Fifty years after the film’s initial release in 1965,
viewers of The Sound of Music could
measure the imprint of the women’s movement of the 1970s by how very different—antiquated actually—the film
is in terms of marital roles. Whether Liesl in the first half of the film or
Maria in the second, their acceptance of the dominance of husbands over wives
stood out like a blade of grass needing to be cut in 2015 for all but a
minority of viewers. Yet the internal changes that Maria and the Captain have
the courage to undergo resonate in any age, being so much a part of human
nature, as distinct from sociological artifacts.
The full essay is at “The
Sound of Music.”
