imitating in 1973, a movie that begins to examine the oppression it advertises by showing someone actively dealing with it, the movie that lays bare the nature of the feminist choices that are to be made has yet to appear.