What interested me most about Pearl Diver is what affects me the most as a (wannabe) writer: Hannah's dilemma in knowing what to write, how to write about it, and who it affects. There is always the question, in writing, about what stories need to be told, what stories do people need to hear.
I was very interested to see how Hannah handled this, because she very obviously NEEDED to tell the story of her mother's murder. She had the same thing happen as I do when I have inspiration and find myself needing to write about something -- she sat down and just wrote and wrote and wrote. We get the impression that writing is cathartic for her (as, obviously, it is for lots of writers.. big deal, Annie), and so, by the end of the movie, regardless of the revelation that's just been made about Sam's innocence, I desperately wanted her to publish the story, if only because there is something about the story that needs to be told, and I can empathize with Hannah in the way that I don't want her to waste everything she's just done. Though, obviously, it made a much better movie that she tossed the pages into the pond, however painful it was to see all that hard work literally washing away.
This ending didn't help me at all grapple with "What is the role of the Mennonite writer?" because our example in Hannah leads us to believe that our role is first to be a Mennonite, and only if writing fits peacefully into that lifestyle should we attempt it. Or at least that's how I interpreted it.
This tied in well with our class discussion of Mennonite in a Little Black Dress today. Though obviously there were different circumstances involved in Rhoda Janzen's life and the lives of Marion and Hannah, I find it interesting to think about why Janzen told what she told of her story, and whether or not she should have taken a page from Hannah's book (not literally. Heh) and chosen to respect the feelings of people she loves or once loved, or even Mennonites in general, instead of cashing in on their stories, which is what I felt she was doing at times.
The other aspect of the movie that I found particularly interesting, especially as an ethnically Mennonite viewer who spent a lot of my most formative years bumming around the town in which this movie was filmed, was how the film painted and explored the differences between Hannah and Marion as characters and the worlds they inhabit, and used these differences to speak to larger issues of what it means to be a Mennonite today, and how "ought" Mennonites to behave/believe/dress, etc? Though at times, as an "insider" in this world, I found myself getting a little frustrated with the use of stereotype in portraying the sisters, I also found a lot of things about their identities resonating with me, as someone who is neither a city mouse Mennonite like Hannah or a country mouse Mennonite like Marion, but perhaps a college mouse for now.
As a writer I, too, have wrestled with the ending of Pearl Diver.
ReplyDeleteI'm inclined to agree with Julia Kasdorf's pressing question at the end of her review of the film in the CMW Journal issue on Martyrs when she asks whether the film suggests that in order to love the people we care about we have to give up the thing we love to do. Kasdorf's last words: "Perhaps we need to look a bit deeper at the wisdom of sacrifice and the ways it might speak to makers of art. It is also the case that sometimes in order to save a thing, you must give it away, by which I mean publish it."
But it's interesting the Rhoda Janzen's memoir, which really does delve deeply into family life and characterizations, puts the issue in a different light. I'd like to hear more about which aspects of this memoir make you as a reader uncomfortable. When do you feel that Janzen is "cashing in" on the stories, and when does she tell a story we need to hear?