Becoming

Another of my rather odd uni literature papers was all about Becoming – with a capital B to show that it was a terribly clever literary term rather than just a word. Becoming is all about starting off as one thing and finishing as another.

Take Thelma and Louise for example, who start off as a ditzy and rather impractical stay at home wifey and her friend, the worldly and sensible working woman, but who Become (there's that capital again) a wisecracking thief and her murderess accomplice. There's Becoming in a nutshell.

It's a fairly easy thing to study, because any decent story has some sort of Becoming in it, since one of the things that makes a story a story is the central character undergoing some sort of change.

I chose a selection of films in which female characters go through blokey Becomings – GI Jane, Thelma and Louise, stuff like that. But then, just to make life interesting, I chose to argue that those Becomings weren't about swapping gender roles at all. I don't know why, in hindsight, but I think it was something to do with wanting to do a feminist re-interpretation of the whole thing, so that women could be strong and macho and arse-kicking without necessarily Becoming male. It was the convoluted sort of postmodern gender studies argument that my lecturers at the time would have loved.