Benjamin’s tensions about his status as man or boy are not solved in any typical ways and this part of what makes this film revolutionary in terms of understandings of gender in the 1960s. For his parent’s generation, the best way for him to “become a man” would be to either secure a professional position at a company and have a wife or to have an affair with a woman. While he is only successful at the one, this still does not make him a man. He is still awkward and boyish, especially early in his sexual relations with Mrs. Robinson and simply feels more torn between his position as man versus boy. What does create his understanding of himself as a man, however, is not an act of conformity, but an act of rebellion. He drives across the country to break up a marriage (the symbol of the old generation’s social order) and thus is a real man. Granted, this ending still smacks of the traditional outcome, especially for his bride who has the quintessential “happy ending” but this is still a subversion of the traditional gender expectations in that his act of “coming into his manhood” has not followed a prescribed route.

Benjamin’s age-appropriate love interest in the film, Elaine, offers viewers two ways of considering gender as it is represented in films from the 1960s. It should be remembered that by the 1960s there were many “significant changes to the lived experiences of women…and to the ways in which these experiences were reflected by the film industry. Undoubtedly, marriage and motherhood remained central to the conceptualization of womanhood but there were important shifts in attitudes toward the woman her rights to personal fulfillment” (Fink 241). This tension between traditional versus revolutionary views on gender is represented by Elaine as she both seeks to appease the status quo as set forth by her parents and suburban society while at the same time to break free and form her own understanding of herself as a woman. It is significant that she is attending college at Berkeley because during the 1960s this was the American center of many revolutionary movements that took place during the 1960s, in terms of class, gender, and race. By placing this character within such a setting, the film is making the tension between these two understandings of traditional female roles clear. The problem with Elaine’s character, however, is that she, unlike her mother, does not clearly embody the values of the 1950s nor those of the 1960s. Instead, she blends these two and is the perfect immersion of the new and the traditional.

The film “The Graduate” meets the viewer’s expectations in terms of the “happy ending” for this woman who has liberated herself from the prospect of a boring marriage and life in suburbia, but still her ending is more or less the same—she is married and thus is confirming old beliefs about women and their roles. In short, despite the gender consciousness of films of the 1960s like “The Graduate” the gender expectations are not always reversed. As one critic notes, most films from the 1960s—even those we might consider to be revolutionary or defining of an era, “always produced an obligatory ‘good man’ in the final frames for our newly liberated heroine…Still they were fun to watch because they showed women going off in search of their own destinies, their true selves” (Rapping 70). For Elaine to be a character that defines the “new” woman the 1960s were supposed to have produced, she might have had to have a different ending. Still, she successfully represents the tension between the old and new notions of femininity during this time. One the one hand she cannot break free entirely from the old constraints of marriage and tradition yet on the other hand, she is independent, educated, and able to make her own decisions about her future. Like Benjamin, Elaine represents a society on the verge of a massive shift of gender consciousness; each of these characters is struggling to for redefinition of self in the midst of two competing cultures and ways of understanding gender.

In terms of gender, Mrs. Robinson is the most fascinating character in the film. While the struggles with gender of both Benjamin and Elaine are wrought with their own complex set of issues, those of Mrs. Robinson are completely different because she is part of the older generation. As a member of this older generation, Mrs. Robinson is supposed to have traditional ideas about her place as a married woman in suburban culture. Such a culture confines her to the “June Cleaver” model of the 1950s woman and should, it seems, keep her away from the new way of conceptualizing her femininity that is having an effect on her daughter and young lover. As it stands, despite her status as a member of this older generation that has very definite ideas about gender roles, Mrs. Robinson is a rebellious character because she is playing both sides. She is perfectly comfortable with the whitewashed unhappiness of suburban living and is equally at home with her role as an openly sexual woman with her own needs and desires. The woman of the suburban culture should be seen and not heard, should always be attentive to her husband, should not have desires outside of those that her husband cannot fulfill…the problem is, Mrs. Robinson fits none of these molds. As a result the viewer cannot help but find her to be an enigma—she is both male and female since she is demanding and powerful yet a creature bound by her sex. The question becomes, is Mrs. Robinson an accurate representation of what we should see as a woman of the 1960s? On the one hand she is liberated in that she is able to make up her own mind and follow a course of action that is not dictated by the typical “romantic love” trope that guides the plots of so many films of both the 1960s and those of today. On the other hand, her entire story revolves around her interactions with someone of the opposite sex and thus she is still a female character that is defined by her relationship with a man rather than her own actions—even if this man is years younger and still, in many ways, more like a boy.

As a result of this paradigm and in terms of films of the 1960s, the character of Mrs. Robinson is interesting on a more theoretical level. Throughout the 1960s, women in film were appearing more often in different roles than they used to, but even still there problems with these “liberated” women since so much of who they were as characters was based on their interactions with men. One scholar notes that this is the result of the film industry’s inability to break free from the traditional representations of women so common throughout the history of cinema. She states that, “Audiences for the most part were not interested in seeing, and Hollywood was not interested in sponsoring, a smart, ambitious woman as a popular heroine” (Haskell 22). One cannot help but see how this assessment can be correct, particularly when thought of in the context of “The Graduate.” Mrs. Robinson is a compelling character—one of the most famous in film, in fact, but when one considers her in terms of gender representation it is clear that she is not compelling because of her achievements, but because of her status as something of a monster. What is even more interesting is that she is considered something of a monster not just because of her deviation from normal sexual desires but also because she is a deviant in terms of her whole society. Whereas she should be upholding traditional values that are parallel with her status as a suburban wife, she is not happy with this life and instead of being heroic and abandoning it completely, she simply lives in these two spaces at once. In other words, the fact that she occupies two modes of gender at once—that of the old versus new generation—is, in itself, monstrous. She is a villain and worse, she is considered such because of her refusal to adhere to one conception of gender or the other. She is already a wife and mother but on the other hand she is a lover and an independent woman. This is a scary combination, particularly in terms of films of the 1960s which sought, for their own purposes, to portray women as one or the other.

The 1960s and the films that came out of the period reflect the tensions between the old and new order, especially in terms of gender. The reason “The Graduate” is such an excellent example of this tension is because it offers characters who show the “full spectrum of the generational differences in terms of conceptualizing femininity or masculinity” (Man 106). On the one hand there are Benjamin and Elaine who are characters on the brink of the new age while on the other, there are characters such as Mrs. Robinson—a character who is straddling generations and their representations and understanding of gender and is thus monstrous. While there are a number of films from this period that seek to explore issues of sex and gender, this one is particularly well-suited for an analysis because it does not just look at gender alone, but also at the ways in which other elements such as class and generations intersect.

Other essays and articles in the Arts Archives related to film topics include : Sex and the Holy City : Film Analysis    • Summary, Analysis, and Review of the Film “Gandhi” (1982   •  Representations of Mental Illness in the Film “A Beautiful Mind”  •   An Epic Hero in the Film “Pulp Fiction”?

Works Cited

Beuka, Robert. “‘Just One Word … ‘Plastics’: Suburban Malaise, Masculinity, and Oedipal Drive in The Graduate.” Journal of Popular Film and Television 28.1 (2000), 12-21.

Fink, Janet. “Pictures from the Margins of Marriage: Representations of Spinsters and Single Mothers in the Mid-Victorian Novel and Inter-War Hollywood Melodrama of the 1950s and 1960s. Gender and History. 11.2 (1999), 233-255.

Haskell, Molly. “From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies.” Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

Liebman, Nina. Living Room Lectures: The Fifties Family in Film and Television. Austin: U of Texas P, 1995.

Man, Glenn. Radical Visions: American Film Renaissance, 1967-1976. Westport: Greenwood, 1994.

Rapping, Elayne. “Media-tions: Forays into the Culture and Gender Wars” New York: South End Press, 1994.