MILAN – Glenn Close, talented artist, interpreter of numerous films such as The House of Spirits and Albert Nobbs, was nominated for the 2019 Oscars as Best Actress in the role of Joan Castleman in The wife . The award was won by Olivia Colman, protagonist of The Favorite , despite the fact that according to many the real “favorite” was Glenn Close, for her masterful interpretation of her in a film that deals with a very important theme: the role of women in literature. The protagonist of the film Joan Castleman and the wife of Joe Castleman, an internationally renowned writer so much as to win the Nobel Prize for literature. The problem is that the real authorof the books and the writer’s own wife. In short, she lived a life in the shadow of her husband, just like a ghost writer. A life as a ghost writer The wife – Living in the shadowsand the title of the film directed by Bjorn Runge, in which the performance of Glenn Close stands out so much that it earned the nomination for Best Supporting Actress. Glenn Close plays the role of Joan Castleman, a woman with an extraordinary narrative gift at the service of the success of her husband Joe, who, thanks to his wife’s talent, receives the call to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. The plot of the film unfolds between the various stages of the journey that takes the couple to the prestigious celebration of Stockholm, highlighting the temperaments of husband and wife: self-centered and full of himself, faithful even if full of resentment she, whose success is not recognized and made public. While Joe basks in her glory, Joan spends time with reporter Nathaniel Bone,thus the feelings of anger, restlessness, love, moral obligations and duties of wife emerge . The wife is the story of a woman who cannot enter the society of success because otherwise she would not be taken seriously, precisely because she is a woman. The female gender and the canons of art
It is not new in the field of literature, and more broadly of the arts, that women remain in the shadow of their husbands or, more generally, of men, precisely because they are not considered adequate to cover a public role. . One of these examples is the one, told in the movie Big eyesby Tim Burton, by the painter Margaret Keane, deprived of her success by her husband, who claimed to be the true author of the works. Why women are considered inadequate to enter into a certain logic of success
Because for many centuries women were excluded from artistic and literary canons
Just think of the authors we study in school textbooks: women are almost completely non-existent, except in rare cases. Yet the relationship that binds the female gender to art and literature is very strong, so much so that the majority of the reading public is made up of women. But, then, because only fourteen women have won the Nobel Prize for literature
In history, women have been considered inferior to men in everything, including the arts: certainly women wrote, but the contents have often been considered frivolous, linked to jokes, to light feelings: in short, they were arguments “for women” and therefore of doubtful thickness. It is not surprising that the critic Francesco De Santis excluded women from the literary canon, or if thirty years later Benedetto Croceadmitted its existence, but maintained that this literary production was “incomplete in form”, as if it were in fact of series b. The great writers of the past, such as Livia Di Stefano, Sibilla Aleramo, were not considered at all (and are still not very well known today), precisely because the standards of judgment are those that men, holders of culture, have established. If we consider that some successful cases of writers are attributable to the women around them, as in the case of The wife , the need to rewrite the history of literature becomes more pressing.
