Ammonite - Mary Anning Film

[Fossiliy]

Just seen a trailer for the new Kate Winslet film ‘Ammonite’. I went fossil hunting with my family on holiday in Lyme Regis last year for the 1st time ever and purposely got the audio book of Tracey Chevalier’s book ‘Remarkable Creatures’ to give me some insight into Mary Anning.

Admittedly I have a reaction to audio books that mean I fall asleep to them far too quickly if I’m listening in bed (must be a throwback to falling asleep during the bedtime story) so my recollection of the story might be slightly fogged. BUT I don’t remember it being a ‘love story’ about two women set amongst the sludge and windswept beaches of Dorset? The film seems to be pushing this as the main thrust of the film.

The main theme I took from the book was the huge prejudice against women and the enormous injustice of several men trying to take credit for Anning’s discoveries. Class was certainly an issue too between the two female protagonists and their relationship was at the core of the book. There was a sense of repression and suppression of women in all aspects of their lives most certainly. But I don’t recall a love-affair or even any sense of attraction on a sexual level?

I know, I know artistic license and all that but I can’t just help but imagine when they optioned the book someone saying ‘Two Victorian women right? A friendship right? Can we shoehorn some girl-on-girl action here?’

I think it’s a fascinating story and I was very ignorant about the history and importance of Mary Anning. Maybe I should hold back full judgement until I see the film but I can’t help feeling a bit cynical.

Did Tracey Chevalier gloss over a lesbian relationship? I wonder what she thinks of it? Anyone else read the book?

I guess I'm much less interested in Anning's love life than I am in her discoveries. I wouldn't have minded the romance as a subplot, but from the trailer it seems to be the main focus. So I'm probably not the audience for this. Which is ok, I suppose. Hopefully it will revive interest in the real Anning.

I know some women would have been having lesbian relationships in an under-the-radar way so we wouldn’t know about it. But even if Anning was, it would be so far from the most interesting thing about her. Her story has incredible discoveries, ancient fossils revealing (at the time) mindblowing new knowledge, close escapes from death (more than once), meetings with so many important people of the time, injustice, drama, her constant fight to escape poverty, people who exploited her and slapped her down and those who fought for her - and so many personal friendships that are fascinating in themselves. Focusing on a made up love story means focusing less on all that and that makes me really annoyed.

@DreadPirateLuna

I guess I'm much less interested in Anning's love life than I am in her discoveries. I wouldn't have minded the romance as a subplot, but from the trailer it seems to be the main focus. So I'm probably not the audience for this. Which is ok, I suppose. Hopefully it will revive interest in the real Anning.

Particularly since another relationship, the one she had with Elizabeth Philpot, another Lyme Regis fossil hunter, seems to have been a serious minded relationship based on a shared passion. Philpot was older and unmarried and not working class like Mary, but they developed a strong friendship. She and her sisters feature in the children's book 'Stone Girl, Bone Girl', I read it to my daughters and I'm always struck by how it features strong women without wondering about their roles as 'love interests'. It's a shame the film can't focus on her working relationships and passions and how she and the women in her life were treated by the male establishment.

The Dinosaur Hunters - Deborah Cadbury begins with an excellent first chapter that introduces Mary Anning along with Hutton, Buckland & Cuvier. It's a great book.

I can't remember if there is an original or copy of one of Anning's fossils in the Sedgwick Museum, Cambridge. Will have to do a revisit sometime (in my 'Mary Anning Rocks' t-shirt)

I'm disappointed the film is sold more as an unverifiable romance than about Mary's solid contribution to paleontology but then I'm not financing it! lol. Maybe it will be better than I expect...
matadornetwork.com/read/mary-anning-ammonite-movie/

I guess I'm just tired of the assumption that if female X from history was not married or had any recognised heterosexual relationships, then she had no relationships......

What is wrong with playing with the idea that perhaps the people who were important in her professional or working life might have been important in a personal romantic and emotional level as well? Just because these women were single, why should we assume they were all celibate as well? Why isn't lesbianism as likely an assumption as any other?

I'm just tired of the stereotype of women scientists from history, we either have wife-husband pairs like Marie and Pierre Curie, or we have a mass of single (assumed celibate) females. Where are all the dykes, when younger I would have found such a possibility much more interesting.

The Favorite missed an opportunity to show how interesting Sarah Churchill actually was. The evidence from their letters and other documents suggests strongly that the big rift between the women was primarily political in nature. Sarah Churchill had, from all the reading she had been doing, gradually become quite radicalized and was increasingly pushing hardline Whig politics at Queen Anne. QA inclined towards the Tories and also saw herself as a moderating influence and became increasingly turned off by SH's increasingly extreme political stance. The story between them was mostly about how politics can cause good friends to grow apart. It might have been interesting to have developed this theme as a story which has relevance in our own times as well.

@SomeDyke

I guess I'm just tired of the assumption that if female X from history was not married or had any recognised heterosexual relationships, then she had no relationships......

What is wrong with playing with the idea that perhaps the people who were important in her professional or working life might have been important in a personal romantic and emotional level as well? Just because these women were single, why should we assume they were all celibate as well? Why isn't lesbianism as likely an assumption as any other?

I'm just tired of the stereotype of women scientists from history, we either have wife-husband pairs like Marie and Pierre Curie, or we have a mass of single (assumed celibate) females. Where are all the dykes, when younger I would have found such a possibility much more interesting.

I don't think there's anything wrong with playing to the idea that she might have been a lesbian, I just think the framing of her sex life as the main reason to watch the movie when so little is known about her and her work amongst the general population fails to highlight the importance over her work - which we know to be a fact - in favour of conjecture about her personal life. If Mary Anning was a widely celebrated figure in popular culture and this was an exploration of her sexuality which ran alongside other mainstream content about her I would welcome it. It's more that in order to make her interesting they feel they have to promote it as a love story, when she discovered plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs etc etc

I just think the framing of her sex life as the main reason to watch the movie when so little is known about her and her work amongst the general population fails to highlight the importance over her work - which we know to be a fact - in favour of conjecture about her personal life.

This. Calling the film Ammonite when May had three important firsts in the fossiling world that helped changed the scientific conversation at the time also grinds my gears. I realise Ichthyosaurus, Plesiosaurus or Dimorphodon (or Pterodactyl as they are now known) do not exactly trip off the tongue, which is what you want when selling a film but naming it Ammonite just seems like another pointless misdirection.

Love her sketches in this piece
www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/mary-anning-unsung-hero.html

Mary even!

I've seen the trailer. The subject of the film is clearly a lesbian love affair.

They've taken a story that was dramatic and fascinating in its own right, and completely changed it, made it into something completely different. Very disappointing.

I've read the Tracy Chevalier book - a really good book. It presents Mary Anning as an intelligent and formidable character who made ground-breaking and outstanding scientific discoveries, despite being uneducated. She showed huge strength of character but was wronged by the patriarchy and Victorian scientific community due to her sex and class.

Just be grateful they didn't try to suggest she was trans.

With such a lack of lesbain movies or love stories portrayed on screen it might be nice if the feminist board got behind this film. Surely lesbian representation is a good thing?

It's a film, it needs to make money. While I like to think that audiences would be fascinated about the life of a Victorian fossil hunter in reality its a bit of a hard sell. This isnt a bbc 4 documentary. If this film takes off then it will ignite interest in her life and sporn a range of documentaries so people can learn more about her actual life and contribution to science. If this "hook" draws in audiences then wouldnt that be worth it?

Nobody has seen the film yet but Gods Own Country was beautiful. I am hopeful we will see the same sensitivity shown to this relationship and that it won't just be titilation for the lads.

@DJLippy

With such a lack of lesbain movies or love stories portrayed on screen it might be nice if the feminist board got behind this film. Surely lesbian representation is a good thing?

It's a film, it needs to make money. While I like to think that audiences would be fascinated about the life of a Victorian fossil hunter in reality its a bit of a hard sell. This isnt a bbc 4 documentary. If this film takes off then it will ignite interest in her life and sporn a range of documentaries so people can learn more about her actual life and contribution to science. If this "hook" draws in audiences then wouldnt that be worth it?

Nobody has seen the film yet but Gods Own Country was beautiful. I am hopeful we will see the same sensitivity shown to this relationship and that it won't just be titilation for the lads.

Fully support lesbian representation, just not sure if Mary Anning was a lesbian, plus why is it ok to centre male characters as pioneers within trailers, see Stephen Hawking etc but females always have to be framed within a romantic narrative to be of interest to the audience. Surely you can also see that it's problematic that a woman who is know to have been a pioneering palaeontologist is not being represented as such, but instead as a famous lesbian, which we aren't certain that she was. By all means speculate within the film but I just get a bit bored about women always being there to provide the sex. Again, I want to say I'm all for more lesbian role models in film.

Maybe I'm a hypocrite because I did like The Favourite, despite there being no evidence that Queen Anne was lesbian.

Historians have speculated or theorised that Queen Anne was bisexual or gay for a very long time. It wasn’t something the film made up.

In terms of “evidence”, it’s pretty much impossible to prove a historical figure’s sexuality, especially in women. And sexuality is complex, and coded differently in different societies; many people aren’t 100% straight or gay yet society is predicated on an inaccurate binary concept of sexuality. Same-sex female attraction has been dismissed or downplayed throughout history (even now really obvious female love/lust is often dismissed as “just really good gal pals!”, while men who show even the slightest platonic affection for another man are at risk of being labelled gay).

There’s a fairly substantial body of evidence that suggests Anne had a particularly intense love for Sarah and that others around her considered that love to be inappropriate. Whether that’s labelled as being bi/gay or not is a cultural thing. A publication at the time also accused Anne of sleeping with her chambermaid, might just have been an attempt to slur her, but those rumours were contemporary.

It's striking to compare Ammonite to The Imitation Game, which chose not to concentrate on Turing's known relationships with men but rather on his scientific achievements.

Would love to see a film or TV series about the Ladies of Llangollen, though. A genuinely romantic story about two women in the Georgian era.

Would love to see a film or TV series about the Ladies of Llangollen, though. A genuinely romantic story about two women in the Georgian era.

Yes. See also Eleanor Roosevelt & Lorena Hickok, always thought that would make a fascinating film!

With such a lack of lesbain movies or love stories portrayed on screen it might be nice if the feminist board got behind this film. Surely lesbian representation is a good thing?

You say that as if you have no awareness that gratuitous girl-on-girl action has a long history of being used to titillate men. Is that really something feminism should get behind because it's "lesbian representation"?

I'd have to see the film of course to see how gratuitous it is - but I don't agree at all that it couldn't be interesting without it. And as PPs have said many historical films about scientists in the past haven't focused primarily on their love lives, even when they definitely were gay. That's when they are men though.

What is wrong with playing with the idea that perhaps the people who were important in her professional or working life might have been important in a personal romantic and emotional level as well? Just because these women were single, why should we assume they were all celibate as well? Why isn't lesbianism as likely an assumption as any other?

For me it's the assumption that work, even pioneering, all-consuming, historically-significant work, is somehow not regarded as 'enough' for women, and they must be framed in the context of a significant relationship -- I suspect that in the case of Anning, the absence of evidence for any significant heterosexual relationship means they opted for her having had a same-sex one, as that's nice and secret and unprovable, but (a) still reframes her work within the context of a relationship, and (b) provides the opportunity for a bit of titillating action.

Did anyone see Radioactive - the recent film about Marie Curie? It would be interesting to hear how much of that was centred on her amazing achievements and how much it focused on her romantic life (which was pretty scandalous at the time).

As the director is gay and his last film was a really beautiful love story between two men that avoided pretty much all of the "gay film” cinematic clichés, and was full of his love for his own rural Yorkshire background and the English countryside, I think that it's far more likely that he spent childhood days hunting for fossils on the Yorkshire Jurassic coast so that Mary Anning's story and the coastal landscape appealed to him, and he wanted more same-sex love stories than he suddenly decided to totally change direction as a filmmaker in order to titilate with some hot girl on girl action.

You say that as if you have no awareness that gratuitous girl-on-girl action has a long history of being used to titillate men. Is that really something feminism should get behind because it's "lesbian representation"?

Why are we having this debate when the film hasn't been released yet? The director has a track history portraying gay love in a sensitive manner. The trailer isnt all "wahey boobs out for the lads." You want lesbian representation but you dont want to see any icky actual lesbians doing actual lesbian stuff?

I'm going to duck out here. I have no problem with beautiful films depicting gay and lesbian relationships, with as much sex as you like. I have a problem with the trailer - and possibly the movie itself - framing Mary Anning as someone primarily involved in a passionate lesbian love affair, rather than as a pioneering palaeontologist who changed history. We don't have evidence for the former and we do have loads of evidence for the latter. That's it. I hope it's a lovely movie that actually focuses on the things we know that she did and which were seismic and are of huge interest in and off themselves. See also The Imitation Game & The Theory Of Everything, which seemed to do ok whilst also centering the achievements of the pioneering scientists they featured.

See also The Imitation Game & The Theory Of Everything

Both these movies were centred around exploring the private lives of the subjects though?

I think there are two things going on.

The first is that very often in a film, they want to include a personal story, even if the film is written around an event. It's usually through the characters that the viewers connect to the story and so the writer wants to make them human and real for the viewer.

There should be a lot of ways to do that, though given that many people have romantic relationships it makes sense that's a common element of these stories.

The other issue which really chaps my hide is that pop culture seems to have decided that people without sexual relationships don't exist, and that deep friendships that are really platonic aren't really a thing. Even the odd time when a biopic subject was well know not to have had romantic entanglements they have to include some sort of angst about that, and it's generally shown to be the result of some trauma or terrible bad luck, rather than something someone might have chosen for positive reasons.

Friendship as a topic doesn't get much interest in modern pop culture.

@SomeDyke

Leaving aside the admittedly big issue of titillating the male gaze......I actually like the idea of suggesting that perhaps all those single ladies weren't so single. Because it is a possibility, and we know that apart from some exceptional ladies, it would have been hidden in some way. So, yeah, I like the idea that some of those women who I have always admired anyway, might also have been engaged in significant emotional, romantic and sexual relationships with other women. I'm resisting saying lesbian in the sense that our current usage of the term might not have fitted with how they saw themselves or how they organised their lives.

That's true, but OTOH there were also many people who agreed with the dominant cultural view of the time. That's true even of lesbian women or gay men in those periods.

I don't feel entirely comfortable with speculating not only about a real individuals sexuality with zero evidence, but how they thought about issues many people thought about quite differently at the time.