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Film Studies 101
Professor Welsch
Mira Elena Peralta Nair, B2407
November 2008, Fall Semester
The Narrative Representation of Feminist Ideology in Vagabond
Vagabond constitutes an almost subversive narration of what it means to be a woman. It
abandons traditional filmic representations of femininity and female roles, a defiant style
discussed by Giannetti (477). Mona, the protagonist, thoroughly eschews the well-worn female
identities defined by men, and which traditionally deny women masculine characteristics such as
sexual confidence and independence. The complex process of interpreting Mona’s character is
woven into the progression of the narrative. Instead of viewing a seemingly contradictory
succession of images through the lens of force-fed conventional stereotypes, the audience is
challenged to penetrate a complex portraiture of the protagonist emerging from her interactions
with various people whose lives she had entered. What viewers experience departs from the
alienating patriarchal representations of the female gender as the sexualized, glorified, or
submissive “other.”
Varda affirms her self consciously iconoclastic design of Vagabond’s
narrative: “So I ended up structuring the film in the shape of an impossible portrait” (). Yet,
Varda’s “impossible,” or confused and mixed, “portrait” of a vagrant woman leaves the audience
with no clear answer to the true identity of Mona. What lingers as a haunting question is, “Who
is she?” Varda’s alternative to the stereotypical objectified feminine identity is the complicated
imagery of a desexualized and independent individual, whose struggles nonetheless appear free
of the constraints of the conventional masculine perspective on women. The audience is
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challenged to jettison received notions of femininity and to instead judge the female protagonist
through her raw human nature.
The film launches this earthy characterization of Mona when the audience first finds the
protagonist as a corpse in a vineyard ditch. This opening literally and metaphorically casts Mona
as a creature of the earth, immediately enveloping her identity within the enigmatic nature of the
human life cycle itself. Varda then cuts to a shot of Mona walking naked onto the beach from the
sea against the modified direct narration “It seems to me she came from the sea.” Despite her
errant odyssey throughout the film, Mona is literally grounded in the film to the vineyard, a place
to which she returns as a place variously of work, of rest, and of sleep, until finally we see her
dying in the ditch at the end. Thus, the audience is thrust into the natural but modified cyclical
narrative of the protagonist – from after-death lifelessness, to a birth symbolized by her rising
from the water, to life, and then to death again – which connects Mona firmly to the earth.
Dispensing with hackneyed suspense over whether the character survives to the end, the film
focuses the audience on Mona’s life as a female mortal. Flitterman-Lewis explains “this
emphasis on discourse-over the naturalizing function of the story” as “one of the ways that
Vagabond presents a challenge to dominant forms”(). Mona is constructed as a natural being, but
not one who is untouched by violence – as signified by her rape – or death. The framing by
Mona’s death at both bookends of the film constitutes her ultimate humanization because
humanity’s inevitable death is the epitome of realism. It echoes Freud: “The goal of human life is
death.” The narrative representation of this life and death relationship emphasizes the humanity
of Mona’s identity and of female identity in general.
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This cyclical, realistic, and yet modified narrative structure, based on the natural rhythms
of death and life (and death again), is a two-fold expression of feminist ideology. First, the
humanization of women through acknowledgement of their inevitable, looming death negates
possible objectification of the female character as inactive or barely existent, such as is the
currency of the conventional patriarchal film narrative. Second, the naturalization of women
through seeping their essence into earth-related motifs, such as vineyards and the sea, provides
an interconnection of women with the natural earth. This resonates with the feminist sentiments
of pagan ideology in which female figures are empowered by their prowess in nature. This
enables Mona to adopt traditional masculine characteristics of independence and autonomy.
Varda’s early acknowledgement of Mona’s inevitable death is thus the ultimate humanization of
the female protagonist, inoculating her character from the deformities of the patriarchal tradition.
By resisting classical narrative structure patterns, Mona’s story steers clear from a
traditional ideological portrayal of female characters. Mona has no continuous and consistent
relationship which endures throughout the film. Instead, her encounters feature characters who
appear – almost randomly and out of narrative sequence – and sometimes re-appear, but never
linger. These episodic encounters frame Mona as a completely independent individual, not bound
or defined by a relationship. More traditional narratives bind a female character within her
relationships with men. For example, a female character traditionally appears throughout the
narrative as the “wife” or the “love interest”, but not as an autonomous being defined by nature.
Free of the definitional trappings of particular relationships, the narration instead relies on a
succession of testimonies from each "witness" who encounters the protagonist. The camera
renders a vision of the events, either simultaneously, before, or after the encounter (FlittermanLewis). Just as the audience cannot rely on one narrative point of view to define her, Mona relies
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on no single person to shape her identity. Through this “impossible portrait” or montage of
viewpoints and impressions of, and interactions with, Mona, Varda humanizes her female
protagonist as a complex being whose nature cannot be reduced to the traditional representations
of women as simple objects of desire.
Mona’s sexual encounters and relationships with men defy conventional filmic malefemale relationships for two reasons. First, Mona feels no obligation to be with any particular
man, and retains her power to go and stay with whomever and for however long she likes.
Mona’s errant freedom and mobility are the subject of admiration mixed with fear in the
commentary of several female characters who are conventionally defined by their relationship to
men as “wife” or “mother,” never pursuing lives of their own beyond the men to whom they are
attached. Second, Mona’s traits invert the traditional definition of the female character as
submissive and dependent through the portrayal of powerfully masculine male characters.
Instead, Mona’s traits are a yardstick against which masculine characteristics are measured,
making the men she encounters appear needy and weak next to her.
This unconventional emasculation of the male characters through the female protagonist
emerges in the male viewpoints in Vagabond’s narrative. Such is the case in Mona’s relationship
with David, a fellow drifter. Through her emotional detachment from romantic relationships, the
audience is positioned to view Mona as the measure of the masculine characteristic of
independence, relative to David’s neediness and longing for domestic stability, which is richly
conveyed in his own narrative David falls short of Mona’s strength as both his emotional and
economic dependence become abundantly apparent, symbolized by the lock around his neck (“I
threw away the key”). Toward the end of the film, he emerges as the less stable of the two when
the dashed promise of ill-earned money throws him into violent rage. In a direct, unmodified
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narrative address, David recalls that “When I had grass, she was nice, but less so when I ran out.
When I got slugged, she split. I thought she was a homebody, the staying kind. ” Mona is
relatively freer than the man, with no need for a “staying type” and unconstrained by monetary
obligations. Mona does not borrow money but, rather, only hopes to come across it whenever she
can. She rejects opportunities of steady income which come with a boss, telling the goat herder,
for instance, that she left the secretarial business to be free of a boss. By leaving David without
notice, and in a particularly vulnerable state, for the sake of her own safety, Mona mimics typical
male behaviour of abandonment. Rather than nurse David, Mona defies the stereotype of the
female as caretaker, choosing instead to continue her own life. In contrast, David clearly laments
his solitude: “Usually it’s all alone for me.” David’s lonely and vulnerable narrations serve to
enhance the characterization of Mona in her refusal to subordinate her autonomy to the promise
of intimacy with her man. The juxtaposition of male neediness against female emotional
detachment and self-sufficiency underscores the feminist message that men ultimately rely more
on women than women do on men.
Through a series of brief encounters between Mona and various male strangers, the film
quickly establishes Mona’s unlabored disposition to coolly fend off primal masculine
propositions towards a perceived female sexual provocatrice. To the truck driver, who, shortly
after picking her up as a hitchhiker, attempts to lure her into “a bed in the back”, Mona
mockingly rejects his truck a “heap”, only to be ejected by the offended truck owner. Pit against
man and machine, feminine prowess nonetheless prevails and Mona is unperturbed. Later in the
film, another encounter with Mona leaves an engineer in an unmodified, indirect address, saying,
“She said I had dirty hands. No, that’s not what she said. She said ‘You’ve got a dirty mind.’ The
nerve.” The intensity of the engineer’s and the trucker’s aggrieved sensibilities contrast with
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Mona’s lighthearted dismissals of their overtures, underscoring her power to perturb masculine
vulnerabilities through her feminine independence and coolness.
These male characters complement the narrative viewpoint of female characters’ in
drawing the contours of Varda’s feminist message. Early in the film, an otherwise unidentified
minor female character is left deeply impressed by Mona after only a brief encounter. In a
conversation with her parents, she reflects, “I’d rather go away. The girl who wanted water …
she was free. I’d like to be free.” Another minor female expresses her admiration of Mona’s
freedom: “She’s got character, she knows what she wants. Marry the wrong man and you’re
stuck for life. I liked that hippie.” The same envy and admiration for Mona’s freedom and
detachment from men resonates especially with the character Yolande, a housekeeper whose
destructive relationship with her uncaring and brutish boyfriend causes her to feel that “being
alone is rough and being a lonely couple is no better.”
These episodic observations from a female viewpoint bear a dual message. Women do
not need men to be happy or feel fulfilled in life. Moreover, reliance on men can make them feel
even more lonely and miserable. Yolande’s narration is often direct and unmodified, as if she
speaks directly to the audience, and particularly to women, evoking their pathos which resonates
with her typical female condition. Female reliance on other individuals, particularly men, is
conveyed as a personal imprisonment. Even while she is hardly involved in their lives, Mona
liberates these female characters by the suggestive power of her unattached life. Through their
direct, unmodified address, allowing them to speak their minds directly to the audience, these
characters voice their inner monologue which is otherwise a silent cry for freedom from male
oppression.
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Varda uses narrative point of view in the film to validate her representations of feminist
ideology, encouraging women to question the aspects of their lives that constrain them and to
remove the shackles to their freedoms as individuals. Narrative patterns and male perspectives
construct Mona as a thorough representation of feminist ideology. Yet, Mona’s fate is tragic and
her encounters are destructive, leaving her ill placed as an ideal heroine. Varda’s feminist
ideology thus needs to be differentiated from Mona’s vagrant lifestyle. Even though their
admiration of Mona is tinged with hesitation, these other female characters clearly cast Mona as
far more than a social outsider whose behavior and lifestyle are completely unacceptable and
shameful. These women crave Mona’s empowerment and freedom, demonstrating that women
are ill at ease within the restrictive and oppressive norms of mainstream society .
Thus, with Mona’s death serving as both book ends of the film, the intermediate narrative
structure defines Mona’s life through the reactions of the various men and women she touches.
The narrative points of view of these men and women construct an “impossible portrait” of the
protagonist, complicating her identity and inviting the audience to judge for themselves who
exactly Mona is. The evidence of Mona’s identity lies in her defiance of traditional feminine
roles and characteristics, giving the audience freedom to view Mona as a complex and
mysterious human being, rather than a mere object or a supporter of male characters. Vagabond
stands as a challenge to patriarchal filmic representations of women, delineated by feminist
sensibilities toward male-female relationships and alternative representations of female identity.