Saturday, February 25, 2012

"They are the one thing that has never failed me"

Source: ABC.com

With Desperate Housewives (clearly one of my guilty pleasures) in its eighth and final season, it's time for me to finally confess, so I'll come out and say it: I have always had somewhat of a soft spot for Bree. She has been my favorite character right from the start, and I have always been moved the most by the things that have happened to her. I'll explain why, to me, she's always been a feminist character, despite the fact that she has tried so hard to be the perfect homemaker, to be a traditional, old-fashioned woman.

Bree starts out torn between her desire to fulfill what she sees as her role, and the wish to be really good at something. When she and her first husband, Rex, see a therapist, it's partially because Bree feels under appreciated and undervalued. She works hard, and she knows she's good at what she does, but her husband (and her kids) don't acknowledge it at all. They take her for granted, and disparaged her accomplishments.

You can see some of the underlying resentment Bree carries around in her rant about Sigmund Freud. When being able to project her feelings onto somebody else - Freud's mother - Bree is able to express how hard she works, and how much it hurts her that, with all the sacrifices she has made, nobody appreciates what she does. 

Bree's is the one character in the show that grows and evolves the most. She starts out with very rigid values (which lead her to tell her son that he will not get into heaven if he is gay), but she is able to recognize when she is wrong, when she is making a mistake, and not only does she correct herself, but she has the strength and courage to apologize and ask for forgiveness. She apologizes to her son Andrew for the things she said. She can take criticism (for example by her future son-in-law), think it over, and accept if and when there's truth in it. She, who's always so concerned about being humiliated, about giving people something to talk about, learns to trust her friends with her feelings, to reach out to others, to admit mistakes. She overcomes obstacles, not because she never falls down, but because she always gets back up.

Bree is strong. She overcomes alcoholism, the fact that she has lost, or been betrayed by, a number of husbands and boyfriends, even the loss of her hugely successful business. She stumbles all the time, and she is deathly afraid and ashamed, but she does find the strength to go on, even when it means being on her own.

Bree believes in herself. She, who has never worked outside the home after college, when faced with the need to earn money, has enough guts, enough faith in her abilities, to go out, start a catering business, and write a cookbook. Even though her first husband had told her that "every bored housewife" thinks she can write a cookbook, Bree believes that her cooking is good enough, noticeable enough, to stand out, to compete in a market place - and it does. When the photographer taking the cover photo for her cookbook belittles her, she doesn't smile and take it, she calls him out, and confronts him about it.

Bree believes in true friendship among women. She never betrays her friends, and never turns them away. In the last season, when an angered ex-boyfriend is looking for ways to destroy her, he knows that the only thing that she will not be able to take is losing her friends. He knows that, while she has lost almost everything else in her life at one point or another, her friends are "the one thing that has never failed" her. They are the ones she could always depend on - and who could always depend on her. In a world where female friendships are portrayed as temporary at best, she risks a lot for her friends. She gets the others to protect Katherine after the showdown with Wayne, Katherine's ex-husband. She helps Gaby and Carlos after the incident with Gaby's stepfather. 

She's not perfect, but that's what makes her believable, what makes it so easy to relate to her. She wants to do what is right, but she carries a lot of baggage, and she is haunted by society's expectations, many of which she has made her own. She can be harsh at times, but she reconsiders. She's proud, but not too proud to admit when she was wrong. She has a hard time expressing her feelings, but that does not mean they are not there. She has weaknesses, but in time she learns to own up to them, and to face them. 

I think Bree is a feminist character because of how far she has come. Because of how strong she has been, and how resilient. Many times she has been the leader of her group of friends, taking charge when nobody else wanted to, protecting them when she felt she had to. 

I only hope that, in the end, she and the other women will go back to being friends, because I think that the one thing she wouldn't be able to bounce back from is losing them. And that, all by itself, is a feminist message in its own right.

Source: ABC.com

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