The Green World; A Reality Made by Ivy

Ivy Sedam

Romantic Comedies

February 25th, 2020

The Green World; A Reality Made

Shakespeare's plays are famed for having a fantasy other-world that the characters travel to for their romance to happen. This other world is described by Northrop Frye in “The Argument of Comedy” as the green world, a place that is not entirely a world of fantasy but a place that allows for things that do not happen in society to take place. This green world in Much Ado About Nothing is the arbor in which Benedick and Beatrice are tricked into falling in love/acknowledging their love for eachother. Through the cover of trees these two separately overhear their friends exclaiming regret that the other one is in love with them amd in hearing so lower their pride to admit their own love.The elements of this original romantic comedy have endured throughout the centuries and when the type of story hit the big screen in the mid 1930s the narrative element of  the green world remained an important part of the way characters fall in love.

In Jack Conway’s Libeled Lady (1936) the characters Bill and Connie (William Powell and Myrna Loy) fall in love on Connie’s fathers estate where they go fishing and swimming- this is the real and literal green world of the film. The only parts of the film that are outside are the scenes important to their romance, even when Bill tells Glady and Warren (Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy) to turn around and leave it is the point in which we as the audience see that he is now on the side of protecting Connie instead of the newspaper. Significantly in this scene Bill is the only one who is actually outdoors; the others are in a car.  Even Bill and Connie's proposal takes place outside, secluded from all the people despite everywhere around them being filled with people. The green world that Shakespeare shows as a source of isolation and becoming one with nature allowing the couple to form is almost identical to how these two's story goes.

Gladys, however, believes Bill and herself to be in a green world.The fighting that she and Bill start the film with subsides after they spend some time together in their rooms, just like how a green world would function. She sees a romance (partly encouraged by Bill's manipulation to get her to do what he wants) in their sham marriage. The hotel suite that Bill and Gladys pretend to cohabitate becomes her green world because she sees the narrative patterns of a romantic comedy within the world of the film. We see some of  the same elements of the film's real green world in the hotel room. Both the real and imagined green worlds focus heavily on scenes of fishing. In the hotel room there is no fish to catch which works very aptly to explain just how much Gladys version of the green world is false. 

Bill accidentally hooks Gladys while trying to learn how to fish, the very thing that eventually wins Connie for him. In his fishing lesson Bill quite literally uses Gladys as a prop and ends up hurting her, which is a brief scene but also Gladys arc with him throughout the film. One of the main obstacles that Bill and Connie have to get past is her distrust of him and his belief that she is spoiled and uptight. When they go fishing both of these problems are resolved because he accidentally lands a big fish and she lowers her guard. Because of their time alone together the couple can talk and get to know each other and bond, something Gladys perceives to be happening with herself and Bill. The fake green world holds the same kind of isolation that the real green world and along with Bill's kindness (as explained by Connie at the end of the film) Gladys is thoroughly convinced that she and Bill are in love or at least she is and he could be. She creates the idea of a perfect romance with Bill as a form of escaping the reality of Warrens cruelness and indifference. She gets caught up in the lies she is being told to tell by both of these men and believes that the fiction is reality. 

The kind of deception that Gladys is placed under is a direct parallel to Benedick and Beatrice's but her story ends in the arguably more realistic way. Benedick and Beatrice are both lied to about how the other feels about them. While in the arbor they are intentionally allowed to overhear a fantasy they come to believe much like Gladys. She is led on by Bill and Warren to get what they want and lies herself into believing she is in love with Bill because the reality of her being in love with Warren is one she wants to (reasonably) escape. Gladys green world isn't really a secluded spot in nature but in the middle of the city where anyone can come or go as they please. The real green world is threatened by this false green world because of this. The annoying society women see into the false green world and try to bring the problems of it into the real green world. 

The real significance of Gladys false green world is that she herself is the one who created it. Because romances like Much Ado About Nothing exist Gladys- even in one the early film rom-coms- sees her isolated location and insults as the banter and romance that Shakespeare showed as true love and believed that she and Bill were the couple being formed because the ideas put forth by Shakespeare have so shaped and formed our ideas of how love happens. Gladys is an interesting figure though because she realizes that she has been lied to and tries to hold on to what little she can out of a kind of self preservation. She is quite aware of the narrative elements happening around her and tries to make them work for her in the final scenes of the film. Despite the fantasy of the fake and real green worlds these elements of romantic comedies endure because they can help to create realistic characters like Gladys in Libeled Lady.