The movie "The Pride of Horses" adapted from this true story focuses on the secretariat's hostess, penny chenery, and tells the story of the full-time housewife inheriting her father's legacy and pushing the family business back to the top step by step. The deeds of the human heart have more profound significance in the context of the rise of American feminism in the 1960s and 1970s.
From the other in the family to the self
at the beginning of the film, it is a very warm and beautiful picture. In a villa with beautiful surroundings, the jack family is enjoying a hearty breakfast, and around the table sits a slender daughter and a healthy and lovely daughter. 's son. At this time, the hostess of the house, Penny, appeared. Although the middle-aged Penny had nasolabial lines at the corners of her mouth, her thick blond hair and tight skin exuded the dignity and elegance of women in the upper class who lived a superior life. As a wife and mother, she is the quintessential wife and mother who keeps everything in order, from the exquisite breakfast to the laundry, from the wine for the guests to the children's homework.
In the view of existential feminism, the status of women in society always exists as "others", they are the daughters of fathers, the wives of husbands, and the mothers of children. These roles constrain women to become "selfs". For a long time, women have accepted their role as the "other", taking these roles as their life goals, and immersed in the joy and happiness of reaching their goals.
Penny could have played her character well through her life, but her mother's death changed her life. The deteriorating family farm ignited Penny's young love for horse racing, a passion that made her see another possibility in her life. She realizes that she is not only a wife, a mother, but herself, and she bravely follows the cry of her heart to her long-forgotten self.
The hardships of walking towards the self,
entering marriage and building a family means the fulfillment of life for many women. In the movie "The Lovers of Floral Cafe", one of Beauvoir's classmates and friends was going to drop out of school and go home to get married. Beauvoir stopped her and said, "Your talent is better than mine, and if you go home, you will be ruined." The classmate said, our pursuit is different, I just hope to have a happy and happy home. Achieving happiness is the common pursuit of every individual, whether man or woman. But happiness often means choice, which means you can't have both. For a woman, what role she should be has been chosen. But a woman is a woman not because she was born that way, but because she is shaped by social circumstances. If one's life is likened to a circle, having a happy family is an indispensable arc to form this circle, but it is not the whole circle.
The gender of a woman is on two levels. One is her biological gender. She is similar to all female animals in nature, and has different physiological demands at various stages of life. At a certain period, she will give birth to the next generation, and life will be shaped accordingly. It's all so natural and wonderful. One is social gender, that is, women in the social and cultural context, they are required to be gentle, good and virtuous, to handle housework, and to support their husbands and children. This latter social and cultural level of gender creates a contradiction between the definition of women and their self-appeal.
After Penny took over the farm, she began to live back and forth between the two places. She was a housewife on the one hand and the manager of the farm on the other. Although it was very hard, she worked tirelessly and was full of passion and a sense of achievement. Under Penny's management, the farm business has slowly moved from years of loss to flat. Jack attacked her, and he, like hollis (penny's brother), wanted to sell the farm before it continued to depreciate. Penny has to stick to the family business. She loved horse racing from the beginning, under the influence of her father, who thought it was a challenge full of adventure and hope, and his father started from scratch with his fearlessness for the challenge and his unquenchable desire to win. Now that the heavy task of reorganizing the world has fallen on her shoulders, she faces the difficulties and hopes to reproduce the glory of the family business.
When the usual lovely woman in an apron who skillfully cooks a fine meal in the kitchen is as ambitious and full of thirst for success as a man, her husband obviously cannot accept this fact. Although Penny wants to balance her current life and constantly compromise and show weakness to her husband and brother, the contradiction is still intensifying.
With the death of her father, Penny, in grief, faces a joint siege from her husband and brother. The father's estate is subject to estate tax of $6 million, and they plan to sell the up-and-coming secretariat for $7 million - if the secretariat loses a game in the next game, it will be worthless not worth. Her brother Hollis, who is in Harvard's economy, attacked her: I can't raise $6 million, how can you? Our family era has passed, why do you still insist!
Things have reached a stalemate that cannot be negotiated, and Penny has to deal with it in a tough way. She showed her father's will, in which the farm was left to hollis, while the expensive racehorse belonged to penny. Penny used the power from the patriarchal society to win the counterattack against the patriarchal society, which is also worth thinking about. But the outcome of victory in a tough way was bitter, with the end of the marriage and the brother and sister turning against each other. This makes people reflect on, where is the destination of the so-called self-liberation of women, and when they break free from the so-called imprisonment, where is the brave new world? At least so far, feminism has not given a satisfactory answer in this regard. Their fables about the future are nothing but daunting utopias constructed with the peculiar imagination of mankind.
It is gratifying that Penny's chosen "revolutionary path" won the victory and finally reconciled with the patriarchal society as an equal, rather than becoming a declaration of a self-reliant kingdom of radical feminism, which is also a blessing.
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