The Limits of Feminism in Queen Christina

I’ve been on a Greta Garbo kick the past year. Grand Hotel was an outstanding film all around, but Camille and Mata Hari left me unmoved. Then just the other night, I watched Queen Christina (1933), based loosely on the life of Queen Christina of Sweden. What interested me most on a first viewing was the film’s handling of feminist themes.

The movie begins in a strong feminist current. Queen Christina, who is given to wearing manly clothes, is a forceful and capable ruler who clearly needs no man, either for counsel or romance. Her court wants her to marry the national war hero Karl Gustav, and the scheming Count Magnus is never far away, but she insists, “I shall die a bachelor!” The only person she truly has an interest in is another woman, the dainty and girlish Countess Ebba Sparre. When she finds out that Ebba has a lover whom she wishes to marry, Christina flies into a jealous rage and heads out into the country with only her footman.

Here, the movie abandons its subversive feminist, bisexual and cross-dressing themes and veers toward conventional territory. Posing as a man while on the road, Christina ends up sharing a room and bed with the Spanish envoy Don Antonio. When it’s time to disrobe, her secret is out and the two fall passionately in love. Later, Christina walks around the room, running her hands over and pressing her face against various objects in order to memorize this glorious place where she found a man. Queen Christina has become a man’s woman.

Just when it seems the film has abandoned its more challenging themes--Christina has abdicated her throne in favor of setting up house with Don Antonio--the unexpected happens. Count Magnus mortally wounds Don Antonio in a duel. Christina arrives on the deck of the ship that was to carry them to Spain only to find her lover gasping out his final breaths. Christina declares the ship will set sail despite his death, and the movie ends with Christina at the bow, looking boldly out across the waves, a content smile upon her lips. Now for the first time in her life, she is truly free of men and ready to make her own destiny.

In its unrelenting ending, Queen Christina succeeds where other texts fail. Watching the 1970 movie of Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre (starring George C. Scott as Mr. Rochester), it occurred to me that in many of these old tales by women writers, the extraordinary female protagonist who supposedly needs no man often ends by marrying a man of wealth. Apparently, every good woman needs recognition as such by a man of considerable means and, in the movies at least, a man who also happens to have brooding good looks.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is another example. Throughout the whole book, we are told that Elizabeth is intelligent, independent and generally superior to all those frivolous women who only bother their heads with finding a man to marry. But, of course, she ends up marrying Mr. Darcy. In Joe Wright’s 2006 movie, which is otherwise excellent, these two sober heads suddenly, in the final moments of the film, become giggly dipshits!

Queen Christina avoids this betrayal of the ideals at its core.

But there are limits to Queen Christina’s feminism. What are we to make of her penchant for dressing as, and even pretending to be, a man? Is she proving how even a woman should be able to do anything she pleases? Or does she feel that a woman cannot be equal as a woman but only by becoming a man? And what of her obsessive rejection of men early in the film? Can she not realize herself as a woman except through rejection of men? There is an awful lot of man in this formulation of woman.

But perhaps these limitations cannot be avoided. After all, to be human is to be male, female or intersexual, and to exist in matrices of gender identity. The one thing you cannot do is avoid the male/female polarity altogether. Therefore, any feminist message must fall within the broader context of human biology and sexuality.

Finally, we must consider that Queen Christina’s feminism is limited because it is not the whole story--the movie’s stronger push is for individualism. Queen Christina simply wishes, beyond any aspirations of female empowerment, to be herself. Like the historical Queen Christina of Sweden, she refuses to be bound by convention.

Watching Queen Christina, I couldn’t help but feel that this role suited Greta Garbo more than any other I have seen her in--and indeed, the documentary Garbo by Turner Classic Movies draws connections between the themes in Queen Christina and Garbo’s life. Garbo is always so herself that many roles don’t seem to fit her, but she and Christina fit seamlessly, and the result is entertaining and thought-provoking cinema.