"Dead Poets with Girls?"

I saw a clip from Mona Lisa Smile on TikTok: Julia Roberts as Katherine Watson, the new art history professor at Wellesley, facing a class of women who seem to know her entire syllabus already. They identify every image she puts on the screen. They’ve read the textbook and the suggested supplements.

Someone in the comments asked, “Isn’t this just Dead Poets with girls?”

Women, not girls, geez. Wellesley is a college. As a women’s college graduate, that distinction is important to me.

But the comparison stayed with me. I remembered Robin Williams as John Keating, the English teacher in Dead Poets Society (“O Captain! My Captain!”). I’d seen Mona Lisa Smile too. I’d just never thought to put them next to each other.

Once I started looking, the similarities weren’t hard to find. A new teacher at a prestigious school. Students who know how to give the right answers. A school that would rather they keep doing that.

Keating tells his class to tear out a textbook introduction that offers a formula for judging poetry. At one point, he has the boys climb onto his desk and look around the room from up there. Katherine shows hers a paint-by-numbers Van Gogh. A painter who refused to conform to popular taste has become a project anyone can complete by following the instructions in the box. I could see why someone had made the comparison.

I mean, even the names of the schools sound similar: Welton and Wellesley.

Both films take place in the 1950s. Keating teaches high school boys in 1959; Katherine teaches college women in 1953. All of them have inherited someone else’s expectations, but they don’t have the same ability to decide what comes next.

Neil wants to act. His father forbids it, but Neil goes onstage anyway. After the play, his father tells him he’s taking him out of Welton and sending him to military school. Keating had urged Neil to tell his father how much acting means to him. When Neil has the chance, he can’t bring himself to say it. He feels trapped.

At Wellesley, Katherine’s first class has shown us women who can master anything the college assigns. Then Betty gets married, misses classes and assignments, and expects it to be excused. Katherine objects. Betty sees that as an attack on marriage and later writes an editorial accusing Katherine of encouraging Wellesley women to reject “the roles they were born to fill.”

Katherine responds by bringing advertisements into class. She puts images of women ironing and cooking in front of students who have spent years earning their place at Wellesley. What exactly is all that education supposed to be for?

I remember how angry she was. I was angry too.

I don’t remember Keating having a moment quite like it. He wants the boys to imagine lives beyond the ones planned for them. Katherine is looking at how insistently one particular life is being sold to her students.

She helps Joan apply to Yale Law School, and Joan gets in. Then Joan decides not to go. She tells Katherine that the man she plans to marry would have supported her studying law, but she wants to raise a family. Katherine worries that she’ll regret giving up the chance. Joan hears her disappointment and asks why a teacher who tells students to look beyond appearances has already decided what a housewife must be like.

I understand why Katherine worries. I also understand why Joan resents being told what she should want by one more person.

Betty makes a different choice. After defending the expected path so fiercely, she files for divorce. Her mother tells her she won’t be welcome at home if she leaves her husband. Betty leaves anyway, plans to live with Giselle, and even begins to consider law school.

In the end, both teachers leave. Welton blames Keating for Neil’s suicide and fires him. Wellesley offers Katherine another year only if she accepts rules that would change how she teaches. She declines.

Neither has had more than a year with these students.

When Keating returns to his classroom to collect his things, one of the boys stands on his desk and calls, “O Captain! My Captain!” The headmaster orders him down. Others stand anyway.

Katherine’s students bring her their own versions of the paint-by-numbers Van Gogh she showed them (Joan’s idea). When Katherine’s taxi leaves, the women ride alongside it.

The boys will have to climb down from their desks. The women will have to ride back to Wellesley. I don’t know what happens after that.

Maybe something changes.