A FILM OF ONE’S OWN: SIGNIFICANCE OF PERSONAL SPACE AND WOMEN’S AUTONOMY IN GRETA GERWIG’S LADY BIRD (2017) AND BARBIE (2023)

Abstract

Virginia Woolf once said “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” in her groundbreaking essay A Room of One’s Own (Woolf 1929, p3). Contemplating on the obstacles that women in academia are forced to overcome in order to reach the similar recognition as their male counterparts, Woolf stressed the significance of women’s acquiring their private, personal space, that allows them to be free of the responsibilities that the patriarchal world imposes onto them. Considering that she wrote this essay right at the beginning of Hollywood’s Golden Age, would it be possible for us to apply Woolf’s ideas into the new medium of cinematic world? Suppose that Greta Gerwig, Hollywood’s new name of feminist film, attempted to answer that question! As Judith Mayne wrote “the novel provides a model of the connection between art and industry later expanded by the cinema” (Mayne 1981, p29), this research examines the extent to which Greta Gerwig, as a feminist script writer and director, continued Woolf’s ideas on female authorship and developed them into a new medium. While applying close reading to the films Greta Gerwig wrote and directed herself – her debut coming of age film Lady Bird (2017) and the box-office record breaker Barbie (2023), I explored the extent to which the themes of public and private spaces, and the significance of women having personal space remain prominent in both of the works. Laura Mulvey’s essay “Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema” (1989) was also applied in order to evaluate the portrayal of women on screen. Gerwig’s intentional allusion to Woolf, Mulvey, and other feminist film scholars can be traced from the extensive analysis of narration and her choice of cinematic techniques as well, thus giving us opportunity to evaluate the portrayal of women on screen from the perspective of a female director, who aims to the audience of female spectators.