By Sharanya Gopinathan
It’s just such a good time to be alive. Soolagna Majumdar, a 27-year-old Kolkata woman currently based in Perth, Australia, has created a zine of surrealist, manga-influenced illustrations called Marge Simpson Anime, subtitled The Liberation of Marjorie Bouvier, that depict the revolutionary awakening of Marge Simpson.
And Majumdar has the most intriguing things to say about the series. In a (really very insightful) interview to the UWA Student Guild, she said that she “wanted to keep Homer as far away as possible from Marge”, and create a Marjorie Bouvier, whose awakening is shown through these images.
She chose Marge because she felt Marge so badly needs liberation, and was a character firmly embedded in our cultural purview, plus, she found many women stuck in circumstances like Marge’s who she felt needed the kind of liberation she depicts. She also says that in her images and imagination, Marge may not be straight.
The images are also supposed to speak of brilliant women trapped in marriages to mediocre men. Majumdar agrees that Marge is just so much better than Homer, and she says her art offers Marge a better life. Her children feature in these dreamy depictions as angelic bird-like beings circling around her head; Majumdar said that it was because she feels Marge would be unhappy without her children.
Here’s a bomb paragraph from the interview:
“You don’t lose jobs for being a misogynistic man. You don’t lose family. You can settle into a very comfortable, fifty year marriage as a very shitty, mediocre man with no qualms. You don’t have to do emotional or household labour. You don’t even have to raise your kids – you can be ‘fun dad’. We accept this and it’s profitable because it’s a fantasy that has come to life for so many men. Unless we critique this phenomenon, it will stay the way it is. In many ways, Marge Simpson anime was a direct critique of male mediocrity.”
For more of her amazing work, check out her website, and Instagram handle.