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Meetings with the mother: The maternal and spectatorial pleasure in film

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Meetings with the mother: The maternal and spectatorial pleasure in film

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Content MEETINGS WITH THE MOTHER:
THE MATERNAL AND SPECTATORIAL PLEASURE
IN FILM
by
Mary Regina Desjardins
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Cinema-Television)
August 1992
Copyright 1992 Mary Regina Desjardins
UMI Number: D P22277
All rights reserved
IN FO R M A TIO N TO ALL USERS
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In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript
and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.
UMI DP22277
Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author.
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY PARK
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90089-4015
This dissertation, written by
Mary Regina Desjardins
under the direction of h..&c... Dissertation
Committee, and approved by all its members,
has been presented to and accepted by The
Graduate School, in partial fulfillm ent of re
quirements fo r the degree of
D O C T O R O F P H ILO S O P H Y
Dean of Graduate Studies
Date
DISSERTATION COMMITTEE
Chairperson
> qz
[ 745°\
ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This dissertation would not have been completed
without the help of many people.
First of all, I want to thank my family for their
love and support. My parents, Paul and Rosemary
Desjardins, offered love, prayers, financial aid, and
encouragement throughout. My brothers, Chris and Vincent,
shared my love for movies, and contributed time, tapes,
and when needed, a place for me to write.
My gratitude also goes to the following people:
Barbara Hall and Val Almendarez, for their intellectual
companionship, emotional support, and welcoming
hospitality; Laura Hess and Cheri Derby, not only for
always being there, but for going enthusiastically to
films with me and encouraging my speculations in fruitful
directions; Linda Nelson, for sharing the tribulations of
writing and teaching at the same time; my in-laws, the
Williams family, for their loving support from all over
the continent; Jim Dailey, for his cheerful hospitality;
Edward Branigan and Charles Wolfe, for their unsolicited
enthusiasm and everyday kindnesses; the late Beverle
Houston, for inspiring me— as she did so many of the
people I shared USC life with— through the pleasures she
took in film and through her intellectual rigor.
My dissertation committee was crucial to the
successful completion of this project. Tania Modleski and
Michael Renov offered perceptive criticism that has not
only made this dissertation better, but will resonate in
whatever future incarnations it might have. I thank them
for their time and insights. My warmest thanks go to
Marsha Kinder, the chair of my committee, and the greatest
influence on my scholarly life at USC. Marsha has been a
true support from my first day in the School of Cinema-
Television, and I have benefitted greatly from her example
as a scholar and teacher.
Lastly, my husband Mark Williams, who has helped me
in more ways than I can enumerate here, gets my loving
gratitude. Even while working on his own dissertation, he
gave practical help and nurturing emotional reassurance
throughout the writing and the even longer thinking
process of this work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ............................................ 1
Part I
Chapter 1:
The Maternal in Film Theory's Conceptualization
of Spectatorial Pleasure ....................... 6
Part II
Chapter 2:
The Maternal and the State..............................31
Chapter 3:
The Phallic Mother vs. the Mothering Phallus . . . .98
Chapter 4:
The Comedy of Surrogacy.............................. 13 8
Part III
Chapter 5:
Meetings with Mother:
Feminist Counter-Cinema and the Maternal ......... 178
Bibliography .......................................... 217
j INTRODUCTION ,
I ’
: I
I Goals and Methodology
I
i This dissertation explores the relationship between
; film studies' theorization of spectatorial pleasures and
\
’ concepts of the maternal and mothering in some of our |
culture's most popular film narratives. My interest in i
p
the topic developed out of a simultaneous exposure to !
I
!
; contemporary film theories of the spectator, feminist !
i !
{theories of female/feminist identity, and the
i
1 proliferation of representations of the maternal in film
and television of the past decade. Specifically, my own .
i . t
jinterest grew as I witnessed how psychoanalytic theories j
- t
of film spectators and psychoanalytic feminist theories of
feminine/female identity have developed in tandem— so that j
1 now theories of spectatorial pleasure and identification |
! do not just center on issues of gender or sexual '
: difference, but argue that the existence of those effects
i
and activities actually pivot on questions of sexual
I .
! difference. I have qualified the theories I am concerned
i
1 with here as pyschoanalytic, because it was only when a
i
|psychoanalytic feminism interrogated filmic theories of ;
! I
!spectatorial pleasure and identification that film theory j
'conceptualized any notion of the maternal— the main term i
; |
( i
>
j or function under scrutiny here— outside of some notion of
i
I how well mothers in films reflected "real" mothers.
f
i "Real" mothers are important to my project, with the
: understanding, of course, that what is "real" is
understood through the historical frames of
| intelligibility that mediate how we make sense of it. One
I
] of the main goals of this dissertation is to articulate a
I
j relationship between the maternal/mother constructed in
! psychoanalytic theories that narrativize the process of
I sexual differentiation— which then figures in an
understanding of cinematic spectatorial pleasure and
identification— and the mother/maternal subjectivity which
could be said to belong to the social rather than (only)
the psychic. The latter would be a maternal constituted
jthrough social, historical experiences of mothering in
|patriarchal culture and addressed by institutions of the
social formation (Church, State, Medicine, etc.) of which
cinema is only a partial— albeit very powerful—
| representative. The theories necessary for supporting
this kind of examination are not limited to psychoanalytic
j theories— one could say that in the history of film theory
| the articulation between the psychic and the social
subject has been limited in some ways by psychoanalytic
!
;theories. The recent intervention of a "cultural studies"
j
I tradition in film theory has introduced the notion that
I cultural exchange and meaning are negotiated in a process
| in which the textual subject (the subject described by j
J psychoanalysis) exists in relation to a social subject.
i
I
|Both subjects are positions negotiated out of the
i
. inevitable struggle between the competing agendas and
j frames of experience that make up texts, audiences, and
institutions (which produce texts).
j
j If one goal of my dissertation is to address the
i
j historical discourses of mothering in their relation to I
!
representations of mothers and mothering (which can be
I "done" by men) in film narratives, another is to specify
i
I
more clearly how a spectator takes pleasure from these
representations of the maternal, what the implications of
this pleasure might be for the spectator, and how the
spectator is constructed through and by history. In fact,
this spectator might be feminist or capable of
constructing a reading influenced by the discourses on
I
' mothering and female sexuality that were circulated by the |
!
Women's Movement and that are now threatened by a supposed
"post-feminism."
For that reason, after some initial discussion in
Part I of what is ideologically at stake in current
j theories of spectatorial pleasure and identification and j
i _ i
their relation to a concept of the maternal, each of the |
j three chapters in Part II will focus on at least one film !
from Classical Hollywood cinema (not only because this
"style" or regime of film was produced in a period roughly
coinciding with the pre-Women's Movement period, but also
because it has been theorized as offering pleasures to
compensate for the loss of maternal plentitude), and at
least one film from the post-classical, post-Women's
movement period of the late 1970s and 1980s. I have
deliberately not specified that these latter film texts
should necessarily be feminist re-writings of patriarchal
constructions of the maternal. I am also interested in
how contemporary film texts, such as Ordinary People and
Baby Boom, co-opt feminist discourses on female sexuality
and the maternal and not only make them serve less than
feminist intentions, but do so while articulating their
point of address to a spectator sensitive to the
intervention of feminism and the Women's Movement— in
short, to a spectator constructed in historical difference
from the spectator of the classical Hollywood film which
represented the maternal and mothers as characters. The
pairs of films in each chapter in this part will not be
randomly chosen; the pairs will share a common theme about
the maternal: the maternal and the state, the surrogate
maternal, and the phallic mother vs. the mothering
phallus. I will discuss the films not only in terms of how
differently they handle similar themes, but how their
different historical moments and, in some cases, different ,
national contexts, work as determining factors in the *
specific imaging and functioning of the maternal.
Part III, which consists of the last chapter, will
discuss only feminist counter-cinema, using Germany. Pale
Mother and Les Rendez-vous d/Anna as examples. As well as j
summing issues of the dissertation as a whole, my J
examination of feminist counter-cinema will more clearly |
posit the feminist spectator and the differing historical
moments in which the subjectivities of the mother and
daughter were formed.
6
PART I
| i
I '
i Chapter l
The Maternal in Film Theory's
Conceptualization of Spectatorial Pleasure
A concept of the maternal has been central to !
i
psychoanalytic-semiotic film theories which examine the ,
, spectatorial pleasures offered by classical film |
narratives. I will discuss these theories not only on the
‘ I
I
, basis of their shared recognition of the relation between
; spectatorial pleasure and the maternal, but also in terms
i
of the emphases, counterpositionings, and even, in some J
cases, premises, which distinguish them from one another,
i In very broad terms (because there are overlapping
determinations operating in much of contemporary film
1 theory), these theories differ from one another in terms
of whether their emphasis is on the cinema as an apparatus
i
I mainly defined by its scopic regime, or on cinema texts as |
historically delimited rhetorical structures; whether |
, their arguments are premised on a textual subject or on a 1
i
social subject, or a negotiation between the two; whether
their premised subject is male or female or bisexual !
(psychically or otherwise); and whether they consider \
I
i
cinematic pleasure to be from the spectator's sadistic I
j control over images and narratives or his/her mascochistic
; t
submission to images and narratives. i
; I
Until recently, film theories of the "cinematic
apparatus" have arguably been the most influential on
} feminist film theory's articulation of the relation
!
1 between spectatorial pleasure and the maternal. Writing
in the mid 1970s, Jean-Louis Baudry in "Ideological j
iEffects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus" and j
• # # l
I Christian Metz in The Imaginary Sianifier describe cinema I
!
as an apparatus which functions like the mirror in the
Lacanian "mirror phase." By hiding its enunciative
i
process, the apparatus positions the spectator in a
i
i primary identification with himself in the act of
I
1
perceiving. As in the mirror phase Lacan has described,
I I
. the subject/spectator can conceptualize, through a !
I j
>misrecognition, a coherence of vision that "is a guarantee '
f
jof the untroubled centrality and unity of the subject."1
j i
| While these arguments underline the ideological j
j position of the spectator posited by this apparatus, they
ignore to what degree this process of misrecognition
j
j involves sexual difference— in other words, they ignore to
! what degree the spectator is gendered. As Laura Mulvey,
j Mary Ann Doane, and other feminist theorists have pointed j
i i
out, it is "an image of the body which anchors the ego |
j which in its turn is the point of articulation of I
8
identification. Any body can be used as a mirror— but in
psychoanalytic theory it is most frequently and
! significantly the body of the mother."2 (my emphasis)
i According to these feminist theorists, acceptance of
' the mirror metaphor for the cinematic apparatus has
jprofound implications in terms of how sexual difference is
' inscribed in the structures of identification in classical i
narrative cinema. The male subject/spectator can have the
! ' i
: mother's body act as his mirror because that body is ;
; i
• I
j outside, distanced and different from the male's body. '
' Distance from the maternal body insures the coherence of
i his vision, providing the grounding for primary |
' identification and the assumption of an "exteriority" I
i {
j which suggests discursive mastery. Doane argues that it f
{ also allows him "the possibility of displacing the first j
I
iobject of desire (the mother),"3 a displacement which I
1 [
! facilitates the desire of the lost object to be t
t
represented as narrative. This means that woman qua woman >
has no access to the mirror, because she is the mirror,
i i
j the image, the lost object of desire. Laura Mulvey, in ■
j
] particular, has argued for another implication of i
| classical cinema's resemblance to a mirror which insures
j male vision through its relation to the mother's body— j
1 I
j that the mother's body, not only functions as a reminder
j of a regressive plentitude, but also of lack. Her status ;
I as "bearer of the bleeding wound," as signifying
1
I castration, is threatening to the male spectator, as it (
i serves to suggest his own lack. Classical narrative :
cinema compensates for the loss of maternal plentitude and
j
! \
the threat of maternal lack by submitting the woman to the
itriple gaze of the camera, character, and spectator,
1 satisfying the demands of fetishistic and sadistic i
Iscopophilia, and thereby providing the spectator/subject
i
!closure through the illusion of phallic omnipotence.4 1
i Teresa De Lauretis has identified the logic that
I
I
iMulvey describes for classical cinema as operating in all
:narrative in patriarchal culture. Suggesting that the
j Oedipal myth is the "master" myth in western patriarchal |
jculture, De Lauretis argues that all narrative is governed
l
( ^ I
: by the conflict of the male(s) over possession of the i
woman (as representation and object). The woman's
i i
negotiation of the Oedipal drama is to consent to or be j
!"seduced" into consenting to her place as space (as
■ I
"matrix and matter"), as that which is mapped out as j
;obstacle and as the prize for the male hero at the end of I
! the narrative. The concept of woman/matrix and j
* matter/mother as the space-obstacle and space-reward i
I
coincides with Mulvey's notion of the image of j
woman/mother representing both lack (lack of phallus, 1
10
: therefore space to be won over to non-lack) and plentitude
| (the hero's reward at the narrative's resolution).5
i While the theories discussed see spectatorial
I
pleasure as deriving from the spectator's apparent
i (sadistic) mastery over images, characters, and narrative
1 .
events, which compensates for or masters female/maternal
lack, other theories of spectatorial pleasure and
identification posit the possibility of a psychically
! bisexual spectator (or at least one not necessarily
I
| constructed as male) and rely on a different scenario of
I
: desire, one which offers pleasures derived from the
i
spectator's (masochistic) submission to the workings of
J
; the apparatus, images, characters, and narrative events.
I
As early as 1980, Kaja Silverman questioned the
mastery model of pleasurable cinematic spectatorship,
1 arguing that texts provide pleasure in their mastery over
i
| readers/spectators— in how they help us learn to take
j pleasure in a re-enactment of imaginary loss, which moves
| us as subjects from the Imaginary to the Symbolic. For
Silverman, it is the cinematic apparatus as "suturing
! machine" which most facilitates this re-enactment:
To push the analogy between castration and
the cinema a bit further, I would like to
suggest that the missing element by which
a shot is defined as a shot might well be
the cut. Seen in these terms, cinematic
activity comprises a constant fluctuation
between the imaginary plentitude of the
shot, and the loss of that plentitude
j through the agency of the cut ....
| Thus the moment of the cut can only be
i experienced by that subject . . . as a
j repetition of the transition from 1
; imaginary to symbolic. The viewing
i subject has learned to take pleasure . . .
! in the re-enactment of the traumatic
dialectic of presence and absence.6
I
: Silverman suggests that this pleasure in pain is available
jto both male and female spectators, but patriarchal
I ,
culture has traditionally assigned the masochistic i
]position only to the female.
I
In a different, more controversial, but also much
more fleshed out theory of masochism, the maternal, and j
j spectatorial pleasure, Gaylyn Studlar, argues that }
I I
i |
j spectatorial pleasure is related to the ]
1 ' i
: spectator/subject's desire to regain oneness with the j
1 mother, but this pleasure is achieved in submitting to, !
i |
rather than controlling, a powerful representation of the
[maternal.7 Using the theories of Jean-Louis Baudry (in
I his other major article on the cinematic apparatus, "The j
[Apparatus") and Robert T. Eberwein, Studlar contends that
! the cinema functions as a "dream screen" which recreates
"the first fetish— the mother as nurturing environment."8
i
;In this conceptualization of the maternal and pleasure, I
l
the mother's breast functions as a dream screen, the last |
, image the orally-satiated infant has as s/he falls asleep. ;
>
| Studlar and Eberwein argue that the cinematic apparatus
!
j restores "the first sleep environment of the dream !
12
screen.”9 Studlar further contends that the cinematic
I
experience, when structured by narratives prolonging I
l
l
suspense (and therefore, desire) and articulated with the 1
visual excesses in set and costume design and in mise-en-
scene that characterize the masochistic fantasy scenario—
fixated as it is on oral pleasure and the desire to return !
to the non-differentiated body— makes an archaic pleasure !
available to both male and female spectators, which is ;
unavailable outside the confines of the fantasy structure, j
While Mulvey's argument has been criticized for its '
i
inability to envision any place for a spectator positioned j
\
as feminine (other than masochistically identifying with j
her controlled image or taking on the sadistic masculine
position as a transvestite dons the clothes of the
opposite sex),10 Studlar's has been criticized for being
apolitical, grounding masochism in biology, and !
I
constructing binarisms as determined as those in Mulvey's j
I
theory.11 While underestimating Studlar's contribution to I
1
a weakening of cinepsychoanalysis's monolithic •
understanding of spectatorial pleasure, Tania Modleski has j
I
forcefully responded to this argument by pointing out that j
men's identification with the mother— the foundation in |
Studlar's argument for male masochism— is repressed in J
patriarchal culture, resulting in dire effects for women. I
I
On this basis, Modleski rejects Studlar's model as being
13
unable to account for the fact that women are treated
sadistically in the majority of classical films.12
Another group of feminist film theorists— Janet
Bergstrom, Elizabeth Cowie, Constance Penley, Elizabeth
Lyon (all associated with the journals camera obscura
and/or m/f), and Linda Williams— have also posited the
possibility that spectatorial pleasure resides in other
than a strictly masculine, sadistic position. In various
ways, all have argued that psychoanalysis's importance to
film theories of spectatorial pleasure and of sexual
difference is its emphasis that sexual difference is
imposed on the subject and that this imposition is never
totally successful.13 Some of these theorists, Cowie and
Penley in particular, suggest that a model of cinema as
fantasy (as in "primal fantasy"), in which "all possible
roles in the narrative are available to the subject, who
can be either subject or object and can even occupy a
I position 'outside' the scene,"14 would not assume in
I
!advance the sexuality of the character or the spectator
i
:(which Mulvey's account surely does). This kind of theory
! supposedly has the advantage of Studlar's in its
i
1 envisioning of sexually mobile and shifting
'identifications, without the necessary insistence on more
binary oppositions or on masochism (though its insistence
ion fantasy as a mise-en-scene of desire, its
14
i
t
|identifications of pleasure based on the detours to
‘ resolution, and its reliance on Freud's "A Child is Beinq
! I
Beaten" clearly suggest similarities with Studlar's I
I
model) -15 Because it has the possibility to account for
, films in which masculine positions are not necessarily
!aligned with male characters or male spectators, and !
I
j feminine positions are not necessarily aligned with female I
I
j characters or spectators, I think this theory can be
| usefully appropriated to analyze films in which male |
i
J characters "mother" (identify with a feminine subject
i I
'position), and/or in which mothering is offered as an j
j identifactory position for all spectators. This theory is
compatible or overlaps with my strategies in analyzing
films in this dissertation. However, I also intend to
also show how the possible consequences of these shifting
and mobile spectatorial and character positions might
differ for men and women,16 and differ from one !
' i
i
historical period to the next and in distinct national \
i
contexts. In other words, I will ask, what are the !
I
consequences of this mobility for the historical/social |
spectator— both male and female? for an understanding of j
the mother/female characters who are more than replicas of |
i
psychic structures, who are also related to subjects of :
»
the social formation? The theories of cinema as fantasy— «
corresponding to various psychic fantasies of origins,
j castration, seduction, beating— are only useful to the
j extent that they factor in how cinema fantasies change
i
(through and in historical moments, and have different
|
implications for differently gendered spectators.
* In this relation, it is perhaps important to bring in
I
j the arguments of several theorists who have tried to
theorize the female spectator and/or the position of the
imother as a site of identification for a female or
|feminist spectator. These arguments have been profoundly
I
i influenced by feminist theories of the feminine subject
i
jand of the maternal. The most significant of these
theories for a theory of the female spectator (and her
i
relation to the maternal)— those by Nancy Chodorow, Luce
[
i
llngaray, and Julia Kristeva— suggest that the plurality
or multiplicity (over unity) of female identity is related
|
jto the fluid relationship between daughter and mother,
j Chodorow's theories examine how mothering is
experienced and reproduced in daughters in patriarchal
jculture. She argues that because of social arrangements
jof parenting in patriarchy, in which women exclusively
]perform mothering activities, boys not only seek to
differentiate themselves from the mother, but also to
repudiate her. Girls, on the other hand, continue to
experience an ongoing pre-Oedipal bond with the mother,
which constitutes their identity as relational.
j The ambivalence of the mother-daughter relationship
is emphasized in Irigaray's work, as is the potential
I . .
subversiveness of feminine multiplicity. The latter
J
:emphasis is also one of the many— often conflicting—
!points posited by Julia Kristeva in her theories of the
maternal. Kristeva originally theorizes the maternal as
\
[part of a "choric" fantasy, which associated with the
relation between mother and child in the pre-Oedipal, is
i
I subversive because it is unassimilable to the Symbolic,
associated as it is with regimentation, structuring, and
t
j heterosexuality.17
j These theories will be discussed further in Chapter
j Five in relation to feminist counter-cinema, but their
i
I importance to this dissertation also resides in how they
I
: served as inspirations and foundations for much of the
I
) feminist film theory positing a female spectator
i
| imbricated with a notion of the maternal.
I
8 Linda Williams's essay "'Something Else Besides a
J
Mother': Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama" is one
| of the earliest and most important arguments for the
i
; possibility of a specifically feminine spectatorial
position that is neither simply masochistic or sadistic,
and that is possible because the mother or mothering
serves as a site of identification. Williams basically
' argues that Stella Dallas (as exemplary of the maternal
17
i
i melodrama) has a narrative structure that privileges
!multiple viewpoints and a visual economy that privileges '
the look between mother and daughter. She claims that ;
this look testifies to the possibility that women (mothers I
and daughters) can take each other as primary objects of
desire, and that these qualities of the film have profound
i
implications when the fact that the film/genre are ]
addressed to a female audience is taken into j
consideration. Williams suggests that Stella Dallas and
I
jthe maternal melodrama have "reading positions structured (
1 into their texts that demand a female reading competence," J
which "derives from the different way women take on their
!identities under patriarchy and is a direct result of the |
: i
social fact of female mothering.1,18 Because women have [
: i
been socially constructed in the identificatory fluidity !
described by Chodorow and Irigaray, as readers of Stella j
*
Dallas. they can identify with both Stella and Laurel. j
iThey can experience the contradictions facing these j
jcharacters because they, themselves, experience the
I
!contradiction of being female in a patriarchal culture— I
living the laws of the Symbolic while still experiencing j
j
some aspects of the pre-Oedipal. Consequently, when
Stella "gives" Laurel up to the patriarchy by making
Laurel think that she doesn't care for her (the only way f
j the film shows it is possible to wrench mothers and i
| 18
| daughters away from each other), the female spectator—
1 I
socialized as she is— will see this ending as sad rather |
| than as happy (as the film, still part of the patriarchal '
j
! institution, assumes the viewer will see it).
Williams's essay stimulated an enormous amount of
discussion after its initial appearance from such film
' theorists as E. Ann Kaplan, Christine Gledhill, Carol !
I FIinn, Patrice Petro, Diane Waldman, and D.N. Rodowick.19 ;
I
! Criticisms centered on how much Williams attributes the i
, I
: possibility for a specifically feminine identification i
I
! with the mother as an inscription within the text itself
and how much such an identification is brought to the text
by a socially constructed, female spectator who might also j
! be constructed by the discourses of feminism (who might
I
even be a feminist film analyst/scholar!). I think 1
Williams is arguing for both— she is arguing for a text
| whose visual and narrative economy evokes empathy and j
pathos in the female spectator and for a spectator that |
might be able to read that text because she identifies |
with a femininity socially and historically defined in
i
terms of contradictions that make women suffer— although ;
her reading is more explicit about the latter. This line
of argument does not necessarily have to be a problem if
we take into account that texts do not just inscribe
psychic spectators— though these may be the easiest for
19
analysts to extrapolate as a text's hypothetical
spectator— but that they also "hail" us as social subjects
by their inscription of recognizable historical contexts
and by determinants of subject-effects, such as class,
race, age, nationality, etc. as well as gender.
In The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the
1940s. Mary Ann Doane attempts to articulate the
social/historical (female) spectator of the 1940s with the
psychic (female) spectator, but her goal of tracing the
coincidence of cinematic scenarios and psychoanalytic
scenarios of female subjectivity dominates her attempts,
so that the results of her analysis insist again on how
determinantly classical Hollywood narrative inscribes an
ahistorical female spectator who identifies with
masochistic, paranoid, and hysterical subject positions.
One of the main areas of coincidence between the classical
I woman's film— a genre addressed to a female audience— and
i
the psychoanalytic account of feminine subjectivity is the
assumption that that subjectivity can only be defined in
tropes of "closeness" and "proximity", due to the fact
that the female does not completely give up her
identification with her mother, even after exiting the
Oedipal complex. When woman tries to appropriate the
gaze, to see or to desire, the "closeness" through which
her subjectivity is defined, she comes into conflict with
20
a subjectivity that can negotiate "distance.1 1 The conflict
erupts across the classical text, a regime constructed for
and by the male identification with the look, in hysteria
or paranoia. In both classical narrative and
psychoanalytic accounts, the female subject can only
masochistically or hysterically identify with being the
object of desire.20
When Doane turns to the maternal melodrama, she once
again draws on notions of closeness and presence to
describe the inscription of feminine identification and
the place of the maternal in these films. Because
maternity (or more precisely, knowledge of it) is
constituted in terms of immediacy, the melodrama is a
privileged form in cinema to investigate the maternal— as
a sign system it is also understood in terms of immediacy.
The language of melodrama is also obvious, too readable,
and invites spectatorial overinvestment through tales of
sacrifice, suffering, and separation. The assumptions here
are thus: if psychoanalysis offers a patriarchally-
inflected account of feminine subjectivity that posits the
female in terms of a closeness to the maternal, and the
cinematic institution is a patriarchal institution trying
to imagine a female audience for its own success, then it
follows that melodrama, with its language of closeness,
and the maternal melodrama, with its mother characters,
; 21 '
|would be associated with the feminine or female spectator. ,
' In the maternal melodrama, argues Doane, all the ' !
I . !
iinstabilities of this feminine subjectivity are brought ,
! i
, into play so they may be judged and an ideal of motherhood
|may be established. Although Doane is attentive to how
1 this ideal motherhood is variously constructed in
i !
I different historical moments (for instance, in the WW II |
j period, it is aligned with patriotic nationalism), unlike '
Williams, she does not envision what positions a female I
j
, spectator might take towards that ideal motherhood other i
;than masochistic submission. Doane argues that the pathos j
| of the maternal melodrama (pathos of separation of mother j
iand child) feminizes the spectator, and concludes that the
spectator is masochistic because she enjoys submitting to j
1 the violent assault of the films to elicit tears from her. J
1 The assault is seen as violent because according to j
1 t
psychoanalytic theories of spectatorial pleasure and
i !
| identification, "aggressivity is an inevitable component j
of the imaginary relation in the cinema."21 Specifically, !
i !
, the maternal melodrama aggressively overpowers the female !
, spectator, leading her to imitate the tears of its [
| characters. I think this account, which to a degree j
; commits Doane to the odd position that the maternal 1
i !
! melodrama "rapes" the spectator into tears of pleasure,
! suggests some of the more serious conundrums of the
j psychoanalytic position as used in film theory. Because
it does not adequately theorize the mediation of history
in the formation of the spectator subject, it leaves (as
in Mulvey's argument) the female spectator as a sadistic
"transvestite" or as a masochist, and the maternal
melodrama as a rape. Wouldn't a consideration of the
|social and historical formation of the spectating subject
,suggest there could be other responses to such an
i
I excessive experience (which in Doane's words, is a
|"rape")? Couldn't the female spectator,an historically
I
I formed subject— whether having some awareness of her and
i
the film's historical context (which may or may not
overlap) or not— respond with anger, or derision, or camp,
or a sadness that is not masochistic (such as Williams
describes for the spectator of Stella Dallas)?
; In two essays more recent than her one on Stella
I
Dallas, Linda Williams offers valuable, alternative ways
iof theorizing the maternal in relation to texts and
i
|spectators. In an essay on Mildred Pierce. Williams
argues that maternal melodrama is neither evidence of an
overthrow and repression of a transhistorical ideal of a
matriarchy nor a transparent reflection of mothers in
,World War II America.22 She instead claims the importance
.of understanding the historical female spectator by
understanding what texts both repress and reflect of their
I historical moment. :
! I
I In an essay on the "body genres" of horror,
I
i
pornography, and the (maternal) melodrama, Williams again
stresses the importance of understanding how texts both
;reflect and repress their historical moment in their
negotiating accommodation of and resistance to dominant j
culture. These genres, which seem to operate through |
!evoking in the body of the spectator an almost involuntary
'imitation of the sensation of the (female) body on the
I screen, are actively working through changing notions of
!
j femininity and masculinity. The pathos of the maternal j
i
melodrama, which according to Doane feminizes and
i
]
i facilitates the rape of the spectator, is for Williams
(and Italian critic Franco Moretti), a trace of a lost
■ utopia— the union of mother and child as it exists in the
I
psychic fantasies of the subject's origins, and which j
I
;seems to oppose the social forces determining the I
;subject's oppressed position: !
; i
^ What triggers our crying is not just the |
■ sadness or suffering of the character in i
the story, but a precise moment when j
characters in the story catch up with and
realize what the audience already knows.
We cry, Moretti argues, not just because
the characters do, but at the precise
i moment when desire is finally recognized !
; as futile. The release of tension [
produces tears— which becomes a kind of
homage to a happiness that is kissed I
I goodbye.23
Williams's point is that although the originating fantasy
of the maternal melodrama is primal and speaks to the
i
unconscious, the spectator is active, involved in the
i
processes of both affect and cognition, participating in a
dialectic between the Imaginary and the Symbolic.
Participation in the dialectic makes the spectator
(whether female or male) accessible or responsive to the
social and the historical as well as to the textual. The
i
maternal melodrama, by eliciting pathos, then offers the
^ spectator a way to respond which depends on social
t
.competencies (such as the daughter learning to "mother")
■ as well as on textual strategies.
j In The Acoustic Mirror; The Female Voice in
|Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Kaja Silverman also argues for
the relation between the fantasmatic and social/political
i
alignments. She quotes Laplanche and Pontalis to claim
'that the fantasy scenarios which films draw on and
I
[resemble depend on material from the "outside," which
|would include changing historical understandings of what
jit means to be a man or a woman.24 Silverman's discussion
j of the mother-daughter bond and its implications for the
'female spectator is compatible with this notion of the
imbrication of the Imaginary and the Symbolic in texts.
She rejects the usefulness of the pre-Oedipal for
'theorizing a feminist spectator or an accessible
mother/maternal. For Silverman, the continuing
relationship between mother and daughter, the origins of
which feminists have attributed to the pre-Oedipal phase,
is more useful in its reality as a "negative" Oedipal
(before the girl adds the love of the father to her love
of the mother) and post-Oedipal relationship. In other
words, the mother-daughter bond is more subversive when
considered in its Oedipal and post-Oedipal phase, when the
daughter's relation to the Name-of-the-Father is imposed
on her. Not only is the mother-daughter bond more
subversive when considered in this phase because to
continue to take the mother as a primary love object at
this point opposes the demands of heterosexual patriarchy,
but also because it is possible to represent, symbolize
this phase, because it takes place after entry into
language (while the pre-Oedipal does not). I think these
distinctions are helpful because they suggest that a
notion of the maternal is representable, mobilizable by
and for feminism and that it can be representable and
subversive only when it has a place in language.
Furthermore, Silverman is able to suggest this while at
the same time acknowledging the difficulty of achieving
such representations. She is realistic about the
historically constructed patriarchy that, in privileging
the masculine position in the Oedipal configuration, is
26
J able to project the consequences of symbolic castration
(which all subjects undergo) onto the anatomical sexual
■ difference of woman.
The analyses of films which follows is enormously
indebted to the theories described above. I have tried to
account for the strengths and weaknesses of each for what
I envision as my project: to understand the
;maternal/mother as figured in film texts and theory as a j
historical construct as well as psychic one, and to j
iunderstand the way in which history mediates the j
!subjectivity of the spectator who takes pleasure in
I
j identifying with mothers/mothering. [
In each of the next three chapters, I look at two or ;
three films sharing a similar theme about the maternal. j
l
In Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and Women's Cinema.
I
Lucy Fischer follows a comparable strategy, I
i
; I
counterpositioning in each chapter films configured around |
a shared thematic.25 However, our studies diverge in a
;number of ways. Not only are the thematics in my chapters
all related to the maternal— while Fischer's cover a 1
!
:variety of topics, from acting to lesbianism to mothering-
-but also the films I discuss in each of these three
chapters are all "patriarchal texts" (having males working
in the mainstream film industry as their main producers)—
while Fischer's study counters patriarchal texts with
27
feminist texts directed by women. My interest in each of
the chapters two-four is in the working through of a
different fantasy of the maternal in different historical
periods— specifically before and after the women's
movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In chapter five, the
last chapter of the dissertation, I compare and contrast
two feminist texts to show how although they expose the
historical workings of the mother-daughter bond in
different ways, they both assume an empathetic and
historically constructed female spectator.
I1 Mary Ann Doane, "Misrecognition and Identity,"
ICinetracts 3, no. 3 (Fall 1985): 27.
j2 Ibid., 29. i
I 3 Mary Ann Doane, "Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing
the Female Spectator," Screen 23, no. 3/4 (Sept./Oct.
:1982).
4 Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,"
I Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn, 1975).
I !
j5 Teresa De Lauretis, Alice Doesn/t: Feminism. Semiotics. !
Cinema (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, j
,1984), 103-157. J
6 Kaja Silverman, "Masochism and Subjectivity," Framework
I 12 (1980): 4. j
i <
j7 Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von I
!Sternberg. Dietrich, and The Masochistic Aesthetic (Urbana
jand Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
|8 Gaylyn Studlar, "Masochism and the Perverse Pleasures of j
the Cinema," in Movies and Methods. Vol. II, ed. Bill J
(Nichols (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), j
j 6 1 4 * !
j 9 Ibid., 613.
110 Mulvey's argument has been so important that it would
j be impossible to list all those arguments indebted to
j and/or critical of it. For a series of discussions on the
I female spectator, many of which acknowledge both a debt to
Mulvey's argument and/or take it task, see the special
I issue on "The Spectatrix," Camera Obscura. nos. 20/21
|(May-Sept. 1989).
II see Kaja Silverman, "Masochism and Male Subjectivity," I
j Camera Obscura. no. 17 (May 1988): 66; D.N. Rodowick, The
Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis. Sexual
Difference, and Film Theory (New York and London:
(Routledge, 1991), 10.
1 t
12 Tania Modleski, The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock
and Feminist Theory (New York and London: Methuen, 1988),
<9-13. |
i
13 see Constance Penley, "Preface," The Future of an
Illusion: Film. Feminism, and Psychoanalysis :
j(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), xiv.
,14 Constance Penley, "Feminism, Film Theory, and the j
( Bachelor Machines," m/f. no. 10 (1985). Reprinted in The ]
! Future of an Illusion. 79. ,
I i
i
15 see Elizabeth Cowie, "Fantasia," m/f. no. 9 (1984).
Reprinted in The Woman in Question, ed. Parveen Adams and 1
Elizabeth Cowie (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990).
'16 I think Tania Modleski, in The Women Who Knew Too Much,
has shown quite forcefully how mobile spectatorial and
character positions might have differing consequences for
I men and women. For example, in her discussion of Vertigo. 1
i she discusses how a male character (Scottie, played by i
| James Stewart) may identify with a female character ;
! (Madeleine, played by Kim Novak), but that this
! identification suggests an identification with a feminine !
! subject position that the male character finds so !
j threatening that he must destroy the woman.
|17 Kaja Silverman has traced how Kristeva's understanding
; of the chora develops from this account, which suggests
J the subversiveness of the maternal space/voice as well as
I a libidinal basis for feminism, to one in which the
j maternal voice can only be heard through the intercession
i of the son/artist (Kristeva's much criticized valorization
■ of the male avant-garde), to an account which does away
; with the importance of the maternal altogether in favor of
; the paternal position. Silverman argues that this
j rejection of the maternal is evidence of how fearful !
|Kristeva is of the maternal, how strong the lure is to j
i link herself with her mother in a homosexual economy of !
! desire. See Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The |
! Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington: j
'Indiana University !
;Press, 1988), 101-140. I
I
!18 Linda Williams, "'Something Else Besides a Mother':
■ Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama," Cinema Journal
24, no. 1 (Fall 1984). Reprinted in Home is Where the
I Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, ed.
Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Publishing, 1987), 305.
All citations are from this volume.
; |
j19 See replies by E. Ann Kaplan, Cinema Journal 24, no.2 ;
: (Winter 1985), Cinema Journal. 25, no. 1 (Fall 1985), and !
.Cinema Journal 25, no. 4 (Summer 1986); by Christine j
I Gledhill, Cinema Journal 25, no. 4 (Summer 1986); by Carol ,
FIinn and Patrice Petro, Cinema Journal 25, no. 1 (Fall *
■ 1985); Diane Waldman, "Film Theory and the Gendered I
i Spectator: The Female or the Feminist Reader?" Camera j
; Obscura, no. 18 (Sept.1988); D.N. Rodowick, The Difficulty
j of Difference; Psychoanalysis. Sexual Difference, and Film
■ Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 39-44. t
I ;
i 20 Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film 1
i of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, ■
| 1987). '
j 21 Doane, The Desire to Desire. 95. While Doane is aware
that terms like "violent assault" and "rape" are complicit
, with patriarchal constructions of sexual difference,I try
: to suggest here the implications of her borrowing those
metaphors.
I
j22 Linda Williams, "Feminist Film Theory: Mildred Pierce
' and the Second World War, " in Female Spectators: Looking j
at Film and Television, ed. E. Deidre Pribram (London: ;
j Verso, 1988) . j
j 23 Linda Willliams, "Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and
Excess," Film Quarterly 44, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 11.
24 Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror. 217-218. !
!25 Lucy Fischer, Shot/Countershot: Film Tradition and j
| Women/s Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
; 1989).
Part II
I
I '
Chapter 2
; I
The Maternal and the state i
I
| In my introduction, I have contended that one of the
j goals of this dissertation is to articulate a relationship j
[ between "the psychic mother" and "the social/historical j
I mother," the latter concept of the maternal concerning its
(
j constitution through social, historical experiences of
! mothering in a patriarchal culture and addressed by
{ institutions of the social formation (Church, State,
i (
i 1
, Medicine, Media, etc.). However, my analysis of the place j
, of the maternal in film theories of spectatorial pleasure j
i
! discussed only "the psychic mother." But to a degree, my
| critique there of those theories was based on the fact
1 that "the psychic mother" is the only concept of the
maternal they describe— in fact, it may be the only kind
I
I of maternal they can describe considering their reliance
j on the psychoanalytic paradigm. I called for an
I
understanding of how a social, historical spectator— more
than the sum of psychic processes relating to the
! maternal— might take pleasure in representations of or in j
identifying with maternal characters who are subjects of a ‘
! historical, social formation— not just replicas of the
jpsychic mother. In this chapter, I hope to get closer to I
that kind of understanding of the maternal and to its
I
, consequences for film theory. Here I will look at how the !
I '
I mother or a concept of the maternal has been important to
I
theories of the modern state and how a relation between
the maternal and the state has been represented or
* suggested in some filmic representations— Mv Son John
!(USA, 1952), Hope and Glory (Great Britain, 1987), and The !
, I
Krays (Great Britain, 1990— with film understood, in j
j Gramsci's terms, as working in and through the hegemonic !
5
'process of the ruling class(es). i
i |
! A concept of the maternal has been central to a I
i !
j number of contemporary feminist contributions to modern |
Apolitical and legal theory.1 Christine Di Stefano, j
jwriting about the rise of the idea of the individual and j
,the modern liberal state, argues that a concept of the j
j (m)other has existed "as a representational support for j
■the gendered masculine subject of modern political theory, !
I but also as a recurring threat to his construction of self |
;and world."2 She suggests that modern political theory !
A forcibly expels the mother, denies or "forgets" this
i
expulsion, and is thus able to identify a sovereign and
self-generating individual (Hobbes), a discrete, abstract, ;
I and self-disciplined individual who freely traverses a !
i I
I
ipublic-private distinction (Mill), and a self-creating |
i
; producer (Marx). In short, modern political theory !
I creates (as in Hobbes and Mill) a rationale for or (as in
' I
I
{ Marx) an opposition to the individual who engages in
I i
; contract-making and property ownership in a state with a
free-market economy, but does not acknowledge this
subject's gendering as masculine, nor to what degree its
independence and masculinity rely on the construction of a ■
i I
! monstrous nature as synonymous with (m)other. I
I ;
Though Di Stefano's premise (that the mother
i
I
; constructed in modern political theory is identified with
an invasive, monstrous nature) is close to that
established by Michael Rogin's theory about Cold War films
and political demonology, which I will endorse in my
j discussion of My Son John, it is argued without much
i . !
j historical specificity. Di Stefano writes "mother" as j
| "(m)other" to indicate the separation between "mother" as
a real, social being and "mother" as a symbolic construct j
i
that stands in for that "other" or "others" against which I
the (male) subject defines itself. However, her reliance !
J
on object relations theories which are almost exclusively
centered on an ahistorical account of mothering/gendering j
in the "private" realm, makes it difficult to understand
either where those "others"— besides the mother— come 1
into the definition of the independent male subject or
when historical developments have made changes in |
j gendering and mothering and, consequently, in their
i t
| relation to the state. |
i
In Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other Episodes in
Political Demonoloqy. Michael Rogin also suggests that the ,
! free or independent man of the modern (American) state has
been constructed against a monstrous figure that threatens
i to overwhelm that independence. He points out that j
j monsters— "the Indian cannibal, the black rapist, the '
papal whore of Babylon, the monster-hydra United States j
j j
: Bank, the demon rum, the bomb-throwing anarchist, the J
I I
; many-tentacled Communist conspiracy, the agents of
i .
, international terrorism"— are part of the collective dream
i
life of the people making up the American state.3 The
j tradition of countersubversion and political demonology !
I splits the world in two, attributing j
, magical, pervasive power to a
, conspiratorial center of evil. Fearing
chaos and secret penetration, the
i countersubversive interprets local
| initiatives as signs of alien power.
■ Discrete individuals and groups become, in
the countersubversive imagination, members
of a single political body directed by its I
head. The countersubversive needs !
; monsters to give shape to his anxieties
and to permit him to indulge his forbidden <
; desires. Demonization allows the counter- 1
subversive, in the name of battling the I
subversive, to imitate his enemy.4 j
Rogin describes this tradition in American political j
, history as changing throughout history, due to changes in
: the economy, in the ideas about imperialism/expansion, in j
the patterns of immigration, in the organization of labor,
and in the rise of mass society and the surveillance 1
state. In other words, in Rogin's theory, the free man of <
the modern state is read against the racial, ethnic,
class, and gender aliens who ground the construction of
his identity in specific historical periods. He argues
i
that although this tradition of countersubversion and !
demonology has always defined the threat of subversion in
1
terms of a threat to this free man's family (wives/mothers i
and children), it is only in the Cold War period that the
(Communist) subversive is conflated with the mother. I
think this kind of analysis, which makes distinctions [
between historical moments and their effects on gendered j
subjects, is a necessary component of any theory which j
tries to understand how the modern liberal state has
become associated with a public, male subject defined as
I
independent from the uncontrolled desires associated with '
i
the private realm where the mother resides. \
i
The constructions of dualities (free man/slave, \
countersubversive/subversive)— which are always
threatening to collapse— and the excess in which they are
defined (e.g., "Indian cannibal," "papal whore of j
I
Babylon," etc.) are, of course, defining characteristics
of the epistemology and aesthetic of melodrama. Political 1
demonology could be considered the melodramatic mode of i
f politics or of the state (although so far only fascism has
been claimed for that distinction). This should not be
| surprising, because melodrama as a fictional mode
developed out of historical events that also gave rise to
the free man and the modern state (the growth of the
; bourgeoisie out of a struggle with landed aristocracy, the
I
! growth of industrialization with divisions between public
i
j and private realms). Before discussing melodrama's
[ relation to the state as part of the hegemonic function of
I displacing social/economic/gender conflicts onto the
j family/private realm— that site where the maternal is most
j
I likely to be maneuvered in the dominant ideology's self-
j reproduction— it is necessary to further explicate the
jmaternal's historical relationship to the modern
European/American state. The political demonologist's (or
^Hobbes's, Mill's, or Marx's) view of the mother as an
i
I
: invasive monster subverting the free man is made possible
I
; because it has been institutionalized through a historical
1
!process of patriarchal domination.
In History and Gender; The Limits of Social Theory in
the Age of the Family. Linda Nicholson that the modern
I state and modern family emerged in conjunction with one
another and that their structures were interdependent.5
During the Middle Ages, power was divided between kinship
|ties and the state (lead by the king, the head of the most
! 37
! powerful kin network). As the state gained control over
1 property, crime, and punishment (as for example, in :
l 1
sixteenth century England), it required a more predictable
! and universal— in other words, more controllable—
j allegiance than the particularistic allegiances of kin
I
irelationships. In the new state's struggle for power with I
| i
- the kinship system, it encouraged patriarchy within the J
I individual household (the basis for the modern nuclear
i
: family). By claiming that loyalties expressed to the
; i
I father within the household were analogous to those j
jexpressed by all to the king, the state was able to j
j transfer the power of the kinship patriarch to the family I
i
|patriarch, who led a smaller group less dangerous to the
(state. The familial patriarchal thenceforth became a
support for the state rather than a threat to it. By the
!
!seventeenth century, the persistence of the family
;patriarch in a state that more and more was recognizing
the free man, generated an ambiguous understanding of the
rights of the individual. Did rights of the individual j
1 mean rights of the individual household or only of the j
male head of household? In the eighteenth and nineteenth j
centuries such contradictions intensified when the growth i
of industrialization undermined the individual household <
i <
las a productive unit. In this period, men and women were
;relating to the outside world as individuals (individual I
I wage earners) rather than just as heads of households or j
|dependents of households. Given women's increasing j
j presence in the public sphere, the fact that they were not
■ equal to men in the home or before the law, was
;experienced as a contradiction that would eventually
■inspire women's movements in both the nineteenth and
i
twentieth centuries. j
Another experience of contradiction could be found at
l j
I the level of the industrialized state's short- and long- j
!term economic interests. Because the industrialized state I
i
j
|had no short-term economic self-interest to preserve the j
|family (all members of the family "reduced alike to wage |
3
|slavery, all human relations, including the most ancient
jand intimate, dissolved in the cash nexus"6) at first it
! . i
I did not provide protection for working children, and never j
| provided for working mothers. As a result of the latter j
1 lack, women went into the workforce only if absolutely J
necessary, becoming increasingly isolated in the home, j
i I
iwhich not only further weakened their position in the
i
!public realm associated with the state, but also weakened I
! |
jtheir unity by fragmenting experience according to class.7
1
IIn the industrialized state's long-term economic interest
i
the family was important, as it was in earlier periods I
I when it shared its role as an ideological state apparatus j
(with the Church, as a place to reproduce dominant (class) I
j relations.8 But now that the father was a wage earner !
i i
outside the home, the family's role in reproducing the )
!
! dominant ideology became more exclusively centered around 1
1 the mother.
An examination of Rousseau's political philosophy,
i ,
! "the paradigm of . . . [the] ideal of the civic public"9
; (
• i
i in the modern age, from a feminist perspective makes clear ,
| 1
the place of the mother and the private realm in the
, 1
I
jreproduction of dominant ideology and class relations. In
i The Social Contract and Emile, both published in 1762,
l
! Rousseau develops a notion of the model citizen that is
!both a reaction to the kind of individual and state suited
i
;to the logic of the free market and a rationale for
i
perpetuating the conditions for such a state's existence.
| -
|According to Rousseau, the atomistic egoism which supports j
this state cannot be sufficiently curbed by laws and j
punishment. The impartiality of reason expressed by the }
I
civic public can help rid the particular needs and
I
i interests of the individual of their destructive desire:
. . . reason brings people together to
i express common interests and a general j
1 will. . . . Normative reason reveals an i
i impartial point of view . . . that all !
rational persons can adopt .... I
Participation in the general will as a
citizen is an expression of human nobility
and genuine freedom .... [The] purity, !
unity and generality of this public realm
require transcending and repressing the
| partiality and differentiation of need,
; desire, and affectivity . . . .10 i
I Need, desire and affectivity, which Rousseau sees as both
i
impediments to reason and lacking because of the rise of
i
Industrialization, will be experienced in the private
I
: realm watched over by wives and mothers. They will guard
these qualities, and with chastity and submissiveness,
, temper them to "ensure that men's impulses do not remove
i 1
1 them from the universality of reason."11 Women in the 1
private realm of the family not only act as a safety valve
for the repression of male desires necessitated by the
I
rationality of the law and the industrialization of {
|
production, but because they are constrained within a
sexual hierarchy, they can also perpetuate the logic of
i
the free market and the industrialized state by helping to
maintain the necessary order for its functioning.
i
!
j If Rousseau's definition of the private realm as
i
j support for the ideal civic sphere partially explains the j
i
| basis for the Cult of True Womanhood, a nineteenth century !
: discourse which "elevated" women in the home by idolizing
! their assumed "piety, purity, submissiveness, and [
i !
.domesticity,"12 his theories of child rearing in Emile j
! laid a basis for many of the discourses on mothering |
i I
i i
provided by scientific "experts" and clergy in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Rousseau,
; the child is the potential citizen, and consequently, his
I upbringing is of extreme importance. The mother gains
t
| 41
importance in this view because she is the being most
i
j responsible for this early education. Mothers should be
i
educated because they raise children who will be society's
I
future citizens.13
i
Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English demonstrate how
I
ithroughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth
I
i
: centuries the idea that mothers were responsible for the
future citizens of the state became more and more
| interdependent with ideas about the needs of modern
j industry. Mothers were encouraged by scientific experts
| to inculcate "regularity" in the child's life: "the goal
| was industrial man— disciplined, efficient, precise—
I
, whether it was his lot to be an industrial laborer, a
| corporate leader, or another expert himself."14 Such a
i
task required discipline and efficiency on behalf of the
| mother, a requirement that was compatible with the j
| Tayloristic demands put on her as a housekeeper. Like the
j worker on the assembly line subject to the theories of j
; efficiency expert Frederick Taylor (who at the turn of the j
I I
| century taught factory managers how to accelerate i
! , I
i production by breaking down the workers' movements into I
I
elementary series and then how to choose the quickest J
ones), the mother's active role in the process of
mothering and housekeeping was disciplined and subject to
42
control from the outside world— the male mediators of
science.15
With the change of the American and most European
economies to consumer economies in the first thirty years
of the twentieth century,16 the mother's role was depicted
by medical and psychological experts as less concerned
with turning out "industrial man." The mother was now !
supposed to create an atmosphere of loving approval: j
I
Only an atmosphere of loving approval I
could allow a child to develop into a j
well-adjusted member of the new consumer
society. Therefore, mothers must provide,
not only a deftly managed stress-free
environment, but loving encouragement to
each childish impulse. To child-raising \
experts of the thirties and forties, to i
love is a mother's job.17 I
Ehrenreich and English call the mother of this period the
"libidinal mother" to indicate the degree to which j
!
mothering in this more permissive age (lacking as it was j
in the discipline that had been necessary in the !
industrialized age and promoting a more hedonist lifestyle J
i
in tune with consumerism) had become considered 1
i
inseparable from a woman's desire. Women were supposed to I
find their own fulfillment only by meeting the needs of
their children. That the experts who were constructing
this mother in America were psychologists rather than
clergy, behaviorists, industrial engineers and domestic
scientists, is emblematic of how important a popularized
| version of Freudian psychoanalysis was becoming for
t i
!assessing the role of the mother. While Freudian '
I psychoanalysis first became influential between 1908- j
19181 ? it was its use after the two world wars that
j solidified its impact. The "libidinal" mother was
!supposed to find it possible and desirable to put so much
I energy into mothering because having a child was an ;
i !
:assumed compensation for her "lack." But even this j
| solution to "penis envy" (with the gift of the child I
i 1
| making up for a lack of penis) could undermine the j
societal order if mothers were too overprotective. Edward
Strecker's Their Mother/s Sons19 blamed mothers for
problems associated with cowardly behavior on the
I battlefield in World War II. By the mid twentieth
! :
i century; mothers were not only left out of the definition j
I . I
!of the free individual, but because of their assumed I
J inability to separate from their sons, they were actually
,held responsible for male failure to adequately "protect"
'the state.
I
The most well-known of the diatribes against mothers j
I and mothering practices was Philip Wylie's Generation of I
r
i
Vipers, first published in 1942, which coined the infamous '
term "momism."20 Although a somewhat long subtitle of a
! new annotated edition in 1955 suggests that Wylie (or his !
publisher) fashioned himself as a sort of Jonathan Swift
44
Jwith this book being an "immodest proposal,” Generation of
| Vipers is an hysterical denunciation of the castrating
I
I
i mother depicted in popularized versions of Freudian
psychoanalysis. While attempting to make fun of an
America enthralled in a so-called mother worship, Wylie
castigates the mother as a lazy whiner who is happiest
I
consumxng, and who is unable to negotiate a distance
! ;
between herself and the consumer pitches addressed to her ;
on the radio. Since the book was written shortly after j
1 j
| the start of World War II, her gullibility— compared here J
j I
■ to that of the Germans before Hitler and Goebbels— is j
; i
tparticularly dangerous. Because she has father and sons I
I . i
under thumb, keeping sons from maturity because of her |
overprotectiveness, she can drag them down to a "national j
1 death.” When Wylie added annotations in 1955, he was able |
f
to blame mothers for not only a weak nation able to
I j
succumb to the Soviet Union, but also for the phenomenon ;
of McCarthyism (he notes how most of McCarthy's supporters ,
I <
, are mothers).21 The connection between women and the j
evils of mass culture is not new,22 but the emphasis on j
overprotective mothering in association with an !
I ' ■
interrelation between mass culture/consumerism, fascism, j
and communism is provocative in its overdetermination.
This condensation of a number of terms representing the 1
anxieties of post-WW II culture within the figure of the j
45
mother suggests the degree to which the "mother" can be
become "the sign around which to mobilize discontents
I
whose origins may in fact lie elsewhere.1,23 1
What I have been describing are discourses which make |
i
f
an explicit or implicit connection between a notion of the ^
maternal and the state. I join with other feminist
theorists in reading them against the grain to show that
their use of "mother" as a sign to mobilize discontents is
far from stable or subtle. However, this lack of
representational stability did not keep these discourses
from having an effect on real, social mothers. Betty
Friedan's The Feminine Mvstioue. first published in 1963,
forcefully spoke to this reality, which helped to make it
one of the founding documents of the Women's Movement of
the 196Os-7Os.24 While the Women's Movement was largely a
result of women seeing the disjuncture between their own
experience and the discourses which supposedly defined
them, even this large social movement hasn't prevented
political and social groups (especially right-wing groups)
from continuing to blame mothers— now they can blame the
Women's Movement itself for problems in the state, the
economy, and the family.
If the patriarchal discourses on mothering are
unstable, but still can have deleterious effects on women,
and if the Women's Movement, which gave collective voice
46
to women experiencing discontent, can be used against
mothers, what possibilities are there for mothers (or !
others on their behalf) to speak of their oppression? The
i
spirit behind this question is a partial motivation behind
this study, and it is phrased thusly not to suggest that
the Women's Movement has not had a powerful and positive
effect, but as an attempt to underscore the historical and j
material reality of the discourses on mothering. In my j
survey of their history, I have tried to suggest their 1
I
I
relation to a changing understanding of the state, the
economy, the individual, and the family through different
historical periods. The current debates centered around
melodrama are of central importance in answering this
question as it relates to artistic practices and/or j
popular culture, and how they may be mobilized to speak to j
and about women/mothers. Melodrama has been a key genre i
i
xn the history of modern literature, drama, film, and !
television, not only for its seeming prevalence, but j
because of the centrality of the family to its discourse j
and because its history (its history as a genre/mode and |
j
the history of its acceptance in critical studies) is ,
I
intertwined with questions of domination and popular ]
resistance.
I
Most of the recent discussions about melodrama, j
l
particularly in its cinematic form, are concerned with its '
47
i
function as escapist entertainment or subversive critique ,
I
relative to the given historical and social context, and ;
i
its conflictual status as a genre that often invests in 1
'woman' as a patriarchal symbol but offers unusual space
to female protagonists and to women's concerns.25 Both
Peter Brooks and Thomas Elsaesser place the origin of j
melodrama— as both an epistemology and a genre— in a J
revolutionary social and political moment, in the period j
just prior to and following the Enlightenment and the
French Revolution, starting a pattern of coincidence of
its appearance with social and ideological stress.26
According to Brooks, the Enlightenment and the French
Revolution did away with the traditional Sacred and its
institutions, the Church and the Monarchy. Melodrama as
an epistemological mode and genre in popular art forms is
(
I
a reaction to this desacralization. Its sudden plot J
i
reversals, and its use of hyperbolic language, gesture, i
i
and dramatic situations, evidences a desire to say what
cannot be said in the world created within the post- t
Enlightenment, post-Revolution social code. As
entertainment/art form, melodrama borrows from the
practices of pre-Revolutionary popular theater of the
lower classes, which used music, dance, mime, and tableaus
largely because only aristocratic patent theaters had the J
right to full-scale productions and classics, in other 1
| 48
I
jwords, to official language. This suggests that from the
! beginning melodrama wedded conservative aims with
I
!
, potentially subversive aims and forms— the need to
i
; reinvest in the Sacred as a conservative goal within an
|
; inherited tradition of subverting censorship.
| Elsaesser argues that the politically subversive
| aspects of melodrama diminished in the post-Revolutionary
j period, because "with the bourgeoisie triumphant, this
1
: form of drama lost its subversive charge and functioned
i
j more as a means of consolidating an as yet weak and
j incoherent ideological position."27 Yet Elsaesser
| continues to argue after making this point that a
j particular usage of melodramatic conventions, foremost an
I
| ironic one, could still yield a socially subversive
| narrative. So, even though melodrama's persistence
through time is partly due to its refusal "to understand
social change in other than private contexts and emotional
terms,"28 it has continued to allow representation for/of
groups resistant to the status quo. Current studies of
national cinemas and of gender representation affirm this
observation. In her study of Spanish cinema, for
example, Marsha Kinder has shown how, within the Spanish
historical context, melodrama has been ideologically
| reinscribed by both the left and the (Francoist) right.29
1 Laura Mulvey, in her study of the representation of women
in the melodramas of Douglas Sirk, goes so far as to
suggest that ideological contradiction is overt in some i
i
melodramas of the 1950s— it is not hidden to be found by
some special critical process, but available for a direct
contact with the expressed groups whose experience it
suggests.30
I
The history of melodrama traced by Brooks and |
I
Elsaesser— its origin in popular art of protest against a J
censoring social order, its waxing and waning with periods j
I
of social and ideological crisis— and the varying opinions
about the regressive (effacing political/social conflicts
by displacing them onto the family) and progressive (the
centrality of ideological contradiction in its discourse)
aspects of melodrama suggest a particular way of looking
at melodrama as a purveyor of ideology, as part of the
cultural formation that interpellates subjects in relation |
I
to the state. The meanings in/of melodrama is not imposed i
I
from above by a ruling class or alliances of classes (the j
"triumphant bourgeoisie") or from below by the groups f
oppressed by the dominant class ideology, but as Christine f
l
Gledhill argues, arise "out of a struggle or negotiation j
I
between competing frames of reference, motivation, and I
i
experience.1,31 Gledhill comes to her position from an '
application to cultural production of Gramsci's notion of j
hegemony as that process by which competing classes engage 1
j in a struggle for meanings. Ideological power, in this (
| view, is not a matter of force, but of persuasion, which
I l
takes place through negotiation, "an ongoing process of
give-and-take," in which "opposite sides" are held
together.32 This explanation of the political nature of
|cultural production not only does justice to an
, understanding of a complex genre such as melodrama, which i
! I've argued has been seen as regressive and/or subversive, ;
j but also allows for an understanding of how a generic form [
! . |
j such as melodrama has a definite relation to specific '
|historical moments and national contexts. I
I „ I
j If, as E. Ann Kaplan has argued, the mother can be a I
i
j sign around which discontent can be mobilized, this theory
| of melodrama and hegemony might be productive in showing
!
| how mother as sign is used m the process of negotiation |
between competing groups, and how she is used in melodrama j
j (which is a part of culture through which this process
takes place) as an appeal or an impediment to national
| consensus. In "Melodrama In and Out of the Home," an !
i
| essay that is less optimistic about melodrama than her
i
I earlier one on Sirk, Laura Mulvey suggests that in certain !
historical moments melodrama has used the figure of the
mother to appeal to national consensus, thus effectively
silencing the genre's potential to speak for oppressed
j
| groups:
I There is a moment that might approximate
; to the threshold of speech, where
i conscious articulation is prefigured by
the oblique forms of metaphor, symbolism
j and a complex, semiotically charged,
system which implies desire for political,
conscious realization of oppression in
language. . . . The moment of threshold
in popular spectacular entertainment has
been turned away from speaking for
i oppressed groups by the centrifugal forces
of national consensus, which then
i represent their interests and welfare and
improved conditions of life with
' accompanying cultural loss.
Paradoxically, this process has been
; negotiated primarily through an appeal to
' the figure of the mother as 'signifier of
censorship', which then comes to
J complement the eroticised image of woman
that signifies only male desire and cannot
j speak woman's desire.33
I In the rest of this chapter, I will discuss melodramas
I
! from two different national contexts and time periods. My
j Son John is an American film made during the "red scare"
| of the 1950s; Hope and Glorv and The Krays are two British
i
i films made during the last years of the Thatcher regime,
which contrast in their attitudes to the past. In each
film, the mother or a concept of the maternal is an
important figure for understanding the film's relation to
the hegemonic process of negotiation between competing
groups for a definition of the state or the national.
Mv Son John
My Son John was co-written and directed by Leo
McCarey, a veteran of the Hollywood studio system,
j director of comedies and comedy-dramas, such as Going Mv
J
iWav (1944) and The Bells of St. Marv's (1945), which
I
jcombine traditional American sentiment with traditional
! Irish Catholic sentiment. McCarey was also a "friendly
witness" before House Un-American Activities Committee
(HUAC) in 1947, as it was conducting its investigation
i into communist influence in the motion picture business.
My Son John was released in 1952, within five years of
McCarey's appearance before HUAC, and towards the end of a
i
J cycle of about forty Hollywood films made between 1948-
I
| 1954 that dealt openly with what was perceived as a
1
! widespread communist infiltration in the American way of
I
life.
My Son John is the story of good Catholic parents,
! Lucille and Dan Jefferson (played by Helen Hayes and Dean
l
! Jagger) and their three sons. Two of the sons are
| soldiers bound for action in the Korean War (they exist in
i
ithe film more as a symbolic, than as an actual, presence);
I the third son is John (Robert Walker), the mother's
t
I
, favorite, a government employee in Washington, who is
j involved in a communist spy ring in Washington. The
j narrative follows John's parents and the FBI as they
simultaneously investigate and condemn his activities.
After a series of emotional confrontations between John
and his parents, including one after Lucille flies to
t
!
Washington and ponders the truth about her son in front of
the Jefferson Memorial, mother and son are severed
emotionally. John decides to give himself up to the FBI,
but is killed (in front of the Lincoln Memorial) by his
communist colleagues before that is possible. He leaves j
behind a tape recording condemning communism, which is
played for the graduating class of his alma mater.
Unlike most of the films made in the anti-commie
cycle, Mv Son John is not a thriller, but a domestic
melodrama. So it is the familial agony over John's
betrayal of parental love (especially maternal love),
Christian principle, and love of country, and not the
investigation, that subsumes most of the narrative action.
If most melodramas, in this case the family melodrama of
the 1950s, displace the political for the private or
familial by being "attentive only to problems which
concern the family's internal security and economy,"34 Mv
Son John, by depicting a family whose skewed organization
has threatened the political order, would seem to remind
us— as feminist political theorists have— that the
patriarchal family supports the patriarchal state. While
some feminists might rejoice in the failure of patriarchy
(undermined by mothers), the film is very concerned that
this failure means also the demise of the state. But
although the film is pre-eminently readable as a
: politically right-wing agitprop narrative blaming "moms"
| for communist invasion, because it combines elements of j
I the maternal melodrama of the 1930s and the family
! i
; melodrama of the 1950s with the heavy propaganda line, it
! also speaks to the oppressive nature of the patriarchal
I
I family for mothers and children, and of the process by
i
j which the family serves to produce subjects for the state
j (involving the mother figure as censoring body, keeping
1 !
j masculine excess m check). It is precisely this ;
combination— abstract, but rabid ideological tract and ;
subversive family melodrama— that has made the film one of j
I
the most written about of the anti-commie cycle of
J i
Hollywood films. I will argue that it is also this
combination that makes the film especially interesting in
understanding how spectators might identify with the
mother/the maternal— how generic elements of melodrama,
; including actors' performances, compete with the !
} propaganda, and might contribute to the production of
i contradictions, interrupting the dominant ideology which
i . .
I seeks to position a unified spectator in opposition to the
mother. j
! j
I Most of the commentators of Mv Son John have a ,
i ;
| difficult time with the film's combination of agitprop and
I
j melodrama, or claim the film's difficulty with such a |
; I
j combination is responsible for its failure. Even though
they find this fascinating, they would prefer to read the
j film solely as a melodrama or as the propaganda of the
> vociferously anti-communist American Legion, which
i
;supported the film and is featured in the diegesis through
character Dan Jefferson's membership in a local branch.
j
!Consequently, these critics can only recuperate the film
I
|by studying its relation to other fifties melodramas or to
i
i
jMcCarey's canon and visual style, or refuse to recuperate
i
: it at all, but revile it instead.35 Many of these critics
i
have contributed to the reassessment of this film and make
very perceptive points about it, including that it almost
i
j subverts its own ideological project, but all are nervous
|about taking the film to its own logical extreme. Only
!Michael Rogin, in his study on demonology in American
1 politics, seems confident to argue that the film
1
!participates in the larger construction of collective
subjectivity by using a representation of the family in
1 order to support the state.36 He also suggests that the
i
| film creates an image of communism that is a double of the
j
;mother, that alternately desirable/desiring and censoring
j figure in the family which insures the proper functioning
! of the patriarchal family and state by initiating the
Oedipal complex and working, under the pressure of the
;patriarchy, to censor Oedipal urges. The communist
! threat, like representations of mothers in fifties
jAmerican culture (the culture of "momism"), is pictured as
j secret and invasive. The mother's closeness to her son
!confuses boundaries, a fearful possibility that is
connected to or, perhaps, (barely) displaced onto the
I
boundary confusion between the citizen of a mass society
and the Communist (who could be anyone, who looks just
i
like you and me). Although it is unclear in Rogin's
argument which boundary confusion is primary (between
imother and child or between the free individual of the
jliberal state and the "others" or "aliens" against which
|he defines himself), one of his most provocative points is
[that the surveillance state, exemplified here by the FBI,
| t
j is constructed to perform like the mother (getting close
to the individual, knowing his secrets). While his
comments on the closeness between mother and child would
seem to agree with Julia Kristeva's theory about the
functioning of the abject in patriarchal culture, in which
I the mother is reviled as "unclean" and undifferentiated
matter,37 his argument is most valuable when it relies on
1 the historical specificity of such a designation.
There is much evidence in Mv Son John to bear out
Rogin's argument. The film goes to great lengths to
:suggest that Lucille is close to her son and unwilling or
unable to give up that closeness. This results in an
impairment in John's masculinity, separating him from his
father and brothers, who excel in stereotypical masculine
pursuits such as football. Lucille's encouragement of
John's intellectual abilities further emasculates him as
there is some suggestion that Lucille has once controlled
John and is still living through him— she is clearly
smarter than her husband and other sons, but has been
unable to express this except in her enjoyment of John's
achievements (i.e., in Freudian terms, she has penis
envy). The film's anxiety about intellectualism, which
according to Rogin, is also a fear of mass society
(education supposedly makes all Americans alike), is
expressed in its linking between higher education and
communism (John is first "recruited" in college).
Ironically, then, the film can only protect what the state
holds dear (the liberal mass society in which free men
have access to education and consumer goods) by linking it
with what it fears (communism). The FBI does work like
patriarchy's vision of the mother, as well as through her,
finding out the secrets hidden in men's hearts,
manipulating them out of their recesses by laying on
alternate does of love and guilt (Steadman, the FBI agent,
makes Lucille feel guilty about not coming forward about
John by telling her that it would be a tragedy if other
sons died fighting against what John is promoting).
While in agreement with Rogin7s brilliant argument, I ,
I would like to re-direct the emphasis on how this film
I 1
1 accomplishes the above constructions through its status as
| a melodrama, which, I have argued, has both conservative
J J
and subversive aims and forms inscribed within its history
i
j as a genre. By redirecting the emphasis towards the (
\
I melodramatic, I will focus on gaps in Rogin's argument— ;
t
| the implications of the film's representation of gender in .
terms of the genre's history of giving voice to oppressed j
I ,
; groups and in terms of spectatorial readings resistant to,
as well as complicit with, the dominant patriarchal order.
In its focus on the mother and on the intense interaction
within the family, which give order to the private/public j
dichotomy supporting the modern state, the melodrama, like j
I ,
j the demonological text, evidences many of the same
i contradictions and threatens to deconstruct its own (
project.
The maternal melodrama, which historically focuses on j
[ the sufferings of the mother as she negotiates distance j
t
. from her child, and the family melodrama, which focuses on
i . j
j conflicts between parents and children, are pertinent to a |
! I
| generic definition of My Son John— Lucille, the mother, [
| emerges as the main character (as in the maternal
! melodrama) and much of the conflict is between both
J parents and their young adult son (as in the family i
melodrama). The maternal melodrama, most popular in the
1930s and 1940s, typically devalues and debases "the
actual figure of the mother while sanctifying the
institution of motherhood,"38 but also registers the sense
of loss for both mother and child. One could say that the
genre serves the patriarchal function of upholding the
institution of motherhood only through a negotiation with
a resisting aim which demands that the sorrow that this
entails for mother and child be registered. This
negotiation is responsible for the genre's popularity and
power; to use Gramsci's terms, the ideal— a sacrificing
motherhood— has penetrated into the common sense of the
collective after a process of negotiation, but the ideal
must be constantly won because the experiences of real,
social subjects will contradict it. Likewise, the
patriarchal family of the family melodrama, so popular in
the 1950s and early 1960s (making a comeback in the
1980s), can be reaffirmed through a negotiation with a
subversive aim which sees its decay and destructive power
over children and parents (sometimes over specifically
mothers, as in All That Heaven Allows and Mv Son John).
The mise-en-scene, as well as the amount of dialogue
and number of scenes in which she is present, privileges
Lucille, making her into the central character and the one
with which the spectator is invited to identify. The
| 60
l
j scenes in which John and his father Dan argue over family
| I
| and state politics, frame Lucille between the two, |
! i
, foregrounding her frantic attempts to mediate between
them. These framing patterns are often immediately
I followed by a mise-en-scene that makes the strain of this
J
I typical mothering function clearly noticeable. Shot in
I
! close-up, Lucille lies alone on her bed, half in shadow,
I (
with one arm over her face. Instead of suggesting the ■
!
’ mysterious of the femme fatale, which such lighting does J
in the film noir, the elusiveness of the woman's figure 1
here connotes suffering and a female body that is passive
i
| and vulnerable to psychic and biological "disturbances,"
! such as menopause. Yet, when John joins her in these
scenes, the closeness between mother and son is depicted
' (
' in an almost sexually suggestive manner, as they engage in j
l I
j emotionally intense exchanges on Lucille's bed. These j
J moments can be contrasted with one towards the end of the !
1 i
: film, in which Lucille, who has flown to Washington to see i
1 i
i i
| John as her suspicions about him are most intense, is j
i * i
| shown in a series of long shots, alone in front of the I
I I
j Potamac River, with the famous presidential memorials in !
I 1
i the background (including the Jefferson, the one bearing :
|
; her legal namesake). The centrality of Lucille within the [
| visual scheme, which identifies the trajectory of female 1
j suffering, invites our identification with her, and often j
61
specifically with her situation as a mother— mediator,
"lover" to her child, "the matrix and matter" from which |
j
sons must separate, the person whois most responsible
within the state as responsible for the reproduction of
ideology within the home. This identification is at least
partially dislodged when we see her agony in Washington, |
as she realizes how she has failed in this last function. j
The film then invites our participation in that assessment <
of mothering that Doane locates as a crucial part of the
maternal melodrama's work.
The film's insistence on the erotic charge to
i
Lucilles' relation with John and its final positioning of
her as an hysterical, menopausal woman (the more she finds
out about John, the more she submits to the diagnosis of
her husband and doctor about the delicacy of women "of a
certain age") could be read as an attempt to construct the '
I
I
maternal in an essentialist identification with a
"natural" or inherently feminine psyche and body. It is j
also evidence of the debasement of the actual figure of j
I
the mother in preparation for a moment in which an ideal I
I
of motherhood will be sanctified— when Lucille will j
exclaim to John, "I will not let you poison other mother's !
sons and daughters!" After an enforced separation between
i
her and child, she can give him up to the Law (and
therefore, to the Symbolic) and uphold the role of
| motherhood for the state— as protecting sons and daughters
and reproducing within them the ideology which supports
the dominant order. These are sons and daughters in the
j abstract, not in the personal. Lucille will lose her own
son, even if he will repent before dying. The ideal of
r
| motherhood will also be legitimized through the FBI.
i
■ Robert Warshow suggests the FBI takes over the role of the
i
I
j Church (which is shown as weak in this film in, again, an
*
unintentional register of anxiety over boundary confusion-
-the Church is subject to similar frailties as Communism
| in its dogmatism), and Rogin suggests the FBI is like the
j maternal, but Steadman the FBI agent (played by Van
Heflin), will also become a surrogate son for Lucille.
Their scenes together are characterized by the same kind
I
i of erotic-maternal banter as between Lucille and her sons.
I
j When she comes to accept him as a son— signalled finally
by her request that he be kind to his mother, made just at
the point where she is sure she has lost John— she will
insure the tomorrow of the state and her own immortality
1
as an ideal mother. In one fascinating scene, Steadman
I
i and another FBI agent watch a film of Lucille,
■ surreptitiously shot by hidden FBI cameras as she finds
I
| out that John's mysterious key opens the door to the
J apartment of an arrested (female) spy. The two men,
representatives of the invasive surveillance state,
j 63
i comment in a most maternal way at how hard it must be for
1
i Lucille to find this out about John, how "she has taken a \
' i
!beating." This scene is a turning point in our changing j
i ;
!responses to Lucille. If Lucille's examination of
i
I conscience by the Washington memorials replaced some of
1 our identification with assessment, then here we are 1
j I
directed to look at Lucille in judgment but with the j
i
empathy of a mother. The point of view structures here |
\
I
negotiate our identification with the FBI agent as mother-
-empathetic and all-knowing— but also with the power that
male sons of the state possess to enforce the Law of the i
. . i
I Father. The film's invitation to identify with a maternal j
position that has the power and security of the paternal
legacy extends into the final scenes between mother and
! son, where Steadman is even relatively tangential to the i
!
iaction. At this point, Lucille becomes increasingly j
I 1
j infantilized by her menopausal state, which her doctor, J
j her husband, and finally John, have convinced her will j
make her crazy. 1
|
S Yet, one may wonder if the scene in the screening !
! .
room m which Lucille is made object of a de-eroticized
i
'gaze, like the one Mary Ann Doane describes as the gaze of
i
the medical discourse, may not, in its sympathy for j
Lucille, open some libidinal urges in the spectator that
l
is not in service to the construction of the ideal I
i 64
mother.39 There are other instances in the film that
suggest an alternative way of looking at and identifying :
i i
| with mothering. I've already argued that the mise-en-
I
> i
! scene often invites identification with Lucille on the
basis of the difficulty she has in being mediator in a
; family ruled by the male, but the performances of Helen j
] Hayes as Lucille and Robert Walker as John, and the j
j _ |
j script's creation of sarcastic, parodic dialogue for both j
! Lucille and John against Dan, the father, can also be used
I as evidence for the presence of the melodrama's potential
I
! subversiveness.
; Mv Son John was the first appearance Hayes made in
j films in seventeen years.40 She agreed to make the film
on the basis of the script written by screenwriter John
t
( Mahin, and was reportedly aghast by the changes McCarey
1 made during the shooting of the film and by the final shot
version. Mahin later indicated that he and Hayes felt
! i
, that McCarey's virulent anti-communism had made him
| crazy.41 Robert Warshow thought Hayes's performance was
: all wrong, dominated by a "mad, jerky passion."42 Even if
j it would be too much to suggest that her performance is a J
l j
! result of the alleged tensions between Mahin, McCarey, and |
j Hayes, it is actually unusual in the way it works to !
f 1
i create tension within the melodramatic style. The jerky j
{ quality that bothered Warshow is the expression of a
| sarcastic humor and the use of parody to characterize a
i
j woman who knows she is smarter than her husband, yet has
i accepted his rule of the home. In an early scene in the
I film, Dan and the family doctor try to convince her that
! she should start taking pills to counter the side effects
; of menopause (though, of course, that term is never used).
She disregards their idea with a parodic performance of a
i crazy woman, showing she understands their implication
1 that women are supposed to go crazy with a change in
hormones. When her husband orders her to take the pills,
ishe mockingly says, "the frail little woman will do His
I
I bidding]" and then hides them in the kitchen. When John
j arrives shortly after, he also adopts a pose of sarcasm.
!
jWalker's performance codes the character as effeminate,
t
' which given the film's historical and political context
I can be read as another fearful register of Lucille's
i
j
| psychic influence on her son. Yet like the way film noir
i
| represents the femme fatale in counterpart to the "weak,
little woman," this film at least depicts homosexuality as
a sexual "deviancy" that is powerful, connoting
I
; intelligence and cunning. And John's constant "bitchy"
j mimicking of his father could be read as a response, like
j Lucille's parodying, to Dan's stupidity and looney
j paranoia about intellectuals. In fact, as much as the
■ text works to show a psychic or erotic connection between
j 66
I
John and Lucille, they are united at least as much in
their similar responses to Dan arising from social
I
;interactions. Their sarcasm could be seen as a defense
imechanism for survival in an oppressive family situation,
I
|and invites our pleasure in mocking the bromides of the
;patriarchal super-ego. The allied position of mother and
!son against the father's rule suggests, as do so many
i
j family melodramas of the fifties, that sons have
I
;difficulty "attaining an active sexual identity in which
patriarchal power can be confirmed and reproduced," and
mothers have difficulty "subjugating and channeling
feminine sexuality according to the passive functions
which patriarchy has defined for it."43
. While I think it is possible that the historical
viewer of 1952, in identifying with the position of the
J
mother in Mv Son John, might experience the kinds of
Idisjunctures in the maternal I've described— masochistic
I
;mother functioning for the state/heroic mother resisting
1
1 her passive positioning— and become aware of the text's j
i
repression of history (HUAC's place in the production of
*
this film and its paranoid displacements), as Linda
.Williams argues, it is important "for feminists to see how
their own well-intentioned hindsight...may blind them to
I
jthe historical conflicts managed by the film for the
i i
j historical viewer."44 Williams suggests that the critic i
I
I t
67
i
looking for the historical spectator (not entirely
synonymous with the psychic spectator of the text) 1
i
i identify what the text represses and reflects of the |
historical moment of the film/s production. One could say
;that Mv Son John as melodrama within the classical
Hollywood system, by focusing on the private, represses
'the history of HUAC and the FBI, which helped erect a 1
i surveillance state that threatens the free individual in I
; i
■ the modern liberal state and contributes to the j
I
displacement of that threat onto the mother. One could !
1
j also say that the scrutiny of the private allows the text
i to reflect the conflict of mothers and children within the
!patriarchal home and state. Working in and through i
! i
!familiar and popular generic patterns, these repressions '
!and reflections produce contradictions available to the
I viewer addressed by the film in 1952. Though the
1 . I
I historical spectator cannot be hypothesized as having the |
;same impetus for "reading against the grain" as the
I \
1 I
Jcontemporary critic does, Mulvey's point that ideological j
:contradictions are the mainspring of some fifties I
i
;melodramas suggests that the popularity of these resided i
1 in their failure or refusal to unify the heterogeneous ;
1 subjectivity of their audiences, in "the amount of dust
jthe story raise[d] along the road."45 But since these |
|anti-communist agit-prop films were all box office
jfailures it might be that these contradictions were too
mnpleasurable or too irreconcilable for most of these
viewers. Thomas Doherty argues that ideological mission
of this cycle of films was too straightforward and could
not mesh with the "entertainment" goals of classical
cinema.46 Perhaps in this particular agit-prop film the
identifications with characters— first with a suffering
mother and a mocking son and then with a FBI agent who can
risk the feminizing maternal because he is heir to and
!
enforcer of the patriarchal law— were too difficult to
i
I negotiate successfully. The desire of children to rebel
[against parents, which films like Rebel Without a Cause
I
Iwould mobilize as a successful fantasy later in the 1950s,
i
is hardly satisfied in this film, which ends in the death
i
of its younger protagonist. And perhaps the
l
| "transvestite" position, to paraphrase Mulvey, that all
i
■spectators are asked to assume in the film's transactions
of identifications— the identification with the mother
iyielding to one with a maternal FBI agent— were not
sufficient cover for the baldness of the film's
i
[ideological message.
i
For this contemporary feminist spectator, My Son John
is a fascinating example of how a film "manages" its own
contemporary social and political anxieties by mobilizing
|them around the mother character. Despite the evidence
69 |
I
(mainly from the family melodramas themselves) that there
were conscious and unconscious manifestations of
resistance to the patriarchal status quo in the 1950s, the
force of anti-patriarchal discourses was not yet
articulated as the expression of a widespread social
i -
movement, such as the women's movement of the 1960s-70s.
The international women's movement of the 1960s-70s and
the feminist theory and criticism that has since then
analyzed the representational practices of the patriarchy
is responsible for much of the self-consciousness
displayed by recent films in their imaging of women. The
beginning of the women's movement roughly coincides with
the international decline of the classical Hollywood
stylistic paradigm, so many of these films negotiate their
changing imaging of women with narrative, generic, and
stylistic experimentation. With a returning economic and
political conservatism (including a backlash against
feminism) in the late 1970s and 1980s, American narrative
films have become increasingly classical in style and
reactionary in gender politics. Despite a growing
conservatism in many European countries at this same time
and a steady audience desire for Hollywood or Hollywood
like films, experimentation within narrative features in
these countries has survived because of auteurist
traditions, movements associated with national self-image,
active feminist leftist intelligentsia within the arts, ,
! etc. The problems facing contemporary British filmmakers j
I !
j producing narrative features that depart from the
;classical style and present reactionary politics have been '
I I
immense. Working within a country under conservative rule '
(led by Margaret Thatcher until late 1990) perhaps more j
stultifying than that of Reagan America of the 1980s, and J
I
within a film industry traditionally plagued by its :
1 i
j relation to the dominating American industry, a number of j
i
British filmmakers have still managed to produce narrative j
feature films that are sytlisitically experimental and j
evidence a sensitivity towards women's history and women j
i ■ 1
j m history. Hope and Glory and The Kravs. two British j
i •
]films produced during the last years of the Thatcher
I
I j
I government, look back at another historical period to j
understand historical problems of the 1980s in terms of |
that earlier one, and to position the mother in relation |
to the state. While both films claim the World War II i
i l
! years as defining moments for Britain and for the worlds j
I of the films' characters, they also represent the maternal
i
iwithin a post-women's movement perspective and locate it
^ in relation to the public discourse of the British
f
}
I government of the 1980s.
71
Hope and Glory and The Kravs
A number of internationally successful British films
imade in the latter part of Margaret Thatcher's political
1
! rule offer images of mothers compatible with a number of
the possible representations of the 'maternal' constructed
1 in psychoanalytic discourse and its appropriation by
,feminist discourses. Distant Voices. Still Lives, for
instance, exposes the tragic way the mother's masochism
can function, in the words of Julia Kristeva, as a
i "structural stabilizer" to smooth over contradictions in
!the patriarchal family.47 Hope and Glorv features the
!
j Oedipal mother, as its young male protagonist struggles to
i
I find adult role models in an increasingly feminized
homefront in World War II England. The mother in The
Kravs is the phallic mother who, with her own mother and
sisters, usurps the place of the patriarch, infantilizes
[her sons, and willfully ignores their brutalization of
f
I other men because she despises how men have oppressed
;women and because she wants to banish all rivals to her
,son's power and to the power she holds over her sons.
; The rest of this chapter is an exploration of these
l
!representations of the maternal, but my emphasis remains
i
|on showing the relation between films' constructions of a
;psychic mother and spectator and the historical discourses
jwhich position both in very specific contexts. In fact,
I
]what interests me about all three films is how their
72
positioning of mothers as central forces in the narratives
seems significant in the historical context of 1980s Great '
I
Britain, a period in which both prime minister and monarch '
| are women and mothers. Although I will sometimes refer to
| i
j Margaret Thatcher specifically, and Jacqueline Rose has
j argued in a brilliant essay on Thatcher and Ruth Ellis j
i i
| that the collective fantasy of state violence that j
jcharacterizes Thatcherite Britain has something to do with
j what she as a (right-wing) woman can bring into play,48
| the questions I will entertain here have more to do with
i
! how the discursive field of Thatcherite Britain has
negotiated an understanding of the maternal in relation to
I
;the state. Two questions seem to me to be central to this
j understanding: what does it mean to represent the
i maternal in films in a nation whose political agenda is to I
! !
! free the people "from the apron-strings of the governess |
I i
‘state,"49 in other words, to free them from a state ,
1 I
| rhetorically figured as an infantilizing maternal? And i
I
| how does a government in the process of constructing a j
: contemporary popular memory that will re-assert an older, j
I j
! glorious national identity mobilize representations of the ,
! I
!maternal to that end? I
I I will focus here on The Kravs and Hope and Glorv.
i I
j not only because these films are most attentive to the
i
| historical specificity of the maternal, but also because
they suggest World War II as a crucial moment or reference
l
! point for real, social women as well as for a contemporary
j popular memory for Britain. Of course, for many feminist
i
| historians and film scholars of film noir and the woman's
film, World War II is also a privileged historical moment,
i
i
■ as it is when twentieth century women were able to most
i enter public consciousness, and as the films under
| discussion her suggest, when women were also able to most
figure in the private unconscious. In both Hope and Glory
and The Krays, mothers on the homefront substitute for
I absent or weak patriarchs, increasing the psychic hold
| between mother and child. The films' perspectives on the
I
1 value of such a substitution differ, as do the ways they
< participate in the construction of a contemporary popular
memory of World War II. I will argue that Hope and
Glory's production of memory of the War is a production of
and for a unified ground for past and present, whereas The
Krays' memory of that period is effected in a
I
| contradiction between the dominant contemporary meanings
| of the war and the particular disruptive memories that
| cannot find their place in the public field. _________
i
l My conceptualization of 'popular memory' is derived
i
. from a series of written exchanges in the 197 0s on the
i
j British Telefilm Days of Hope.50 from work done by the
j Popular Memory Group associated with the Center for
; 74
i
|Contemporary Studies in Great Britain, and from the
,British Film Institute's 1983 Summer School on "National j
I !
I Fictions: Struggles over the Meaning of World War II." 1
i I
| The work of both the latter groups was given impetus from .
i
the Falklands War of 1982, when, as Colin McArthur argues, ;
1 i
1"the left and liberal opinion generally experienced what t
I
!could only be described as a deep sense of shock at the !
i j
.massive resurgence of a regressive definition of British
i
inational identity."51 McArthur and other participants in
j the BFI Summer School further argue that "the central
l
j historical experience in this refurbished national
I .
|identity was the Second World War and the over-arching
j rhetoric of its enunciation by the Thatcherite government
! i
iwas Churchillian."52 In other words, the Thatcherite ;
|government was at once constructing and drawing on a j
,popular memory of Great Britain and World War II to j
support its contemporary claims about war and the nation, !
with popular memory being understood as "a version of the
past which connects it up to the present so as to produce j
popular conceptions" of who a particular people or nation j
are, where they have come from, and why their society is
as it is.53 The popular memory of World War II j
constructed within the Thatcherite years positions the war ;
I
period as part of an unfolding destiny of the British I
I
people. Memory here is a work of discovery, confirming a !
75
unified subject. One of the concerns of the various
scholars analyzing this construction is to replace the
aforementioned notion of memory and history with one which
sees history as "something perpetually constructed in a
specific juncture.1154 This understanding of popular
memory can help to place the mythology of World War II not
only in the terms and conjunctures in which it was
constructed in the war years themselves, but also in the
present or the Thatcherite period in which the films in my
discussion were produced and received. This understanding
will be attentive to "disruptive" memories of the War as
well as those belonging to the dominant public field, to
the displacements effected by and the pressures resulting
from the need to re-articulate the past in the present,
with both the past and present national history the
process and result of popular struggle.
Both Hope and Glory and The Kravs begin with self-
conscious evocations of the process of memory and history.
Hope and Glory, the autobiographical film of director John
Boorman's childhood experienced in wartime London, when
his mother took over as head of the family in his father's
absence, begins with a newsreel of Chamberlain's and
Britain's admittance that appeasement has failed. The
Kravs. the biographical film of the notorious Kray
brothers, gangsters who loved their mother "too much" and
| terrorized London in the 1960s, begins with the voice-over
narration of the Krays' mother, as she recounts a dream in
i which she is a bird keeping her egg warm and safe. While
the beginning of Hope and Glory's narrative, with newsreel
j footage of events supposedly securely ensconced in public
1
memory, holds the promise of exposing how the filmic
i
institution has mediated history and memory, The Krav's
■ beginning clearly positions its conception in the
: personal, and since this specific memory is of a dream,
I within the unconscious. That Hope and Glory's
i
] construction of popular memory of World War II is begun
j with a self-reflexive gesture and with an event
| recognizable to the collective does not insure that public
I
I struggle will be represented or serve as some kind of mode
t
i of representation itself. Hope and Glory's beginning with
! the failure of appeasement is significant. The shameful
; appeasement policy of Chamberlain will be the lack
!
motoring the war in popular mythology during World War II,
! and in Thatcherism's construction of memory of World War
II in the post-war period. In the words of Graham Dawson
1 and Bob West,
| Thatcherism has reworked the meanings of
that moment when 'appeasement collapsed,
so as to re-establish continuity with that
previous glorious history: a continuity
now broken, not by the disasters of 194 0,
but by the period of the post-war
consensus, 1945-79. Britain has fallen
i from 'her' previous supremacy, but can be
77
great again. The Thatcher government is
the self-appointed heir of the glorious
past.55
I think Hope and Glorv marks its difference from the
Thatcherite rhetoric of greatness by constructing a memory
of the war from the point of view of the child, a subject
whose experiences are usually excluded in representations
of war and popular memory. Boorman has stated in
interviews that he made the film as a tribute to the
wartime contributions of his mother and aunts. As
typically ignored or underrated experiences, the
activities and feelings of women and children could work
to fragment "consciousness into a contradiction between
one's preferred 'general' meanings and the displaced, but
persistent, particular memories; which if brought to life,
can be most disruptive."56 So in the film, the young
Boorman and his sisters actually wish for war and bombings
as a kind of liberation from the strictures of their
ordered bourgeois life, his older sister becomes sexually
active, and his mother expresses desire to be with men
outside of monogamous marriage. These "persistent,
particular memories" could disrupt a popular memory in the
process of smoothing over contradiction or inadequately
representing the experiences "which impede identification
and the fusion of the personal and the general."57 They
could expose the partiality or contradictions within the
consensus politics of the war. But ultimately the film
1 fuses the personal lack with the social or national lack,
I
with both resolved in fullness and unity. The shame of
appeasement is resolved by a war in which class
differences supposedly eroded, in which the people
supposedly kept "a stiff upper lip," and in Churchill's
rhetoric, 'the native soil' was protected from invasion.
The "lack" of the young Boorman in HOPE AND GLORY is an
inadequate Oedipalization due to the absence of fathers on
the homefront. So one of the film's memories potentially
disruptive to a national popular memory— the experiences
of mothers, sisters, and aunts— is also the source of the
boy's insecurity and embarrassments. That mothers and
other women become a problem is made clear throughout the
film— the young boy squirms and chafes at signs of the
feminized homefront— the love story film he has to sit
through, witnessing of his older sister having sex in a
public place, overhearing his mother confess her love for
his father's best friend. These traumas, and thus the
boy's lack, are resolved when the mother's desire for
infidelity is met with the literal destruction of the
home— just after she confesses her love to her husband's
friend on a train, the family's home is bombed out. The
bombing will take her and the family to the home of her
father, a misogynist who not only fills the gap left by
the absent father, but who constantly gives the boy
i 79
lessons in how to undermine what he sees as an
increasingly feminized culture. The grandfather's house
is on the Thames River, serving as both the pastoral
paradise of Churchill fantasy and as the place where the
young Boorman will have his first experience with the
British film industry. The pastoral paradise of England,
securely in the hands of the patriarch, will then serve as
the place Boorman will find his vocation in film— destiny
of Britain and destiny of the individual, Oedipally
resolved male converging at the film's conclusion. Past
and present, individual and collective popular memory of
the war come together as Boorman finds the man in the boy.
Mother will be under the eye of her father, and the older
I
sister, now pregnant, will marry her soldier boyfriend on
I
the country estate. Women, who during the war were
producers, wives, mothers, lovers, nurses, soldiers, etc.
will now be confined to the institution of motherhood,
contained within marriage or the care of secure
patriarchs.
The Kravs. puts a different value on the substitution
of mothers for absent patriarchs on the homefront, and
because it cannot fully contain the disruptive memories of
these mothers on the homefront, exposes the gender and
class problematics of the coalition politics of the war
;and even exposes the core of resentment that the
80
Thatcherite government was able to tap in the later post-
I
war period. While the opening memory of The Kravs seems
to position the maternal in a mythical space— in a dream
of and by the all-nurturing mother— and thus work to
further mystify it, the film also contains evidence of the
inextricable connection between gender and class, and
their specificity in history. If the opening memory,
which will be repeated at the end of the film in voice
over mother Violet's funeral, succeeds in making the
maternal an eternal, then at other points it counters that
construction with memories of specific historical moments
when women have been most oppressed and repressed by
patriarchy. For example, in one scene, the young Kray
boys huddle with their mother and aunts in a World War II
air-raid shelter; their maternal grandfather entertains
the crowd with stories of Jack the Ripper, a construction
of memory conveyed by a male, but the kind of memory of
male violence against women (and women of a certain class)
that will fuel feelings of resentment against men, because
not only is it just as potent a myth as the one of the
simultaneously frightening and loving phallic mother, but
it is also a historical reality. The film constantly
reminds of the difference between psychic fantasies and
historical realities and when the two might converge.
Violet Kray often self-mockingly compares herself to the
81
wicked mothers of fairy-tales, but it is the violence of
the Kray boys and their male cronies and rivals that
result in murder and intrigue. Reggie even becomes the
embodiment of an evil maternal when he "mothers" his young
wife to the point she commits suicide. Violet even sees
this coming, and says, as much as she loves her son,
Frances (Reggie's wife) is going to have to learn to kick
back at men, like she has.
The film also abounds with the kind of memories of
World War II that disrupt the unified image of that war in
popular memory. Violet and her mother are constantly
reminding men that they are children, only thinking that
they are in control, for it was actually women who fought
the war, and continue to do so in the home everyday. They
provide a charge to what might be considered from one
point of view, utterly banal motherly and housewifely
activities (as Margaret Thatcher always seems to describe
her duties as wife and mother). One memory, evoked by
Violet's sister Rose, who is the most beloved aunt of the
Kray boys, serves as an excessive disruption not only in
terms of its content (disrupting the popular memory of the
war), but also as a narrative disruption, coming as it
does after the happy moment of Reggie's wedding and
precipitating Rose's death.
82
As the camera slowly tracks in on her face, Rose recalls
I
that after overhearing a man on the bus boasting of his j
I
war experiences: i
! 1
I It was the women who had the war, the real
| war. The women were left at home, sitting ’
; in the shit, not in some sparkling plane
I or gleaming tank. They should have been ;
> with me when old Pauline Wooley went into
! labor. Seven hours of screaming, and then j
! I had to cut the baby's head off to save j
I the mother's life. She died anyway. So
I much blood. And the abortions! Poor i
| girls. One day they'll drain Victoria
; Park Lake. And you know what they'll
I find? What glorious remnants of the
Second World War? Babies. Bullets and
I dead babies. Men! Mum's right— they stay
! kids all their fucking lives and they end
up heros or monsters. Either way, they
| win. Women have to grow up. If they stay
| children, they become victims.
Ironically, it is this Aunt Rose and Violet who have
]helped keep their men in a state of prolonged adolescence, J
but again, if the film suggests that strong mothers are
j responsible for male violence— another way of containing I
s <
.the maternal by claiming its subversion of the social !
j j
j order— it also suggests that if the mothers and aunts 1
|revenge against patriarchy is to train their male children
‘to kill other men, it is due as much to class resentment
as to gender vengeance. j
i
| This suggestion also disrupts the popular memory of
I World War II— from its inception during the war through !
the present— as successfully fought because of a coalition
j I
jgovernment on the national level and a putting down of j
i I
83
•class boundaries on the local level. But, in reality,
|that coalition was in a constant process of struggle, and
resentment was felt by the lower classes because they were
making greater sacrifices than the upper classes. These
failures are not adequately addressed in either the
popular memory of World War II constructed during the War,
or in the Thatcher years. In the latter period, the !
Conservative government has located failure instead in the
post-war consensus period, with its concessions to unions 1
j
and creation of a welfare state. Thatcher's government j
, ' I
was to liberate Great Britain from "the apron strings" of j
the maternal state through privatization and promotion of
free enterprise. In The Kravs. Violet and her sisters and I
I
mother locate failure in both the coalition government of
I
World War II as they identify over and over again the ,
oppression of women during the war, and also in the post- 1
i
war consensus years, as they reward the Kray twins for
gaining social status not through identification with
working class unionization, but through a vicious pursuit :
of individual success and power in the marketplace, even
if the marketplace must be taken by force. It is as if j
the film perversely suggests that Violet Kray had the idea
for "mothering" free enterprise rather than having the
welfare state "mothering" the lower classes before
Margaret Thatcher did, and all while doing the everyday
duties of mothering and keeping the family together ("For
what is the real driving force in our society? It is the
desire for the individual to do the best for himself and
his family."— Margaret Thatcher, 1979)
Violet Kray hates her slacker husband not just
because he is a man or because he deserted during the War,
but because all his cheating hasn't gotten him anywhere in
terms of social mobility. If men of a certain class can't
succeed lawfully, Violet can't understand why they don't
do so outside the law— she knows that men have the power !
I
i
no matter what side of the law they are on. She also 1
knows that women have no power except as mothers, and she
agrees with Rose that, if women stay like children, they !
become victims of the patriarchy, as does Reggie's wife
I
Frances.
f
What does a film like The Kravs suggest in a national
and historical context in which a female Prime Minister
had tried to free the "people" form a supposedly j
infantilizing maternal state? Violet Kray uses the
maternal to promote free enterprise. In many ways, Violet <
is in alliance with the Thatcher philosophy that respects
and gives Spartan nurturing to those who succeed through
individual initiative. But neither the film nor Violet is
I
so naive as to suggest that success through individual I
initiative is achieved out of the context of a power that
I oppresses certain groups— whether that power be an
infantilizing maternal that Violet can exercise over her
sons, or patriarchal power the exercise of which could
jeopardize Violet and her matriarchal clan. She chooses
to bind her sons to her so that patriarchal power will be
exercised over other men.
At its conclusion, the film bring these gender and
class issues together in a cross-cut sequence that
confuses which has primacy. As the twins are committing
their most brutal crimes, those that will consolidate
their power and send them to prison, where they remain to
|this day as working class heros working class heros,
Violet sits at home watching a documentary of World War II
on television. The murders are intercut with images of
Violet watching and sobbing as a popular memory of World
War II is being constructed through the media and she
finds her experience, once again, left out. As the
television documentary ends, the boys come home, Violet
turns to them and recounts the dream of her bird-like
protection of the boys, which was the film's opening.
Personal memory— for Violet, a mythology of a powerful
maternal— resists the public, media-made memory that
marginalizes disruptive recollections. It is through such
i >
strategies— the constant contextualization and
,recontextualization of the personal memory and historical
86
1
jmoment— that The Kravs. more successfully than Hope and
1Glorv. suggests the process of popular memory in all its
contradictions.
I am not suggesting, however, that the depiction of
the maternal in The Krays is radical or even necessarily
progressive. The film's image of the mother can be
appropriated for a misogynistic or homophobic response.
The film shows Violet Kray's closeness to her as having
terrifying implications for both the private and the
social levels. Because the film suggests that Ronnie
j
Kray, the homosexual twin, is the more violent of the two, !
.classic homophobic and misogynist depictions of ^
homosexuality are potentially revived— as they could, and
probably were, for My Son John. It could be argued,
however, that the depiction of homosexuality in this film j
is less concerned with the influence of the maternal i
(despite the mother's centrality) on sexual "deviance,"
and more concerned with exposing a "homosocial economy" of
the male gangster society as "doppelganger" of the ordered
society of Thatcher England, which rejects the maternal.
Moreover, the film's focus on the victimization of women
and mothers by men, which is seen as a historically
specific victimization, makes the film a valuable text for
an understanding how the mother can be the subj ect and
object of a historical representation, rather than
dismissed or vilified as the "eternal unclean" of the
l
ab j ect.
The strategies in Hope and Glorv and The Kravs that
centralize, but also evaluate the maternal and female
concerns, evidence many of the ambivalences western
societies feel about women in power sine World War II,
growing especially intense in ambivalence since the
Women's Movement. Janice Winship has traced the debates
about women's power in post-war Britain, arguing that the
dominant discourse tried to reconcile a notion of "we the
nation" with "we women" through constructing peace as a J
battle only women (especially mothers) could help to
win.58 This includes figuring a popular image of Queen j
Elizabeth (crowned in 1953) as both ruler and devoted wife
i
and mother. While this image has continued to the present !
i
(with the Queen's ruler image predominating during various
IRA crises, her mother image predominating in a tabloid
press concerned with the social foibles of her various !
I
sons or daughters-in-1aw), the introduction of a female j
i
prime minister in the configuration of British ruler- !
i
mothers with Thatcher's election in 1979, brought many of j
the culture's resistance to feminism to the foreground.
This was not because Thatcher represented feminism.
Despite her own rise to power, Thatcher served as one of
feminism's greatest detractors, and thereby expressed the
88
more incoherent thoughts of many. Her remark in 1978 that
I
■"the feminists have become far too strident and have done
damage to the cause of women by making us out to be
something we're not," is representative of the position on
women's rights and on sexual difference that Thatcher
maintained in her eleven years in office.59 It is also
representative of a culture which increasingly believes
that we live in a post-feminist age, when feminism and the
movements of other marginalized groups are no longer 1
needed as positions of political resistance to the
i
dominant culture. That feminism in no longer— or perhaps, i
was never— needed is supposedly proved by the fact of |
i
Thatcher's election. Likewise, that feminism (and
socialism) has gone "too far" and now given benefits to
the undeserving is proved by an underclass that demands
"rights" rather than works for them. When Thatcher
remarked before her election, "you get on because you have j
the right talents," she encapsulated the philosophy of
free enterprise that would be invoked in her own country,
and in the United States, whenever programs helping
i
marginalized groups were weakened or dismantled.60
Whenever this attitude about winning through individual
initiative was clothed in nationalistic terms reminiscent
of the Churchillian rhetoric of World War II, Thatcher and
89
her constituents participated in the state's construction
:of public memories.
The self-conscious positioning of mothers within
narratives constructed around the bittersweetness (as in
Hope and Glorv) or the disruptiveness (as in The Kravs) of
memory must be seen in this context of a culture coming to
terms with the place of feminism in a resurrected free
enterprise world where even women can be leaders. Hope
and Glory suggests its place for feminism when it recalls
the mystery of women from the safety of nostalgia and a
fully Oedipalized male adulthood. The Kravs. looking back
at war, post-war, and the "swinging London" period of
British history, exposes the connection between free
,enterprise and criminality that is as surely relevant to
Thatcher England as Coppola's Godfather saga (1972 and
1976) was to Watergate and post-Watergate America.
Although it pictures the terrifying power of the maternal
familiar to misogynistic representations of mothers, the
film also provides an outlet for the anger and for the
memories of mothers who fought a war everyday in the home.
The Krays suggests, with a kind of irony and cynicism,
which seems particularly relevant to a historical context
in which a woman can claim, with no apparent irony that
"you get on because you have the right talents," that
I women can save themselves from victimization only if they
control men to act in the name of capitalism on women'
behalf.
,1 see Lisa C. Bower, "'Mother' in Law: Conceptions of
Mother and the Maternal in Feminism and Feminist Legal
Theory," Differences 3, no. 1 (Spring 1991); Christine Di
iStefano, Configurations of Masculinity: A Feminist
Perspective on Modern Political Theory (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1991); Zillah R. Eisenstein, The Female
Body and the Law (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1988); Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic:
Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chape1
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980);
Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the
State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Wendy
McElroy, ed., Freedom. Feminism, and the State
(Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1982); Linda J.
Nicholson, Gender and History; The Limits of Social
Theory in the Age of the Family (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986); ; Sara Ruddick, Maternal
Thinking: Toward a Politics of Peace (New York: Ballatine ;
Books, 1989); Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and
Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). 1
2 Di Stefano, Configurations of Masculinity. 19.
3 Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, the Movie and Other
Episodes in Political Demonology (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1987), xiii.
I ;
4 Ibid.
i
5 Nicholson, Gender and History. 105-208.
6 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deidre English, For Her Own Good:
150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women (New York:
Doubleday, 1978), 187. See also, Maxine L. Margolis,
Mothers and Such: Views of American Women and Whv They
Changed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
7 That the experience of women/mothers differed according
to class did not mean that they were judged as appropriate
mothers according to those differences. The discourses of
mothering tended to position their address to all women, j
but in terms defined by middle-class expectations. That
meant working mothers were judged and their place was
constructed by assumptions about middle-class mothers (of
course, these standards were also problematic for even
this class of mothers).
8 Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)," in Lenin
and Philosophy (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971),
92
127-186. Althusser argues that although there is one
' (Repressive) State Apparatus (governmental bodies and
their means of enforcement, such as the police and
courts), there are a plurality of Ideological State
Apparatuses (such as the Church, the Family, the
Communications Media, etc.). No state can hold power over
a long period of time without hegemonic control through
the State Ideological Apparatuses, which, according to
Althusser, function primarily by ideology and secondarily
by repression.
9 Young, Throwing Like a Girl. 99.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 101.
12 Barbara Welter, "The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-
1860," American Quarterly. 18 (Summer 1966): 152.
13 Some parts of my account of the mother and the state,
particularly in regards to Rousseau's theories about
mothering, are similar to E. Ann Kaplan's in "Mothering,
Feminism and Representation: The Maternal in Melodrama
and the Woman's Film 1910-1940," in Home is Where the
Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman's Film, ed.
Christine Gledhill (London: BFI Publications, 1987). In
some cases, we have drawn on the same sources for our
accounts, while in others, I have drawn on sources that
have been published since Kaplan's article.
14 Ehrenreich and English, 201.
15 "The assembly line and Taylorism diminished the factory
worker's active control over the immediate future in the
productive process and relegated him to an expectant mode,
waiting for the future to come along the line, at the same
time increasing the manufacturer's control," in Stephen
Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880-1918 (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1983), 92. One of Taylor's
disciples, Frank Gilbreth, became the subject of a popular
Hollywood film, Cheaper Bv the Dozen (1950). This film
focused on the comedic aspects of raising a large family
(he and his wife had twelve children); part of what was
comic in this film was his children's resistance to the
kind of efficiency techniques employed in the factory. In
Belles on Their Toes (1952), a sequel to this film (also
based on the memoirs of two of the Gilbreth children),
Mrs. Gilbreth continues her husband's work after his
death. However, although she carries on his work
professionally, she (the filmic character, anyway) does i
not seem willing to employ his methods in the home.
16 Sources differ on exactly when the trend towards a j
consumer economy really took off. Robert S. Lynd, in
Recent Social Trends (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1934)
I indicates the years 1900-1929 as being the most
significant in this move in America. Many scholars
jwriting on the effects of consumerism on the American
woman argue that a consumerist discourse was firmly in
place by the 1920s. See, for example, Ruth Schwartz
Cowan, "Two Washes in the Morning and a Bridge Party at
!Night: The American Housewife between the Wars," in Our
American Sisters: Women in American Life and Thought, ed. 1
Jean E. Friedman and William G. Shade (Boston: Allyn and :
Bacon, 1976).
i
17 Ehrenreich and English, 220.
18 see Nathan Hale, Freud and the Americans: The
Beginning of Psychoanalysis in the United States 1876-1917
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).
j19 Edward Strecker, Their Mother's Sons: The Psychiatrist
iExamines an American Problem (New York: J.P. Lippincott,
11947). For an excellent discussion of the uses of
j psychoanalysis in post-war America and the
representational practices circulating its views of women,
see Janet Walker, Couching Resistance: Women. Film, and
Psychoanalytic Psychiatry from WW II through the mid-1960s
(PhD dissertation. University of California at Los
Angeles, 1987).
I
I 20 Philip Wylie, Generation of Vipers (New York: Rinehart j
& Co., 1942). Reprinted with annotations in 1955.
j Citations will be from the annotated 1955 edition.
21 Ibid., 196.
i
;22 According to Tania Modleski in her Introduction to
j Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to Mass
I Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986),
jxviii, "... women have often been identified with the
i specious good, with pleasure, and with mass culture j
itself." See also, in the same volume, Andreas Huyssen, j
"Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other;" Tania i
Modleski, "Femininity as Ma[s]querade: A Feminist
i Approach to Mass Culture," in Colin MacCabe, ed., High
Theorv/Low Culture: Analyzing Popular Television and Film :
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986); and Patrice Petro, J
Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in I
94
Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1989) .
j
23 E. Ann Kaplan, "Motherhood and Representation: From
Postwar Freudian Figurations to Postmodernism," in
Psychoanalysis and Cinema, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 142.
24 I am not so sure that Friedan saw the instability of
these discourses. If anything, she overestimated their
monolithic power, but ironically, her book and the Women's
Movement following attested to their weakness.
25 These issues are discussed in many of the essays in
Home is Where the Heart Is. ed. Christine Gledhill. Thomas
Elsaesser's essay, "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations
on the Family Melodrama," is one of the most comprehensive
surveys of the genre. Christine Gledhill's Introduction
to this volume is also extremely valuable in that regard.
The discussion of the 'woman' as symbol in a genre that j
gives unusual space to female protagonists and women's
concerns, is from Gledhill's Introduction, 13. ’
26 Elsaesser, "Tales of Sound and Fury," 45-46; Peter
Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac. Henrv
James. Melodrama and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale j
University Press, 1976). I
i
27 Elsaesser, 46. 1
28 Ibid., 47.
29 Marsha Kinder, Blood Cinema: The Reconstruction of
National Identity in Spain (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1992).
30 Laura Mulvey, "Notes on Sirk and Melodrama," Movie. no.
25 (Winter 1977/78). Reprinted in Home is Where the Heart
Is, ed. Christine Gledhill, 75.
i
31 Christine Gledhill, "Pleasurable Negotiations," in
Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television, ed. E.
Deidre Pribram (London: Verso, 1988), 68.
32 Ibid., 67.
i
33 Laura Mulvey, "Melodrama in and out of the home," in
High Theorv/Low Culture, ed. Colin MacCabe, 97-98.
134 David N. Rodowick, "Madness, Authority and Ideology:
The Domestic Melodrama of the 1950s," Velvet Light Trap.
; 95
no. 19 (Winter 1977/78). Reprinted in Home is Where the
I Heart Is. ed. Christine Gledhill, 270.
35 For a recuperation of the film in relation to McCarey
as auteur and visual stylist, see George Morris, "McCarey
and McCarthy: Mv Son John." Film Comment 12, no. 1 (Jan.-
Feb. 1976); for a study of the film in relation to family
melodrama, see Glen M. Johnson, "Sharper than an Irish
Serpent's Tooth: Leo McCarey's Mv Son John." Journal of
Popular Television and Film 8, no. 1 (Spring 1980); for an
analysis based on its relation to anti-communist agit
prop, see Thomas Doherty, "Hollywood Agit-Prop: The Anti-
Communist Cycle, 1948-1954," Journal of Film and Video 40,
no. 4 (Fall 1988); for reviews that revile the film, see
Robert Warshow, "Father and Son— and the FBI" in The
Immediate Experience (New York: Atheneum, 1974), Manny
Farber, Negative Space: Mannv Farber and the Movies (New
York: Praeger, 1971), Nora Sayre, Running Time: Films of
the Cold War (New York: Dial, 1982).
36 Michael Rogin, Ronald Reagan, 2 36-2 71.
37 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).
38 Linda Williams, "'Something Else Besides a Mother,'" in
Home is Where the Heart Is. ed. Christine Gledhill, 300.
39 Doane, Desire to Desire. 38-69.
40 Hayes was, of course, a very famous stage actress. In
11931, she won an Academy Award for The Sin of Madelon
Claudet, a maternal melodrama in which she plays an unwed
mother who gives up literally everything for her
ungrateful son. In my opinion, her performance is among
the most "modern" in the melodramas of the early talkie
period. As in John, she plays the role with aggressivity
rather than passivity, rendering sentimental lines with
humor and irony.
41 John Lee Mahin interviewed in Backstorv: Interviews
with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age, ed. Pat
McGilligan (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1986), 261.
42 Warshow, "Father and Son," 261.
43 Rodowick, "Madness, Authority and Ideology," in Home Is
Where the Heart Is. ed. Christine Gledhill, 272.
96
44 Linda Williams, "Mildred Pierce and the Second World
War," in Female Spectators, ed. E. Deidre Pribram, 28.
45 Laura Mulvey, "Notes on Sirk and Melodrama," Home is
Where the Heart Is. ed. Christine Gledhill, 76.
46 Thomas Doherty, "Hollywood Agit-prop."
47 Julia Kristeva discusses the relation between masochism
and maternity in her essay "Stabat Mater," in The Female
Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives, ed.
Susan Rubin Suleiman (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1985). As with so many of Kristeva's arguments,
with her linkage here of masochism and maternity it is
difficult to know whether she is discussing the
ramifications for mothers in patriarchal family life or
some causal analysis of feminine "nature."
48 Jacqueline Rose, "Margaret Thatcher and Ruth Ellis,"
New Formations. no. 6 (Winter 1988).
49 Margaret Thatcher, reported in The Guardian. December
30, 1978. Quoted in Alan O'Shea, "Trusting the People:
How does Thatcherism Work?" in Formations of Nation and
People, ed. Formations Editorial Collective (London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 22.
50 See Colin McArthur, "Days of Hope." Screen 16, no. 4
(Winter 1975/76); Colin MacCabe, "Davs of Hope— A Response
to Colin McArthur," Screen. 17, no. 1 (1975); Colin
MacCabe, "Memory, Phantasy, Identity: Days of Hope and
the Politics of the Past," Edinburgh '77 Magazine; Keith
Tribe, "History and the Production of Memory," Screen. 18,
no. 4 (Winter 1977/78). All the above are reprinted in
Popular Television and Film. ed.Tony Bennett et al.
(London: BFI Publishing, 1981). All citations are from
this volume.
51 Colin McArthur, "National Identities," in National
!Fictions: World War Two in British Films and Television,
ed. Geoff Hurd (London: BFI Publishing, 1984), 54.
52 Ibid.
53 Graham Dawson and Bob West, "Our Finest Hour? The
Popular Memory of World War II and the Struggle over
National Identity," in National Fictions, ed. Geoff Hurd,
9.
54 Keith Tribe, "History and the Production of Memory," in
'Popular Television and Film, ed. Tony Bennett et al., 321.
97
55 Graham Dawson and Bob West, "Our Finest Hour?", in
National Fictions, ed. Geoff Hurd, 9.
56 Ibid., 11.
57 Ibid.
58 Janice Winship, "Nation Before Family: Women, the
National Home Weekly, 1945-1953," in Formations of Nation
and People, ed. Formations Editorial Collective, 197.
59 Margaret Thatcher, quoted in Chris Ogden, Maggie: An
Intimate Portrait of a Woman in Power (New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1990), 341.
60 Ibid.
98
Chapter Three
The Phallic Mother vs. the Mothering Phallus
\ x
In Chapter Two, I demonstrated that the maternal is a
subject position that can be taken up or identified with
by either men or women, and that this sliding of positions
is at least partially historically determined. In other
words, although there might be reasons why the maternal
position might be pleasurable for both men and women on
the psychic level (as an escape from the punishing phallic
paternal, for example), the films' status as public j
fantasies which rework contemporary social reality also
I
suggest to what extent their depictions of the heroic, j
:maternal male or the masochistic maternal female are of
k
strategic use for the historical moment. In Mv Son John,
a maternal male FBI agent and a suffering female mother !
i
facilitate an understanding of an ideal maternal for the
state, which is supposedly threatened by an invasive anti- |
capitalist, anti-democratic ideology.
Elizabeth Cowie, one of the critics arguing for
films' resemblance to the fantasmatic, sees films as
fantasies in a public form of representation, with fantasy !
"as a privileged terrain on which social reality and the
unconscious are engaged in a figuring which intertwines
them both."1 If this is so, Mv Son John. Hope and Glorv.
and The Kravs are perhaps especially interesting in that
99
their concern with the public realm, with the state,
jallows us to see more clearly just how intertwined social
I
reality and the unconscious can be figured in film and the
implications of this for female and male spectators. But
what about films which seem to point more obviously to the
private realm, to unconscious fantasies? If social
reality and the unconscious do not correspond in any
simple way and if there is no necessary relation between
the unconscious and the social, this is not to say that
fantasies of the mother in the unconscious or the mother's 1
fantasies do not have an impact on how real, social i
I
mothers are treated or positioned in our culture— I hope
the last chapter argued successfully that the boundary i
confusion between son and mother or the alleged penis envy I
of the mother are psychic relations that are mobilized in ;
public fantasies of the mother and the state, which have
had consequences for real, social mothers. In this ■
t
chapter, I will look at Now. Vovaqer (194 2) and Ordinary
People (1980), two films which not only strongly activate
i
a fantasy of the phallic mother of the unconscious, but j
also thematize the issue of psychic reality itself in
their focus on the participation of psychoanalysis in the j
cure of a mother-dominated individual. What makes these
two films a perfect pair for comparison and contrast is
that they basically use psychoanalysis for the same thing-
100
:-to rationalize a punishment and expulsion of the
biological mother, and to mediate the maternal through
I
male characters in separate, but in some ways, similar,
historical moments. Despite the attention to the private
and the psychic in these films, it is still possible— and
necessary— to see their figurations of the social and the
historical.
i
I
The Phallic Mother in Psychoanalysis ,
Psychoanalysis, which "discovered" the existence of j
the maternal in the psyche, describes the phallic woman/ j
,mother as
I ;
The woman endowed, in phantasy, with a ;
phallus. This image has two forms: the
woman is represented either as having an i
external phallus or phallic attribute, or
else as having preserved the male's J
phallus inside herself....This expression
is often employed in a loose way as a >
description of a woman with allegedly |
masculine character-traits— e.g.,
authoritarianism— even when it is not
known what the underlying fantasies are.2
I
i This definition is necessarily generalized in its
I
description of the nature of the phallus, because it comes i
i
from Laplanche and Pontalis's dictionary of '
I
psychoanalysis, which attempts to do justice to the ways a
term has been defined by a variety of psychoanalytic
theories that may be in disagreement or differ in
emphasis. The "phallic mother" as define here suggests a
: 101
I
number of fantasy mothers figured in psychoanalysis. The
I
mother who has incorporated the father's penis in coitus
i
is the "combined parent" argued for by Melanie Klein; the
externally-phallicized mother, whose hermaphroditic
qualities might be a fantasy projection of the child's
wishes to be both sexes;3 the mother whose aggressive,
masculine traits might be interpreted as the powers of the
pre-Oedipal mother over the defenseless infant (whom Freud
tended to downplay in contrast to object-relations
theorists) or as the powers of a woman with a masculinity
complex, who refuses the "normal" development of the girl
into penis envy (because she refuses to believe she lacks
,one).
The multiple possibilities for the appearance of the
phallic mother in fantasy would seem to indicate her
centrality to psychic life and that there is more than one
way in which the castration complex (of both boys and
girls) might be understood. Of course, the Lacanian
conceptualization of the Phallus as the "third term" or
signifier that comes between mother and child understands
castration as primarily a castration of all subjects into
language and difference. The phallic mother with power
over the uncoordinated infant can suggest castration is
linked with an initial separation from the mother, with
her breast as first fetish.4
102
Despite the plurality of the phallic mother in
psychoanalytic theory and Freud's acceptance of her
importance in fantasy life, Freud tends to equate the
phallic mother more literally with the penis. In his
theories, the phallic mother is the mother whom both boys
and girls will repudiate when they find out she does not
have a penis. Boys can disavow this assumed "lack" for
only so long— as they enter the Oedipus complex they
eventually come to understand even the mother as
castrated.5 While this "fact" is frightening to boys
because it reminds them of their own vulnerability to ,
i
castration (as does their rivalry with the father for the
i
mother), they can gain symbolic privileges and denigrate j
!
femininity as consolations as they submit to and identify
with the father in resolving the Oedipus complex (while
still loving mom in the fantasy of a future wife). j
According to Freud, girls, who also love and respect the
phallic mother, are not only disappointed in the mother's
lack of penis, but are resentful and blame her for ;
castration. In "normal development," a girl will envy the j
! i
boy's penis and find a proper substitute for it by wishing |
for a penis-baby. At the same time she will identify with '
the maternal position and take up a heterosexual (and at
first incestuous) object choice. In an alternative,
"abnormal" development, the girl might refuse her
! castration and out of a masculinity complex, display
i
: phallic traits and activity.
While these Freudian accounts are obviously more
concerned with setting up norms for appropriate sexual
behavior and identifications than some of those accounts
contributing to Laplanche and Pontalis's definition of the
phallic mother, they are valuable in the following
!
discussions of Now. Vovaqer and Ordinary People precisely
because they embody the most conservative elements of
patriarchal definitions of sexual difference and the
maternal that these films will mobilize and possibly— in
the case of Now. Voyager— subvert with fantasies of a
i different kind of phallic mother and mothering phallus.
Now. Voyager's insistence on a mother-dominated woman in
1 need of cure and its position within a tradition of
women's fiction that focuses on female strength, makes the
film, as a public fantasy, not entirely recuperable for
patriarchal imperatives for women. It might even ask, as
Sarah Kofman does, shouldn't the girl "abandon any
resentment she may feel toward her mother [for castration]
I
and transfer her hostility to her father, the only one who
has a penis?"6 Ordinary People, because it centers on and
empathizes with an inadequately Oedipalized boy in an
upper middle class home, finds it difficult to also
activate sympathetic or empathetic fantasies for his cold,
phallic mother who does not serve his needs. The desire
expressed by the film to expel the mother from the home
has great resonance in the historical moment of 1980, when
mothers might have actually been leaving the home because
their needs were not being met or they might have already
been left by husbands unwilling to take responsibility for
the family. The film's reversal of this historical
reality was undoubtedly responsible for much of the film's
popular success— in fact, it is possible to see the film
as one of the first of a series of films made popular by
| the backlash against the women's movement during the
i
Reagan era of the 1980s.
Now. Vovaaer
Now. Vovaaer is the story of Charlotte Vale (Bette
Davis), who lives with her wealthy, dominating mother in
iBoston. Her concerned sister-in-law, Lisa, asks Dr.
Jaguith (Claude Reins) to come to the Vale house and
I
:diagnose Charlotte, who has been having crying fits and
displaying secretiveness. He discovers that Mrs. Vale's
domination has repressed Charlotte so thoroughly that she
must come to Cascade, his mental hospital, in order to
escape complete mental and emotional collapse. After her
"cure" there, Jaquith and Lisa see to it that Charlotte is
:sent on a cruise to South America, where she has a tender
1 105
I love affair with Jerry Dorance (Paul Henreid), who is
1
I married to an unloving wife who mothers her children in
I
the way Mrs. Vale has mothered Charlotte. Once back home,
Charlotte takes initiatives to free herself from her
mother's tyranny while still living in her home. She even
becomes engaged to be married to a well respected
Bostonian, Elliot Livingston, but breaks off with him
when, after seeing Jerry again, she realizes she cannot
marry someone for whom she does not feel sexual desire.
|This decision so upsets her mother that she has a heart J
i
1 , , i
attack and dies. Charlotte, who has inherited most of the
i
f family money, feels so overcome with guilt for her
mother's death that she rushes back to Cascade. There she \
meets Jerry's daughter, Tina, whose feelings of self-worth i
have been demolished by her mother. Charlotte, forgetting !
|
her own problems, takes on Tina's and nurses her back to
! 1
;health. The film ends with Charlotte becoming a member of
I
Cascade's board of directors, the opening up of her home
to an extended family which contrasts with the previous
home created by Mrs. Vale, and with Charlotte's
i
renunciation of Jerry as sexual partner so that she may !
i '
!keep Tina as a ward. 1
I
Now. Vovaaer is one of the most written about films
of all the woman's film genre, a subgenre of the
i
:melodrama, which features female protagonists and usually
106
1
1 attempts to privilege female point of view and traditional
i
female concerns.7 All of the analyses note the film's
!need (derived from childhood fantasy and/or from
patriarchy's need to control female sexuality and power)
i to designate a "bad" mother and a "good" mother, with
Charlotte Vale's mother the former, and Charlotte herself
the latter. The role of Dr. Jaquith (and psychoanalysis)
in helping Charlotte transform herself into the good
mother does not escape notice, nor does the sexism of the
film's ending, in which Charlotte gives up an active
sexuality for motherhood. In fact, the possible
;reactionary and subversive aspects of all of these
characteristics have been so thoroughly and perceptively
discussed that one might wonder what is left to say.
While in agreement with this generalized argument about
Now. Voyager. I find it does not account for the
I
complexity of the film's positioning and repositioning of
the maternal. As I will discuss later, a few critics did
note that "mothering" is taken up in the film by a variety
of characters, but they leave vague the implications this
might have for spectatorial positions and identifications
and how it relates to the historical specificity of the
film. I will argue that Now. Voyager attempts a
negotiation of the various meanings of the phallic mother
and allows for a mediation between them by a fantasy of
i 107
I
the mothering phallus. As with Mv Son John, this brings
the film and my discussion into the territory of male
mothering or a maternal position taken up by males and
suggests what such an opposition (phallic mother vs.
mothering phallus) might have for the historical
spectator.
E. Ann Kaplan's argues that Now. Vovaqer depicts Mrs.
Vale as a phallic mother, suffering from penis envy, who
keeps her daughter in the Imaginary with her. Though not
an inaccurate description of Mrs. Vale or of the qualities
typically associated with mothers in negative j
stereotyping, some of what Kaplan describes are I
characteristics that psychoanalysis has defined as the j
mother herself experiencing, while others are what the 1
i
child projects on to her. The phallic mother as discussed
above is the fantasy of the child (which Kaplan seems to
acknowledge later when she suggests that the film "speaks J
from a position of incomplete entry into the symbolic"8) i
and not an entirely negative assignation for the mother |
(of course he is speaking from a phallocentric position,
i
but Freud knows that this is a fantasy of the child and I
one which allows the child to show the mother respect).
Penis envy, on the other hand, may be a fantasy of Freud's
and of the film's, but it is supposedly experienced by the
woman herself and transformed into a wish for a baby and,
108
ultimately, satisfied by the reality of having a baby.
The Imaginary is that space in which the subject has a
narcissistic relation to his ego, where difference is not
experienced, and is often depicted as embodied in the
mother-child relationship before the intercession of the
father as the "third term." Kaplan does not indicate that
this combination of states/stages assigned to Mrs. Vale is
evidence of the film's continual repositioning of the
maternal and Charlotte and the spectator in relation to
it.
Mrs. Vale could be considered phallic from the
position of the spectator identifying with the child,
Charlotte. Mrs. Vale seems to have the kind of life and
death hold over Charlotte that the more powerful mother
has over the helpless infant— in fact, from the first shot
the film establishes the mother's association with the
annihilation of identity. The first image after the
credits is of the stone marker outside the house engraved
with the name "Vale", which is reminiscent of a gravestone
(a connotation furthered by the fact that it is pouring
rain). Within a the next two scenes, Mrs. Vale's
domination of Charlotte to the point of the latter having
a nervous breakdown will be established in dialogue of the
character of Dr. Jaquith and a mise-en-scene that will
make Mrs. Vale threatening and Charlotte seem withdrawn
109
|and weak. So the film not only suggests what Freud and
t
I other psychoanalysts argue is a fantasy of the child— that
!the mother is omnipotent or has a penis, (depending on
which psychoanalytic account one wants to emphasize)— but
i it also engages in the assessment of that position from
1 the position of a culturally powerful individual in the
form of the doctor.
But Mrs. Vale/s supposed penis envy and existence
with the child in the Imaginary is more complex than the
I
ways those terms have been used popularly or by Kaplan j
t
herself might suggest. In some ways, to say that Mrs. Vale !
suffers from penis envy, as Kaplan does, is not to say :
j f
anything that could not apply to anv woman in Freud's \
I '
,conception of the construction of femininity. Whether the !
*
woman's or girl's response is towards "normal" femininity J
or not, it would seem that this envy for a penis is never
absent, even though it may be repressed. According to
Juliet Mitchell: J
Accepting for the moment the assertion
that the girl wants a penis, the desire
for one is incompatible with actual !
possibilities. It is therefore repressed
into the unconscious, from whence probably ;
on many occasions it emerges transformed.
The only legitimate form (or the only form
legitimated by culture) is that the idea
(the representation of the wish) is
displaced and replaced by the wish for a
baby which is entirely compatible with
reality. The two wishes are in fact one,
and will continue to be active in
different parts of the mental apparatus:
110 j
the penis-wish will remain repressed in ’
the unconscious, the baby-wish will be
consciously expressed. When, as probably
in later life, the woman actually comes to
have a baby, the emotions she feels will
also have attached to them the repressed
unconscious penis-wish; the actual baby
will therefore satisfy a very deep-seated,
unconscious desire and if it is a baby boy
the reality offered will give even greater
satisfaction as it will coincide still
more pertinently with the unrecognized
wish.9
Even if the girl moves towards the "normal" development of
femininity by wishing for a penis-baby, penis envy does
not disappear; it is transformed. It is only seemingly
paradoxical, then, that the mother's basking in the
achievements of the child can be both "satisfaction" of
the envy and evidence of its sustained existence in the
mother's psyche.10 Of course, penis envy persists for
girls who follow other developmental paths. The girl who
does not believe (refuses, says Freud) "the unwelcome
fact" of her castration will display an exaggerated
masculinity, perhaps even to the point of manifest
homosexuality. The girl who, after the discovery of the
male penis, judges her clitoridal activity as inferior,
but who cannot give it up, will become the self-hating,
jneurotic individual.11
But what about Mrs. Vale? Unlike the "satisfied"
mother of the (penis-)baby, Mrs. Vale does not find
|satisfaction in an enjoyment of the achievements of her
I |
|children. In fact, she seems to work against her
L _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ I
Ill
: children's success, although only Charlotte seems to be
suffering from the consequences. Mrs. Vale does not need
to vicariously experience power through her children
because she has refused the assignment of the castrated
one and acts as if she did have the penis— in other words,
she acts with masculine character traits. The
masculinized woman, who acts authoritarian, is of course
another way the phallic woman/mother has been described.
So perhaps Mrs. Vale's harshness is so exaggerated by the
film because she embodies both Charlotte-the-child's (and
our) fantasy of an all powerful and terrifying mother and
• the mother's own possible masculinity complex (her
persistent fantasy that she has a penis). While the
duality of fantasy positions of/towards the maternal would
suggest the possibility that Mrs. Vale's position might be
appropriable by the spectator, actually both sets of
fantasies provide a context to judge the mother as
fearful, neurotic, and perhaps unfit. Mrs. Vale's
domination of every aspect of Charlotte's life (her
position as phallic mother) and her stern, censoring
behavior (her position as masculinized woman refusing to
give up the penis and therefore unable to show the empathy
of mothering) provokes Dr. Jaquith into saying that Mrs.
Vale could not have harmed her daughter more if she had
maliciously planned it. From the perspective of childhood
fantasy, Mrs. Vale is omnipotent, but from the perspective
of a doctor looking at her masculinity complex, she is
i malicious without intent— the text shares in the cultural
put-down of women who don't accept the passive feminine
position by first imputing masculinity to them and yet
i
believing that they can't even get that right enough to
deliberately exhibit full manly power.
Kaplan's argument that later in the film Mrs. Vale
becomes "a whining, bed-ridden, almost comic object,"
would substantiate that the text can't sustain Mrs. Vale
S as a fearful object.12 But while I agree that this is an
!enactment of the child's fantasy of the phallic mother who
becomes less powerful as the child becomes more so, I
don't think Kaplan has accounted for Mrs. Vale's
continuing ability to harm Charlotte even after the
latter's cure at Cascade and in her travels with Jerry.
Kaplan states that Mrs. Vale wishes to keep Charlotte
i "down with her in the Imaginary"13 [my emphasis] . Mrs.
Vale certainly blocks Charlotte's access to many levels of
the Symbolic, but one cannot say that she herself lives
,"down" in the Imaginary. Mrs. Vale's fearfulness
partially resides in how determinedly she can wield the
powers of the Symbolic, usually only at the disposal of
the father. The most important of these is the power of
(inheritance, usually passed from fathers to sons, which
113
,Mrs. Vale threatens to withhold from Charlotte if she does ,
4 i
I
1 not obey her. Her concern with preserving the Vale name '
i
(she apparently dies from shock when Charlotte tells her
that she won't be joining the Vale name with the
Livingston name, one of the few in Boston worthy of being
linked with the Vales), also indicates the extent to which
Mrs. Vale is concerned with acting in the Name-of-the-
Father. In fact, Mrs. Vale has such an association with !
i
i
the Symbolic and acting in the Name-of-the-Father, that I
she could be said to occupy the paternal position as well
I
'as the maternal. Again, I think the duality of positions
I
jand/or fantasies embodied by Mrs. Vale explains a great
i '
deal of the exaggeration of her negative qualities and the j
enjoyment we as spectators get from Charlotte's j
i
independence. When Charlotte claims that she can find
t
some way to support herself if her mother refuses her an
;allowance or inheritance, it is a turning point in the i
narrative. When she exclaims, more to herself than to her
mother, "I'm not afraid, I'm not afraid," we know she is
going to stay "cured." And the relief we feel at this is
as much for her escape from the paternal position, which
can control daughters and wives through access to the j
j
social world of exchange and censorship, as it is for her
escape from the phallic mother terrifying to the psyche.14
i
t
; 114
That the film projects all that is hated about both
the maternal and the paternal onto the biological mother
;is as significant as it is overdetermined (the same
j
projection is evident in the depiction of Jerry's wife,
who is Tina's mother). But before exploring the
implications of this projection in both the historical and
j
spectatorial registers, I want to look at whom all of the
positive aspects of the maternal are projected. ,
Many of the critics who have written about Now. j
Vovaaer argue that Dr. Jaquith comes between Charlotte and ’
her mother as the "third term" or father who can raise the I
child to the Symbolic.15 One of the ways he does this is I
authorizing a "reading" of Mrs. Vale and authoring not J
only scenes of independence for Charlotte, but also her
specularization as fetishized object for the male gaze
(although he will reserve the right to control her
response to that gaze).
j
Yet Dr. Jaquith, like Mrs. Vale, seems to embody ;
qualities of the other parental position as well. His |
behavior is "motherly" in its empathy, he is a confidant |
for Charlotte who is always there when she needs him. '
I
Like the women in this film and in the woman's film in
general, Jaquith is associated not only with what is
socially understood as constituting a home. but also with j
,the topography of the house itself. Mary Ann Doane and
115
I
Tania Modleski argue that the house in the gothic woman's
film is linked with the uncanny, a concept which Freud
points out means both what is familiar and what is
concealed or kept from sight.16 So uncanny ("heimlich)
comes to also mean its opposite ("unheimlich"), what is
unfamiliar or strange. The ultimate home, the ultimate
familiar place is the womb, the mother's house. When
Jaquith first arrives at the Vale house and comments that |
it is like a bastion, resisting the new, that it is one of :
I
those houses "turned in on themselves, hugging their ■
j |
jpride," he could be describing Mrs. Vale, who has kept i
.Charlotte from becoming a "modern" (sexual) woman and from j
certain Symbolic exchanges. He could also be describing
;Charlotte, whose identification with the mother has kept
I
her up in an attic bedroom, "turned in on" herself, hidden 1
from the eyes of others (especially the eyes of men). i
I
Jaquith, possessing the power of patriarchy and of |
science, can penetrate the spaces of the house and judge
them. Yet the uncanniness of the house— its association
with femininity and specifically with the female genitals- '
-does not seem to fill him with castration anxiety. This
is due to the fact he comes with the protective armor of
scientific authority, but also because he is secure about
the alternative house he has to offer Charlotte.
Jaquith's house, of course, is Cascade, the mental
j hospital he runs, which sounds more like a home— a place
; where tired people go until they feel like they can face
the world. It is in this home and under the mothering eye
of Jaquith, that Charlotte will be "cured" and find an
example of good mothering. If Mrs. Vale is a projection
of all the negative associations of both maternity and
paternity, Jaquith would seem to be a projection of all
the best in those two positions as they are understood in
patriarchal culture— the empathic tenderness of the mother
! and the authority and wisdom of the father. Instead of
embodying another phallic mother, as Elizabeth Cowie
i
[suggests, Jaquith embodies the "mothering phallus."17
i
The idea of the "mothering phallus" that I am
proposing is similar to Kristeva's notion of the "archaic
father." In "Freud and Love," Kristeva develops the
concept of the "archaic father," a playful and warm
imaginary father intervening between the mother and child
before the Oedipal conflict. Although Kristeva argues
that such a father "is the same as 'both parents,'"18 both
Tania Modleski and Kaja Silverman have seen this
theoretical move as a way of writing the mother completely
out of the child's trajectory towards identity.19 The
mother would be important only in directing the child
toward which she herself desires— the Phallus— which is
1 say, that the mother in this scenario is still operating
j out of a kind of penis envy.
; The film clearly replaces Mrs. Vale's phallic mother
i
with Dr. Jaquith's mothering phallus or archaic paternity.
, But this is not to say that this is the only movement that
the text offers for the spectator's positioning. With
both Mrs. Vale and Dr. Jaquith embodying maternal and
i
;paternal positions, and Charlotte moving from an
i
! inadequate entry into the Symbolic into specularization
• and maternity, it would seem that this woman's film offers
i
j a proliferation of positions within the fantasy of a
1 mother(parent)/child relationship. Which of these
positions might be most accessible to the spectator at the
; moment of the film's production? Which might be most
! accessible or acceptable to the viewer in the post-women's
movement period, the period in which I write as a feminist
| scholar and in which the woman's film genre was "rescued"
from the trash heap of genre studies?20
Maria LaPlace, in her excellent essay, "Producing and
Consuming the Woman's Film: Discursive Struggle In Now.
Vovaaer.1 1 traces the cultural and social discourses which
structure the narrative, mise-en-scene, and mode of
' address of the woman's film in general, and Now. Vovaaer
in particular, as a way of understanding the historical
! spectator of the film. She argues that the film
|privileges the discourses of consumerism, the image of the
female star, and women's fiction. All three of these
1
'discourses profit patriarchal institutions, but they also
function in part for women. The consumerist discourse of
:clothes and make-up, for example, may advocate the
fetishization of women, but it also opens up sexual
desires for women that cannot be fully contained by the
patriarchy. The discourse on the image of the female star
;works in part to make women feel identification with
t
characters by making them identify with the actresses of
I
I
the woman's film. The spectator's identification with
Bette Davis, star of Now. Vovaaer. partially subverts the
film's conservative and sexist message that women must
r
have a man to complete them, for Davis' image is
constructed on her self-sufficiency, a trait that supports
|an identification with Charlotte's most subversive
I
position when she decides to live without men. Finally,
the discourse of women's fiction, with a history
stretching back to the 19th century, serves as a context
for the woman's film and is responsible for the genre's
concern with female self-discovery and the promotion of a
domestic feminism. This domestic feminism is based on the
19th century "cult of domesticity":
The ideal and ultimate project of the cult
of domesticity was the eradication of the
i patriarchal capitalist distinction between
the social and the domestic. The latter
j 119
| would subsume the former and society would
1 become one large 'home'. The family was
1 seen as the central agent in this social
transformation: its highest values— love,
caring for the weak, and mutual
responsibility— would prevail and women
would gain social value and power
accordingly.21
LaPlace argues that this discourse, with its utopian
vision of a female-created social order, like the
discourses of consumerism and the image of the female
,star, was circulating in the culture of the historical
spectator of Now. Vovaqer, and accounts for the film's
jpopularity at that time. Like the other two, the
1 discourse of domestic feminism could be seen as serving
ipatriarchy by its adherence to a "safe” positioning of
women, but its transvaluing of that positioning— making it
■be the measure of society, a measure against which men
must judge their own behavior— was subversive to
1
:patriarchy in the 19th century and continued to be so in
!the first part of the 20th century.
What LaPlace does not discuss is the specificity of
the 194 0s and why the three "privileged" discourses would
ifind such a receptive audience at that time. If we
remember that the 1940s was the decade dominated by World
War II and an increase in women in the public domain, it
is not difficult to understand why the discourses of
consumerism and the image of the female star, which
ILaPlace argues liberate fantasies of sexual desire and
self-determination as well as profit the patriarchy, would
draw the spectator into a favorable reception of the film, j
I
Even though the film's release came at the beginning of
the war and the war itself is never referred to in the
film, Charlotte's struggle for independence and her
lessons in self-sufficiency anticipate many of the joys ,
and sacrifices women would be positioned to feel and make
during the war period. Charlotte's pledge of devotion to I
!
one man, making herself desirable for him, the sad |
partings from him, finding him within his children, would j
also suggest some of the more conservative wishes of the J
patriarchy vis-a-vis a more "liberated" population of j
i
women on the homefront. While the film noir during and
after the war period would confront suspicions about
women's fidelity and create in the femme fatale a j
projection of the male's own sense of instability and I
i
i
uncontrollable desires, the woman's film would show female }
strength while rarely threatening the ultimate authority t
i
of men. Jaquith as the mothering phallus or the archaic |
father is proof of this lack of threat to men's final !
I
power. j
!
Yet there is an aspect to the conclusion of Now. !
Vovaqer that destablizes, if only slightly, the choice of j
the mothering phallus over the phallic mother— perhaps '
even dispenses with the opposition. This, to me, is I
[ 121
j
I evidence of why the film is still popular with
I
contemporary, post-women's movement, (even feminist
i
[scholar) spectators. As LaPlace argues, Charlotte
transforms her mother's house into a home reminiscent of
the home in the utopian vision of domestic feminism, where
[the patriarchally reified image of a sacred female,
i
maternal is turned into a dynamic space against which men
must judge their own actions. This space activates a
sense of the uncanny for the male characters this time,
provoking Dr. Jaquith to wonder if Charlotte is the same
(familiar or unfamiliar?) woman as the one once in need of
'his care. Now she is practically his equal as a healer
and administrator of Cascade— a threat easier for the
"maternal'1 Dr. Jaquith to take because his "paternal"
(powers keep Charlotte and Jerry apart, ensuring his say
over who and what makes a family. Charlotte's space, the
reality of which Jerry now sees for the first time,
I provokes him as well to reassess his knowledge of her— can
he continue to ask for her sacrifices?
1 In the final scene, in which Jerry and Charlotte re
negotiate their fantasies about their relationship, it is
clear that Charlotte will give up heterosexual activity
i
for maternity, allowing Jerry to come and go as he pleases
I
[and pursue his own goals. Although this would certainly
appease any fears that men (in wartime, for instance)
122
might have about orienting the desires of women towards
themselves, Charlotte gives up sexuality not only for
Jerry, but also with him. She says she must show
propriety with Jerry because it is the price she promised
Jaquith to keep Tina as her ward, but as so many critics
of the film have pointed out, the film perversely suggests
that having a relationship with Tina, which excludes men, \
is what Charlotte really wants. Is this Charlotte finally
directing hostility for castration onto the father figure ;
I
rather than the mother, as Sarah Kofmann suggests is a 1
i
possible desire for women that Freud did not consider?22 j
As Elizabeth Cowie suggests, the ending activates the pre- |
phallic childhood fantasy to be a mother, which is j
apparently stronger than penis envy or attachment to the j
father: I
i
The wish to have a child (be a mother) is >
also fulfilled— narratively motivated by !
Charlotte's claim that through his !
daughter, cared for by herself, she and
Jerry can be together, for in Tina she
will have a part of him! The perversity |
of this claim is barely concealed. An
asexuality is posed in the appeal that in
having Tina she has part of Jerry, has
Jerry's child without having sex! On the
other hand, motherhood is sexualized by ;
this association. . . . For instead of j
transferring her desire onto her father, ;
and hence onto his substitutes by whom she
can have a baby/phallus, Charlotte obtains ■
the child but evicts the father (Dr. j
Jaquith) and sets herself up as the "good"
mother" . . . . 23
1 Even though Charlotte has learned from the mothering
I phallus to reject her phallic, biological mother, she
iretains the desire for mothering, a desire which is not
fully contained by the patriarchal positioning of the
maternal. Charlotte's desire to mother Tina is motivated
|by a narcissistic wish to re-experience, in a positive
i
; way, the mothering she received herself.
While Now. Voyager7s complex positioning and
repositioning of the maternal is not entirely appropriable
| for contemporary feminist goals, at least the power of
mothering is retained by women. The mediation of a
I
! mothering phallus or mothering male may be seen as
i
!necessary to renegotiate a positive understanding of the
i
maternal, but the film's context within both a domestic
feminism and a historical context (the 1940s) which needs
women to mother, must judge them as competent and good
mothers. The same cannot be said of Ordinary People. a
1980 film which, like Now. Voyager projects all that is
feared in both maternity and paternity onto the biological
mother, but also uses psychiatric discourses to replace
female mothering altogether.
Ordinary People
Ordinary People, like Now. Vovaaer. is a coming-of-
age story of a mother-dominated young adult. In this
j 124 ‘
j film, the young person is a teen-age boy, Conrad Jarrett
1
I ^ I
(Timothy Hutton) who lives with his parents, Beth and
J
I
: Calvin (Mary Tyler Moore and Donald Sutherland) in a
wealthy suburb of Chicago. The story opens shortly after
Conrad's return from a psychiatric hospital, where he was
committed after trying to commit suicide. It becomes
gradually clear throughout the film that Conrad's action
was provoked by a feeling of guilt for having survived a
I
i
; boating accident in which his older brother was killed. I
i
I l
(The older brother, Buck, was Beth's favorite son. After a 1
series of sessions with a psychiatrist (Judd Hirsch),
Conrad realizes that although he has been living with the
fear that his mother will never forgive him for either
! I
'Buck's death or his own suicide attempt, he actually needs ■
! I
1 to learn how to forgxve her for not being able to love him :
i |
1 as much as she did his brother. Meanwhile, Calvin also i
t 1
sees the psychiatrist, and also becomes aware of Beth's I
; I
inadequacies— that she is so afraid of losing control over |
f
'her emotions that she cannot display affection for Conrad ,
or show demonstrable grief over Buck's death. As Conrad 1
recovers, Calvin becomes so aware of Beth's ungenerous
nature, that he questions his love for her. When he
,admits this to her, she leaves.
Ordinary People, adapted from a best-selling novel,
was one of the most popular films of 1980, and won several
Academy Awards- Although she was not a recipient of one
of these, Mary Tyler Moore was especially applauded for
her performance, partly because it was such a departure
from the warm, insecure, and maternal, character she
played on her television series, The Mary Tyler Moore Show
(or the character she played on the earlier Dick Van Dvke
Show).24 The film was released after a series of films in
the 1970s, such as An Unmarried Woman. Alice Doesn't Live
Here Anymore, and Girlfriends. updatings of the
traditional melodrama which now drew on images of the
"new" woman facing choices about love, men, and career in
the age of the women's movement. However, the
concentration on the coming of age of the teen-age boy, on
the family dilemma and on the feelings of the male members
links Ordinary People more strongly with Kramer vs. Kramer
(1979), the previous year's major Academy Award winner, in
which a father is forced to re-assess his role within the
family when his wife leaves to find herself. Like all of
these films, Ordinary People exhibits "structured
ambiguity" in contextualizing any issues or events that
might relate to the women's movement, because as, Annette
Kuhn points out, as films directed at a politically
heterogeneous audience, they can't "overtly take up
positions which might alienate certain sections of the
audience."25 Yet Kramer vs. Kramer and Ordinary People
126
would seem only to alienate women who supported the
|women's movement, for these films are aligned with
I 1
I feminist calls for men to be more sensitive and to take up j
’ i
|parenting, and for women to not feel the pressure to be
j"traditional" mothers, what they suggest is that changes
J in roles do not necessarily effect changes in power. ;
i
j Kramer vs. Kramer and Ordinary People can be considered |
!the first of the anti-women's movement backlash films j
!which purport to answer feminist pleas for change while I
! . . . !
|finding new avenues for patriarchal power, a move which
will culminate by the end of the decade with films like
i Fatal Attraction and Three Men and a Babv.26 In relation
to my discussion of Now. Vovacrer. Ordinary People is the
most interesting of these films because it uses
I
;psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourses to activate and J
i i
:assess the powerful maternal and give men "permission" to !
j feel, to take over some aspects of the maternal. I
| In fact, the demonstrable need to display feelings is j
the structuring motif of the film. The film considers j
j this to be so important that Beth, the mother, must be
i
banished from the film for not being able to show emotion
openly. Curiously, the film has a tight, painterly visual
( !
!quality, accompanied by the restrained music of Pachelbel
i
I Canon on the soundtrack. For all its talk of exploring '
j feelings, the film seems deathly afraid of displaying the !
( I
J
I _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ i
| 127
| stylistics of the melodrama. This paradox— the film
| valuing characters for their ability to feel, but
j unwilling to stylistically exhibit the marks traditionally
i
j associated with the most "feeling" of genres— is crucial
i
j to understanding the film and its accomplishment of
i negotiating the maternal through male characters.
»
In his sessions with Dr. Berger the psychiatrist,
I
Conrad reiterates a need to feel he is in control. He is
j unable to handle feelings of guilt and is aware of being
J the object of the gaze of others— of his brother's
, friends, of girls at school and of his mother. In short,
I
j he seems to suffer from being put in a position in which
he is specularized and hystericized, a position usually
designated as feminine in our culture, a culture in which
I women are assumed to lack "phallic power." Yet it is
Beth, Conrad's mother, who he feels is most capable of
j putting him in this feminized position, of being his
;phallic mother to his status as a powerless infant (much
I
| is made in the film of Conrad's need to re-learn social
| skills after his suicide attempts— his re-birth, so to
j speak). Beth's phallic qualities are not just Conrad's
i
1 fantasy— they seem to be a fantasy of the film itself.
I The direction of the actor's performances, the mise-en-
i
I
I scene, costume design, and dialogue foreground Beth's need
I for control and the infantilization of everyone before
; 128
i
! her. Moore as Beth rarely establishes emotion in her face i
I i
or voice. Point of view shots relay Beth's disapproving !
glances with shots of the less controlled behavior of
J I
j Conrad or Calvin. In one memorable shot in the film, the
| camera capture Beth in medium close-up as she stuffs
i
;Conrad's uneaten french toast down the garbage disposal,
i f
I
! suggesting her anger and impatience with his slow I
I ■
!recovery. In another shot, in a scene after Conrad has
i
J quit the swim team at school, Beth is shown— with
I
perfectly coifed hair and in fashionably slimming slacks—
setting the table, fussing like a perfectionist over
; crooked placemats and napkins. We can empathize with
Conrad's fear of telling her of his problems at school.
Conrad's subjection to Beth's judging gaze makes him
jaware of how tenuous his control is over his own emotions.
I
jOf course, the phallic mother of a boy's fantasy does not
just signify a woman with a penis, but a mother who is
jlike the little boy. Conrad's fear of Beth is not just ’
I
because she has the phallus— and therefore control over I
! _ I
j him— but because she also doesn't have it, she is f
j j
i castrated like him. (In fact, in the scene in which
Calvin visits Dr. Berger, he remarks that Conrad and Beth
have always been alike in their need to feel in control.)
; The film's strategy is to activate a fantasy of Beth as
i |
phallic mother, then show how Conrad and Beth are actually
129
alike in their insufficiencies, and finally, effect
I
j Conrad's cure through a mediating male psychiatrist who |
! !
| helps him position himself in a superior place to Beth
! t
(helps him to distinguish himself from her). Conrad's
| lack is filled at Beth's expense, in a clever sleight of
; hand. Conrad gains power by showing his feelings, whereas J
| . i
1 Beth is shown to lack power because she tries so hard to I
I j
i
j hide hers. j
1 1
The resemblance between Conrad and Beth is suggested |
in the two scenes which mostly strongly recall the ^
i charismatic, phallic qualities of the now dead Buck.
|
!About midway through the film, Beth is shown coming home
one afternoon to an empty house and entering Buck's
bedroom, which is still kept intact, "perfect" as the boy
he is described as being. Beth looks longingly at the I
jphotos of Buck achieving at athletics. As her gaze )
| completes its turn around the room and rests at the door, I
!
j Conrad appears. Beth jumps from fright, as when one see
an unexpected reflection of oneself. Conrad, the
adolescent boy, who we know is continually feeling his own ’
"lack," functions here as the uncanny reminder of Beth's ;
|
I"lack," as if her desirous gazing at the photos of her j
I • I
:firstborn and most loved son wasn't enough to suggest her
1 • I
I penis envy. j
i
In a following scene, Beth and Conrad again try to
"connect." Beth sees Conrad sitting alone (rhyming the <
scene of her solitary reverie) in the yard. In a rare
! display of traditional maternal empathy, she joins him and
s
I tries to make conversation. He has a brief flashback of
I |
I Buck charming Beth into girlish laughter and then tries to J
i I
I imitate his brother's charm by recalling a memory of a |
I
| silly neighbor dog who used to scare Beth. She stiffens (
i , , , , i
, at this reminder of her lack, and Conrad realizes again
i
j his failure to master the situation. The scene does not
I
j reveal Beth's phallic gualities, but her lack— her
i i
j castration— which reminds Conrad of his own. Without j
j Buck, Beth does not have the penis; Conrad's inadequacies
i
I make him an unsuitable substitute, and he only serves to
t
I remind her of her lack of sufficiency she is able to j
j j
i skillfully hide under a guise of masculine control. j
i Once the association between Conrad and Beth is made !
i
i I
j on the basis of their each mirroring the lack of the other !
j for the other, the film's commitment to the discourse of j
! psychoanalysis or of contemporary therapeutic experts t
I I
I points to the only solution: the ones who seek therapy I
I
1 will be saved, which will leave Beth out, as she refuses
I
j to open up her private life to experts. At this point,
I i
j Conrad will come to understand that he should not fear his
mother's inability to feel, her inability to forgive him, 1
131 |
but that he should forgive her. Dr. Berger helps him to
come to this acknowledgment by encouraging Conrad to I
I
accept his mother's limitations, to accept she cannot love 1
! !
[enough. At least Dr. Jaquith's tirade against Mrs. Vale's 1
i
J"harm" to Charlotte was honest in its loathingI
t
! This move is exemplary of the film's "structured j
I 1
;ambiguity" towards incorporating in its narrative changes i
i >
I brought about by the women's movement. While the
psychiatrist's suggestion that Beth should not be held
accountable for not living up to the expectations of the
greedy-for-love psyche of the child is compatible with !
feminist arguments that women have had to suffer by
measuring themselves up to patriarchy's unrealistic
I
notions about the maternal, Conrad is cured when he adopts
j
the feeling qualities of the traditional maternal. Of j
[course, this validates the traditional maternal, and I
i
places Beth's refusal to display emotion not as an i
alternative way of showing maternal love, but as a force
destructive to herself and to her family. She is excluded
I from the family circle altogether when Calvin also feels
permission to feel, which gives him a vantage point to see
i
Beth's lack of feeling as abnormal, perhaps even malicious |
i . i
(after seeing Dr. Berger once, Calvin is able to confront !
i
! I
!Beth with the fact that on the day of Buck's funeral she I
j f
j criticized his choice of socks). !
132
Like the film's style itself— visualizing a film
about feelings with the utmost control— the narrative
shows male characters who are able to feel (and be
healthier for it) as long as they can control the fantasy
of the phallic mother. I think my analysis of the film
has implied the positions offered to the spectator at the
historical moment of the film's production, which does not
differ much from the spectator at the historical moment of
this writing. The film and this study frame each end of a
historical period (the Reagan era of the 1980s) in which
the advances of the women's movement were eroded by a
return to a conservative political ideology. Ordinary
People's expulsion of the mother enacts a symbolic
|punishment on women who do not fit the traditional
maternal or passive femininity, yet the film's questioning
of the male's inability to show emotion, acknowledges
j shifts in the validation of traditional masculinity. This
acknowledgment of change while maintaining basic social
I
|control (over women) is the way the film can speak to
I contemporary audiences who might be affected by the
i
i
jwomen's movement, yet feel threatened by it. Meanwhile,
I
ipatriarchy can be renewed as men "find" themselves (since
| this film, the "men's movement" has grown immensely; best-
*
|selling books and popular organizations tell men how to
|show the feelings their fathers never let them express).
133 1
The era is now called the "post-feminist" age, and the j
women's movement can be critiqued for setting up its own !
I
set of unrealistic expectations for women. Patriarchy can i
isuggest, just as Ordinary People does about Conrad's I
f i
j"misperception" of his mother, that in giving in too much
to the demands of the women's movement, we mistook
|feminism's "lack" for the phallus. Now. Voyager. produced >
i
I almost forty years earlier is, in this sense, a far more |
]
progressive film. Made in the context of women's fiction,
at a time when women were expected to step forward in the
j public domain in the absence of men, Now. Voyager expels
J
jthe biological, phallic mother through the mediation of
|male mothers, but still reserves the right and desire for
women to mother, even possibly outside a phallic economy.
i
134
1 Elizabeth Cowie, "Fantasia," m/f 9, 1984. Reprinted in
The Woman in Question, ed. Parveen Adams and Elizabeth
Cowie (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), 164.
i ;
j2 J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis, The Language of ;
Psychoanalysis (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1973), 311- !
| 312 . (
3 Charles Socarides, discussed in Studlar, In the Realm of ,
iPleasure, 40-41.
1A Madelon Sprengnether, in The Spectral Mother: Freud.
j Feminism, and Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University i
Press, 1990), suggests Freud avoided Otto Rank's theory of j
the birth trauma because it threatened his own "safer"
theory of the father's role in castration anxiety. For
Freud, it was less threatenning to designate a castrating
father who instigates the mother-son incest taboo than to
argue, like Rank, that castration was caused by separation
from the maternal at birth and that incest was a !
regressive desire to "repair the first rupture from the |
mother's body." See especially pp. 13 6-152. |
5 In "The Inftantile Genital Organization of the Libido
(1923)," Freud writes that "women who are regarded with
respect, such as the mother, retain the penis long after
| this date [after the child has noticed some women don't
I seem to have penises], in Sexuality and the Psychology of
|Love (New York: Collier Books, 1963), 174
j6 Sarah Kofman, The Enigma of Woman: Woman in Freud's
jWritings. trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell
]University Press, 1985), 168.
I
|7 See Jeanne Thomas Allen, introduction to script for Now. ;
I Voyager (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); ,
Stanley Cavell, "Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly: Bette
;Davis and Now, Voyager" followed by "Postscript (1989): To
iWhom It May Concern," Critical Inquiry 16 (Winter 1990);
'Elizabeth Cowie, "Fantasia," in Woman in Question, ed. j
(Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie; Lea Jacobs."Now.
IVovaqer: Some Problems of Enunciation and Sexual
jDifference," Camera Obscura. no. 7 (1981); E. Ann Kaplan,
"Motherhood and Representation: From Post World War II
j Freudian Figurations to Postmodernism," in Cinema and
;Psychoanalysis, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (New York: Routledge,
1990); Maria La Place, "Bette Davis and the Ideal of 1
Consumption: A Look at Now. Vovaaer." Wide Angle 6, no. 4
(1985) and a revision of this article, "Producing and
Consuming the Woman's Film: Discursive Struggle in Now.
Voyager," in Home is Where the Heart Is. ed. Christine !
135
Gledhill; R. Barton Palmer, "The Successful Failure of
Therapy in Now. Vovaqer." Wide Angle 8, no. 1 (1986) ; and j
Naomi Scheraan, "Missing Mothers/Desiring Daughters: j
Framing the Sight of Women," Critical Inquiry 15 (Autumn
1988). j
8 E. Ann Kaplan, "Motherhood and Representation," in
- Cinema and Psychoanalysis, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 131.
I
I i
j9 Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: Freud.
|Reich. Laina and Women (New York: Vintage Books, 1975),
17-8. j
!
I 10 We have seen the harm that this paradoxical j
I satisfaction and sustenance of penis envy can do when i
|designated to mothers— Lucille Jefferson in Mv Son John
jloves her son in part because she can narcissistically and
ivicariously enjoy his power, but the extent to which the
|text is threatenned by the fact that her envy is not
I satisfied by this vicarious experience is evidenced in the
\violence of a narrative resolution which infantilizes her
|(through menopause, making her womb again unproductive)
and gives away part of her maternal power to a male (and
!institution) who does not envy the possession of a penis, !
I because he (and it) "has" the phallus or can act, as male
Iheir, in the Name-of-the-Father.
i
i
! 11 Sigmund Freud, "Femininity," New Introductory Lectures
I on Psychoanalysis. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, j
1965), 99-119.
12 E. Ann Kaplan, "Motherhood and Psychoanalysis," in
Cinema and Psychoanalysis, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 132.
I 13 Ibid., 131.
! 14 Elizabeth Cowie implies this same point when she
suggests that the film enacts the desire to evict the
father. As one piece of her evidence, Cowie recalls that
;when Charlotte goes upstairs to tell her mother that she
[won't be marrying Elliot Livingston (which will
precipitate the mother's death), she is remembering the
j silence in the house when her father died. "Fantasia," in
I Woman in Question, ed. Parveen
Adams and Elizabeth Cowie, 177. [
j *
I 15 See especially, Lea Jacobs, "Now. Vovaqer: Some \
Problems"; Jeanne Thomas Allen, "Introduction"; E. Ann
Kaplan, "Motherhood and Representation"; and Naomi j
Scheman, "Missing Mothers/Desiring Daughters." i
I 136
16 Mary Ann Doane, Desire to Desire, and Tania Modleski,
Loving With a Vengeance: Mass-produced Fantasies for Women ,
(Hamden CT: Archon Books, 1982 and Methuen, 1985) .
i
17 Cowie argues that both Jaquith and Jerry are '
substitutes for the phallic mother. "Fantasia," in Woman
in Question, ed. Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie, 177. j
l18 Julia Kristeva, "Freud and Love: Treatment and Its !
[Discontents," in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New
i York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 244. This piece ,
| is part of Kristeva's Tales of Love (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1987), but my citations are from the
I anthology article. j
19 Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror. 116-126, and Tania j
Modleski, "Three Men and Baby M," Camera Obscura, no. 17,
(May 1988): 78-79. J
l
20 All of the studies of Now. Voyager I've mentioned have j
been written since the women's movement and the
development of feminist film scholarship. All the authors
of these studies, except Cavell ("Ugly Duckling, Funny
Butterfly: Bette Davis and Now. Vovager.11) contribute to
the development of the study of the woman's film and
acknowledge the debt owed feminist studies. Cavell, whose
analysis of Now. Vovager contains some perceptive and
original insights, seems to be ignorant of the attention
given the woman's film by feminist critics when he says :
that it is a genre "despised" and "dismissed." This in an
! article published in 19901 Although he does give Molly
I Haskell's 1973 From Reverence to Rape (its chapter on the
iwoman's film is decidely ambivalent towards the genre) and
the Now. Vovager screenplay (with introduction by Jeanne
Thomas Allen) a footnote, he does not even mention Lea
Jacobs' essay on Now. Voyager, published in 1981, three
years before he claims he first started thinking and
j writing about the film. Between 1984 and 1990, when his
I essay was published, many of the most important pieces on
1 Now. Voyager appeared (such as Maria LaPlace's two
j essays). I suspect part of Cavell's rationale for j
! ignoring this work is in his insistence in calling this ,
S film and some other woman's films (like Gaslight and |
| Letter from an Unknown Woman) the film of the unknown |
I woman (see his Postscript re Letter from an Unknown Woman. ;
; in which he constructs an odd argument about Tania [
1 Modleski's placement of that film in the woman's film !
1 genre). ^
137
21 Maria LaPlace, "Producing and Consuming the Woman's
Film: Discursive Struggle in Now. Vovaqer.1 1 in Home is
Where the Heart Is. ed. Christine Gledhill, 152.
22 Sarah Kofmann, Enicrma of Woman.
23 Elizabeth Cowie, "Fantasia,” in Woman in Question, ed.
Parveen Adams and Elizabeth Cowie, 177.
24 Serafina Bathrick, "The Marv Tvler Moore Show: Women
at Home and at Work," in MTM: 'Quality Television'. ed.
Jane Feuer et al. (London: BFI, 1984). Bathrick
describes the apartment of Mary Richards as a maternal
space in which characters come together and resolve
conflicts.
25 Annette Kuhn, "Hollywood and New Women's Cinema," in
Films for Women, ed. Charlotte Brunsdon (London: BFI,
1986), 129.
26 For a discussion of these issues regarding Three Men
and a Baby. see Tania Modleski, "Three Men and Baby M,"
Camera Obscura, no. 17 (May 1988). In the next chapter, I
discuss some of the points addressed by Modleski, but in
the context of Baby Boom.
Chapter Four
The Comedy of Surrogacy
138
My study thus far has focused on the melodrama as it
suggests a maternalized positioning of both the characters
who inhabit its narratives and the spectator who
supposedly overinvests in its tales of sacrifice,
suffering, and separation. In this chapter, I will look
at two comedies, Bachelor Mother (1939) and Baby Boom j
(1987). Since this dissertation is concerned with the ;
historical dimension of cinema's positioning of spectators
vis-a-vis some notion of the maternal through a focus on
pairs of thematically similar films from periods before •
and after the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s, a |
consideration of filmic comedy is in order. For as Marsha [
Kinder, Tania Modleski, and Lucy Fischer have recently
suggested in exploring the popularity of films about
parenting in the 1980s, the contemporary comedy film has
powerfully and repetitively (as in the cycle of father-son
[
i
reversal films in the late 1980s) represented the wish for
the restoration of the patriarch in a "post-feminist" age,
an orientation that has often worked against mothering
done by women.1
For example, Tania Modleski has argued that the
ideological function of such recent films like Three Men i
and a Babv and television series like My Two Dads and Full
House is to give men "more options than they already have
in patriarchy." These films and television series, in
which men get to be "real fathers, 'imaginary' fathers,
godfathers, and, in the older sense of the term, surrogate
mothers"2 to one or more little girls, accomplish this by
marginalizing women and mothering done by women. Modleski
concludes that this male "mothering" seduces the daughters
away from feminism, thus negating any progressiveness the
comedy might also generate in demonstrating that nurturing
is not a naturally-defined gender trait.
This argument and its conclusions quite rightfully
assume that such texts' ideological functions are
understandable as responses to historical changes and
realities— historical changes brought about by the women's
movement that are now threatening to the patriarchy, and
the historical reality that, despite these changes, women
still have not achieved full rights to their children.
Modleski's choice of Three Men and a Babv for discussion
also makes it possible for her to examine how the film's
fantasy celebrating male mothering (a kind of surrogacy)
relates to the public and theoretical discourses on a
parental configuration specific to the post-women's
movement era— contract surrogacy (through which women
contract their services as womb mothers, birth mothers,
140
and/or genetic mothers for couples or individuals who
cannot reproduce in the "traditional" manner).
One goal of this chapter it to widen the discussion
about the significance of surrogate parenting in films
whose scenario centers on surrogate mothering done by a
single, career woman, as imagined in Bachelor Mother and
Babv Boom. If the comic representations of men
"mothering" respond to feminism's demand that men be more
nurturing and to technology's development of new
reproductive possibilities with a further marginalization
of women, then what purpose(s) does the surrogate-mother
comedy serve for both feminism and a culture that has
reacted generously to the anti-feminist surrogate-father
comedies? And if the issues surrounding "expanded"
concepts of mothering and surrogacy relate so specifically
to the 1980s and 1990s, how is it possible that Bachelor
Mother, made in 1939, would share the thematic
preoccupations of these two films from the 1980s?
The answer to the latter question can be answered
partly in response to the former question. Like Three Men
and a Baby. Babv Boom's relationship to surrogacy (and
specifically to the Baby M case) is a displaced one. By
having a character inherit a baby rather than contract for
one or be the contract mother for one, the film does not
have to explicitly address the controversies currently
surrounding new reproductive technologies and contract )
V
surrogacy, but can still tap into and disavow fears that
those new reproductive choices introduce into a "post-^
feminist" culture. In her examination of Three Men and a
Babv. Modleski focuses on the psychic and social
components of men's envy of women's reproductive
capacities in contemporary culture, but many of the fears
involving new reproductive choices have to do with the
current organization of women as producers and reproducers
and as consumers and as objects of consumption. In other
words, the fears have to do with how new parental
configurations— especially new mothering configurations—
intersect with class and economic conflicts in a society
in which more and more mothers are working outside the
home whether by "choice" or necessity. Though the way
these fears are given voice in Babv Boom are determined in
part by the new reproductive technologies and the multi
nationalist, capitalistic and post-modern nature of
contemporary American culture, a registering of anxieties
about the role of mothers in capitalist production and
reproduction is not new to American culture or to filmic
representation. The "fallen woman" film and the maternal
melodrama (specifically those that designate the mother as
"fallen" in some way) of the 1930s, influenced by or even
based on nineteenth century novels and plays about
142
adulteresses and on the golddigger/Cinderella comedies and
dramas of the 1920s, explicitly relate the significance of
women's mothering or expression of sexual desire outside
the current norm of monogamous marriage to class issues.
As many film scholars have noted, the women who sin in
these narratives are subjected to punishment figured in a
downward trajectory in class.3 Women who have sexual
relations or children outside of marriage are disturb the
social order both economically (by upsetting the ordered
transaction of inheritance through the male line and by
straining social services) and morally, and are not
allowed to share in the privileges of being high in the
class hierarchy. Lea Jacobs has argued that the films
which did not follow this direction, but which instead
showed the fallen woman gain in material status, were
targets for pressure group complaints and eventually for
censorship through the industry's self-regulatory codes of
production.4 This targeting would even— -perhaps
especially— include fallen women comedies, such as Mae
West's series of films for Paramount in the early 193 0s,
and screwball comedies, which revolve "around
misinterpretations, around the difficulty of knowing the
truth about the heroine's putatively guilty past."5 Like
the fallen woman film which showcases economic rise for
the sinning woman, these comedies might confound
143
distinctions between chaste and unchaste women and inspire
i
l
.imitation by female spectators.6
Bachelor Mother, a comedy produced and released in
1939 about a young working woman who, on the day she loses
her job, "inherits" a baby mistakenly believed by others
to be her illegitimate child, is an amalgamation of the
fallen woman film, the maternal melodrama, what Mary Beth
Haralovich has called the "proletarian woman's film,"7 and
the romantic comedy (a more appropriate designation for
this film than screwball comedy). I will argue that in
its comic inversions of the fallen woman and maternal
melodramas, its complementary relationship to the
proletarian woman's film, and its status as romantic
comedy, Bachelor Mother evidences an attempt at
historically managing some of the social, economic, and
moral anxieties of both working women (especially mothers)
and a capitalist patriarchy in the 1930s. Babv Boom.
though historically distanced from the fallen woman's
films, the maternal melodramas, and the proletarian
woman's films so popular and controversial in the 1930s,
also comically reverses many of the conventions of these
genres, as well as uses romantic comedy conventions to
manage some of the anxieties of its period. In this film,
however, the shift in emphasis from the woman's moralj
status to a concern with issues of women's "choice" /
144
signals changes in how the positioning of women in terms
of reproduction and production is articulated in the 1980s
and 1990s.
Bachelor Mother and the Comedy of Surrogacy in the 193 0s
Bachelor Mother opens as Polly Parish (Ginger Rogers),
a young woman working in the toy section at J. Merlin and
Son's department store (winding up and selling mechanical
Donald Duck toys) gets a dismissal notice on the day
before Christmas eve. Although she was hired, like so
many women, as part of the casual workforce common to
large businesses, the depressing reality of finding a job
when the economic situation is so tight, makes her
determined to start looking that very day during her lunch
hour. While scanning the "help wanted" column as she
walks from one employment agency to the next, she sees a
middle-aged woman leave a baby on the doorstep of a
foundling home. After her attempt to stop the woman is
unsuccessful (she tells Polly that the child has no
parents and then runs off), she reaches down to make sure
the baby is all right. At that moment, someone in the
foundling home opens the door, invites Polly in, and
before she realizes it, the workers at this social
institution have convinced themselves that the baby is
hers. Protesting their assumptions, Polly runs out the
145
door and back to the department store. Based on
information she had innocently given them about her job
and dismissal, the social workers from the home trace her
to the store, confront the younger Merlin, David (David
Niven), and convince him to hire Polly permanently so she
can keep "her" child. David has just had a run-in with
his store-owner father, John Merlin (Charles Coburn),
about his irresponsible behavior towards women and work.
Thinking of how he can show his father that he is
"mature," David colludes with the condescending male
social worker (the female social worker is more
"maternal") to give Polly the permanent position and have
the baby delivered to her apartment that night. Polly
receives the baby right before she must leave for a date
with a fellow worker, who has convinced her to participate
in a dance contest with him. He also believes the baby to
be hers, and concludes the father is David Merlin when she
deposits the baby at the Merlin mansion on the way to the
dance contest. David follows her there, rails against her
maternal "irresponsibility," and when she refuses to leave
the dance, waits for at her apartment with the baby boy.
Exhausted from dancing and arguing with everyone about her
relationship to the baby, she pretends the baby is hers
and that his father had beaten and abandoned her. Polly
secures David's sympathy, but has now given in to
146
everyone's belief that she is the mother of the child.
Between Christmas (which is elided in the film) and New
Year's Day, she works at the store all day and stays up
with the baby all night. But she has no trouble adjusting
to other mothering behavior, such as feeding the baby.
Even as David lectures her on the "scientific" methods for
child raising, a mutual attraction grows between them, and
when he is stood up on New Year's eve, he dresses Polly up
in fancy clothes from the store and takes her out for a
night on the town. Their growing romance is interrupted
on New Year's Day when Polly's previous co-worker date,
angered at David for reprimanding and demoting him at
work, informs Mr. Merlin that David is the father of
Polly's baby. Mr. Merlin, wearied of his Oedipal conflict
with his own son, desires to get a second chance with a
grandson he did not know he had. When he threatens to
take the baby (now named John) away from Polly if David
won't marry her, Polly, believing that David does not love
her, comes up with an imposter father to convince Mr.
Merlin that the baby must stay with her. When this plan
fails, she tries to flee. David, realizing that he loves
Polly only after she threatens to disappear forever,
decides to marry her. Polly agrees even while she is
still unable to convince him that the baby is not hers.
147
t
j A much briefer recounting of this film's plot might
I read: a young working woman's life is put into reversal
I or turned upside down when she accidentally comes into
i
possession of a baby who is believed by everyone to be
jhers; her predicament changes her employer's son, an
I , #
;irresponsible playboy who comes to love and marry her.
The dominance of "reversals” in this plot clearly marks it
j as a comedy, for it has been duly noted that comedy as a
i
|genre is premised on reversals or incongruities in what is
; considered the "normal" social order.8 The comedies of
J surrogacy, whether the adoptive parent is male or female,
j rest largely on these incongruities and reversals. The
■ incongruities are based on conflicts or a seeming
i
(incommensurability between the new, surrogate parents'
!lack of desire or ignorance of how to raise a child, and
Jthe infant's own pressing, but incommunicable basic
;demands. The reversals are based on the irony that the
I
iperson most happy being childless and the least
1 emotionally equipped to deal with a child, in fact, "gets"
I
|one. Before long, the new parent finds the child to be
indispensable to his or her happiness, thus reversing the
character's initial paradigms for self-fulfillment. The
comedies centering on men trying to raise a child alone
are funny because they play off the widely-held cultural
assumption that men are "unnatural" in this role; the
148
progressive awareness we are supposed to develop as the
narrative unfolds in these films or series is that
mothering is not a question of nature, but of nurture, and
that men can be "nurtured" into nurturing. The men are
empowered by their acquisition of traditional maternal
traits, or, as Modleski puts it, they get more options
than they already have.
When the comedy centers on the adoptive mother, as
Bachelor Mother does, the potential also exists for
mothering as a social function to be separated from
mothering as a biological or essentially-defined function,
thus deconstructing the "naturalness7 of mothering. This
potential suggests that the comedy of surrogacy is an
inversion of the maternal melodrama, which begins with an
unquestioned closeness between mother and child, and moves
towards the separation "necessary" for the child's entry
into the social world.9 The narrative resolves itself by
negotiating a distance between the mother and child, which
while registering a loss to both, also exalts and
justifies the sacrifices made on behalf of Motherhood as
an institution. This description characterizes the
maternal melodrama as a genre which both questions and
recuperates maternity as constructed under patriarchy.
Bachelor Mother also plays with "closeness" and "distance"
between mother and child, with a comic inversion of the
149
maternal melodrama's resolution. In this film, the
distance between mother and child is the initial premise
of the narrative rather than indicative of a closure
characterized by pathos, as in the maternal melodrama.
The gap between Polly and baby John is cause for amusement
and urges an awareness of the social construction of
mothering (the scene in which David tries to convince
Polly of scientific methods of child rearing exposes this
construction) as well as the social problem of mothering
in a capitalist patriarchy (how is Polly to mother without
a job; how she is supposed to mother with a job; how is
she supposed to mother without an economically privileged
male to father). Yet, the film moves to close the gap
between Polly and little John fairly rapidly and validate
a "natural" maternal in women. Although Polly struggles
to do work for wages and take care of a child, there is
never any question in the film that she does anything but
excel at mothering. In fact, one of the gags in the film,
which also constitutes proof to the social workers that
Polly is the baby's mother, depicts the baby's immediate
cessation of crying everytime Polly picks the child up, as
if the child knows before Polly that she is the "true"
mother. Even the scene in which David's use of scientific
methods of childrearing (and thus social constructions of
mothering in the 1930s) are ridiculed, also functions as
evidence that Polly's emerging brand of mothering is more
valid because it is based on a pragmatic sense that is
often read as women's intuition, a "mystical" logic.
The film's depiction of the restrictive life of the
working woman and how that impinges on her domestic life
aligns the film with the proletarian woman's film, which
Haralovich defines as focusing on how "the economic
realities of woman's daily existence modify her presence
within these traditional places."10 These films, which
often place the working woman as a clerk or model in
department stores, trace how she comes to realize "that
economic power informs both romantic and sexual
relationships [and maternal relationships, if we include
Bachelor Mother as belonging to this genre]."11 Bachelor
Mother puts a comic spin to this lesson— all the more,
sobering in the Depression— as it makes comedy out of the
way work renders the body mechanical in the Bergsonian
sense, even as the economic/sexual lesson elicits our
sympathy for Polly. One of the running gags in the film
has to do with the ubiquity of the wind-up Donald Duck
toys Polly sells. Not only do they figure in the plot
(David buys one for John, which at the end of the film,
when Polly tries to hide the baby and herself from the
Merlins, serves as a clue to her whereabouts), but they
come to symbolize the bureaucratization (the duck David
151
buys for John breaks and David encounters the
dysfunctional bureaucracy of his own store when he tries
to return it) and mechanization (the walking, quacking toy
ducks are superimposed over the image of Polly as she
looks for work; when Polly is exhausted after being up all
night with the baby all she can do is wind up ducks like
an automaton) of labor in an age when workers find no
identification with what they do for a living. The ducks
could even be said to be a trope for the reproductive
process, suggesting the terror of reproduction, which this :
surrogate comedy can disavow by having its mother (like
J.C. in Baby Boom) "inherit” a child.
It is difficult to assess whether this comedy makes
the proletarian woman's film conventions serve any more
i
subversive purpose than they might already (by connecting j
gender and economics), but another element in the genre j
threatens to overpower the liberating possibilities of 1
recognition potentially available from the representation i
j
of how the work world inflects the traditional realms of
femininity, such as mothering behavior. As Haralovich {
argues, many of the proletarian woman's films include
scenes which clearly subject the woman to objectification
and spectacle, and align the films with consumerist
discourses which merchandize lifestyles, tempting women
into buying into their own oppression. The films set in
152
department stores often entail fashion shows or images of
women dressing to model glamorous clothes beyond what the
female characters or the female spectators of the films
could afford at that historical moment. These scenes also
function sometimes as a foreshadowing of a Cinderella
ending, where the female character "captures" the rich
executive. In Bachelor Mother. Polly's nightclubbing
with David on New Year's eve, provides that Cinderella
moment, as she is temporarily arrayed in the most
glamorous clothes in Merlin's store and proves to David
that she is not only sexually attractive, but can fit into ;
|
the lifestyle of the rich with ease (just as she fits into j
I
motherhood with ease).
It is interesting to contrast the way these material
f
markers function in this film with the way they typically
function in the fallen woman film. In that genre,
material success either eludes the fallen woman as she is
banished from the middle or upper classes for her sin, or
I
she gains more goods as she falls from the standards of
conventional morality and becomes a "kept" woman. As
Jacobs and others have argued, the former possibility
works for the status quo in that it shows the punishment
for the woman's behavior, whereas the latter has the
potential to suggest that class mobility is possible and
even desirable through immoral sexual behavior. In
153
Bachelor Mother. Polly becomes socially more isolated (she
can no longer go out on the town dancing unless "rescued"
by someone like David) and her potential unemployment is
seen as more serious after she becomes a mother, but the
downward trajectory of the fallen woman is not a real
threat. However, although Polly gets a job and her
Cinderella treatment because she is believed to have
"fallen," the film does not have the potential for the
moral subversion that the "golddigger/Cinderella" fallen
woman film has as it shows the woman rewarded for her
transgressions. We know that Polly is innocent of what
others believe about her, and for that reason, the film
seems more like a comic inversion of the fallen woman film
which punishes the transgressor than a direct relation to
the "golddigger" fallen woman film (where we know the
woman is "guilty"). There is nothing immoral about
rewarding a woman we know to be innocent (in melodrama,
the pathos is a result of how we know the innocent has
been misjudged and punished).
Bachelor Mother's status as a romantic comedy, which
traditionally focuses on the impediments to and eventual
success of romantic coupling, also suggests that its
relation to the fallen woman film is as a comic inversion.
The couple united at the end of romantic comedies is
supposed to stand for the possibility of a new society.
154
Although it might seem strange that a film whose plot
begins on December 2 3rd would elide Christmas but not New
Year's Day, it is consonant with the narrative's eventual
displacement of Polly's fallen and maternal status in
favor of her status as a romantic partner for David—
Christmas with its focus on the Virgin Mary and Christ
Child displaced in favor of New Year's Day, with its focus
on transformation (new resolutions) and the new beginnings
brought by romantic love.
Critics have argued that the censoring mechanisms of
the Production Code Administration often tried to contain
the threat posed by the attractiveness of the fallen
woman's situation by suggesting her eventual domestication
through romantic love be represented at the film's end.
According to Lea Jacobs:
At both a narrative and a symbolic level,
the classical text resolves conflict
through what Raymond Bellour calls the
formation of the couple. The disharmony
or disruption which initiates the story is
resolved happily insofar as the woman
assumes a position within the couple as
loyal wife or sweetheart. Censorship
improvised upon the convention of the
happy end according to a logic of
compensation. Emphasis upon the heroine's
final domestication was used to negate or
counteract her sexual transgressions.12
The ending of Bachelor Mother subverts this project in so
far as it exposes the mechanics of such a compensation.
The men— David, Polly's co-worker, the social worker, Mr.
Merlin— believe Polly to be guilty and see themselves as
saviors or benefactors of her "misfortune." Since we know
she hasn/t transgressed, we see the extent to which men
orchestrate her domestication out of a desire for self-
importance (the social worker), for revenge (the co-worker
who wants to get back at David), for lineage (Mr. Merlin
declares at one point, "I don't care who's the father, I'm
the grandfather!" as if such things can be decided by
fiat), for sexual/romantic love after full Oedipalization
(David, who comes to terms with his father's notions of
responsibility and decides to marry Polly).
Although I have suggested the ending as subverting a
typical censoring mechanism, I am not arguing that film is
really subversive of the social status quo. Again, it is
important to understand how films manage the historical
conflicts of their moment of production. That Bachelor
Mother was so popular (one of RKO's most successful films
of all time— they even made a remake in the 1950s with
Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher titled Bundle of Joy)
attests, I think, to the way it articulates a number of
current discourses through repression and reflection or
disavowal and acknowledgment. Bachelor Mother can
acknowledge illegitimacy while denying its protagonist's
"guilt." It can reflect, like the proletarian woman's
film, the difficulties for the woman in the workplace,
156
especially for those having to also maintain a family
outside the traditional patriarchal nuclear family, but
repress the sexual exploitation of women in the workplace
and the home. It can acknowledge men's unfair, superior
sexual privilege while denying the implications by showing
it's male protagonist as learning how to behave
responsibly.
This latter point is especially interesting in
regards to Bachelor Mother, the film genres of the 1930s
discussed here, and the direction that social reform of
unwed mothers and of the sexually active took during the
1930s and the prior fifty years. As historians John
D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman point out, the social
reform movements of the late 19th century and the early
2 0th century evidenced certain contradictions in regards
to containing the threat of sexuality outside of marriage.
The Social Purity movement of the late 19th century tended
to recognize the relationship between women's vulnerable
economic situation and sexual exploitation, so while
reformers urged no condemnation of the "fallen woman," the
tried to convert such women and the men who exploited them
to middle-class standards of purity and marriage. By the
2 0th century, these standards included "companionate
marriage," which though it emphasized men's responsibility
and went some ways in separating the linkage between sex
157
and procreation (which validated women's desire to limit
the size of their families), it idealized the mystical,
spiritual bond between partners. This did not necessarily
erase hierarchical relationships between men and women— in
fact, it could even obfuscate them— nor did it give women
much power outside traditional realms.13 The mechanics of
the woman's domestication may be exposed in Bachelor
Mother. but the romantic ideal of a love or "companionate"
marriage overpowers the expose, as does the emphasis on
David's coming to terms with responsible male behavior
towards women and the family. Although David's
transformation is achieved in the Oedipal terms familiar
to classical narratives, it has a very specific historical
function here in terms of how the patriarchy should deal
with male sexuality, the nature of guilt in the expression
of female sexuality, and in mothering outside marriage.
Baby Boom and Anxieties of the 1980s and 1990s
In Baby Boom, high-powered career woman J.C. Wyatt
"inherits" Elizabeth, a baby girl, from a deceased cousin
and his wife. J.C. first attempts to give Elizabeth up
for adoption, but her growing bond with the child and the
horror of giving her up to strangers of a different class,
causes her to change her mind. With this decision, she
first loses her live-in boyfriend. Then, the increasing
158
amounts of time she spends taking care of Elizabeth causes
her to lose both a partnership in the PR firm where she
works and a major account with a food company called The
Food Chain. Taking a leave of absence from her job, she
buys a home in Vermont, and out of boredom and
compulsive/obsessive behavior, starts making thousands of
jars of applesauce, which she turns into a successful
cottage industry, simultaneously winning the romantic
attention of a country veterinarian (played by Sam
Shepherd).
It is hard to imagine another contemporary mainstream
Hollywood film bringing together so many issues of concern
to feminism as it stands in this historical moment, as
well as to feminism in the pre-contract surrogacy age. As
my brief plot synopsis suggests, Babv Boom positions its
comedy of surrogacy within several contexts pertinent to
feminism: the public/private dichotomy so crucial to '"'x
middle-class culture and to feminism's concern that womenj
have traditionally been exploited in both realms, the |
possibility of a separatist female space, the failure of
redistributing power among the sexes within corporate j
capitalist structures, and current alternatives to j
biological parenting and to the traditional nuclear —■ "
family. While the combination of these contexts suggests
the film's acknowledgment of the binds that constitute the
1 159
l
"superwoman" myth, and the fact that it is a comedy
. suggests the possibility that the artificiality of the
J ideal will be humorously exposed, Baby Boom also uses 1
t !
; comedy for disavowal. As mainstream comedy, Babv Boom
I disavows fears that will not go away in what it posits as
j the post-feminist age, when feminism supposedly no longer^)
i !
j exists or is no longer needed as an oppositional political !
| position: fears that multi-national, patriarchal - —
capitalism is responsible for discourses of the
"superwoman"— the woman who has it all— as a way of ]
i I
F j
' ■ organizing women as both producers and reproducers. In
i i
j its comic inversion of the maternal melodrama, its !
j
\ sometimes strange displacements of the issues surrounding
| contemporary contract surrogacy (in which biological
mothers or womb mothers are the surrogates), and in its
j articulation of production and reproduction in terms of a
I
I commodified feminism, Babv Boom desperately asserts
i # !
|instead that female achievement in both public and private (
^ (which includes "mothering" a child not biologically j
I 1
related) is a sign of liberal feminism/s attainment of a !
| !
. proliferation of options for women, which are "out there"
I I
I for the choosing. i
160
The Comic Inversion of the Maternal Melodrama
Even more than the comedy of Bachelor Mother. Babv
Boom's comedy of surrogacy emphasizes the separation of
mothering as a biological or essentially-defined function
and as a social function. J.C.'s slavish devotion to her
career makes her an even more unlikely candidate than
Polly for "surprise" motherhood, and the incongruities are
even stronger here between a surrogate mother's knowledge
about babies and their incommunicable needs. And unlike
the male "mother" in the male parenting comedies of the
1980s, the female parent in this comedy does not
automatically gain more power than she already has— in
fact, the narrative registers (more here than in Bachelor
Mother) the threat of a downward trajectory for the^~~-^ !
single, adoptive female parent, revealed through J.C.'s \
manic production of gourmet baby food in order to escape \
economic ruin and the claustrophobic female space to whichx i
the flight from the world of public business has confineclj
her. In other words, this comedy of surrogate parenting
has an intertextual relation to the maternal melodrama, ,
which also speaks to the vulnerability of women mothering !
I
in patriarchal society.
In both Babv Boom and the maternal melodrama
(especially in the maternal melodrama in which the mother
has "fallen") the mother struggles within the loss of a
161
certain social power and increasing isolation, although
the melodrama makes the ultimate isolation for the mother
come after her sacrifice of the child to society. Babv
Boom also plays with "closeness" and "distance" between
mother and child, with a comic inversion of the maternal
melodrama's narrative resolution. And as in Bachelor
Mother, the distance between mother and child is the
initial premise of the narrative rather than indicative of
closure, as J.C. Wyatt, married only to her career and ^
unwilling to "mother" any of her office underlings, J
"inherits" baby Elizabeth. Likewise, the narrative moves
to close the gap between J.C. and the child, with humorous
results, as J.C. struggles to feed and diaper the baby or
sings lullabies to her over the phone during business
meetings. But this representation of "mothering"
emphasizes the work and the social dimensions that
accompany the attainment of "closeness" between mother and
child. Because Bachelor Mother did not (perhaps could not
in 1939) envision either the possibility that Polly might
have an emotional investment in her job from which she
might need a "divorce" in order to focus on a child, or
the possibility that a woman could have a managerial
position that would place her on a par with male workers—
in short, it didn't envision the "superwoman" syndrome— it
emphasized the physical toll on Polly more than the
162
psychic toll. While depicting the mother-child bond as
j constituted by and through the social is a mark of both
f
the Baby Boom's comedy and its potential progressiveness,
the counter-hegemonic possibilities of this construction
of the maternal are mitigated as J.C.'s work at mothering
feeds into a problematic definition of feminism and of
what constitutes the basis for deciding who should
'•mother. "
J Paradoxically, the image of feminism circulated by
I
i Baby Boom rests on an assumption that this is a post
feminist age; that women can have it all now. ' This,,
paradox is only seemingly so, however, because the
|
jdiscourses of "post-feminism" rewrite what feminism was/is
J as a political practice: as though it was/is merely an
’ avenue for getting more women into corporate positions and
j a higher consumer bracket. As the film plays with
I ' !
I accommodating maternity within this definition, it follows |
I i
f
; that the woman with the best potential for correct I
i I
;mothering is the one who will provide economic self- 1
^ « • 1
,sufficiency, protect the privacy of the home, and provide ;
'more options for the next generation— in other words, the
i !
:woman who is aggressively pursuing it all by choice. The
1 |
j commitment to this construction of feminism— a commodified J
i
j feminism— favors the primacy of money and class over any i
163
essentialist link, or one forged through mothering
activities.
The sequence in which J.C. decides to keep Elizabeth
instead of giving her up for adoption make this clear.
The adoptive parents are aptly named the Whites, a name
which both denies any bigotry in the portrayal and
suggests the fantasy of a white middle-America which white
yuppies who have it all have smugly left behind. The
Whites are a lower middle-class couple from the midwest,
coded as fundamentalist Christians (they refer to "the
Lord" and their pastor as arbitrators in their decisions)
who believe in the natural subordination of women to men
(Mrs. White calls her husband "sir"). Perhaps most
damaging to their character in terms of the film's comedy
is their refusal of the $1700 of clothes and toys J.C.
bought Elizabeth immediately after she decided to give her
up. The portrayal of these characters is mean-spirited,
stereotyping lower middle class fundamentalists beyond the
exaggeration of careerism already comically exploited in
terms of J.C.'s character. J.C. keeps Elizabeth
ostensibly in the name of feminism, but the excessive
portrayal of these surrogates and J.C.'s fantasy of
Elizabeth's future with them betrays the motivations of
class and consumerism implicated in this "feminist"
action. J.C. says she couldn't think of Elizabeth growing
164
up to wear white lipstick and work at a Dairy Queen, a
description that suggests a future in which Elizabeth is
defined by her sexual allure and works at a low-paying,
dead-end job, that no woman, if "mothered” as a feminist,/
would choose for herself. In other words, the film^s^^^
conception of feminism is related to high income status,
consumer power, and the possibility of individual choice
and agency those (rather than political action) promise.
With such power, baby boomers can reject the non-liberated
aspects of their pre-women's movement, pre-yuppie
upbringing, of which the Whites are atavistic
representations.
Although the Whites reject the lure of consumerism
and the choice in lifestyles its discourses offer, the
film suggests people of their class, who act in the belief
of natural male and female qualities, nevertheless are the
only ones who are subject to controlling discourses. In
this way, the film tries to deny the possibility that the
single, high-wage earning woman is also subject to
controlling discourses and is positioned as a consumer of
contemporary discourses about maternity and the family.
The real life melodrama of Baby M suggested otherwise to
many feminists. It exposed that in the context of multi
national capitalism, advanced reproductive technologies
may have given women more reproductive "options," but it
165
has also given patriarchy more opportunities to create its
i
j own new discursive practices around the breeding of !
1 offspring and the rights of men to women and children as
; property.14
i
i
i
! BABY BOOM's Displaced Relation to Contract Surrogacy
! |
1 The montage sequence following the scene in which I
i :
J.C. offers her rationale for keeping Elizabeth also |
i i
i . . !
!privileges class and commodified feminism as factors in i
i
organizing contemporary discourses about correct |
parenting, justifying the film's conclusions about J
| i
>surrogate parenting, and making them compatible with the
i
^legal conclusions reached in the Baby M contract surrogacy
1
i case. In this sequence, J.C. interviews and rejects a
number of potential nannies for Elizabeth: a
fundamentalist Christian (again coded as co-extensive with
I
I
; lower class), a Third World woman who expresses her
! I
!subservience to men, a woman who is too sexualized, and a j
: I
;woman who is recovering from a nervous breakdown. These
!
women, presented to us in a very rapid montage
i
jcharacteristic of comic narrative presentations of
character "types," are supposed to make J.C., with all her |
: \ I
original ineptitude in the work of mothering, seem like s' I
■the best mother. jThe rejected nannies are related to J.C. i
\ .
I 1
I and mothering in some of the ways Mary Beth Whitehead was I
166
seen in comparison to Elizabeth Stern in the Baby M case.
Biological mother to Baby M, yet rendered a "notional"
mother by the term "surrogate," Whitehead was presented by
the Stern's attorney and the media as too emotional
(headed for or having a nervous breakdown), too sexual
(much was made of the fact she worked for a while as a
dancer in her sister's bar), too lower class and by
implication not "feminist" enough (her lack of education
and her "choice" to devote her time exclusively to her
family restricting her notions of what was possible for
women). Many of the commentators on the Baby M case have
seen it in the context of patriarchal capitalism's
mobilization of reproductive technologies to commodify
female bodies, exploiting lower class women by having them
do the compulsory reproductive service of more privileged
women.15 They argue that Mary Beth Whitehead's kinship
bonds to Baby M, as well as to the rest of her family,
were seen by the court as inadequate grounds for custody,
because "such bonds no longer make a family," rather
economic self-sufficiency is now the "ideological litmus
test for the proper family."16
Although J.C. is a surrogate mother in Baby Boom, she
is so in the same way Elizabeth Stern is a surrogate to
Baby M— parenting a child not biologically related to her-
-and not in the notional way Whitehead was termed
167
surrogate. And J.C., like Elizabeth Stern, is presented
as an appropriate mother because of her economic and
educational superiority. Of course, Elizabeth Stern was
also considered appropriate because the patriarchal legal
system saw her as an extension of the property of
biological father Bill Stern.17 J.C. has no father for
Elizabeth when the film designates her as the rightful
mother, but her eventual romantic pairing with the country
veterinarian and her assumption of entrepreneurship
suggests the intervention of "the third term" or Law which
supposedly makes it possible for the child to escape the
confinement of the exclusive mother-child bond and enter
the social, the realm where men, generally supported by
the legal system, often succeed in exercising power over
women as producers and reproducers.18
To press the relationship between Babv Boom and the
Baby M, a real life case, is, it might be argued, to
overlook the film's status as a fairy-tale and privilege a
more tenuous status for it as displaced allegory. The
sudden death of Elizabeth's parents, J.C.'s surprise
inheritance of a baby, her discovery of a 'miracle
formula' for economic success, her romance with the
seemingly perfect veterinarian, suggest the logic of a
fairy-tale. As I've argued, Bachelor Mother (the kind of
romantic comedy Baby Boom is surely nostalgic for) made
168
this connection with the fairy-tale just as explicit, as i
t
its protagonist finds a baby on a doorstep, has a night of j
I
transformation like Cinderella, and eventually marries the I
!
[wealthy son of her employer.
| The foundling fairy-tale, as some psychoanalysts have
|suggested, responds to a wish and/or fear of the child.
Freud argued that the child in the asexual stage has |
fantasies that he/she is a foundling and that his/her real j
| i
parents are of a higher class. In Sacred Bond; The Lecracv
of—Baby M, Phyllis Chesler explores the gendered
implications of this fantasy, suggests that we carry it
into our adult life, and that in a patriarchal culture
I such as ours, it plays itself out through some rather ugly
i
jmother hatred. She states, with irony, that "everyone
jwants a (surrogate) mother. No one's real mother is ever
jgood enough."19 Chesler's remarks place the fantasies
i
experienced by the public in regard to the Baby M case in
[the same realm as those tapped into by the foundling tale, i
Jso perhaps it is a moot point whether Babv Boom is a I
I j
ifairy-tale or a displaced allegory for real life contract
I
[surrogacy cases.
j Does Babv Boom activate fantasies only for our j
i
continuing wish for another, "better" mother than our real
i
mother? The perspective of Babv Boom, again like Bachelor
■ \
'Mother, is not that of the child, but of the [
adoptive/surrogate mother, the working woman whose life is
turned upside down by the arrival of the baby on the
doorstep. This analysis involves seeing both films as
fantasy negotiations of the contradictions facing working
mothers and mothers outside traditional patriarchal family
contexts in their respective historical moments. Bachelor
Mother, made in 1939, provides a utopian answer to those
contradictions through a reversal of the fallen
woman/maternal melodrama so popular in the 193 0s, a genre
which in the context of the Depression era's collective
celebration of social mobility depicted the punishment for
women's "errors" in terms of social anonymity.20 Every
character in this film considers Polly to be an unwed
mother, yet instead of punishing her, as forces in the
fallen woman film would, they do everything in their power
to insure her upward economic mobility. Babv Boom may
reverse the maternal melodrama, with the attainment of
mother-child bonding and a rejection of a masculinized
corporate environment, but this fantasy solution is
achieved accompanied by a disavowal of how patriarchal
capitalism deploys the discourses that currently organize
women as producers and reproducers.
170
Production. Reproduction; A Boom for Whom?
Linda Singer argues that "what makes the Baby M case
possible is a confluence of social forces which divide the
body and body functions into separable units, linking them
with a commodity system that proliferates sites and forms
for these exchanges."21 By this logic, Mary Beth
Whitehead agreed to divide her reproductive functions from
whatever else constitutes the maternal relation to a child
and to the genetic father. When she reneged on that
agreement, she rejected the connection between "the well-
managed female body of the 80s" and the commodity systems
that exchange babies. According to Singer, "the well-
managed female body of the 80s is constructed so as to be
even more multi-functional than its predecessors. It is a
body that can be used for wage labor, sex, reproduction,
mothering, spectacle, exercise, or even invisibility."22
Singer's points are relevant to my argument about
Baby Boom because they expose the links between women as
producers and reproducers in contemporary culture. A
source for much of the humor in Babv Boom is J.C.'s
inability to be the multi-functional body— laborer,
mother, sexual being— with the effortlessness of a
superwoman. The initial humor in the film— before
Elizabeth even arrives— derives from J.C.'s excessive
identification with her work as producer that does not let
171
her be anything else (especially sexual). The phrase
"she's married to her job" is not cliche here, but a
profound observation of J.C.'s positioning within an
economic system and its discursive practices that mobilize
women workers of a certain class through a language of
desire and improved status while maintaining the
subordination of all women to patriarchal utilities.
When Elizabeth arrives, it is funny that J.C. can't
shift to a new role as mother. How this manages to be
funny is rather obvious— the comedy does derive from
reversals in positions (the happily childless woman "gets"
a child) and from what is at times an almost slapstick
rendering of the impossibility of the multi-functional
body, as Diane Keaton plays J.C. with her trademark
hesitant speech patterns and fussy body movements that at
times verge on the collapse of activity.23 But why the
film renders comic the contradictions facing women who are
told they can have it all is another question. I argue
that it is one way for a film which wants to both
problematize contemporary choice and avoid oppositional
stances (such as those feminism offers) to manage the
anxieties arising from the recognition that being a
reproducer and a producer does not necessarily empower
women. The film's emphasis on Keaton's/J.C.'s "out of
focus" body for comic effect would suggest that it
172
acknowledges that the possibility of more choice about
career and reproduction seems to diffuse where to focus
opposition. The film's privileging of class, exaggerations
of careerism and middle Americans, as well as its romantic
comedy closure, disavow that choice is always
circumscribed and feminism is still needed to at least
identify where choice has been co-opted. A further irony
of the comic disavowal of Baby Boom is that the film
presents us with a woman who inherits a child, whreh ^
obviates the need for either choice or fertility, once j
again allowing the film to tap into contemporary anxieties
and to deny their seriousness.
One can at least say that Babv Boom sees corporate
capitalism as responsible for the further division between
public and private by refusing to accommodate J.C. as both
mother (and what work that takes) and as powerful
worker/producer. J.C. makes a dramatic speech at the end
of the film when her former client, The Food Chain, wants
to buy her baby food company. She argues that she doesn't
want to work in an environment where she can't have toys
and a mobile by her desk (although, of course, if women
like J.C. were allowed to "merge" their work as producers
and reproducers in the corporate environment they would
have another way to function as superwomen).
173
But whatever fears Babv Boom expresses about the role
of corporate capitalism in the co-option of choice, it
counters with classical cinema's (and traditional
comedy's) very powerful tradition of a narrative closure
which unites the couple in romance— J.C.'s desire for a
relationship with the Vermont veterinarian helps her make
her choice to leave. The romantic closure renders
unnecessary any further choice about how to make over the
corporate space in terms of a feminist utopia, or at least
into one that is more hospitable to women, children, and
parents. The film also counters its fears with assurance
that J.C. will still reproduce capitalism, albeit in a
nostalgic entrepreneurial form, her baby food cottage
industry. Elizabeth's image— her aura as country baby—
compensates or hides the product's commodity status, even
as it reveals that babies in capitalism are now
commodities. If the film uses comedy to disavow
patriarchal capitalism's organizing discourses about women
as reproducers and producers that co-opt their choices, it
also uses the aura of feminism (women who choose to
support themselves with their own businesses) and babies
to co-opt the original baby boomer (the audience to whom
the film pitches its address), the prime constituent of
feminist politics.
Babv Boom wants to hold onto that part of feminism, 1
or image of feminism, that validated female agency and j
self-determination in terms of equal access to economic
success. But that retention requires the new, "post
feminist feminism" to mask both the manipulations to which
economically liberated women are still subject and the
barriers that many women face in even becoming
economically self-sufficient. Against its own assertion
that the non-feminist conditions of baby boomers'
upbringings have disappeared, the film would seem to be
evidence that contemporary women are often seduced into
the reproduction of those same non-liberated conditions by
many of the discourses surrounding the current baby boom.
175
1 Tania Modleski, "Three Men and Baby M"; Marsha Kinder,
"Back to the Future in the 80s with Fathers & Sons,
Supermen & Peewees, Gorillas & Toons," Film Quarterly 42,
no. 4 (Summer 1989); and Lucy Fischer, "Sometimes I Feel
Like a Motherless Child: Comedy and Matricide," in
Comedy/Cinema/Theory. ed. Andrew S. Horton (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1991).
2 Modleski, "Three Men and a Baby": 80.
3 See Marilyn Campbell, "RKO's Fallen Women, 1930-1933,"
Velvet Light Trap, no.10 (Fall 1973); Lea Jacobs, The
Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film. 1928-
1942 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991);
Richard Maltby, "Baby Face or How Joe Breen Made Barbara
Stanwyck Atone for Causing the Wall Street Crash," Screen
27, no. 2 (March/April 1986); Christian Viviani, "Who is
Without Sin? The Maternal Melodrama in American Film
1930-1939," trans. Dolores Burdick, Wide Angle 4, no. 2
(1980).
4 Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin.
5 Ibid., 113.
6 Jacobs, in The Wages of Sin, discusses the Payne Fund
Studies of 1933 in terms of how it warned of adolescent
girls possibly imitating "kept" women they see on the
screen. See especially pp. 4-5.
7 Mary Beth Haralovich, "The Proletarian Woman's Film of
the 193 0s: Contending with Censorship and Entertainment,"
Screen 31, no. 2 (Summer 1990).
8 See Andrew Horton's editor's introduction to
Comedy/Cinema/Theory for a survey of many of the theories
of comedy which emphasize reversals.
9 See Linda Williams, "'Something Else Besides a Mother':
Stella Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama," and chapter 3
in Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire.
10 Mary Beth Haralovich, "The Proletarian Woman's Film":
173 .
11 Ibid.
12 Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin. 41.
176
13 John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate
Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York:
Harper & Row, 1988), 150-156.
14 This suggests that every woman is subject to
contemporary discourses of maternity, no matter what her
class, whether she is lesbian or heterosexual, a
biological mother or womb mother or adoptive mother. That
these discursive practices extend to concerns of male
property suggests that even women who do not mother are
still affected.
15 Phyllis Chesler, Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Babv M
(New York: Vintage Books, 1989); Janice Doane and Devon
Hodges, ' ’Risky Business: Familial Ideology and the Case
of Baby M," Differences 1, no. 1 (1988); Maureen Turim,
"Viewing/Reading Born to Be Sold: Martha Rosier Reads the
Strange Case of Babv S/M or Motherhood in the Age of
Technological Reproduction," Discourse 13, no. 2 (Spring-
Summer 1991).
16 Janice Doane and Devon Hodges, "Risky Business": 70.
17 This is not to suggest that Elizabeth Stern is not also
a victim of the Baby M case. Like Mary Beth Whitehead and
many contemporary women, she must have felt enormous
pressure and desire to "mother," even when it was not
physically safe for her to do so. See Turim,
"Viewing/Reading," for a sensitive discussion of Elizabeth
Stern's positioning within the public discourse on Baby M.
18 The legal support for men in surrogacy custody disputes
may be becoming more tenuous. After this paper was
completed, an April 1991 surrogacy custody case was
settled in the California Superior Court of Orange County
with primary custody granted to the surrogate mother who
bore a child for a married couple who split up after
receiving the child. This case was unusual for a number
of reasons: the judge was a woman; the surrogate—
biological mother who had served as both "egg" and
"gestational" mother— was judged in part as a fit mother
for custody because she had also "acted" like a mother in
the period since the baby's birth and the trial, which was
evidenced by her showing concern for the best welfare for
the child rather than for herself; and the surrogate
mother, has indicated that after gaining custody, she will
give visitation rights to the former wife of the
biological father who must now relinquish primary custody
rights to the childi
177
19 Phyllis Chesler, Sacred Bond: The Legacy of Babv M
(New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 41, See Maureen Turim,
"Viewing/Reading," for a discussion of how Chesler
"essentializes" surrogate mothering.
2° see Christian Viviani, "Who is Without Sin."
21 Linda Singer, "Bodies— Pleasures— Powers," Differences
1, no. 1 (1988): 62. The phrase "boom for whom" is also
used in her article.
22 Ibid., 57.
23 In one scene, J.C. does collapse in a dead faint after
an impassioned attempt to try to get a plumber to
understand her burdened economic and social predicament as
a new stay-at-home mother. In this scene, Keaton can't
keep still, stuttering and wildly gesticulating before
fainting in a backwards pratfall.
178
Part III
Chapter 5
Meetings with Mother:
Feminist Counter-Cinema and the Maternal
An examination of feminist counter-cinema is crucial
to any study of the relation between historical discourses
of mothering and filmic representations of the maternal.
Whether conceptualized as scapegoats for daughterly anger
at the patriarchy, as victims of patriarchal rule over
social organization, or as symbols of female creativity
and power, configurations of the mother, mothering, the
maternal, women as reproducers of the species and
ideology, have been central to the women's movement and to
feminist theory. Many of the women directing films
within a feminist context or whose films have been
appropriated for feminist readings have been influenced by
the variety of discourses of mothering that circulated
within the women's movement, and in some cases, by
feminist film theories (discussed in chapter one)
concerning how the maternal functions as a grounding for
primary identification and as a signifier of castration.
Several films made by women in the 1970s and 1980s
which take the mother and/or the maternal as their main
subject, object, or trope are: Daughter Rite (Michele
179
Citron), which combines staged cinema verite scenes of two
sisters talking about their mother with home movie footage
of a mother and daughters backed by a highly subjective
voice-over recounting dreams about the maternal; Riddles
of the Sphinx (Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen), which
juxtaposes a prolonged discourse on the maternal myth
embodied in the sphinx with images of the social realities
of mothering in contemporary Western Europe; Ties That
Bind (Su Friedrich), which uses experimental video
techniques with traditional documentary interviews to
create a portrait of the filmmaker's German born mother
that will also interrogate Nazi Germany's ideal of
femininity; Malou (Jeanine Meerapfel), which experiments
with temporal structures in an otherwise traditional
narrative context to depict a daughter's search for her
Nazi collaborator mother; and Germany. Pale Mother (Helma
Sanders-Brahms) and Meetings with Anna (Chantal Akerman),
the two films discussed in this chapter.
Feminist interpretations or re-writings of
psychoanalytic theories of the maternal have been, as I
argued in Chapter one, the most influential in feminist
film theory. But while these psychoanalytically-informed
film theories exploring the maternal have only recently
focused on the historical dimensions of discourses on
mothering, many feminist filmmakers concerned with
maternal themes have been attentive to issues of
historical (and, in some cases, national) specificity for
some time. Both Helma Sanders-Brahms in Germany. Pale
Mother (1979) and Chantal Akerman in Meetings with Anna
(1978) suggest that mother-daughter relationships have
profound implications for the artistic and political work
of the daughter (filmmaker). These implications are in
part understood in terms of the differing historical
formations of the mother and the daughter. The mother's
historical formation has resulted in her acceptance of the
traditional role of wife and mother, while the daughter's
historical formation within the women's movement has meant
not merely "more options," but more importantly, a
politicized understanding of her mother's positioning
within patriarchy. Both filmmakers also show an awareness
of the way classical cinematic mechanisms have constructed
the maternal (and the "feminine" in general), a fact which
makes their films enter into an intertextual space with
cinema produced under the patriarchy and with the feminist
film theory which has critiqued that classical cinema.1
The Maternal and Feminist Counter-Cinema's
Mechanisms of Identification
In this chapter, I will argue that the two feminist
film texts under examination here are exemplary of the way
feminist counter-cinema has employed visual and narrative
181
strategies not so much to deconstruct, as to provide
alternatives to the mechanisms by which the classical
cinema has won spectatorial identification through "a
compulsive play on the terror/pleasure opened up by
difference and process, but predicated on the safety of an
already known closure."2 In addition to thematizing the
mother-daughter relationship in the films' narratives,
both Germany. Pale Mother and Meetings with Anna suggest
ways that spectatorial identification and pleasure might
be engaged through the solicitation of another kind of
subject— a subject constituted in similarity to the lost
object of desire (the mother), whose displacement is
represented in/as narrative in the patriarchal classical
cinema. The attempt to conceptualize this alternative
address grows from the filmmakers' commitment to exploring
the specificity of feminine subjectivity and to finding a
way to tell the "herstory" of their mother's generation— a
commitment they share with many women who, like Sanders-
Brahms and Akerman, came of age during the women's
movement. Of her film Jeanne Dielman. Akerman has said:
I didn't escape from my mother. This is a
love film to my mother. It gives
recognition to that kind of woman, it
gives her "a place in the sun."3
Akerman's remark shares the desire for validating the
maternal that characterizes feminist theories examining
the construction of feminine subjectivity in terms of
interrelational capacities. Theorists Nancy Chodorow and
Carol Gilligan argue that female subjectivity is defined
by a relational capacity to experience others more as an
extension of self. Their re-readings of the
psychoanalytical account of the Oedipus conflict form the
basis for this claim: the Oedipal complex is not
significant so much for its establishment of sexual
difference, as it is for its establishment of different
relational capacities for male and females. Girls do not
have to give up attachment to their mothers entirely
during or after the Oedipal phase, so that they grow up
with more permeable ego boundaries. Consequently, girls
grow up with ability for personal identifications embedded
in ongoing, internalized relationships. Both Chodorow and
Gilligan contextualize their re-reading of the Oedipal
phase and its outcome within a feminist tradition of
"women-centered" analysis that attempts to redress the
denigration of female subjectivity in patriarchal culture.
Gilligan even takes on Freud's belief that women have
weaker super-egos because they do not identify with the
Father, and suggests that women's judgmental capacity is
not inferior to men's, but different in that women's sense
of connectedness encourages an inclusion of other points
of view in assessing moral behavior.
Yet if we read the subtext of Akerman's remark that
she "didn't escape" (emphasis mine) from her mother, it
reveals an ambivalence towards the mother-daughter
closeness. Ambivalence also characterizes much of the
feminist theory that explores female subjectivity as a
product of mother-daughter fusion. French theorist Luce
Irigaray, for instance, has problematized the empowering
potential of the woman's permeable ego boundaries,
particularly as this condition exists in the mother-
daughter relationship. She examines the unstable ego
boundaries between mother and daughter, and identifies the
mother as source of nurturance, but also of psychic
paralysis. Irigaray puts emancipation from "our fathers"
high on her agenda, but this liberation cannot be achieved
without daughters freeing themselves from the psychic hold
their mothers have over them. Freedom from the mother is
necessary for the revolutionary act of one recognizing
another who is "neither sister nor mother."4 Although
Irigaray envisions a situation in which mothers and
daughters will relate to one another from reciprocity and
mutuality, she suggests that the confused ego boundaries
between mother and daughter as they exist now in
patriarchy are problematic for the goals of feminist
transformation.
184
Likewise, Jane Flax describes an anger daughters feel
towards their mothers "for not possessing the sort of
power that could free both of them from the dependency on
each other and on the father, and which could provide the
daughter with a means of entry to the outside world."5
Although Flax's argument is sympathetic enough with the
daughter's anger to verge on blaming the mother for
keeping the daughter dependent, she does critique
patriarchal society for enforcing a split between women's
access to nurturance (through the mother) and access to
autonomy (through the father).
As Jane Gallop and Susan Rubin Suleiman have pointed
out, of the theories exploring the maternal and feminine
subjectivity, the work of Julia Kristeva is exceptional in
that she often writes from the mother's position rather
than from the daughter's.6 But the conceptualizations of
the maternal in relation to symbolic discourse and female
empowerment have varied widely over the course of
Kristeva's work, and are of varying usefulness for
feminist theory. For example, in the various essays
collected in Desire in Language. Kristeva envisions the
maternal as a condition of "an internal heterogeneity"
which the mother cannot command; it is best expressed in
the state of pregnancy in which the mother experiences the
child as one and yet the other. Before and after birth,
the child experiences language in coincidence with the
rhythms of the mother's body. Kristeva sees this
"semiosis" (the expressions of those pulsations,
sensations, etc. that the child and mother experience) as
opposed to the symbolic discourse of (Lacan's) Name-of-
the-father, so that its eruption in, for instance, the
writing of certain avant-garde poets and novelists, is
subversive.7 Yet, Kristeva only admits the possibility of
this eruption in the writing of male authors, for the
experience of the maternal-autoerotic body positions women
close to hysteria or even psychosis. In Powers of
Horror. Kristeva conceptualizes the social construction of
the maternal as abject by examining cultural rituals which
allow members of that culture to project all those
"unclean" aspects of themselves onto the mother.8 Yet, as
Kaja Silverman and Tania Modleski have suggested,
Kristeva's most recent work on the "imaginary father"
abjects or rejects the role of the maternal in the
construction of subjectivity except in so far as the
mother introduces the child into a "loving life" through
her desire for the phallus/male Other.9
Given what seems to be little space for negotiation
between conceptualizations of the maternal which validate
the permeable ego boundaries between mother and daughter
and those that position the mother and daughter in
186
proximity to psychosis or paralysis, what kind of
intervention is possible for the feminist filmmaker who
desires to explore feminine subjectivity and female
empowerment in relation to the mother-daughter bond? One
aspect of this intervention might be to create films which
solicit the engagement of a spectator constructed in
relation to a closeness with the maternal, but not assume
that the spectator is constituted in terms of hysteria (a
state of being in closeness to one's body as the daughter
is close to the mother) or in terms of a judgmental
"distance," as is the possessor of the male analytical
gaze, who reads and evaluates the symptoms of female
hsyteria (as the doctor or analyst does in the woman's
films which depict female madness). This means conceiving
of a spectator who can sympathize, even empathize, with
the position of the mother, but who can maintain the
distance necessary to an understanding of how mothers have
functioned in and for the patriarchy. One possible
implication of this intervention is filmic representations
suggesting that the notion of closeness or the
reversibility of positions between mothers and daughters
has to do with a symbolic exchange in which power
disparities and historical differences are acknowledged.
The feminist daughter is constituted in difference from
the mother because of that feminism, which represents new
187
social formations and new understandings of power
resulting from the historical occurrence of the women's
movement. This kind of intervention, I would argue, is in
agreement with what a group of Italian feminists have
developed as "entrustment" between women. In this
relationship one woman entrusts herself to another woman
who, because of her acknowledged "superior" power, will
function as "symbolic mother" or guide. According to
Teresa De Lauretis, "both women engage in the
relationship...not in spite but rather because and in full
recognition of the disparity that may exist between them
in class or social position, age, level of education,
professional status, income, etc." This bond comes out of
a belief that mutual trust between women of unequal powers
is possible because disparity is understood as "invested
in women by dint of their subjection to the institutions
of the male social contract."10 The process of
entrustment, and the possibility that it may characterize
filmic representations of the mother-daughter relation and
the relationship between spectator and the filmic
construction of the maternal evokes Luce Irigaray's
utopian vision of a future mother-daughter bond:
It will be necessary for us somehow to
mourn an all-powerful maternal presence
(the last refuge) and to establish with
our mothers a relationship of reciprocity
woman to woman, where they could also
eventually feel themselves to be our
188
daughters. In sum, to liberate ourselves
with our mothers. . . . The
mother/daughter relation constitutes an
extremely explosive core in our
societies.11
Germany. Pale Mother, a film written and directed by
German feminist filmmaker, Helma Sanders-Brahms, employs
various textual strategies to continually question and
critique the reality status of narrative and history. The
film simultaneously acknowledges the positive lure of
merging with the (psychically) powerful mother and the
strength gained by the daughter's entry into the symbolic,
from which she can use discourse to give witness, to
accuse, and to disengage from the primary narcissism of
the mother-daughter relationship, and take a political
stance against the patriarchy, fascism, and the mother's
place within these two discourses which have been
historically articulated together.
Meetings with Anna, a film written and directed by
Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman, exposes the hunger for
mothering felt by all subjects in post-WW II, post-modern
patriarchy. It does this by focusing on the daughter
filmmaker's unease with being positioned as a maternal
figure (by those hungering for an unconditional, mother-
love) and with her ambivalence towards her mother's
solicitous care, while also showing maternal and women-
centered love to sustain artistic creation. In the
contemporary Western European society of Akerman's film— a
189
society characterized by a weakened national identity
(yet, with a residue of fascism), the dispersion of
parents and children, the sexual "liberation" of women,
and general social isolation— many individuals appear to
have a projective and individualized framework for
comprehending social behavior. That is, they cannot
understand their feelings of rootlessness and longing for
the mother as contingent on social and political changes
occuring in their historical moment.
Germany Pale Mother and The Maternal
Germany. Pale Mother is the story of a politically
"neutral" German man and woman who marry just as Europe is
entering World War II. Hans, the husband, is drafted into
the artillery, and as he is progressively worn out
learning to kill (often civilian women) on the
battlefront, his wife Lene gains strength on the
devastated homefront. Lene gives birth to their baby Anna
during an air raid, and after their home is bombed out,
travels with her to Berlin. At the home of Lene's wealthy
Nazi cousins, Lene and Anna spend a few nights with Hans,
who expresses his jealousy of baby Anna's closeness with
his wife. After Hans's departure, Lene and Anna continue
their travels, changing their direction back towards home
190
i when the war ends in Germany's defeat. As they walk, Lene
1 entertains and teaches Anna with fairy-tales. At one
point she is raped by drunk American soldiers while Anna
watches in mute sympathy. Once home, the two survive with
other "Trummerfrauen" (women who rebuilt German cities
from the remaining rubble) in makeshift housing until
their men have come home and the restoration of "normalcy"
begins. When Hans returns and the country begins to
rebuild its patriarchal familial and economic structures,
the strength and autonomy Lene developed during the war
are denied. At this point, she becomes paralyzed on one
side of her face (an inability to control her face which
is prefigured earlier in the film when her face starts
twitching as Hans tells Lene that the child is sapping all
of her strength). Hans passively agrees with a dentist's
decision to pull all her teeth. Lene is devastated and
begins a process of further psychological and physical
disintegration. Hans, depressed by Lene's inability to
keep the family going through a cheerful repression of the
past and by a German administration favoring the promotion
of de-nazified bureaucrats, leaves her and the child.
Lene closes herself in the bathroom and attempts suicide
until saved by her young daughter, Anna. The film ends
with this rescue and the grown daughter's voice-over,
191
which laments that it sometimes seems as if Lene was still
behind that bathroom door.
Germany. Pale Mother has been the subject of numerous
critiques since its release in the United States (and its
release in the 16 mm film rental market, where it is one
of the few films directed by German feminists
available).12 These critiques all agree that the film is
important because it exposes the contradictions in the
places the patriarchy assigns female desire and the
(female) Oedipal trajectory. They argue that the film's
most powerful weapon is its contention that the mother-
daughter bonding threatens patriarchy. By reasserting
this bonding and making it the focus of the Oedipal
relationships here— with the father, as Chodorow suggests,
a "second best" object of desire— the film also exposes a
culturally repressed fantasy of the daughter.
The critiques do not agree on the general goal of the
film (apart from the displacement of the father within the
Oedipal conflict) or on the number and success of the
anti-realist or "distancing" devices. The issue of the
film's anti-realist or "distancing" stance is not only
pertinent to the context of a feminist re-writing of the
mother-daughter relationship I've been discussing here,
but also to the context of the film's re-writing of the
history of Germany under fascism. This latter context is
undeniably important. For Ellen Seiter and Angelika
Bammer (although Bammer doesn't completely condemn the
film), for instance, the film does not problematize the
mother in terms of historical responsibility for what
happened in Nazi Germany. Seiter sees the film's use of
documentary footage of the war as entirely recuperated for
and within the film's diegesis (rather than as self-
conscious interruptions), conveying that history is
relevant only to the extent that has it itensifies the
psychological problems of individuals. Bammer argues that
the film goes to such links to show sympathy for Lene's
ignorance of what the Nazis are doing, that she seems
outside of history, and therefore not responsible for it.
Arguing in a somewhat similar vein, E. Ann Kaplan has
difficulty with what she identifies as the film's
validation of an idealized mother in its insistence on a
transparent relationship between Lene and Anna and a "real
mother" and a "real daughter" (Helma Sanders-Brahms and
her mother). According to Kaplan, this is problematic in
a film which does not represent how Nazism constructed an
image of the "holy" mother in service of the Third Reich.
These charges are significant. Any film appearing to
be sympathetic to gentile Germans during the war by not
having the distance necessary to condemn them is subject
to attack for its potential repression of German guilt for
193
the persecution and extermination of Jews, homosexuals,
communists, and others during the Third Reich. And while
I agree with Kaplan that the film could have been more
firmly historicized if it placed its use of the 'maternal'
in the context of Nazism's particular presentations of the
"holy" mother, the film is working through new
understandings of history, not only by placing the mother
(and therefore placing gender specificity and sexual
difference) at the center of this history of fascism and
World War II, but also in its focus on the children of
this period, who are adults in the 1960s, 1970s, and
1980s, when this and other films and literature like it
were being produced. Anton Kaes places this film, as well
as the New German cinema and the Vaterliteratur (novels,
stories, and biographies in which sons looked at the WW II
generation of German fathers with great ambivalence)
within the context of a new kind of history writing that
seeks to show the harmfulness of repressing the past and
how the fascist past continues in the present.
But to say that the film is a new kind of history
writing is not a sufficient defense against the points
made by Seiter and Bammer. The film's notion of history
may still not include an understanding of Lene's
responsibility. I would argue that the problem these
critics identify with Lene's ignorant complicity with
194
fascism is also identified by the film itself and is
related to its working through of mother-daughter history
as well as German history.
First of all, the film's narrative is constructed
through a first person voice-over authored by grown
daughter Anna commenting on the story events, as well as
through a more realist third person narration in which the
characters act and speak for themselves. The narration
includes events that happened before Anna's birth or when
she was very young, and the voice-over reminds us of the
constructed nature of this scenes and how much the
construction is in the self-interest of the daughter's
(and Sanders-Brahms') project of showing up the
contradictions in her parents' "non-political" behavior
and emphasizing the political nature of her own decisions
as feminist and story teller. On her parents' wedding
night for example, Anna admits that she can only envision
her father's face as old, as it was after the war, which
calls attention to a decision about representation—
Sanders-Brahms casting choice of an older actor (Ernest
Jacobi) to play Hans, while Anna is played by a younger
Eva Mattes. And over the tender scenes of her parents'
shy love-making, the grown Anna in voice-over claims she
has learned from her parents never to marry. This comment
not only undercuts the romanticism of the scene, but
exposes that the daughter is aware of the political nature
of personal decisions. Here, Anna is self-consciously
calling attention to her difference— for a feminist
growing up in post-War Germany, marriage is no longer
understood as a merely personal decision, but one which
links the personal to the political and the individual to
the social body. At another point, Anna's voice-over
suggests that Lene's belief in the neutrality of personal
decisions had serious implications for those persecuted by
fascism. Lene is looking for thread in a trashed-out
store once owned by Jews, who have been taken by the SS.
She expresses surprise that such old people— even if they
were Jews— would be taken. Not only is it evident that
Lene does know that Jews are being persecuted, but it is
also evident that Lene's understanding of the political
nature of such actions is severely limited by the
personalized or individualized nature of its framework for
comprehending social behavior. As Lene denies
understanding of the fascist persecution of Jews through
her single-minded pursuit of a colored thread (for the
blouse she is embroidering to wear on Hans' leave), Anna's
voice over accuses her: "I accuse you. You did not want
it. You did nothing to stop it." But Anna counters
accusations with admittance that her own generation might
not act any differently. Although this could be used as
I 196 '
i
| evidence that Sanders-Brahms is too "close" to her mother
| and absolves her of responsibility, it also can be read as J
| a painfully honest admittance of the presence of fascism !
| in contemporary Germany— even among those who hate their i
i j
j parents for repressing Germany's guilt for the past— and a I
I '
[ refusal to phallicize the feminist discourse of the ;
, I
j daughter who is now acting as "symbolic mother" to Lene. I
i # ;
| Anna's historical difference from Lene contributes to her i
understanding of the political nature of the personal, but
does not guarantee her innocence or free her from her own
construction as a historical subject.
While I concede Seiter's point that the strategy of
I making the documentary footage of the war part of the
1
diegesis weakens its use as a device for calling attention |
j to the existence of history as something more than what
j happens to private individuals, the footage is juxtaposed
i to fully diegeticized scenes in which the mise-en-scene
I
I
j suggests a wider context than Lene's understanding of
| history allows. For example, documentary footage of
’ bombed-out buildings and of a war orphan are intercut with j
: i
j Lene and Anna trekking through the German countryside. j
! Lene seems to grow stronger in proportion to the weakening j
jof the Third Reich. Her narration to Anna of "The Robber |
i
, Bridegroom," a fairy-tale recounting a young woman's
i
discovery that her husband is a robber and murderer of
197
women, is evidence that Lene has not only found her
| :
I "voice," but that she can use it to teach Anna of the
» i
I
f dangers of patriarchy for women. What is beyond Lene's
i
' understanding, but not that of Sanders-Brahms, is that the
! tale also has relevance to the German state and their
i
: murdering of people considered "undesirable." Lene and (
l
J Anna wander about an abandoned building that is probably j
j an old mill; but its smokestack and furnace remind the j
)spectator, if not Lene, of the gas chambers of Nazi !
i !
j concentration camps for Jews, communists, homosexuals,
etc. When Lene exclaims, as she tells the tale, "Escape j
young woman, this is the house of murderers," she is !
unwittingly commenting on what we, as well as the grown
Anna and Sanders-Brahms (for whom Anna is a surrogate)
I
know to be the true about Germany's "final solution" as j
| well as patriarchy's victimization of women. Anna's !
! . I
jvoice-over need not tell us this, the mise-en-scene |
,against which the tale is told by Lene can convey this j
1 i
ironically. !
I
i Through tales, Lene can pass on her unconscious fears j
j of men (even of the one she married); through the film's
I
; parodic narrative strategy (by reinscribing other well-
I known tales) and mise-en-scene, the spectator can also see |
i
Lene's inability to link patriarchy and fascism. In an
| essay on New German cinema and ideological parody, Marsha
198
Kinder brilliantly argues that this film situates the
spectator historically and ideologically through its
hypertextuality. She contends that Sanders-Brahms
cultivates "a hypertextuality. . .that sets the film
against many different works from multiple contexts,” such
as classical Hollywood film, New German cinema, Brecht's
ironic poem Deutschland. and fairy tales such as The
Robber Bridegroom, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella, and
directs the "spectator's attention to the specific
transformative changes." According to Kinder, multiple
texts "are needed in order to show the pervasiveness of
patriarchal hegemony across the borders of contrasting
cultures, ideologies, historical periods, art forms,
genres, and super regimes" and to suggest that the
hegemony can be subverted when these discourses are
appropriated by a voice and gaze of a feminist who has
rejected the placement of her and her mother in the
patriarchy.13
Kinder also argues that the film exposes, through its
deglamourization of beauty, how patriarchal and fascist
discourses were articulated together to control the
representation of Woman. She mentions Lene's facial
paralysis as symbolically registering the split between
patriarchal representations of woman as castrating and as
beautiful object of desire. In conclusion to this
199
discussion, I would like to turn to Lene's facial
paralysis, but in an exploration of the veil that she
takes to wearing on the disfigured side of her face. As
Mary Ann Doane has recently argued in an essay examining
the trope of the veil in the work of Lacan and Nietzsche,
the veiled woman in classical Hollywood cinema functions
to isolate and contain "the precariousness of vision."14
I would argue that, in the context of Germany, Pa1e
Mother, the veil's usual function of containing the
instability of vision by ensuring the spectator's phallic
omnipotence and superior epistemological position is
displaced for the examination and working-through of the
ambivalent mother-daughter relationship.
Lene's split face (one side paralyzed, one side
healthy) and the veil covering the paralyzed half function
to self-consciously— almost theatrically— suggest a number
of splits associated with the mother in the psychoanalytic
perspective on mother-child relations and cinema
spectatorship. According to psychoanalysis, the mother's
power and illusory wholeness is split between functioning
as a comfort and a threat. In the psychoanalytic account
of spectatorial pleasure, the cinema plays on a split
between presence and absence. In other words, the cinema
as imaginary signifier creates meaning in the play between
presence/absence, similarity/difference. In our
200
patriarchal culture, the mother's body is always "behind"
or an anchor for those plays of presence/absence,
similarity/difference. By veiling the woman/mother,
presence and absence is signified simultaneously. The
presence for the mother is intensified as her absence is
continually suggested by the veil, just as the phallus is
more valued under the threat of its castration. So, on
the one hand, the veiled Lene surely evokes the powerful
erotic lure the child feels towards the mother. When Anna
expresses in voice over that as a child she desired to be
a "witch" with Lene, flying over the ruins of Germany, she
exposes a longing for union with this powerful, phallic
mother.
Yet, on the other hand, the veil can only suggest
that the mother was once beautiful because we know it now
covers Lene's disfigurement. Behind the veil lies not
wholeness, but lack. While this acknowledgment might be
an invitation for a nostalgic reverie about the mother as
she once was, it might also be an exposure of the phallic
mother as fantasy and of the veil as a repression of
women's history. After all, what the veil is hiding is
the history of Lene's life in the war, which now, in a
return of the repressed, is erupting as bodily symptom and
read by post-war German society as Lene's inability to
sustain the woman's subordinate place in the post-war
201
nuclear family. What the spectator, constructed like Anna
in a post-war, post-women's movement moment, can also read
is how the veil cannot hide the fact that women were
expected to sustain their subordinate place in post-war
society by repressing their autonomy— in other words, by
masochistically hiding their strength.
According to Mary Ann Doane (in her work on the
Hollywood woman's film genre), displays of female hysteria
and masochism invite the feminized spectator's
overinvestment and overidentification with the woman's
plight, which will be re-directed by a male analyst who
can recover the necessary distance for evaluation and
discursive mastery. In Germany. Pale Mother. our
evaluative gaze is directed at the mother's hysterical
masochism, but by the feminist daughter. The daughter's
replacement of herself for the male doctor/husband/father
who guides our gaze directs the look at how the repression
of female sexuality and autonomy under fascism erupts in
masochistic hysteria, which then acts in collusion with
fascism to keep women in their place and effectively
repress mother-daughter desire.
The action of the character Anna (fictional daughter)
and the filmmaker Sanders-Brahms (the "real" daughter) is
to reject the passivity of the mother and make a social or
political intervention. The little Anna does this most
202
dramatically by saving her mother from a suicide attempt.
The older Anna, standing in for Sanders-Brahms, does this
by testifying through this story to her mother's strength
and to her complicity in her own (and Germany's)
destruction. This is achieved by remembering what Lene
had once told Hans that Anna would never know or would
forget: Lene's "herstory" during the war, when she
briefly found her voice in the collapse of the traditional
social order.
But while the mother's passivity is rejected, the
mother must still be saved from self-destruction. In the
film's final words and images, Lene and Anna embrace, but
do not look at one another. In this disengagement of the
powerful mother's gaze towards the child, the reversal of
mother-daughter roles is made possible. In voice-over,
the adult Anna laments that although "Lene is still here,"
she sometimes feels as if her mother were still behind the
door. Yet the lament is also a plea, in Irigaray's words,
for reciprocity between mother and daughter. Lene's
presence made Anna's creativity possible, now Anna's
desire is to make that presence meaningful for both mother
and daughter as they exist in their historical difference.
203
Meetings With Anna and The Maternal
Chantal Akerman's Meetings With Anna also depicts
mother-daughter ambivalence in terms of historical
difference, but in a very different manner. As the
reviews of the film by Marsha Kinder and Meg Morley
contend, Meetings with Anna, like so many of Akerman's
films, self-consciously calls attention to the reading
process through its use of extreme long-takes, static
camera set-ups, impeccably symmetrical mise-en-scene
configurations, and thematics centered on the failure of
communication.15 Spectatorial overidentification or
overinvestment in the mother-daughter dynamic is not
invited by the address of this film. Akerman's position
in history— in the history of film— is recalled in this
refusal of typical spectatorial pleasure. This divestment
in spectatorial pleasure familiar to the classical film
experience and Akerman's claim that Godard's Pierrot le
Fou inspired her to become a filmmaker place her in the
tradition of the French New Wave, which radically
intervened in the cultural politics of the 1960s in part
by making films refusing to give the spectator unself-
conscious voyeuristic and fetishistic pleasures. Yet
Akerman differs from the male filmmakers influenced by the
experiments of the New Wave. She shares with directors
making feminist counter-cinema the desire to not only
204
claim the gendered nature of spectatorship, but to depict
ignored or to expose patriarchally-inflected
representations of women's lives, including their
mothering activities. Meetings with Anna provides many of
the phenomenological experiences of experimental—
including New Wave— cinema, but it sympathetically
represents the reality of the subject's longing for a
maternal presence, while investigating the productiveness
of the longing's manifestations.
The film traces a few days in the life of Anna, a
filmmaker who is currently traveling western Europe
showing her latest film. As in all of Akerman's films,
the iterative nature of the character's activity is part
of the film's focus and reflection on the process of
filmic narration. We gather that not only has Anna
travelled like this many times showing films, but that she
often engages in one night stands on the road, that she
often feels ambivalent about her meetings with or calls to
friends while travelling. Her impassive demeanor has
probably inspired the confidences of strangers before as
well, although we learn, as Kinder suggests, that this
impassiveness is from Anna's desire to keep her
expectations of others low.
On this particular trip between Germany and Paris
(she takes a detour to Brussels to see her mother) she has
five main encounters: a one night stand with a male
German school teacher, a brief meeting with a friend of
her mother's who also happens to be the mother of Anna's
ex-fiance, a conversation with a stranger on the train to
Brussels, a night with her own mother, and part of a night
with a male lover on her return to Paris. What ties all
of these meetings together is how they manifest a need for
feelings of fusion or connection, a hunger that is
suggestive of the lure of the child for union with the
comforting mother. Even the briefest and least
emotionally charged of these encounters, the chance
meeting with the stranger on the train, is evocative of
this desire. The stranger, a German brought up in Spain,
speaks to Anna of a former girlfriend who, like a mother,
taught him language. In this case she taught him how to
speak French; he tells Anna how he realized she was no
longer interested in him when she started teaching someone
else— he's like a child jealous of his mother's attention
to a rival sibling. He is now on his way to France to
meet some other woman; we know he is driven to recreate
that mother-son relationship with a new, "mysterious"
French woman.
Anna's first two and fourth encounters are perhaps
the most suggestive in terms of how Akerman exposes the
historical foundation for the characters' maternal
longings. In Anna's one-night stand and subsequent lunch
the following day with the German schoolteacher, what is
most apparent is Anna's resistance to his positioning of
her as a maternal figure. In the middle of their
lovemaking, she asks him to leave, saying she does not
love him. In response to his ardent involvement, she
feels nothing. She seems afraid to lead him to believe
that she cares for him. Her fear is well founded, because
when she goes with him to his house the next day for lunch
(with his mother and daughter), it is apparent he is
looking for feelings from Anna she cannot provide. He
tells her of a series of eruptions in his relationships
with those closest to him. His father, who first planted
the garden that he now tends so lovingly, died in
Stalingrad during the war. Yet, the father's absence
seems recent; there is a determination and deadliness
about the son's willingness to guard the memory of his
father over thirty years later. He also tells Anna that
his wife recently ran away with a Turk. He mourns her
leaving as he speaks of how, in bed at night, she used to
wrap her legs around his body. It was so soothing, he
felt like one with her. And his best friend was fired
from his job and moved from Germany after being branded
subversive. Although he is nostalgic when recounting the
closeness between him and this friend since childhood, he
does seem capable of understanding their enforced
separation as the result of political changes in
contemporary Germany, where fascism is returning under a
new guise. However, he is not able to project the
workings of politics and history onto his wife's
discontent. She had given up her job when their child was
born, so her running away seems possibly motivated out of
a desire to escape her confinement. Perhaps her decision
reflects changes made visible to women because of the
women's movement, just as her choice of lovers (a Turk)
reflects a new social and racial configuration in the
post-war Germany of the 1960s and 1970s— a period in which
there was an enormous influx of foreign workers
(gastarbeiters) into Germany, resulting in a re-fueled
racism and a neo-nazi movement in contemporary Germany.
And just as he projects only personalized motives onto his
wife and her actions because he is blind to his own
political motives (his racism and desire to retreat from
the complexities of modern existence), so he projects his
own loneliness and need for unity and completion onto
Anna. To his surprise, she leaves his house resisting
such a maternal positioning as he laments, "I feel so
alone." He cannot see that in many ways Anna shares more
with his runaway wife than she does with him. Anna may
have gone to bed with him, but historically— in her sexual
208
freedom and desire to escape traditional feminine
positioning— she has more in common with his wife and
women in the feminist movement.
Anna's meeting with Ida, the friend of her mother's
and the mother of a fiance Anna has rejected twice, is
also characterized by the other's investment of desire in
Anna. Ida and her family, like Anna's, moved from Germany
to Belgium at the outbreak of the war, and has lived most
of her adult life speaking a foreign tongue. But Ida has
recently moved back to Germany with her husband and the
son once engaged to Anna. She tells Anna it is like they
never left, though in the next line she says everyone is
dead there and all their friends are in Belgium. Ida's
feelings of lack, of displacement are also exposed in her
continual questioning of Anna's happiness. Although she
expresses desire to believe Anna is happy being an
independent woman and an artist, she can't help projecting
her unhappiness over her own deracination onto Anna. She
warns Anna that without children a woman has nothing (yet
she also speaks out bitterly against her oldest son, who
never visits since he has moved to America). She tries to
push her younger son on Anna, yet she complains that since
the war her husband has been unbearable. What is clear
from this encounter is that some women of Ida's
generation— which is the generation of Anna's mother— who
209
imagine women of the next generation to be unhappy and
unfulfilled, are projecting their own sense of
unfulfillment onto these women who have attained
independence from traditional family ties. Like the
German schoolteacher, Ida is not jealous of Anna's
independence and career because it offers options she
doesn't have, but because it prevents Anna from desiring
to join them and make them feel "whole." Ida wants her
for a daughter-in-law so she can feel close to Anna, to
her own son, and to Anna's mother who is far away in
Belgium.
Given that these earlier encounters resulted in
Anna's subjection to the neediness of others, the meeting
with her mother in Brussels is surprisingly positive and,
therefore, all the more powerful. Anna's mother had
phoned Anna several times on this trip without
successfully reaching her. Anna took the messages from
her with some curiosity, but not much excitement. She
mentions that she has not seen her mother in three years,
and she tells Ida that her mother always asks her the same
things, to which Anna always gives the same response.
This suggests that Anna's relationship with her mother
relies on conventional, phatic communication and that she
perhaps believes that her mother has nothing more to say
to her. However, ambivalence seems at least momentarily
210
discarded when Anna sees her mother at the train station.
They stare significantly at each other, like two lovers
(one thinks of the filmic convention of train station love
scenes). While they talk in a restaurant, Anna never
stops staring at her mother, even as her mother admits her
simultaneously passive and mothering relationship with
Anna's father— the kind of life Anna is obviously avoiding
in her transience and avoidance of romantic entanglements
with men. The sexual charge between Anna and her mother
and the clandestine quality to their meeting is heightened
when they go to a hotel to sleep, rather than home, which
is apparently nearby. Once in bed together, Anna begins
talking (up until this point, she has mostly listened),
eventually opening up to her mother by telling her of a
lesbian encounter she recently had. Anna describes the
brief affair positively, even though she admits being
frightened and nauseated at first. When the encounter
became pleasurable, she says she thought of her mother.
Although Anna's mother says she has never felt this way
about a woman, Anna's experience is not threatening to
her. The two agree that might be threatening to Anna's
father, and decide not to tell him.
Although Anna's encounter with her mother evidences
the degree to which each is needs the other (Anna needs to
tell her mother what she has told no one; Anna's mother
211
needs to "mother" the daughter she has not seen in three
years), the relationship shows the positivity of mutual
need in which exchange is equal and desired by both.
Although the encounter suggests that the film is flirting
with the homosexual facet of the mother-daughter
relationship, it is not idealized. Anna's mother cannot
share in Anna's life like a lover— she waits patiently and
conventionally, albeit very lovingly, for her daughter's
rare appearances, meanwhile collecting clippings of her
daughter's success. If Ida and Akerman's own mother
(whose letters Akerman reads aloud over images of deserted
New York streets in Letters From Home) are exemplary of
the mother's in Akerman's fictional world, then Anna's
mother probably doesn't understand what Anna does as an
artist or as a contemporary woman.
Yet Anna does not reject the mother's love or doubt
its sustaining value, even if she rejects the choices of
the mother. Akerman does not see historical differences
between mother and daughter as inherently threatening or
deadly. While they create divisions that may never be
bridged, mother and daughter can act in reciprocity. And
while she shows how the maternal may be mobilized in
projection mechanisms that lock people in their own world
and make political choices unavailable to them, Akerman
212
does not suggest Anna's mother projects her unfulfilled
desire onto Anna.
In Germany. Pale Mother. Lene is guilty of such
projections (she resents the reversal of roles between her
and Anna), but Sanders-Brahms still views her positioning
with understanding even as she rejects it. Together,
Sanders-Brahms and Akerman offer representations of the
mother that invite spectatorial pleasure on the basis of a
sympathetic analysis of maternal positionings in
patriarchal culture and history. While Sanders-Brahms
film, through the conventions of period narratives, is
clearly referring to and attempting to recreate a
historically recognizable world— the often represented
Germany of the Third Reich and the Economic Miracle of the
post-war— Akerman's film depicts history as existing
between the traces of a past nostalgically recalled by
subjects longing for a maternal presence and the
phenomenological and social reality of a present in which
women can resist the projection onto them of a confining
maternal. Together, the two films offer an analysis of
the maternal that seeks to dephallicize the mother in the
imaginary and empower her in history.
213
Conclusion
Although I have made distinctions between the films
discussed in this dissertation by placing them in
different thematic categories concerning the maternal, it
would be possible to refigure the combinations of films
compared and contrasted in each category. Germany. Pale
Mother. for instance, could easily fit into an analysis of
the maternal and the state— especially as part of my focus
on that category included a discussion of public memory;
while The Krays could be discussed in terms of
representations of the phallic mother. Bachelor Mother
and Babv Boom, the comedies of surrogacy, could also
figure in a discussion of the maternal and the state, as
it is the state that most often has the power of
designating the legality of surrogate parenting and
suggesting some of the boundaries for the popular
discourses about it. Now. Vovacrer could also fit into the
category of representing surrogacy, as Dr. Jaquith is
Charlotte's surrogate mother, while she is surrogate
mother to Tina. The overlapping of the thematic categories
suggests the centrality of discourses about the maternal
to our culture and to filmic representations
The maternal is a "floating" concept, but not exactly
free floating. I have argued in my analyses that it
fixates on certain gendered subjects or is intertwined
with a number of discourses— legal, psychoanalytic,
social, unconscious, conscious— that have changed in and
through history, including the history of filmmaking and
film genres. I have suggested that the changing
positionings of the maternal have had different
consequences for male and female subjects/spectators. I
hope this work has contributed to an understanding of the
maternal and film that will productively intervene in the
consumption of maternal representations. While my
analysis has not claimed historical "progress" in
representations of the maternal— but rather, that films
"work through" historical changes— my emphasis on the
importance of understanding the historical nature of
discursive practices of and about the maternal, does, I
hope, suggest their malleability and the crucial role of
feminism and feminist filmmaking in rewriting them.
215
1 See Lucy Fischer, Shot:/Countershot for an examination of
feminist counter-cinema as "a web of citations" of male
texts.
2 Christine Gledhill, "Developments in Feminist Film
Criticism," in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film
Criticism, ed. Mary Ann Doane et al. (Los Angeles: AFI
Publications, 1984), 137.
3 Chantal Akerman, quoted in Marsha Kinder, "Reflections
on Jeanne Dielman," Sexual Stratagems: The World of Women
in Film, ed. Patricia Erens (New York: Horizon Press,
1979), 249.
4 Luce Irigaray, "When Our Lips Speak Together," in This
Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 209.
5 Jane Flax, "Mother-Daughter Relationships:
Psychodynamics, Politics, and Philosophy," in The Future
of Difference, ed. Hester Eisenstein and Alice Jardine
(New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press,
1985), 34.
6 Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and
Psychoanalysis (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982);
Susan Rubin Suleiman, "Writing and Motherhood," The
(Ml other Tongue: Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic
Interpretation. ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1985).
7 Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach
to Literature and Art. ed. Leon S. Roudiez (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1980).
8 Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on
Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982).
9 Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror; Tania Modleski,
"Three Men and Baby M."
10 Teresa De Lauretis in her introduction to Sexual
Difference: A Theory of Social-Svmbolic Practice, by The
Milan Women's Bookstore Collective (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1990), 8-9.
11 Luce Irigaray, "Le corps a corps avec le mere,"
translated and quoted by Eleanor H. Kuykerdall, "Towards
an Ethic of Nurturance: Luce Irigaray on Mothering and
Power," in Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, ed. Joyce
216
Treblicot (Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Allenheld,
1983), 265.
12 Angelika Bammer, "Through a Daughter's Eyes: Helma
Sanders-Brahms' Germany, Pale Mother." New German Critique
36 (1985; Mary Desjardins, "Germany. Pale Mother and the
Maternal: Towards a Feminist Spectatorship," The
Spectator 8, no. 1 (Winter 1987); Barbara Hyams, "Is the
Apolitical Woman at Peace?: A Reading of the Fairy Tale
in Germany, Pale Mother," Wide Angle 10, no. 3 (1988);
Anton Kaes, From Hitler to Heimat: The Return of History
as Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989) ; E.
Ann Kaplan, "The Search for the Mother/land in Sanders-
Brahms' Germany. Pale Mother." German Film and Literature:
Adaptations and Transformations. ed. Eric Rentschler (New
York: Methuen, 1986); Marsha Kinder, "Ideological Parody
in the New German Cinema: Reading The State of Things.
The Desire of Veronika Voss, and Germany. Pale Mother as
Postmodernist Rewritings of The Searchers. Sunset
Boulevard, and Blonde Venus," Quarterly Review of Film and
Video 12, nos. 1-2 (1990); Ellen Seiter, "Women's
History, Womens' Melodrama: Deutschland, bleiche Mutter."
The German Quarterly (Fall 1986).
13 Marsha Kinder, "Ideological Parody," 90.
14 Mary Ann Doane, "Veiling Over Desire: Close-ups of the
Woman," in Feminism and Psychoanalysis, ed. Richard
Feldstein and Judith Roof (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1989), 107.
15 Marsha Kinder, "The Meetings of Anna," Film Quarterly
33, no. 1 (Fall 1979); Meg Morley, "Les Rendez-vous
d'Anna," Camera Obscura. nos. 3-4 (1979).
217
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Creator Desjardins, Mary Regina (author)

Core Title Meetings with the mother: The maternal and spectatorial pleasure in film

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Cinema-Television (Cinema Critical Studies)

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