I enjoyed Clare Coffey’s piece in the Bulwark, “There Is No Mary Problem in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life.’” Coffey addresses the angel’s apparently implausible alternative future for Mary Hatch: that, if George Bailey didn’t exist, she would have become “an old maid.” (This is implausible because Mary is extremely beautiful and maternal.) Coffey’s point is that in the alternative version, Mary would remain unmarried not by bad luck but by choice. She writes:
It is certainly pleasant but not unduly extraordinary to be a popular and beautiful woman who can marry a rich and popular man if she chooses. It is less ordinary to see, with Mary’s perfect clarity and uncanny certainty, the life and man you want, and to choose it in the teeth of discouragement with all its disadvantages apparent, to persist single-mindedly in the face of hardship. It’s a Wonderful Life is, in part, the story of someone becoming, kicking and screaming, against all intentions and desires, a big man. Mary sees the big man in George from the first, because she is a big woman.