An essay about the film The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio
by
Susan J. Behrens
I believe in words saving lives. When I have a problem, I know that there is a poem I can write to
smooth the bumpy reality, or a book I can buy that will solve the mess. I thought of this philosophy
while watching the film The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio (2005, director Jane Anderson). The film
depicted a potential suicide case saved by words. Evelyn “Mom” Ryan (Julianne Moore) is a
Midwestern 1950s housewife raising ten children on the salary and drinking problem of her husband
“Dad” (Woody Harrelson). She has endless chores in the home, and doesn’t drive, so there is
nowhere she can go. Sounds like hell for a woman with a mind.
And Mom’s mind wants to go places. In a flashback, we are told that she started in journalism and
wanted to see the world; she left all that behind when she married. The ubiquitous product contests
that are advertised on her television (which always seems to be on) become her escape, her visits to
exotic places. You see, Mom is great at writing jingles, internal rhymes and alliterations, and she has
a knack for conciseness. Hence, she is the '25-words-or-less-challenge' queen. She excels at what is
called “contesting.” Mom writes to survive, with the prize money she earns and the outlet contesting
allows her creativity.
Although set in 1950s Defiance, the film made me think of a favorite short story I read in my college
years: "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1899). The unnamed Edwardian-era
English woman who narrates the story is dying because she is forbidden to write. Her husband John
is a physician, and he refuses to believe there is anything wrong with Mrs. John (we’ll call her) other
than “temporary nervous depression – a slight hysterical tendency.” Her brother, also a physician,
concurs. The patient must rest and is strictly forbidden from doing any type of work. But she writes
on the sly - “There comes John, and I must put this away, he hates to have me write a word." And,
"John has cautioned me not to give way to fancy in the least. He says that with my imaginative
power and habit of story-making, a nervous weakness like mine is sure to lead to all manner of
excited fantasies, and that I ought to use my will and good sense to check the tendency. So I try.”
This rest-cure, not surprisingly, starts to sap Mrs. John’s creativity. “I think sometimes that if I were
only well enough to write a little it would relieve the press of ideas and rest me. But I find I get pretty
tired when I try.” Her “imaginative power” has no outlet, is in a way stuck in 1950s Ohio. Mrs. John
finally goes crazy and succumbs to a world that she discovers existing in the yellow wallpaper of her
room/prison. Virginia Woolf called for women to have their own space (A Room of One’s Own),
physically and creatively. Mrs. John’s room without creative outlets, however, is her downfall.
Mrs. Ryan and Mrs. John are sisters, generations and countries apart but both in worlds in which
women’s thoughts and words are dangerous. Mrs. John and her writing are a danger to herself. Mrs.
Ryan and her talents are a danger to her husband’s masculinity. Dad not only can't support the
family on his salary and drinking habits, but he begrudges his wife her fame and achievements. In
one scene, he mocks Mom as she brainstorms aloud possible lyrics for a fill-in-the-lyrics contest. They
verbally tango with their rhyming one-liners, hers about sandwiches, his about despair. When he
finally zings her with “Your problem is that you are too happy,” she grants him the round, and the
kids pick up on this concession and comply: good one, Dad; where do you come up with them? His
modest, inner grinning reply is “They just come to me.” Dad needs some recognition too. We see in
another flashback that Dad was headed for fame as a crooner, but lost his voice in a car accident.
Now he is determined to diminish his wife’s voice.
To a certain extent, though, the reality of the Ryan’s existence is that Mom’s prize winnings do keep
the Ryan family afloat. And, Dad does begrudgingly concede that women have minds and might not
find fulfillment simply as housewives and mothers. Late in the film, Dad buys Mom a writing desk
and typewriter, a far cry from Mr. John’s prohibition on his wife’s writing. Dad says that he always
only wanted to make Mom happy. She replies, “I don’t need you to make me happy; just stay away
from me when I am.” Her problem, remember, is that she is too happy. She is not Mrs. John on
Prozac, but she is Mrs. John finding her survival through writing. So in this way, Mom is the luckier
sister.
Plenty of men contribute to the limited choices of these two women. In "The Yellow Wallpaper",
husband and brother are both doctors, huddled in agreement about the best cure for the woman. In
Prize Winner, Mom has to call the cops in one instance of Dad’s drunken violence. The cops huddle
with the drunken husband, sobering him up by talking sports and giving the “boys will be boys” nod
to this all-too common scene in the Ryan household. The local priest also makes his appearance to tell
Mom that it’s all her fault, that she is not doing enough for her man. She pleasantly and neutrally
thanks him for coming as she shuts the door; the kids note that the priest’s breath smells like Dad’s.
Other men collude against Mom. In several scenes, Mom fights with Ray the milkman to receive
extended credit on their milk bill. The kids need milk. Now, while this state of affairs could reflect
poorly on Dad, Mom is the one left to beg. Here is a mother who can’t even supply milk for her
babies, who must beg a man for her children’s life supply.
It’s a miracle Mom doesn’t start speaking to the wallpaper. Instead, she finds the Affadaisies, a group
of like-minded housewives in Ohio and Indiana who meet and talk serious contesting-shop. One
woman is in an iron lung and still churns out the product slogans.
The irony of contesting is that while the women write to free themselves and their minds, they feed the
economy that keeps them homebound. They are still the cooks, cleaners, shoppers, diaper changers,
and consumers of America; consuming what is consuming them. Yet they are able to take this
formulaic doggerel that conforms to what the men of Madison Avenue think the housewives of
America want to hear, and plant enough coded messages in these SOS notes to survive.
Dad, in one enlightened moment, teaches daughter Terry (Tuff) to drive, allowing her to drive Mom
to an Affadaisies meeting. The pep talk that Mom gives Tuff, on their way to the meeting, is to use
her mind to go places. Tuff is the next generation of women who will survive more easily than Mom,
who herself is surviving better than Mrs. John. One small step at a time.
One might wonder why Mom would so easily leave behind her dreams of journalism and travel to
become a wife and mother. Yet, Sylvia Plath, who won many awards for her writing as early as high
school, is an example of ambition bowing to the expected role of the 1950s woman. As a young
woman in the 1950s, she absorbed the prevalent message that the wife needs to serve her husband
and children. Plath typed her poet-husband Ted Hughes’ poems on her manual typewriter and acted
as his executive assistant, mailing his writings to magazines and contests, keeping track of what poem
was sent where. She was also teaching, raising two children as an ex-pat living in England and, oh
yes, publishing poems of her own in the New Yorker.
Her suicide at age 30 was the third attempt she had made on her life. In the weeks in 1963 leading up
to her death, she awoke at 4 am to write the best poems of her life, which were published
posthumously as Ariel by Hughes. Did writing keep Plath alive as long as it could? The power of
words can only go so far. Plath and Hughes’ daughter, Frieda Hughes, has recently reordered the
poems in Ariel to more closely match her mother’s intended flow for the volume (an order that Ted
did not respect), and has written an introduction to the reissued volume. The daughter, here, protects
the mother’s words and life.
Same for the Ryans. Terry Ryan wrote the memoir upon which the film is based: The Prize Winner of
Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words or Less. She and her siblings appear as
themselves at the end of the film. The sleeve holding the DVD I rented from Netflix touts the film as
being “based on a heartwarming memoir by Ryan’s son, Terry.”
Don’t let the male corporate world strip you of your gender, Tuff. You write to live as well.
Perkins Gilman discusses her famous story in a short essay written in 1913. She mentions drawing on
her own experiences of treatment for melancholia and a doctor’s advice to “live as domestic a life as
far as possible, to have but two hours’ intellectual life a day, and never to touch pen, brush, or pencil
again as long as I lived. I went home and obeyed…and came so close near the borderline of utter
mental ruin that I could see over.” She said "The Yellow Wallpaper" was written “to save people from
being driven crazy.”
In Prize Winner, Mom outlives Dad. The kids outlive Mom. Mom’s typewriter now sits side by side
with Terry’s computer, upon which she captured her mother’s life and vitality on paper. Writing
paper is healthier than wallpaper.
Disorders at Marymount Manhattan College; she is also an associate of The Institute for Writing and Thinking at
Bard College. She has co-authored a text book on speech science and is in contract for an introductory linguistics
text. Ms. Behrens has published numerous professional journal articles on issues related to the field of
sociolinguistics; her poetry has appeared in regional publications. A film essay she wrote on Gus Van Sant's
Elephant is available on the website Metaphilm.
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