Mia,

I feel your pain. When I was in grade 5 I read Anne of Green Gables and immediately fell head over heels for the title character. Naturally when I finished it I couldn't wait to read the sequels. They turned out to be...disappointing. Painfully disappointing. Anne went from a strong willed, free spirited girl blessed with a wonderful imagination to a highly conventional Edwardian woman, a veritable paragon of respectability. Naturally, she ended up marrying the boy she initially loathed in school (this is a fairly common trope of the period, used to signal the transition of the protagonist from girlhood to womanhood by embracing what was once despised), became a teacher and then a mother. There is almost no trace of the iconoclastic girl left in the adult Anne.

When I was a girl myself I naturally found this very frustrating and bewildering, but as an adult I can appreciate the social context. These stories were written between 1908 and 1920, in a period when females could have certain freedoms as girls that they would be denied as women -at least if they aspired to be regarded as respectable women! Girls had a certain freedom to bend gender stereotypes and experiment with unconventional roles, but as an adult you had to conform to a much narrower conception of what was acceptable behavior for a woman -one which notably defined you mostly in terms of your role as a wife and mother. It follows that spinsterhood, in which you were denied fulfillment on both counts, was conventionally regarded as a regrettable tragedy and made you an object of pity.

Now when you consider that the narration of True Grit begins in 1924, when Mattie is an elderly woman, and relates events that occurred probably more than three decades earlier, you can see how you can see how the depiction of Mattie the girl vs. Mattie the woman fits this template. For the purposes of the story's composition I think it's helpful to think of girl Mattie and adult Mattie as two different characters with two different roles in the story. Sure, Charles Portis could have made the adult Mattie more interesting, but that would have required a lot of extra exposition that would be extraneous to the main story. Adult Mattie is really only intended to "bookend" the story, set the scene, and provide closure. A stock character that didn't require a lot explanation suited the author's needs admirably.

Btw, I haven't read the novel myself but I've been told that in the book adult Mattie is not a very sympathetic character, being a rather crotchety old lady who is only really interested in her religion and the bank she owns.

Hello Emma,

well, fair enough. I like your suggestion of thinking about the two versions of Mattie as two unrelated characters, with all of the symbolic value of this distinction. Perhaps many interesting people in that time died before adulthood, on various levels.  Fourteen is an interesting age to choose for this, and I can't help but wonder if it's fair to read a ritual of growing up into the snake bite and the drawing of blood (not to mention the superlatively vaginal cave!). It's hard to tell if the movie is interested in this sort of interpretation or not. "The snakes are awake," and the shot right before.

At the very least, the movie is not un-selfaware, as that last song about the Everlasting Arm drove home.

just to comment very quickly on this interesting discussion, though unfortunately I have no time at the moment to write a more extensive analysis of True Grit which, I think, is a great film, and its ending in particular I find to be one of the most moving and sad I can remember of any recent movie. I absolutely disagree with you Mia that the ending is a disappointment, though I also know precisely what you mean. You hit the target on the head, the ending IS indeed a dead end. In face, what is so powerful about it is that the only moment of life that Mattie had is the adventure story (hence the movie's character as a fairy tale) she tells. there is no life for her afterwards, and in fact, she has been burried in the cave into which she has fallen. Just to quickly explain, I think one of the major literary reference points of the movie is Antigone, that story about a woman with the task of bringing her brother to burial, who herself ends up being buried alive in a cave. True Grit is all about that girl whose task is to bring the father to a grave, yet no one, until the very ending, ever reaches the grave in the movie, they remain in a way living dead. this inability for a body to get to its resting place is a constant question in the movie. We never see her father buried, we never see anyone buried, though we hear constant promises which are then broken to bring people to their grave. In fact Mattie herself, in a mythologically evocative scene, is refused passage across the river by the boat man, standing for the Mythical Charon. there is also the body fallen from the tree who constantly stays above ground, the unburied young man, etc. it seems that those who live a life where the dead are not buried themselves remain buried alive. It is at the moment where she herself kills her father's killer, whose body falls, again not to be buried, that she herself falls into the cave which is, simultaneously, her only sexual moment (the moment of the poisonous kiss) at the same time as the moment of her burial.