Craig's Wife

Thank god Dorothy Arzner made Craig’s Wife instead of a male director. It would be so easy to tip Harriet Craig into a monstrous harpy and to side with the “put upon” husband. It would only embolden the patriarchy’s vision of marriage as an imprisonment for men with women as a controlling ball and chain to endure. Arzner undercuts this routinely, and Craig’s Wife is a richer experience for it.

When we’re introduced to Harriet Craig it’s as an unknown quantity, a despotic ruler of her household with an iron fist and level of perfectionism that’s squeamish. Then we actually see her, and she gives a matter-of-fact monologue about marrying her husband as a business contract as a lack of opportunities left her with nothing else. Harriet Craig had to marry and marry well in order to make something of her life, so she deferred an interior life, friendships, or anything outside of the home and transformed herself into a beautiful possession. It’s heartbreaking to realize she’s done this, and her eventual awakening to the monster she’s made of herself through pressures from the patriarchy is the basic thrust of the film.

It helps that Rosalind Russell is Harriet Craig as her ability to play tough, nearly unsympathetic characters was one of her trademarks. Think of how she makes us love her gossipy backstabber in The Women or breaks your heart as Mama Rose in Gypsy, and now look back at Craig’s Wife for one of the earliest examples of that talent. Harriet is a woman misshapen and festering resentment imposed upon her by wider society and completely devoid of a social safety net, and it’s a tall order to ask that we slowly feel something like empathy towards her plight by the end. But we do thanks to Russell’s ability to strip away the layers of armor before our eyes as her household empties out and she’s left alone.

Arzner managed to turn a misogynistic play into, as how BFI described it, “a plea for women to become their own people rather than beautiful possessions.” She succeeds by crafting a dueling glimpse of society: one of female solidarity and friendship that is unavailable to Harriet through her own actions, and the other about how repressive and suffocating heteronormative relationships can become when men view women as mere objects to control and own. Not entirely transgressive about the subject matter, Craig’s Wife still offers a thawing ice queen a potential happy ending but crafting a friendship and sisterhood with the widow-next-door.