As I sat, wolfing down stuffing at Thanksgiving dinner, my uncle, a Harvard alum and self-professed Crimson fanatic, turned to me and asked "Susie, when you go abroad, what will you miss the most about Harvard?" My answer? "Nothing." Shocked and appalled, he asked "You're not gonna miss anything?!" I said, "My friends. But beyond that, nothing." Normally, I try to be polite because that's how my parents raised me but at that moment I truly felt honesty was the best policy.
After the semester I've had, I've spent many hours contemplating how disappointed and angry parents would be should I drop out of college, find a husband, have a baby and set up a small but lucrative cookie shop on the boardwalk of Venice Beach in California. The funny thing, though, is that while I've had all these fantasies of escape, I found one particular movie (which is a film adaptation of a best-selling book), Eat Pray Love, completely repulsive.
Well, to be fair, over the holiday I tried to watch it but I only got about 15 minutes in. So I can only safely speak about the quarter hour that I saw and my disdain while watching it. Julia Roberts plays a woman who is bored with her life and so, in her late 30's, she decides to drop everything and spend a year in Italy, India and Bali.
Now, while this part of the film does offer the important feminist message that women shouldn't stay in relationships they aren't happy with, the explanation of her unhappiness seems silly. Her husband tells her that he wants to go back to school for a Master's in Education and poor Julia can't take it. "A man who wants to educate himself to learn how to educate others? How disgusting!" Since this is my blog and I'm allowed to state my opinions I will go ahead a say it: you shouldn't divorce a spouse purely because he or she wants to get a Master's degree.
Luckily enough, the film doesn't entirely suggest that the reason she's mad is because he won't be able to provide financially for her. It doesn't imply, as a film from the 1950's might, that his re-education process would be problematic because she, as a woman, would be forced to be the breadwinner. That is one possible interpretation, though, of the cause of her anger: that she would have to assume a man's role and be a provide while he broke husband got his degree. The film teeters on these perilous lines of gender essentialism and it also plays up racial stereotypes in which brown, third world individuals share their ever-present, ever-exotic wisdom with her. In one review of the film, the critic referred to the original book as "privilege literature" which captures the messages of this movie perfectly.
I say all of this by way of unpacking the reasons why I thought this specific movie problematically explored the nature of personal escape. Don't get me wrong, though. I'm all for taking breaks when you need to. I, for example, am also about to embark on a break while I study at Oxford University for the spring semester. While that sounds like the definition of privilege (and it is), I hope I'm not as not racist and classist about my experience Roberts' character was in that movie. I hope that I can use the time not as a vacation to reward myself but as a reflection period. I hope that it isn't a time I use to avoid boredom or to give myself something new to do. Like Julia, "I want to marvel at something" but I don't wanna do it with the same flat, boring expression that she did. And I don't expect an Indian men to read my palms to tell me what's gonna happen in my future, either.
I guess the biggest reason that I look forward to this break from Harvard is that it will allow me to gain perspective on the things that have happened to me here and that it will allow me to see how else I can exist in the world. After a semester which involved visiting people in hospitals, encountering loved ones' illnesses left and right, moving out of my room and into a another one because of a problematic living situation and losing friends in the process, enduring mistreatment at the hands of multiple men on campus, adding two incredibly stressful and time consuming extra-curriculars to my schedule and taking on an extremely demanding course load, I'm done with Harvard for the time being.
While we can't all be 39-year-old upper middle class white women with the flexibility to travel to multiple countries in search of inner selves, maybe Julia Roberts' character can offer one important bit of advice: we all need to find a way to take pauses in our lives to think about where we've been, where we are and where we hope to go. Whether we study abroad, travel often, write, listen to music, exercise, pray or hang out with loved ones, we need healthy ways to escape our routine and to try to feel whole. Why is it so hard for us to give ourselves these breaks, though, and why do we always make excuses for finding personal stability? What's up with that?
