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Gossip, letters, phones: The scandal of female networks in film and literature

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Gossip, letters, phones: The scandal of female networks in film and literature

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GOSSIP, LETTERS, PHONES:
THE SCANDAL OF FEMALE NETWORKS IN FILM AND LITERATURE
by
Edward Frank Schantz
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
ENGLISH
(FILM, LITERATURE, AND CULTURE)
May 2002
Copyright 2002 Edward Frank Schantz
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U M I Number 3073845
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UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
T he Graduate School
U niversity Park
L O S ANGELES. CALIFORNIA 90089-1695
This d isse rta tio n , w ritten b y
E o lu a sJ $ c k a „ ~ t-Z .
U nder th e d ire c tio n o f A is _ . D isserta tio n
C om m ittee, a n d a p p ro ved b y a ll its m em bers,
has been p re se n te d to an d a ccep ted b y The
G raduate S ch ool, in p a rtia l fu lfillm en t o f
requ irem en ts fo r th e degree o f
D O C TO R OF PHILOSOPHY
'’ De an o f G r aduat e S tu d ies
D ate May 10, 2002____________
DISSERT A W M fTTEE
/ rt f t A L
Chai rperson
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Acknowledgements
I have been most fortunate to write this dissertation under the supervision of
Tania Modleski, who has throughout this long process been an inspiration and most
loyal supporter. I am also especially grateful to Hilary Schor, whose imagination
and tireless labor are everywhere on these pages. I want to thank Leo Braudy,
Marsha Kinder, and Jim Kincaid for their patient advice, and their comments on the
dissertation at various stages. Thanks also to the friends and colleagues who have
influenced my thinking in less formal ways, in particular Mary Beth Tegan.
Michael Blackie, Paul Saint-Amour, and Peter Stokes. I owe most to my family
and Anne—their bottomless faith has endured well past the point o f reasonable
doubt.
This dissertation has been supported by fellowships from Diana Meehan,
the Marta Feuchtwanger Foundation, the Ahmanson Foundation, and the USC
Department of English. Without this generosity the completion o f my project
would not have been possible.
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iii
Contents
Acknowledgements ii
Introduction 1
Chapter 1
Gossip and the Novel 8
Chapter 2
On (not) Reading Clarissa: Fantasies of an Epistolary Female Network 61
Chapter 3
Telephonic Film 105
Chapter 4
Voices Carry: Film and Telepathy 149
Chapter 5
The Space of Crime 202
Works Cited 238
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Introduction
Narrative interest since the novel has been above all an interest in the
private lives of other people—the interest of gossip— and hence participates,
despite sometimes lofty claims, in disreputable feminine discourse. My
dissertation reinstates this disavowed female discourse, tracing the historical legacy
of narrative film and the novel in terms of their representation of female networks.
I define female networks first as strategic alliances forged on women's deep
identification with each other's plight in a society where men hold power, and
second as the resulting ambivalent and complex subject formations. The problem
of communication and trust between women structures a persistent tension between
the narrative of courtship and its gothic nightmare from the current cinema back
through classic Hollywood film and the history o f the British novel. In this
analysis, the modes o f female networking—gossip, letters, the telephone—emerge
not only as pressing thematic concerns, but as themselves crucial sources of
narrative form and logic, dictating in large part the fantasies that drive plot and
build sympathy. My thesis is that the dominant forms o f culture cannot dispense
with these disavowed female networks. Coming to terms with this disavowal
requires what I call a cultural politics of interest, a critical methodology that
identifies the stakes o f a given medium or narrative in the way it manages the flow
of information and directs our interest.
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My emphasis then is on long readings of works that explore crucial aspects
of this problem, works that have famously captured our interest through the formal
deployment of gossip, letters, or phones. The challenge has been to read as if in a
female network, returning insistently to the forgotten interests of female characters
to explode easy assumptions about plot and character. Thus the argument proceeds
above all by demonstration; in breathing what I hope is new life into some old
critical debates, it reveals female networking as a scandalous reading practice. If
the organization o f this project is also something of a scandal, jumping backwards
and forwards in history and inevitably leaving interesting texts out, my belief is that
the comparative perspective these moves generate outweighs any lingering vertigo.
In this argument, formal logic trumps chronology, but this is not the old ahistorical
formalism, for the emphasis is on form as technology, whether letters or
telephones, novels or films, all of which are human inventions with their own
history. Understood in this way, form no longer opposes history, but rather
becomes, in its evolution, the very sign of history. It is o f course when we consider
technology as an important engine o f history as well that things get more
complicated, since each new technology, if it succeeds, engenders a range of
competing designs, exploratory practices, and contested interpretations that never
entirely disappear. Similarly, while we need never lose sight of the fact that
Clarissa came before Emma, or Sorry, Wrong Number before Pillow Talk, we
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3
should accept that the historical emergence of something as threatening as female
networks could never follow a straight line.
Chapter one focuses on Jane Austen’s Emma to anchor a discussion of
gossip as a prototypical mode o f female networking in the novel of the nineteenth
century. What makes my reading distinctive from the many similar discussions
that swirl around this novel is that I do not hold my criticism above gossip.
Instead, I propose a critical methodology that brings to light the covert tendency of
both novelistic and critical discourse to reproduce the dynamics o f gossip in their
pleasures and exclusions. To read the novel through the lens o f gossip is therefore
to see novels as not only about scandals, but also as scandalous themselves. This
point becomes clear when we juxtapose Ian Watt’s naming o f Emma as the
pinnacle of realism with the analysis of Patricia Spacks, who emphasizes the
reader's nosy speculation about Emma's mystery plot. Unable to function without
gossip, realism itself becomes the scandal, but not in a way that necessarily
discredits it. Rather, a critical attention to gossip frees the reader from the habit of
greeting scandal with simple moral condemnation, opening up possibilities of
reading that include new ways o f defining our interest in a heroine, and new ways
of imagining where her best interests could lie. The chapter concludes with a
reading of Henry James’s The Portrait o f a Lady as a decisive endpoint in the
history of readerly consent to scandalous subject matter. James draws on all the
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4
resources of gossip to solicit our interest in Isabel Archer, a “new woman" of the
late nineteenth century. But when her independence, mobility, and relationships
with other women strain the courtship plot and tempt the reader into the worst
habits of sadistic gossip, James can only resort at the end o f the novel to his famous
silence about the heroine’s fate.
In my next chapter on the epistolary novel, the problems o f female networks
become problems o f long distance as female mobility puts increasing pressure on
the secure transmission of information and affection. Samuel Richardson’s
Clarissa and Frances Burney's Evelina, two major early novels, both make
painfully clear that the control o f the female subject lies in restricting— or
flooding—the channels of information, so that all large-scale networks must remain
in the hands of a limited class o f men. Richardson sustains interest in his
monumental novel precisely by staging a cat-and-mouse game between the villain
as manipulative censor and the heroine as potential free agent, only to give way in
the end to a novelistic sadism that sacrifices its heroine to an ideal o f individual
integrity. Burney responds by seizing the power of censorship from masculine
culture, referring to a correspondence between women that she does not show the
reader, thus saving her female network by taking it underground and recasting
female modesty as an authorship o f restraint.
In my third chapter, I develop a theory o f telephonic film, considering what
it means to compare a film such as Pillow Talk, with its endless staging of
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telephone calls, to the epistolary novel, so that telephones are not simply dismissed
as props, but can be seen to entail surprising formal implications for narrative. It is
a perspective that reveals, moreover, the centrality of the phone to films in which
its role is less obvious, from The Big Sleep and Chinatown to I t ’ s a Wonderfid Life.
I begin my analysis by positing a Classical Hollywood Telephone, an idealized
phone that serves genre by transmitting a singular meaning. In this fantasy the
phone always works smoothly, allowing its human masters to forget their bodies,
their surroundings— indeed the apparatus itself—to engage in communication with
perfect control. Like all ideals, the Classical Hollywood Telephone never quite
manages to exist, but its influence as an ideal can nonetheless be keenly felt when
films move toward closure, triggering the narrow expectations of genre. The
foreclosing power o f this ideal, however, meets resistance when films allow for
coincidence to interrupt the smooth flow of singular telephonic meaning. As the
phone ceases to behave itself, instead of delivering messages devoutly wished for,
it unearths a repressed sense o f isolation and danger. But out of these nightmares
we get a glimpse of a more hopeful kind of telephonic film, a film that makes use
of the phone's inherent potential to route interest along unpredictable lines.
At the limit o f the telephonic imagination, the fantasy of an ideal telephone
turns into the fantasy of telepathy. As the phone in an uncanny state of full
dematerialization, telepathy retains and intensifies all the ambivalence we see
surrounding the telephone, its capacity at once to save and to betray. It is this
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complex fantasy that I explore in my fourth chapter, considering the means of
access to the thoughts o f characters as an essential point of comparison between
film and the novel. Indeed what is a fairly routine effect of novels becomes a
vexed site of cinematic technique as films search for the proper degree and means
of telepathic representation. Thus a film like Shadow o f a Doubt, while it follows a
young woman’s investigations, spends a great deal o f energy discrediting both her
telepathic pretensions, and those o f readers in general, whereas Sorry'. Wrong
Number, unwilling to abandon the desire for telepathy as the ultimate sympathetic
connection between women, goes to unprecedented lengths to sustain this fantasy
through cinematic technology. What these films share is a powerful sense that the
female desire for telepathy is a response to claustrophobic domestic conditions, and
that it is a desire all the more important when these conditions turn gothic.
I frame my concluding chapter with an idea o f the gothic as relentlessly
unsettling the question of where crime is—at home or abroad, inside or outside. To
pursue this idea 1 return to Jane Austen’s famous discussion in Northanger Abbey
of the possibility of gothic crime in England, and trace a similar and ongoing
debate from Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle to When a Stranger Calls and The
Terminator. It is moreover through this understanding of the gothic that we can
best consider the implications of new communication technologies for female
networks—implications which I go on to consider in light o f recent Hollywood
films. To a certain extent the expansion of the Internet and the availability of
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mobile phones make the achievement of once elusive female networks seem just
around the corner, for sympathetic interest can be carried around in one’s bag.
Thus in a famous scene in Clueless. Cher and her friend meet in the school hallway
while still talking to each other on their phones. Cellphones promote a fantasy of
uninterrupted friendly contact— a fantasy that turns to terror in Scream as the
cellphone falls into the hands o f the roving, all-seeing killer. Buried w-ithin the
cellphone culture of a continuously coddled narcissism lies a nightmare of total
exposure and vulnerability. We see a similar exposure in the representation o f the
answering machine, which by recording female networking makes it suddenly more
visible. As a result of their relative durability, messages left on answering
machines become vulnerable to a basic kind of eavesdropping that is closer to the
casual interception o f a letter than the hi-tech tapping o f a phone. My conclusion
ends with an extended discussion o f You've Got Mail as a comedy whose
narcissistic e-mail fantasies fail to keep the gothic sufficiently at bay. for the
heroine only finds romance by yielding her professional and imaginative life to a
ruthless business competitor who becomes a no less manipulative suitor. This film
makes painfully clear the need for a politics of interest that would reclaim the
Internet—and the movies—as a space for less brutally conventional fantasies. If
we understand contemporary narrative as thoroughly refracted through the lens of
communications technology, criticism must intervene to illuminate the fear and
possibilities of female networks.
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Chapter I
Gossip and the Novel
"...gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality"
— Oscar W ilde1
Oscar Wilde would liberate gossip from scandal, from morality, in part
because he cannot abide the morality of his day (so that what he really wants to
liberate gossip from is hypocrisy), but also, we might suspect from his reputation,
because scandal arrests the proliferation of charming gossipy performances. And
still there is something left out of the formula gossip + morality = scandal, for
gossip remains nonetheless a dirty word, a put down; it is itself a scandal with its
reckless pleasures, its unaccountability, its status as the not-quite-domesticated
discourse o f women.: Indeed, Wilde cannot celebrate gossip without disparaging it
in the next breath. If gossip is so charming, why should he say that history is
merely gossip, invoking its power as a term of diminishment? He wants it both
ways and cannot decide; indeed it would seem he doesn’t want to decide, seeing
value in the paradox itself.
Wilde may have not had the concerns o f feminism in mind, but his rhetoric
shows how feminism might navigate the stigma o f gossip for itself. Clearly a
feminist account o f gossip must expand Wilde’s categories o f charm and
tediousness, though insofar as they hinge on the concept of interest, they may offer
more of a starting point than first appears. What matters at this point is that
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Wilde’s ambivalence anticipates the paradox of my own feminist approach: on one
hand, I hope to soften the stigma o f gossip, emphasizing the value o f discredited
female discourse: on the other, I wield this stigma to turn male discourse against
itself, discrediting it with its own smear tactics—and bringing the scandal o f gossip
home to roost. Thus, contrary to its status historically in the discourse o f men,
gossip remains as essential as it is inescapable.
We need not look too deeply into the history o f the novel to see the
importance of gossip for an emerging feminist consciousness. At a time when the
marriage plot seems the only woman’s plot worth mentioning, gossip appears
accordingly as a means of women regulating the marriage market and gaining
leverage on a heavily prescribed destiny. It is a kind o f archetypal model of
women using their informal connections both to sustain themselves on a daily basis
and to intervene in the machinations of men, and is therefore the most basic mode
of what I call female networks. Indeed, gossip gamers enough notice to serve as a
crucial turning point in Jane Austen’s last novel Persuasion, in a scene where Anne
visits Mrs. Smith, a lonely widow fallen on hard times. Mrs. Smith has already
made a case for the importance o f gossip during an earlier visit, defending it the
grounds of the emotional support and self-improvement it affords lonely women:
‘Call it gossip if you will; but when nurse Rooke has half an hour’s leisure
to bestow on me, she is sure to have something to relate that is entertaining
and profitable, something that makes one know one’s species better. One
likes to hear what is going on, to be au fait as to the newest modes o f being
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trifling and silly. To me. who live so much alone, her conversation I assure
you is a treat.' (168)
This apology, o f course, is only the prelude to the intervention Mrs. Smith will
make in Anne's life by relating the predatory history' of her most visible suitor, Mr.
Elliot. It is a heartening case o f the power of gossip to counter the abuses o f
unscrupulous men. But we shouldn’t begin the feminist celebration prematurely,
for Mrs. Smith only exposes Mr. Elliot once she is convinced that Anne has no
intention of marrying him: until that point, Mrs. Smith actually encourages the
marriage because she thinks Anne could then use a wife's influence to have Mr.
Elliot help Mrs. Smith recover some property. As we leam, moreover. Mr. Elliot
led her late husband to ruin, yet has been unwilling to help her, so in this context.
her decision finally to expose Mr. Elliot seems more about revenge than any deep
concern for Anne. The fact that Anne later admits to herself that she might in fact
have succumbed to Mr. Elliot does little to redeem the political implications o f
Mrs. Smith's act, for the saving force of gossip becomes in hindsight merely
providential, exceeding the intentions of any individual. Since it is not a
principled political act, it remains gossip in its diminished state. And yet, the fact
remains that Providence in this case takes the form o f a female network, thus
showing the way for more assertive women who might want to make a little
Providence of their own.3
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Less compromised female networking, then, would seem actually to require
a certain distance betw een women, so that conflicts o f interest do not intrude. My
example here is Daniel Defoe's A foil Flanders, a novel w hose form as the
confessions of a sinner and criminal allows for the detailing of. among other things,
a more scandalous version of gossip as a female network in action. The crucial
difference in this case is that, unlike Mrs. Smith, Moll has no connection to the man
she w ill gossip about. This episode begins when Moll discovers that the captain
courting her neighbor has punished his intended bride for making use of her female
network:
and though she had near 2000£ to her fortune, [she] did but enquire o f some
of his Neighbours about his Character, his Morals, or Substance; and he
took Occasion at the next Visit to let her know, truly, that he took it very ill,
and that he should not give her the Trouble o f his Visits any more. (113)
Moll perceives a dangerous precedent: if men believe they can extort women into
accepting them on their word alone, then the power of female networks to regulate
the marriage market will quickly disappear. Moll’s advice, which she herself helps
carry out. is that her friend avail herself o f the powr er of gossip:
she should take care to have it well spread among the Women, which she
could not fail of an Opportunity to do in a Neighbourhood, so addicted to
Family News, as that she liv’d in was, that she had enquired into his
Circumstances, and found he was not the Man as to Estate he pretended to
b e.(114)
As their revenge gathers steam, the rumors escalate: they claim he has a bad
temper and shady morals and then, more concretely, that he had other wives and
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that his share of his ship was not paid for. Two things make this revenge rather
scandalous: the heroine is the agent, not the beneficiary, of the gossip, and is
therefore more directly implicated in the decision to use gossip aggressively; and
the gossip is almost entirely fabricated—the women consult only their imaginations
in trumping up the charges that will thwart him in finding a w'ife. The effect o f this
episode is to offer a glimpse o f the other side of slander, of gossip’s potential as a
pleasurable and powerful form of feminist storytelling. O f course since Defoe’s
sympathetic presentation o f slander takes place under the umbrella o f Moll’s larger
repentance, there is some question how much Moll’s behavior should be condoned
on the novel’s own terms.4 For the purposes of this short example, however. I’m
less concerned with how we should resolve that question than with the fact that w'e
can pose it. that what is at issue in such an early example is the capacity of a novel
to play traffic cop at this intersection, its fitness to contain and commodify the
particularly volatile combination of a dormant feminism and a gossip that makes its
own rules.
Catherine Gallagher argues that the novel emerges precisely as a shelter
from the actionable exposure o f gossip. In her account, fiction is “not only a story
that claims not to be credited but also a story about nobody. Indeed, it is narrative
that differentiates itself from lies and scandalous libels by being about nobody”
(“Nobody’s” 266-7). Fiction, then, lets you talk about people without talking about
people. In this new discursive technology, the deployment o f realistic detail
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preempts the epistemo logical claims of gossip: “The character came into fictional
existence...fully only when he or she was developed as nobody in particular.. A
generalized character would too easily take on allegorical or symbolic reference”
(269). The novelist's line of defense becomes clear: how can you say that Fred is
you. when Fred has brown eyes and you have blue? How successful this strategy
would ultimately be remains open to question—a certain brand of literary criticism
has of course made much work for itself uncovering the hidden biographical
reference of various novels. More important, however, is the question o f whether
fictionality protects the novel where it is most vulnerable. In other words, while
novels may, by obscuring biographical secrets, protect the public somewhat from
gossip, how do they protect it from gossiping?
In her extensive study on gossip and literature, Patricia Spacks probes this
unpurged affinity between gossip and the novel, placing due emphasis on gossip as
an activity, as opposed to its status as information about the world. Thus while
novels may not offer the same kind of information about the world as gossip (they
don't name real people), they nonetheless involve readers in the same kind of
experience: an intimate tete-a-tete with the narrator promising special voyeuristic
access into characters' affairs. Indeed, the analogy goes deeper, as Spacks shows
in a brief analysis of Austen’s Emma. She points out that Emma resembles a
detective novel with its central mystery of Jane Fairfax’s engagement to Frank
Churchill. The considerable poverty of clues creates an atmosphere o f wild.
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gossipy speculation that defines the reading experience. Emma, you may recall, is
at no loss for ideas about who sent Jane's pianoforte, and our following her through
the novel is largely a process o f entertaining and discarding such theories. Spacks
concludes that “women or not, we have been lured into acting like the women of
moralistic stereotypes: lured into the rewards and betrayals of speculative gossip”
(169).
While Spacks's reading of Emma is therefore quite suggestive, a sense
lingers from her account that gossip is a kind of side-show, adding interest and
complexity to the main attraction, the marriage plot, that eventually overtakes it. I
want to emphasize, then, that gossip is in fact the business of this novel in the
deepest possible sense. After all. most of the novel’s “action” occurs at one
remove from the saga of its primary couple, Emma and Knightley, whose romance
is strangely light on courtship— unless, that is, we count all the times they get
together to gossip about other people, whether Jane, Frank, Harriet Smith, Miss
Bates, or Mrs. Elton. In doing so they get to know each other’s minds, keep tabs
on rivals, and stand close together. The only moment that is romantic in a
conventional sense is when Emma and Knightley dance, but this too is a scene
governed by gossip, for their physical coupling merely manifests the far more
crucial convergence of opinion that this scene represents.5 Recall that Harriet has
been conspicuously snubbed by Mr. Elton, prompting Knightley to step in gallantly
and dance with her. These dramatic fireworks provide the occasion for the first
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major reported agreement o f Emma and Knightley’s gossiping career, as they form
a consensus about the relative worth of Harriet and the Eltons. Then the chapter
ends, without showing us Knightley and Emma’s much-anticipated dance. But
Austen has shown us what is important; she has shown us the gossip. Lest there be
any doubt about what matters, Austen begins the next chapter with Emma's fond
memories of the evening, showing what she took away from it:
The little explanation with Mr. Knightley gave Emma considerable
pleasure. It was one of the agreeable recollections of the ball, which she
walked about the lawn the next morning to enjoy. She was extremely glad
that they had come to so good an understanding respecting the Eltons, and
that their opinions of both husband and wife were so much alike; and his
praise of Harriet, his concession in her favour. w r as particularly gratifying.
(303)
Finally, in case we are still not sure about the romantic implications, we learn a
page later that Frank. Knightley’s most serious rival, would not see her that day.
but that Emma “did not regret it.”
And yet. after all gossip does for him, Knightley betrays it in the end in
allegiance to his gender. Giddy with his new engagement to the heroine, and
carrying the news that Harriet will marry the worthy Robert Martin, Knightley
makes a joke at the expense of gossip: “[Harriet] will give you all the minute
particulars, which only woman’s language can make interesting. In our
communications we deal only in the great” (434). It is worth noting that this need
to play the man occurs so late, as if closure requires a shift in discursive registers
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that must occur precisely along the axis o f gender. As a novel winds down, do we
not feel, regardless of tone or genre, a sense of loss, and typically find that the
mourning o f the novel we will soon lose is included in the life o f the novel itself?
And when we can mourn something we know that it mattered; we decide, we insist
that it did. Indeed, what is closure but a process of drawing out of the novel to a
without-within space of such a judgment that promises to transcend gossip and
become masculine, authoritative, even “great”? Austen doesn't accept this process
lying down, of course. Her most aggressive resistance probably occurs in
Nonhanger Abbey, when she calls attention to the readers “who will see in the tell
tale compression of the pages before them, that we are all hastening together to
perfect felicity” (246). Austen, like Knightley. can explain the dynamic and make
us laugh at it, but she can't make it go away. His throwaway remark figures
ironically what continues in all earnestness. It is the masculine disavowal of
gossip, the move by which the novel, passing off its sins on its older sister, asks to
be taken seriously.
Disavowing Gossip
Thus gossip provides the contrast, in a male culture, by which to measure
whatever “greatness” the novel would achieve in the hands of men. This dynamic
becomes clearest, perhaps, not in works o f the highest reputation, but in works that
navigate the border between art and popular culture with some aspirations to the
former. Thus we have the striking case o f Wilkie Collins’s “sensation” novel The
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Woman in White, which to this day suffers the odd perfunctory dismissal despite its
elaborate attempts to suppress gossip.6 Tamar Heller has read this novel as a “tale
of the male artist in the marketplace,” who establishes his professional credentials
by differentiating his writing from its female gothic influences (111). Two
specific points should be added. First, the novel is addressed to men, asserting its
status as male discourse by appealing to a perspective and set of experiences that
gentlemen would be assumed to share. Second, and more important, Collins adopts
a narrative strategy whereby characters only relate the portion of the story o f which
they have first-hand knowledge. He explains this decision in a preamble that
promises “No circumstance o f importance, from the beginning to the end o f the
disclosure, shall be related on hearsay evidence” (18). And what is hearsay after
all but a legal word for gossip? Thus Collins’ narrative strategy suggests that the
novel's credibility is dependent upon a kind of courtroom environment in which
gossip is inadmissible. But. as D.A. Miller points out in The Novel and the Police,
this suggestion paints a highly disingenuous portrait of what the novel is about:
"Nothing, how ever, could be less judicial, or judicious, than the actual hermeneutic
practice of the reader o f this novel, whose technology of nervous stimulation— in
many ways still the state o f the art—has him repeatedly jumping to unproven
conclusions...” (158). We might add that sustaining a sensational plot also means
sustaining the gradual revelation of personal secrets. Thus, despite its opening
disavow al, the narrative reverts to the status of gossip in substance as well as form,
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in the type o f dirty laundry that gets aired as well as in how little evidence we may
require to believe it.
So it seems the novel's effort to sanitize a male discourse against female
contamination doesn't really work on this level. Failing to establish itself on this
level, we might say. it punishes female discourse on another. Indeed, one of the
novel's most dramatic moments, when we read Count Fosco's intrusive postscript
to Marian's diary, is achieved by a violent shift from female to male discourse.
Miller offers a pointed reading of this moment: “the Count's postscript only puts
him in the position we already occupy. Having just finished reading Marian's diary
ourselv es, we are thus implicated in the sadism of his act. which even as it violates
our readerly intimacy with Marian reveals that ‘intimacy’ to be itself a violation”
(164). Indeed, in Spacks' terms our relationship with Marian is not real intimacy,
but voyeurism: it is our relationship with Collins that is intimate, and this
relationship is forged as reassuringly masculine upon the spectacle of feminine
abjection.
It is a similar spectacle that Eve Sedgwick observes at the heart of Austen
criticism, as if criticism too can qualify itself through the ritualized disavowal of
gossip: “Austen criticism is notable mostly, not just for its timidity and banality,
but for its unresting exaction of the spectacle of a Girl Being Taught a Lesson— for
the vengefulness it vents on the heroines whom it purports to love, and whom,
perhaps, it does” ( Tendencies 225). Nowhere does this impulse seem so irresistible
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19
as in the critical response to the notorious humiliation o f Miss Bates by Emma at
Box Hill. For instance, feminist critic Claudia Johnson, who has herself called
Emma “the heroine critics love to scold” (122), nevertheless calls the episode
“shameful” and can only defend Emma with the observation that she is not as bad
as her foil, the “pert” upstart Mrs. Elton. Even D.A. Miller, normally dependable
as an iconoclast, chimes right in with “We rightly protest when Emma shuts [Miss
Bates] up at Box Hill” (Narrative 38). Recall the passage that elicits this response:
the flirtatious Frank Churchill has just demanded that each member of the group
entertain Emma with verbal performances, one if clever, two if so-so, three if dull.
Miss Bates exclaims that she will have no trouble saying three dull things,
whereupon Emma suggests mockingly that her difficulty will be not in producing
three things, but in limiting herself to that number (340). I'm not going to pretend
that I didn't also have a negative reaction to Emma's comment, but it is one thing
to have a reaction and another to insist on its rightness. Why does it feel like an
obligatory critical gesture to assume Knightley’s position and obediently repeat the
verdict “badly done”? Is Emma wrong to tease Miss Bates? Once that question is
posed, it seems impossible to say no. But perhaps we should ask something else
when we read this scene.
One critic's reading deserves special attention as a rare effort to displace the
question of the heroine’s guilt. Adena Rosmarin’s article proceeds from a
distinction between “mimetic” and “affective” readings, in which mimetic readings
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20
treat characters as people (to be praised or scolded), while affective readings seek
rather to describe the reader's experience o f the novel (333). Not content to
reproduce the limitations of prior mimetic readings, Rosmarin offers a dissenting
view on the episode at Box Hill:
The insult is so well prepared by our growing irritation, so irresistibly
invited by Miss Bates’s own remark, and so well camouflaged by its brevity
and the surrounding pages of verbal play that we are distracted from both
Miss Bates's pain and the implications of our distraction. All but the most
meritorious of readers become Emma’s ready accomplices and. thus, her
fellow penitents. (332-33)
Looking back at the scene. Rosmarin's description seems entirely accurate. Indeed,
the narrator records only Miss Bates’s immediate reaction to the insult, while not
until a page later, and with little fanfare, is Knightley “grave.” To what, then, do
we attribute the overwhelming consensus that this is such a shocking, traumatic
moment in the novel? And why do few critics come forward and admit how Emma
satisfies their own aggression toward Miss Bates? Rosmarin comes close to an
overt charge of bad faith, to suggesting that, through a ritual o f scapegoating the
heroine, critics camouflage their own guilty reading (the term “perfidies” in the
title of her article underscores this implicit charge). And no doubt there is always a
risk of bad faith in the conversion of private affect into public discourse.
But there is also some question o f whether the “virgin” reading Rosmarin
describes is really possible for most readers.7 She apparently believes it is, and
cites general support for this position in such claims as Lionel Trilling’s that, even
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upon rereading, “the difficulty of Emma is never overcome” (qtd. in Rosmarin
336).s But I would suggest that, however true this may be for the novel in general,
the Box Hill episode stands out so much—has, indeed, been made to stand out so
much through critical attention—that here, if nowhere else, the reader will be a step
ahead of the heroine, and encounter the scene through the foreknowledge of
Knightlev's disapproval. 9 So which is it? Are critics forgetting (or denying) their
response to this scene, or has their reaction been conditioned by the endless drone
of critical history and prior readings to the point where it is fully coextensive with
Knightley' s j udgment?
To sort this out. I'd like to step back for a moment and analyze the context
of this scene step by step, because by the time we consider my present discussion,
the layers of gossip about gossip will attain a rather daunting thickness. For the
purpose o f this analysis, let’s reduce gossip to its essential dynamic o f forming a
bond through talking about others. In the dynamics at Box Hill, then, the first level
is simple: Miss Bates is a gossip. She is not called the “talking aunt” for nothing.1 0
The second level is Emma's mean remark, which we might describe as Emma
attempting to form a bond with the others in the party at Miss Bates' expense. The
third level, though, is the most crucial, and at the same time perhaps the most
covert. It is Knightley’s private discussion with Emma after the episode. Two key
aspects seem to get overshadowed in the spectacle o f Emma’s shame. The first is
the way that Miss Bates remains more or less abject. In the process o f defending
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her. Knightley not only adopts a rather condescending position, but also agrees
with Emma that Miss Bates blends the good with the ridiculous. The second aspect
is that Emma's mistake, as always, is an occasion for intimacy with Knightley. In
fact. Emma realizes her love for Knightley only thirty pages after their
conversation, so we might want to go so far as to call the moment a seduction,
though of course the crucial plot development in which Harriet Smith fixes on
Knightley occurs in the meantime.1 1 But without putting the weight of their whole
relationship on this moment, we can still say that Knightley and Emma cement
their bond at the expense o f Miss Bates—it is the last step in the only dance they
really know.1 *
Taking the Box Hill episode as a whole, we can now consider what work it
accomplishes for the narrative. First, it punishes the gossip, with Knightlev’s
correction only partly mitigating this effect. Second, it propels Emma and
Knightley together once and for all. Are these effects related? I would argue that
the same reading is available as for The Woman in White, that a certain readerly
coherence acquires definition through the abjection of the female gossip. Again we
see a novel working in the mode of gossip, and again this mode must be disavowed,
for if the clear consensus is that Miss Bates is half ridiculous, then the novel cannot
risk too much open attachment to such a figure. But if Miss Bates falls victim to
some show of sacrifice, she also enjoys a crucial covert status, as Austen buries
many of the best clues to the Fairfax affair at the end o f Miss Bates’s
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23
monologues.1 ' She is even granted a brief moment to shine, as Austen ingeniously
puts her volubility to good purpose in that one glorious entrance where she outtalks
Mrs. Elton as only she could (294).
What remains unanswered is why Austen criticism has become so invested
in punishing Emma, a collective reaction we could characterize as the fourth level
of gossip about the Box Hill affair, in that the critics are indeed bonding at Emma's
expense. Moreover, the bond this consensus forms is much the same as the bond
between novelist and reader, forged on the reassurance that this discourse will not
be gossipy and ridiculous.1 4 But here is where the real scandal lies— not in the
ephemeral idiosyncrasies of a moment’s reading (how' did we respond to the
episode at Box Hill? Were we even awake?)— but in the possible hypocrisy of
published response. And the critics would seem to learn their hypocrisy from Mr.
Knightley, for the episode becomes an alibi for what, if we believe Sedgwick, has
likely been a sadistic desire to "correct” Emma all along. Moreover, Emma
complains about Miss Bates precisely from the rhetoric o f a judgmental male
discourse in which women talk too much, so that we reject Emma at the exact
moment that she comes into her own as this sort o f critic. It is like bringing Emma
into the fold of masculinity through gang initiation.
But of course, however much Knightley and other critics capitalize on
Emma’s remark, their doing so can hardly be her reason for making it. It is only
through apprehending this distinctly female reason that we can make the liberal
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move from punishing to understanding the crime, and from there perhaps to the
radical one of recasting the terms entirely. Emma lashes out at Miss Bates not as
some patriarchal police agent, but simply as a woman who is sick of her, and for
reasons stemming from her own female difficulties. Indeed most of the hostility
Emma displays, whether toward Miss Bates, Jane Fairfax, or Mrs. Elton, can be
traced to the basic, and widely understood, frustration of her situation: Emma
doesn't know enough people!1 5 The deadly combination of a small town and a
high social position leaves her woefully short of friends, acquaintances, and love
interests.1 * ’ The people she does know therefore take on terrible importance of one
form or another, assuming a burden they can hardly support, particularly if they
have their own plot to worry about. And in this scenario Miss Bates holds the
position of a special tormentor, for she is a major source of news, but she makes
her listener work so very hard to get it. Miss Bates's only crime is that she is not a
good sorter: Emma's is that she lashes out at the voice that unwittingly mocks her
profound boredom, a boredom the reader has had only a taste of.1 7 In this way the
Box Hill debacle tells us less about Emma’s need for correction than her need for
relief, a need that Knightley. with his trips to London, cannot fully share.
A New Critical Gossip?
We must be aware o f the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes. Some paradox o f
our nature leads us. when once we have made our fellow [people] the objects o f our
enlightened interests to go on to make them the objects o f our pity, then of our wisdom,
ultimately o f our coercion -Lionel Trilling1 8
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To reconcile female and critical discourse, if that is possible, must mean in
part to gossip openly, to embrace its rewards while carefully assuming its risks.1 9
Indeed, in my own commentary thus far. we could surely detect a fifth level of
gossip about Box Hill in my attempt to bond with my readers at the critics'
expense. That the critics as a body do not cohere as an abject female figure may be
one thing in my favor. On the other hand, such a figure is lurking in my argument,
offering herself in sacrifice to any consensus we may be building. This figure is
Mrs. Elton, the character we really love to hate, who, in a little noticed twist,
happens to be the novel's most outspoken champion of female discourse. As a
provocative combination of unpleasantness and representativeness, she is exactly
the sort of figure whom feminist critical methodology must come to terms with. Of
course such a critical practice is already much in evidence, for what I propose
extrapolates from the fundamental feminist strategy of restaging narrative in ways
that highlight the roles of female characters, or retelling history to emphasize
women authors.2 0 Critically effective gossip therefore requires more than being fair
and kind, it means finding—and generating—a generous attention where it is most
needed, and calibrating the political force of this attention. It is quite simply a
cultural politics of interest, of its value and its violence, and is as much as anything
what Jane Austen is all about.
Consider the basic structure of Emma. During the course o f the novel,
Emma has two main chances for female friendship: Harriet Smith and Jane
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26
Fairfax, but until the end she botches both. The first she jeopardizes through
meddling: the second through misunderstanding. Taken together. Emma's clumsy
interactions offer a veritable case study on the problem of taking an interest in other
people, and the questions they allow us to ask are politically (and morally)
fundamental: in whom should we take an interest, and how should we show that
interest? what is the difference between kind attention and cruel interference?
between mercy and neglect? what are the limits of human empathy, identification,
or generosity?2 1 All o f this is complicated, of course, by the fact that our field of
interest cannot be cultivated systematically, like a garden. Other people have a
tendency to move about, to develop their own interests. Accordingly, Harriet and
Jane bear some share o f responsibility for the fizzling friendships— Harriet for
being tractable and lovesick, Jane for being standoffish and secretive. Neither
grows according to Emma's interests.
It is perhaps only in fiction, or possibly history, that the people we imagine
hold still long enough to reward our interest dependably. And there, at least, we
can do them no harm. For these reasons a novel can be a good place to practice
sympathetic attention, to refine our interest and consider its implications.2 2 On the
other hand, there is the danger that we will forget the difference between characters
and people, demanding o f real people an unfair level of interest and predictability.
It is along these lines that Emma falls into a version of the standard trap, most fully
elaborated by Austen in Northanger Abbey, of reading the world as a novel. For
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instead of friendship, we might say, Emma chooses readership.2 3 Instead o f having
Harriet Smith or Jane Fairfax, she has Harriet (with its comedy of errors and
“family romance” of Harriet’s unknown parentage), and the much darker Mystery
o f Jane Fairfax.
Onto this scene of reading charges Mrs. Elton. She is at first an object of
curiosity herself, with the foremost question for the local gossip to settle being
"whether she was very pretty indeed, or only rather pretty, or not pretty at all”
(246). On one hand, her strain to sustain this interest, as a married woman with
few possible plots, is painfully apparent as she attempts the impossible task of
circulating gossip about herself with such ill-conceived lines as “my friends say I
am not entirely devoid of taste” (252). On the other hand, what will insure Mrs.
Elton a prominent place in her new community is to attend to the plots o f others
around her, to give up being a heroine to become a reader— indeed, to become an
author, launching heroines on their careers. It is of course Emma herself whom she
first wants to sweep up in a “coming out” trip to Bath, sounding a note that
resonates all-too deeply with Emma’s situation: “It could be a charming
introduction for you, who have lived so secluded a life” (251). Not about to give
herself up to someone else's design, however, Emma ignores all overtures, and they
instead become rival readers.
What is particularly striking about this rivalry is how it temporarily aligns
Mrs. Elton with Knightley in her tendency to place less value on Harriet and more
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28
on Jane. It is an alignment that grates on Emma all the more in light of the familiar
tone Mrs. Elton takes with Knightley (254). In this context, it becomes crucial that
Emma recruit Knightley to her ill-opinion o f Mrs. Elton, and he does not
disappoint, finding Harriet an “unpretending, single-minded, artless girl— infinitely
to be preferred by any man o f sense and taste to such a woman as Mrs. Elton”
(302). And while the consensus of Emma and Knightley would seem to generate
an almost overwhelming narrative authority, it is worth noting how hard it is to pin
the narrator down on this point. For instance, an earlier chapter ends by the
narrator reporting w ith lacerating wit that “Mr. Knightley seemed to be trying not
to smile: and succeeded without difficulty, upon Mrs. Elton's beginning to talk to
him" (287). In many ways nothing could be more devastating than this remark.
But in the absence of direct instructions from the narrator, there is just enough
space to gain the clearance we need from Knightley's point o f view to see it as his,
with no necessary extension to the narrator or us. It is just possible to see in this
moment, instead of the irony of his suffering on cue, the pathetic spectacle o f a
woman, without friends nearby or the skills to acquire them, talking valiantly to the
most important man in towm. who doesn't like her. This is not to say that we don't
see enough of Mrs. Elton's behavior to judge for ourselves; her cruelty to Harriet
and her bullying of Jane are especially hard to accept. I do want to insist, though,
that w e extend enough sympathy in her direction to recognize how much her
actions are attempts, however misguided, to compensate for the trauma of being
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uprooted by marriage, a trauma that she notes “is quite one of the evils of
matrimony” (249).
When we first meet Mrs. Elton, she has just left her friends and family
behind to follow a husband she has known just four weeks and start a new social
life from scratch.'4 At first she copes with this trauma through a display o f self-
sufficiency. telling Emma: "the world I could give up— parties, balls, plays— for I
have no fear of retirement. Blessed with so many resources within myself, the
world was not necessary to me" (252). Our embarrassment at such boasting should
not obscure for us the seriousness o f Mrs. Elton’s rhetorical dilemma, a dilemma
that stems from her need to do two things at once. On one hand, she needs to
complain: she has real grievances that deserve attention, as she catalogues further:
“Certainly, I had been accustomed to every luxury at Maple Grove; but I did assure
him that two carriages were not necessary to my happiness, nor were spacious
apartments” (252). On the other hand, she needs to advertise; her happiness
depends on how much her “resources” can attract others, especially Emma, for we
soon learn that this monologue has been the build-up to a proposal: “I think. Miss
Woodhouse, you and I must establish a musical club” (253). Seen in this light the
conversation becomes an interview, an audition. Applying to Emma for a social
position, Mrs. Elton attempts simultaneously to prove her need and her
qualifications. As we know, she doesn’t get the job— in part because she is not up
to the demands of the rhetorical situation, in part because Emma is predisposed to
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reject her. If Mrs. Elton will later insist too emphatically on the privileges of a new
bride (standing first at the dance, taking her coach first, etc.). it is because they are
the only things that give her any semblance of a place in the community, as if the
only answer left to her question “where do I come in?” is “first.”
If anything makes her situation bearable, it is a female network of her own,
her correspondence with her friend Selina, who serves not only as a contact w'ith
her past, but also as an audience for her gossip as she comes to terms (largely
hostile) with her new community. In such a situation the importance o f the postal
system for female networking cannot be overstated. Indeed, Jane Fairfax, living at
the mercy of Frank's comings and goings, expresses her own deep appreciation for
the postal system: “The post-office is a wonderful establishment!....So seldom that
a letter, among the thousands that are constantly passing about the kingdom, is
even carried w rong when one considers the variety o f hands, and o f bad hands too,
that are to be deciphered, it increases the wonder” (271). But it is Mrs. Elton who
raises the issue o f gender when she protests Mr. Weston’s opening o f a letter
addressed to his wife, declaring: “I always take the part of my own sex; I do,
indeed... I always stand up for women.” (280-1). While Mr. Weston’s action is
innocuous enough in the context o f Emma, anyone who has read some o f the prior
century's epistolary fiction (especially Clarissa) can imagine how much is
ultimately at stake in women having uninterrupted access to the outside world.
Indeed, until the invention of the telephone, letter-writing would be gossip’s crucial
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supplement in maintaining a vital female discourse over distance. When the
privacy o f this network is compromised (and this vulnerability is inherent), female
narrative slides quickly into the gothic.
So if Mrs. Elton is a figure, and occasionally a spokeswoman, for important
women's issues, why hasn't she received more critical attention? What I felt during
the course of my own writing, at least, was a tension between my loyalty to Austen
and my feminist theories, insofar as part of being loyal to Austen meant, as it
seemed to. hating Mrs. Elton. Indeed, if there is a greater critical consensus than
the belief that Emma does badly at Box Hill, it is surely that Mrs. Elton does badly
throughout the novel: it has come to be the meaning of her character. But I’ve
already suggested that this meaning is a function of our allegiance to the
converging perspectives o f Emma and Knightley, and should not necessarily be
seen as coextensive with the novel’s meaning in its full range o f possibilities for
understanding Mrs. Elton. Perhaps, then, we should feel more free to occupy the
slight breathing room Austen has left for her. What makes this so hard, however, is
that Mrs. Elton is too familiar in both senses of the word. Not only does she
insinuate herself into others' lives, but she reminds us too much of ourselves, is
indeed a kind of secret figure for the reader. After all, is the reader not an outsider,
a latecomer with pretensions to familiarity, prone particularly to getting too close to
Knightley? Is hating her part of how we disavow our own position? If we see Mrs.
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Elton through this novel, we find she does not go quietly, but kicking and
screaming, stealing the novel's penultimate line:
The wedding was very much like other weddings, where the parties have no
taste for finery or parade: and Mrs. Elton, from the particulars detailed by
her husband, thought it all extremely shabby, and very inferior to her own.
“ Very little white satin, very few lace veils; a most pitiful business! Selina
would stare when she heard of it.' But, in spite o f these deficiencies, the
wishes, the hopes, the confidence, the predictions o f the small band of true
friends who witnessed the ceremony, were fully answered in the perfect
happiness of the union.
In some ways, of course, Mrs. Elton coincides here with the familiar comic villain
who must be expelled for the community to come together at the end.2 5 But her
position, if a kind of exile, is not fully isolated, as again she invokes Selina's
sympathetic ears (and eyes, in this case) to challenge the orthodoxy of Highbury.
And if we make too much of her absence from the wedding, we must remember
that it mirrors our own. Moreover, is it not telling that Mr. Elton figures here as
Mrs. Elton's narrative source, just before our own narrator turns so suddenly
authoritative, and (dare we say it?) masculine? Much like Mrs. Elton, we are left at
the mercy of this privileged narrator, receiving our own most vital report at a
distance. To compensate, we turn to our own female networks, professional or not.
and gossip about the novel.
Jamesian Gossip
In light of his own extensive critical contributions, Henry James represents
an unusual opportunity for refining the study of gossip and the novel. After all,
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gossip is the business o f criticism too, a point which becomes most clear when
James blurs the roles o f author and critic, particularly in his famous prefaces to the
New York Edition o f his works. Only with this in mind can we continue to develop
what I see as James's most important legacy, a sustained commitment to what I am
calling a cultural politics o f interest. What James and Austen share of most interest
to feminism is simply a deep preoccupation with the risks and rewards o f placing
female characters at the center o f attention.
Despite this shared concern, it would be a mistake to imagine James as too
much of a feminist prophet. Clearly problems of interest proved so generative in
his work precisely because he could not resolve them. Consider the unease James
articulates in the preface to The Portrait o f a Lady.
By what process o f logical accretion was this slight ‘personality’, the mere
slim shade o f an intelligent but presumptuous girl, to find itself endowed
with the high attributes o f a Subject? — and indeed by what thinness, at the
best, w ould such a subject not be vitiated? Millions o f presumptuous girls,
intelligent or not intelligent, daily affront their destiny, and what is it open
to their destiny to be, at the most, that we should make an ado about it ? The
novel is of its very nature an ‘ado’, an ado about something, and the larger
the form it takes the greater of course the ado. (xi)
Lingering over this passage, we catch a whiff of circular logic: that she is a subject
because she is presumptuous seems clear—it is why James finds her interesting.
But is she not also presumptuous because she is a subject? James calls his heroine
presumptuous for “affronting her destiny,” when both the presumption and the
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destiny are of his own design, then he worries about why this should interest us.
His anxiety, I would suggest, turns on the definition of the novel as a great ado, as
implicitly something that must rise above trivial gossip. Indeed, to trace the word
gossip through The Portrait o f a Lady is to find a consistently pejorative usage.2 6
Moreover, it is precisely the gender o f his subject that produces the anxiety: he
asks of young women “what is it open to their destiny to be?” as if the answer to
that question were self-evident for young men.
Of course James does not balk at the question. He did go on to write the
book— for most of the preface he seems quite proud of it. As it turns out, what is
open to Isabel Archer to be is a sensitive and expansive consciousness. James
relocates the scene o f interest to the inside o f her head, as in the section he calls
“obviously the best thing in the book.” where Isabel stays late by the fire,
meditating on what has happened to her: “It is a representation simply o f her
motionless seeing, and an attempt withal to make the mere still lucidity o f her act
as “interesting’ as the surprise of a caravan or the identification o f a pirate” (xvii).
Regarding this statement. Peter Brooks points out that “The terms o f reference in
the adventure story are mocked; yet they remain the terms o f reference: moral
consciousness must be an adventure, its recognition must be the stuff o f a
heightened drama” (6). Moreover, how are Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle
not pirates, given their financial and emotional plundering o f Isabel? It is after all
Isabel’s contemplation o f the novel’s criminal element that makes her
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consciousness such an adventure—that and James’s marked reserve about this very
criminality, a reserve that makes the plot o f consciousness an exotic plot indeed,
and which bears a special relationship to gossip.
What feels most forbidden in Jamesian discourse is that basic dimension of
gossip whereby acts are named and relationships spelled out. In its place is a
tantalizing discretion that extends to the most unlikely characters, so that even a
“vulgar" woman like Osmond's sister, the Countess, waits a long time to make
Isabel aware of Osmond and Merle’s prior relationship, and then only through a
minor triumph of indirection, announcing “My first sister-in-law had no children”
(542). In this light, Brooks's designation of James as a special example of what he
famously calls “the melodramatic imagination” seems odd at first, for the definition
of melodrama Brooks unfolds seems to belie such discretion:
The desire to express all seems a fundamental characteristic o f the
melodramatic mode. Nothing is spared because nothing is left unsaid; the
characters stand on stage and utter the unspeakable, give voice to their
deepest feelings, dramatize through their heightened and polarized words
and gestures the u'hole lesson o f their relationship. (4)2 7
By conventional standards, of course, there is an enormous amount left unsaid in
James. But perhaps only by resisting certain kinds of utterances can James avoid
obstructing what he is really after, w'hat Brooks calls a “metaphorical approach to
what cannot be said” (11). Obstruction is a concern because, perhaps even more
than other systems of knowledge, gossip forces its subject into a narrative mold that
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smooths out particularity. The classic gossip's line, which the Countess avoids,
would be something like '‘Merle slept with Osmond.” a statement that disguises its
violence in the apparent simplicity of its “truth,” and that invokes a story as
powerful as it is old. But The Portrait o f a Lady makes it clear how' violent such a
statement would be, both in its traumatic impact on Isabel as a listener, and in its
distortion of the Merle/Osmond complex—indeed, it risks shutting off that
complex forever behind a hard wall of fact. In James, gossip is not crude because it
is intrusive (who is a more intrusive writer than James?), but because it is a
primitive, blunt instrument that disfigures as it causes pain.
What James desires, and goes far in developing, is a kind o f supergossip, a
discourse that w ill at once heighten gossip’s potential while diminishing its
violence.2 8 His work plays out a critical endgame in the long history of gossip and
the novel by foregrounding gossip’s double aspect, a dialectic o f exclusion and
intimacy.2 9 The Portrait o f a Lady in particular draws us in with the threat of
scandal even as its monumental restraint promises something finer. The point,
then, is to articulate what is at stake in our seduction as readers into a novelistic
narrative contract that requires our interest. I am calling this process seduction first
to call attention to how interest is actively generated, and second to put into play
the issue of the reader's consent as a way of gauging what violence we are
submitting to, or inflicting, w'hen we read this or other novels. These complicities
of narrative have been articulated with special emphasis by Laura Muivey in a
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landmark essay o f feminist film theory: “Sadism demands a story, depends on
making something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and
strength, victory/defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning and an end”
(311). To think o f narrative in terms of sadism, then, is to think o f it as a violent
confrontation— one in which, to follow subsequent developments in film studies,
the viewer or reader can be a guilty collaborator, a masochistic victim, or both,
oscillating between the two positions.3 0 Sadism is a word more often used to perk
people up in their seats than to specify precise behavior or attitudes, and diverges
widely in its main usage from the best purchase we can obtain on Sade's own
literature.3 1 But Mulvey’s provocative formulation is worth pursuing nonetheless
because its pejorative rhetorical force can give us pause, arresting the slide of
narrative desire into violence in ways that free our attention for new possibilities—
possibilities that include both new ways o f defining our interest in the heroine, and
ultimately new ways of imagining where her best interests could lie.
Seduction, Sadism, and The Portrait of a Lady
Often lost among the major surprises and disappointments o f The Portrait
o f A Lady— in particular our discomfort at Isabel’s decisions to marry Osmond and,
as it’s assumed, return to him at the end— is a sense of the strangeness o f the
process that launches our heroine’s career as an interesting woman in the first
place, as. indeed, a woman who is particularly worth writing or gossiping about.
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Once Isabel leaves the novel’s opening scenes at Gardencourt. o f course, the basic
question of interest has already been established and taken for granted: Isabel is
interesting, we understand, because she has refused Lord Warburton’s excellent
offer of marriage. Thus, as her cousin Ralph puts it, we will “have the thrill of
seeing what a young lady does who won’t marry Lord Warburton,” a thrill in which
Ralph literally, and tragically, invests by insuring that Isabel inherits a large chunk
of his fortune (149).3 2 In choosing to begin his novel at a place called Gardencourt,
James of course alludes to Paradise and The Fall, but we might also consider the
term garden in its mundane sense. A garden, we might say, is a systematically
cultivated—and fully domesticated— field of interest. Ralph's problem is that he
cannot plant Isabel in a garden. Like Harriet Smith or Jane Fairfax, she will move
about, develop her own interests. His “seed money” will not bring him the return
he expects. But for the novel, this investment indeed yields compound interest,
multiplying Isabel’s attractions. By the time she succumbs to her fatal attraction to
the reptilian Osmond, we have an intriguing picture o f what Rene Girard calls
mimetic desire, in which the beloved, the object of desire, is always identified by
the interest of another. Working backwards through the plot: Osmond becomes
interested in Isabel because Madame Merle suggests it. saying quite directly: “I
admire her. You’ll do the same.” (240). Madame Merle is interested in her
because Ralph fueled his interest with money, which Madame Merle wants for her
daughter Pansy, and Ralph is interested in Isabel, again, because she refused Lord
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Warburton. This mediation of desire filters nothing; on the contrary, instead of
producing friction, mimesis tends toward a lethal inflation. Osmond ultimately
thinks he has a triply-interesting bride: someone to admire, someone with money,
and. to get back to the apparent source of interest, “a young lady who had qualified
herself to figure in his collection of choice objects by declining so noble a hand” as
Lord Warburton (304).
But why is everyone, including, presumably, the reader, content to accept
Lord Warburton as the source of interest in Isabel? What does he find so attractive
in this young American that he proposes to her after spending “about twenty-six
hours in her company?” (103). Looking over the scenes at Gardencourt, all we can
really say is that he finds Isabel interesting because he has been prepared to find
her interesting— that is to say, his desire is mimetic as well; he is not the source
after all. James gives us the finishing touches of Warburton's preparation for love
in such suggestive remarks as Mr. Touchett's that “The ladies will save us.... Make
up to a good one and marry her, and your life will become much more interesting”
(12). But the implication is that Lord Warburton’s education began long before, in
his experience as a reader o f novels. When he proposes to Isabel, he fails to
recognize the role novels have played in his falling in love with her “at first sight”
(104). Instead of considering their possible role as a source of these feelings, he
accepts their counsel as merely the wise echo of a desire he imagines was bom
within himself. As a symptom of this misrecognition, he reserves a special triple
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emphasis for precisely that aspect o f his belief that is most unknowable: “I don't
go off easily, but when I'm touched, it's for life. It's for life. Miss Archer, it's for
life” (105). Knowing this about himself in advance can only mean that it’s written
elsewhere, that Lord Warburton recognizes himself, though only half-consciously.
among the historic cast of novelistic characters who love properly— that is, at first
sight and for life. What we may have to say then, following Roland Barthes, is
simply that characters are slaves to the discourse in which they find themselves,
and Warburton cannot forget that he is in a novel (S/Z 178).
As readers, though, we get to have it both ways. Thriving on the
consumption of interest, we are eager to believe we've found it, despite its
unaccountable source. Indeed, our assent to Warburton's proposal, the fact that we
find his love for Isabel credible, testifies loudly to our own training in novelistic
discourse. We may in fact experience the opening of the novel as a sort of
flattering allegory of reading:
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than
the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are
circumstances in which, whether you partake o f the tea or not— some
people of course never do— the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I
have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an
admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements o f the little feast
had been disposed upon the lawn o f an old English country house in what I
should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. (5)
It seems quite natural to associate the “little feast” with the novel, and the
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“innocent pastime” with reading. The scene is remarkably cozy, launching the
reader straight into the comfort-zone, the “perfect middle,” o f novelistic
subjectivity— a position all the more precious because it obtains only, we agree,
“under certain circumstances.” Indeed, glancing through the rest of the first
paragraph, we see the key terms of reading take their cue: leisure, pleasure,
priv ilege—especially privilege, since, like the gangsters in Goodfellas, we are
making a side door entrance to the show: “The front o f the house overlooking that
portion of lawn with which we are concerned was not the entrance-front; this was
in quite another quarter. Privacy here reigned supreme, and the wide carpet of turf
that covered the level hill-top seemed but the extension o f a luxurious interior.” (6-
7). What we are looking at here is the scene of a seduction— ours, as James
dangles a fantasy of luxurious interiority before us, the quintessential novelistic
fantasy. All that is missing is the mood music, furnished later by Madame Merle
on the piano.
What is the promise of this seduction? Most simply that James is going to
tell us the right story, the story we want to read. My argument is that he does not
do so. indeed, that he cannot. Like all seductions, there is a bait and switch: what
is received is not exactly what is promised.3 3 What he does allow us—and perhaps
this is the best he can do— is a lesson in how novelistic seduction works. A
substantial part of this lesson covers the mimetic desire just discussed: we would
do well not to neglect our own position as the final link o f the mimetic chain,
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accumulating interest with every cue to regard Isabel. Indeed, the problem of
committing to this position is captured in the fact that, upon her entrance to the
novel at Gardencourt. Isabel is noticed first not by any of the characters loitering on
the lawn, but by the dog. emblem both of the potential idiocy o f desire and of our
need to believe it is something natural, something like instinct—and our best
friend.
Our seduction, however, is actually well underway before Isabel appears on
the scene. The first mention o f her existence takes the form o f the transparently
paternal prohibition that her uncle slaps on Lord Warburton: “...you may fall in
love with whomsoever you please: but you mustn’t fall in love with my niece” (13).
WTien it comes to stimulating desire, of course, prohibition is the oldest trick in the
book. James couples this alluring taboo with the attractions o f novelty (we've
never heard o f her) and absence (she is not in the scene) to amplify our curiosity.
Underscoring the sense of absence are the telegrams by which, as we learn
momentarily, her uncle has learned of her imminent arrival from America.3 4 Ralph
explains to Warburton:
'We hardly know' more about her than you; my mother has not gone into
details. She chiefly communicates with us by means o f telegrams, and her
telegrams are rather inscrutable. They say women don’t know how to write
them, but my mother has thoroughly mastered the art o f condensation.
“Tired America, hot weather awful, return England with niece, first steamer
decent cabin.” That’s the sort of message we get from her — that was the
last that came. But there had been another before, which I think contained
the first mention o f the niece. “Changed hotel, very bad, impudent clerk.
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address here. Taken sister's girl, died last year, go to Europe, two sisters,
quite independent.” Over that my father and I have scarcely stopped
puzzling: it seems to admit of so many interpretations.' ( 13)3 5
As figured here, the telegram is the mortal enemy of the novel, upsetting an
equilibrium that will be reimagined but never quite restored. It opposes novelistic
expansion with a technology of such “condensation." as Ralph says, that it achieves
a syntax without subjects. Such a menace, however, only makes us seek the
novel's warm embrace all the more. Indeed, Ralph shows us how to domesticate
the telegram by subjecting it to the terms of novelistic interest, generating a
hermeneutic problem that will govern our pursuit of Isabel throughout the novel:
'But who's “quite independent”, and in what sense is the term used? — that
point's not yet settled. Does the expression apply more particularly to the
young lady my mother has adopted, or does it characterize her sisters
equally? — and is it used in a moral or in a financial sense? Does it mean
that they've been left well off. or that they wish to be under no obligations?
or does it simply mean that they're fond of their own way?' (14)
The table is set for a very interesting arrival.
The final lesson in James's course on seduction has to do with the
perception of linear progress. When we actually encounter Isabel she is first “a
person,” then “a young lady”. Three pages later we learn her last name; we wait
five more for her first. This striptease of withheld knowledge yielding to gradual
disclosure is one that James stages with characters and events throughout the
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novel. '6 It reminds us o f Mulvey's basic point about sustaining narrative interest:
we must have a sense that we are getting somewhere, a sense o f change through
linear time. Where everything is at stake, then, is in what counts as narrative
progress, and what delays and detours we are willing to tolerate— for it is perhaps
in the delays and detours that a novel has some chance o f escaping the
conservatism of its own institution, of refusing simple obedience to the mimetic
order.' What demand scrutiny are moments where James says, in effect, “but I
digress.” cutting short our pursuit of other interests. To guide such scrutiny, we
might follow Isabel’s aunt. Lydia Touchett. who. in her impatience with digression,
calls our attention to the irrelevant.
O f course Lydia hardly represents the voice o f the author in this novel, but
in one instance, she seems to represent precisely what is, if not quite James’s idea
of what counts as irrelevant, at least his view of the problem of irrelevance. Her
comment occurs during Isabel’s travels in the middle o f the novel, and comes as a
response to Isabel’s apology for delaying a visit. Mrs. Touchett says that apologies
are “no more use to her than bubbles,” and describes the idea of considering, in a
given circumstance, what might have been done differently, as belonging “to the
sphere of the irrelevant, like the idea o f a future life or o f the origin o f things” (322-
323). As it seems to function in Lydia’s mind, the scope o f this category is
astonishing: what is irrelevant, apparently, is nothing less than the past, the future,
and any alternate present.3 8 I have already suggested that to ignore the origin of
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things, the dubious sources of desire, is particularly hazardous, as it exposes one to
endless seduction. But beyond that problem, in terms o f narrative, what is
intimidating is the way Lydia Touchett echoes the well-established principle o f the
"whole story.” To call the past and future of a story irrelevant is to say that the
story has given us exactly what we need to know, that it is sufficient and complete,
and warrants no questions out of its temporal bounds: to call an alternate present
irrelevant is to say the story got things exactly right, that other versions have no
interest. We might sum up the problem o f irrelevance, then, by saying that it
always risks making the relevant—that is, anything worth narrating— look like the
inevitable.
For James, one largely irrelevant detour is this same middle section of
Isabel's travels, situated between Osmond's declaration o f love and their eventual
engagement. James moves through this chapter extremely quickly, claiming "it is
not. however, during this interval that we are closely concerned with her.” (318).
But the fact that Isabel's travels include an extended tour with Madame Merle
makes this a striking assertion of irrelevance, particularly in light of a recent article
by Melissa Solomon that rightly identifies Merle as the novel’s not-so-secret erotic
center—as the original "interesting woman." By denying our “close concern,”
James seems to want us to believe that nothing relevant is happening between
Isabel and Merle, that in her travels all Isabel really does is orbit around Osmond.
Indeed, it is just this sense of Osmond’s almost hypnotic control that Jane Campion
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develops in her recent film adaptation. Despite its stylistic extravagance.
Campion's treatment of Isabel's tour with Merle seems quite faithful— perhaps too
faithful—to a conviction that the tour must be mere delay or detour, since during
Isabel's travels we hear Osmond's voice repeating his declaration o f love and see
his disembodied lips surrealistically multiplied on a plate. If there is a difference it
seems mainly that Campion’s revolting “little feast” brings the underbelly of
seductive offerings to light, and prepares us more for the coming sadism (though of
course we're already more prepared, most likely, because The Portrait o f a Lady is
such a famous story and because John Malkovich usually plays libertines and
villains). As striking as Campion's sequence is. we might wonder if she missed an
opportunity for something better, for I think that when James denies the importance
of this section, we have to register the denial as defensive, as betraying a certain
doubt about what Merle and Isabel are doing together, and a certain anxiety that the
doubled interest o f their combination could steal the whole show.
There are o f course hints of what we miss in James’s hasty summary of
their travels, which upon reconstruction begin to look like a great tragic romance.
In the first place they include nothing less than the “consummation” o f Merle
relating her own history (with, we know, key omissions) as well as a significantly
heightened mood: “the girl had these days a thousand uses for her sense of the
romantic, which was more active than it had ever been” (323-5). But they also
contain the final touches of the novel’s central crime— Merle’s transferral of
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Isabel's affections from herself to Osmond, and here James’s reticent treatment of
criminality becomes a serious issue, reduced as it is to a host o f dark insinuations,
such that Merle exhibits “a different morality,” “an occasional flash of cruelty,”
and a “conception of human motives [that] might, in certain lights, have been
acquired at the court o f some kingdom in decadence” (324). We should recall also
that James presents the beginnings o f this process, as Merle prepares Isabel to meet
Osmond, in summary form: “Madame Merle...it must be observed parenthetically,
did not deliver herself all at once of these reflections, which are presented in a
cluster for the convenience of the reader” (197). Given this representational
strategy, it is no wonder that Merle seems such a shadowy figure, operating quite
specifically “behind the scenes.” But whatever effect James achieves with this
enforced exile—an exile belatedly literalized in Merle’s banishment to America—
must be weighed against its cost. Indeed, wherever characters stray into the
category of the irrelevant is a potential site of violence, a violence I’m calling
sadism in the hopes of checking our participation in the rampant inflation of
mimetic desires that we may not want to have in the first place. Instead we could
trust Solomon’s reading, which declines to follow the mimetic chain as Isabel is
handed-off from Merle to Osmond. We might say that in this section the novel
turns doubly sadistic, not only because it submits its heroine to the force of the
villain's gravitational field, but because it does so by sacrificing in large part what
may be its own most interesting relationship. As I see it, the novel never fully
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recovers from this unexplored detour, as it risks submitting Isabel to the kind of
circulation among men— including a masculinized reader—that Eve Sedgwick has
analyzed. No matter how many scenes of revelation James stages in the second
half o f the novel. Isabel remains firmly lodged in Osmond’s orbit.
Or does she? The Portrait o f a Lady features what has been called
"arguably the most delicately understated ending in all Victorian fiction"
(Sutherland 176). Realizing the awful truth about her relationship with Osmond,
Isabel has defied him by going to see the dying Ralph in England. After Ralph’s
death, she is approached by her original American suitor, the relentless Caspar
Goodwood, who demands that she turn to him at last. Isabel flees his embrace, and
then James gets subtle. The scene ends with the following description o f her
mental state: "She had not known where to turn; but she knew now. There was a
very straight path” (591). The novel ends as Henrietta informs a bewildered Caspar
that Isabel has left for Rome, supposedly to return to Osmond. In its extreme
restraint, James's conclusion short-circuits the flow of gossipy narrative
information, questioning the reader’s “right to know” and denying the certainties
sought by sadistic reading.
Historically, this ending has both confused and troubled some readers—that
is to say, some readers did not understand what happened, while others thought
they understood but didn’t like it. Over time though, and with a little help from
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James himself in a revision, both o f these concerns have waned in favor o f a
general consensus not only that Isabel is certainly going back to Osmond, but also
that she must, or should, do so. In other words, most readers now seem to agree
both about what happens at the end, and that this conclusion is appropriate, if not
happy.3 9 The revision to the text that promotes this consensus came as a response
to a contemporary reviewer, R.H. Hutton, who read Isabel’s “straight path” at the
end as leading to adultery with Caspar (Sutherland 176-183). Here is the new end
of the novel, with the revised portion italicized:
Henrietta had come out. closing the door behind her, and now she
put out her hand and grasped his arm. ‘Look here, Mr Goodwood.’ she
said: “ just you wait!’
On which he looked up at her — but only to guess, from her face,
with a revision, that she simply meant he was young. She stood shining at
him with that cheap comfort, and it added, on the spot, thirty years to his
life. She walked him away with her. however, as i f she had given him now
the key to patience. (592)
All that is indicated by the few lines that James adds is that Caspar is, at least for
now. out of luck. Yet in an odd leap of logic, this revision has been interpreted as
evidence that James wants readers to believe that Isabel is returning to Osmond, as
if eliminating one commitment implies another. What this assumption ignores is
the possibility that James was not reacting to the content o f Hutton’s reading at all,
but to the presumption o f it, to the mere fact that Hutton assumed he knew what
happened next for Isabel.
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I submit that what James has tried to do above all as the novel ends is to
keep Isabel away from us. It is no accident that we finish the novel in the position
of Caspar, chasing an Isabel who won’t be caught. In fact, whether we are fans of
Caspar or not, whether we identify with him or hope he wins Isabel, the conclusion
remains a disappointment, because structurally we are out of the loop.4 0 To find
ourselves thus excluded is to find ourselves flung out of our comfy chairs into the
vast loneliness outside of gossip. From this perspective, the critical consensus we
have formed around the ending looks like a compensation, enabling readings that
convert disappointment into satisfaction as they convert narrative silence into
critical knowledge. But in restoring the comfort of gossip, the intimacy that
consensus produces, we bear some complicity with the sadistic turn the novel takes.
Leaping to a clear understanding o f Isabel's “straight path,” we succumb to the
final seduction o f the novelistic, the promise of full intelligibility and the
completion of linear progress at the expense of other interesting possibilities.
A closer look at the rejection of Caspar, however, reinforces the limits of
this intelligibility. I would suggest that, for the reader, Caspar has never felt like a
real option for Isabel. For all the apparent passion of his own desire, he is not a
strongly signifying part of the mimetic chain. It is not so much that we don’t like
him. though James is careful to indicate some faults, as that he is not positioned as
a hero. If Isabel were to end up with Caspar we would have to feel a bit cheated, as
though we had read the wrong novel, because if Isabel was actually in his orbit all
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along, the bulk o f the plot becomes a detour, slipping suddenly into irrelevance.
Thus, the reason Isabel cannot marry Caspar, like the reason Lord Warburton must
fall in love with her, stems more from a law of discourse than of character. We
must feel that the narrative made a difference— forced a change, as Mulvey says. It
won't do to thrust our interest back on Caspar's unaccountable love that predates
the beginning of the story, for then our investment of time and labor will not have
mattered.4 1 Isabel understands quite early that the reason Caspar won’t figure into
her plot is that he belongs to a different genre: “It pleased Isabel to believe that he
might have ridden, on a plunging steed, the whirlwind of a great war” (116). As
she sees it, the courtship novel is too banal for him, and he too overpowering for it:
he would fit better in an epic. Thus Caspar comes to stand for a principle of
otherness, and his proposals are gestures beyond the confines of the novel.
With such gestures James has prepared us for another, more speculative
kind of leap at the novel’s end, one that he could not himself take. This would be a
leap, not onto any straight path, but onto a perpetual detour, one that is also located,
not coincidentally, in a connection between women. My fantasy of this detour is
based on the unfounded guess that Henrietta could be lying at the end to Caspar.
What if she has finally realized that Caspar is also wrong for Isabel, and she
actually has our heroine stowed away somewhere, preparing for a daring break
from all the possessive men in her life? Such sympathetic speculation is not just
our right, but our job as critical readers. So did James at his best, as when he writes
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that Isabel “would be an easy victim of scientific criticism if she were not intended
to awaken on the reader's part an impulse more tender and more purely expectant"
(52).
There is no doubt, however, that this alternate ending takes us beyond
James’s own commentary on the novel, for in his preface, James classes Henrietta
among the characters who are “but wheels to the coach” (xv). This insistence on
her non-essential status, however, cannot but make us wonder what the difference
is, what it would mean to think of Henrietta as more than a mere reporter, more
than a wheel that propels the plot. Moreover, James's very need to explain her, and
the awkw ardness o f his attempt to do so, betrays a telling anxiety about her place in
the novel: “I have suffered Henrietta (of whom we have indubitably too much) so
officiously, so strangely, so almost inexplicably, to pervade” (xvi). After a long
detour into other issues, the only explanation James can provide for this supposed
excess is that Henrietta was there to amuse the reader, that she corresponded to his
“w onderful notion o f the lively” (xvii). But why should a character who can
prov ide amusement not also generate real interest, and become herself a source of
plot? 1 would suggest that, at a deep level, James senses that Henrietta is somehow
essential, but beyond his imaginative reach. All he can do is gesture toward this
plot beyond the plot, this unimaginable horizon, as when Ralph, perhaps the
novel's most authoritative character, says that “Henrietta, however, does smell of
the Future — it almost knocks one down!” (94)
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Isabel’s readiness for this future is suggested in her final encounter with
Pansy, at the convent where Osmond has placed her. In this scene. Isabel proposes
with breathtaking boldness that Pansy come away with her, and while the
possibility is quickly shut down by Pansy’s hopeless subjection to her father, it is
worth noting that this other plot, the plot James can’t or won’t let happen, is again a
plot between women. At the same time, the loss of this plot means that any fantasy
of a future with Henrietta will likely feel incomplete if it leaves Pansy to her plight.
But is this not the most insidious patriarchal ploy, to trap women in personal
commitments, in the very emotional ties they have come to depend on? After all,
one thing Osmond makes sure of is Isabel's interest in Pansy. In fact, this interest
figures as the final touch o f Isabel’s seduction when, after their initial weeks
together, Osmond has her visit Pansy on her way out of town. Thus, however
sympathetic Pansy is, she is also the final iron link in Isabel’s chains o f mimetic
desire. There is no easy way out o f this dilemma, but the best advice James can
provide may come from Osmond’s sister, the Countess, w ho tells Isabel not to
worry too much about Pansy: “Don’t try to be too good. Be a little easy and
natural and nasty: feel a little wicked, for the comfort of it, once in your life!”
(547). Strangely, to resist a sadistic reading may be to license a little sadism in
others, particularly in female characters, the regular victims o f the masculine
sadism Mulvey describes. Feminism can promote this resistance by insisting that
readers learn to take a greater interest in a female character's comfort—and
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freedom—than some image o f the good, the necessary, or the appropriate that she
is made to represent, one that somehow always seems to require her massive
suffering.
NOTES
1 Lady Windermere's Fan in The Complete Plays o f Oscar Wilde (82).
: William A. Cohen's argument in Sex Scandal represents a more recent attempt to define
the relationship between scandal and gossip. For him. gossip implies a community “in which
victims are personally known to their audience" (19), while scandal is the better analogy to the
novel as “a function o f mass media, which rely on an anonymous audience far from the event’s
dramatis personae" (14). While this contrast is indeed useful for defining the conditions o f modem
scandal and its particular resemblance to the novel, we should not feel ourselves confined to such a
narrow definition o f gossip, which is hardly common usage. (Nothing more belies this definition
than the term “gossip column"). As should become clear, moreover, gossip remains the better term
for my purposes because o f the wider field o f interest it implies.
3 It could be argued that Mrs. Smith, in her initial encouragement o f the marriage, is only
making a little Providence for herself, trying to put a female network to work in her favor. And
while this argument might seem somewhat attractive along class lines, the sacrifice o f Anne it
requires can't do much for feminism.
4 Ian Watt discusses this issue more generally, and at length, in The Rise o f the Novel (118-
30).
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' O f course in many respects the opinions o f Emma and Knightley are too close for
courtship. Thus in one scene we see Emma play at the necessary difference, arguing a position that
is not hers simply so there can be an argument.
6 See for instance Cohen’s comments in Sex Scandal (20-21).
I would suggest at the very least that the following conditions would have to be met: the
reader has never read any criticism o f the novel, has not seen the recent film adaptations, and has
read the novel on her own. outside o f any institutional context in which critical orthodoxies could
reach her.
8 Trilling's essay “Emma and the Legend o f Jane Austen" appears in Beyond Culture.
Regarding Emma's difficulty, he claims, rather vaguely, that none o f our rereadings “permits us to
flatter ourselves that we have fully understood what the novel is doing. The effect is extraordinary,
perhaps unique. The book is like a person— not to be comprehended fully and finally by any other
person. It is perhaps to the point that it is the only one o f Jane Austen's novels that has for its title a
person's name" (32-33). While his explicit argument goes no further on this point, the movement
o f Trilling's essay implies that the source o f Emma's difficulty is its membership in a genre of one:
the modem idyll, a genre which creates such difficulty in part because o f its very uniqueness (we
have no practice w ith it) but more for what it attempts in defiance o f m odem sensibility: to use
Trilling's terms, the wresting o f a legitimate “victory" from the “battlefield" o f the mind as it
navigates society. What makes Emma remarkable, from this perspective, would be that it dares to
earn its happy ending— and in the earning lies the difficulty.
" Also, the recent film adaptations register Emma's guilt much more emphatically in the
immediate context o f the remark.
1 0 Frank Churchill gets this line (181).
1 1 Mary Waldron discusses the idea of a covert love scene in “M en o f Sense and Silly
Wives: The Confusions o f Mr. Knightley." She describes the scene when Emma acknowledges her
fault “one o f the tenderest o f low-key love scenes in all fiction: but. typically, Austen places it at a
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point where neither party can possibly know that it is a love scene, so caught up are they in their
erroneous speculations" (154). I agree with her reading o f this scene, and would simply extend her
insight further back to include their entire courtship o f gossip.
I: Jan Gordon has seen this quite differently. For him. Knightley “is a natural ally o f those
like Miss Bates who advance the claims o f voice" (31): "Emma, after her abuse o f Miss Bates,
marries the gossip's defender and virtual competitor, as the voice o f Knightley's authority co-opts
the spinster s more subversive voice. In attacking Miss Bates Emma comes close to becoming her
likeness.' which is a radical mode o f legitimizing her role" (37). Gordon's argument turns on an
associative logic that is inherently reversible, and one that indeed we would typically expect to run
the other way. For is not the usual associative logic the lowering one o f guilt by association? If we
can associate Emma and Miss Bates together (and we assume that Emma enjoys the higher status),
we should expect the effect o f this association to work at least as much to Emma's harm as Miss
Bates's credit. Clearly the larger context o f their association, which Gordon him self notes, suggests
that, insofar as Miss Bates represents a possible future for Emma o f lonely and inconsequential
spinsterhood, her likeness to Emma is intolerable, and must be denied in the most emphatic way-
possible: by marriage. His other claim that in Austen generally "the gossip demands respect before
the conv entional marriage can occur” (39) strikes me as more reasonable, though only half the story
in Emma, since, as I've argued, this kind o f "respect” keeps Miss Bates in a place that is less than
honorary.
L ’ Rosmarin observes this (330-331).
1 4 This distinction in fact makes up half o f Edmund W ilson's defense o f Austen as an
artist: "Miss Austen is almost unique among the novelists o f her sex in being deeply and steadily
concerned, not with the vicarious satisfaction o f emotion (though the Cinderella theme, o f course,
does figure in several o f her novels) nor with the skillful exploitation o f gossip, but as the great
masculine novelists are, with the novel as a work o f art” (Wilson 66, emphasis added).
1 5 Among the critics who discuss this is Spacks (165-166).
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Nor. it seems, does Emma get relief from travel. At any rate, we know she has never
seen the sea (94).
1 Boredom at its outer limits may in fact be incommunicable in novelistic terms— not that
it couldn't be represented in a novel, but who. beyond the most terror-stricken graduate students,
could read it?
1 8 Quoted in Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
|g In the context o f film studies, one critic who has done so is Patricia Mellencamp. See
her Indiscretions.
Mary Waldron has done some o f this work for Emma v/ith her attention to Mrs. Cole and
Mrs. Goddard. O f course, the most important example o f this strategy for Austen studies is in
Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic. It is somewhat strange in fact that
Gilbert and Gubar omit Mrs. Elton from their list of "nastier, more resilient, energetic female
characters who enact [Austen's] rebellious dissent from her culture” (169). Mrs. Elton apparently
gets left out because she's not a widow, but otherwise she fits their critical criteria perfectly: she is
certainly nasty, and she is quite literally still talking up to the end.
:I In regard to the complex politics o f identification, see Diana Fuss’s Identification
Papers.
2 2 In Nobody's Story, Catherine Gallagher cautions against an overly optimistic view o f the
novel as a training-ground for sympathy. Drawing on a theory in David Hume’s Treatise of Human
Nature that sympathy can only occur by making a feeling one's own, she suggests that novels
stimulate sympathy only because they facilitate this appropriation:
We can always claim to be expanding our capacity for sympathy by reading fiction
because, after all, if we can sympathize with nobody, then we can sympathize with
anybody. Or so it would seem, but such sympathy remains on that level o f abstraction
where anybody is ‘nobody in particular' (the very definition o f a novel character). Nobody
was eligible to be the universally preferred anybody because nobody, unlike somebody,
was never anybody else. (167-72)
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: ‘ Spacks describes Emma's difficulty in relating to others in terms o f a tendency to
fictionalize both others and herself (166-7).
:j Readers o f Austen should be especially attuned to the dislocations o f women from her
other novels, whether it is the painful uprootings o f the Dashwoods and the Elliots, the happier
opportunities o f Catherine Morland and Fanny Price, or Elizabeth’s triumphant occupation o f
Pemberley.
‘5 Casey Finch and Peter Bowen offer a reading that develops along these lines: “And
though Mrs. Elton, for instance, may begrudge the match o f Emma and Mr. Knightley. her thoughts,
as they are reproduced in the free indirect style, turn out to be limited and inconsequential. The free
indirect style may well recognize certain resistances to the novel's political impulsions, but it will
always do so in order to render them palpably illegitimate” (14).
See for instance pages 29, 78-9, 195, 262, and particularly 432: “When Isabel heard
such things she felt a greater scom for them than for the gossip o f a village parlour."
‘ Brooks anticipates this objection: “the inclusion o f James in a discussion o f the
melodramatic imagination will to many readers initially appear perverse. James is o f course reputed
for his subtlety, his refinement, his art o f nuance and shading: and his world is preeminently the
highly civilized and mannered" (55).
:s Spacks makes a similar point with respect to James's later novel What Maisie Knevi-:
“We experience a kind o f apotheosis o f gossip, purified, sublimated, providing gratification without
contamination" (217).
1 9 For further discussion o f gossip's double aspect in conjunction with the history o f the
novel, see Spacks.
The notion o f the masochistic viewer was developed first by Studlar and then in more
detail by Clover.
M See for instance the elaborate readings o f Sade by D eleuze or Carter.
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' For an extended discussion o f the economic connotations o f “interest" in this novel see
White.
' For Girard, seduction is a matter o f seeming to possess what others lack, a condition he
calls kudos (152). In this conception, the bait and switch o f seduction is inevitable because the
possession o f kudos is always fleeting. This limitation need not imply, however, that all seductions
are actual betrayals— only that the structure o f desire is such that they eventually feel this way to the
seduced. Actual betrayal, w e might say. occurs when the seducer capitalizes on her seductive
power, as when Merle exploits the seduction o f Isabel for the benefit o f Osmond, and. especially.
Pansy.
'4 Neil Postman claims that the telegraph was the first technology to move information
faster than the speed o f transportation (67). This is o f course only true for written information,
since visual signaling with light or smoke and audio signaling with drums, bells, and so forth had
been around for a very long time. Nonetheless. Postman is right to say that the telegraph represents
a massive acceleration o f communication. We should add that, in rather traumatic fashion, its very
speed calls attention to the distance that it bridges.
’5 1 want to thank Tate Hurvitz for reminding me o f this telegram at a conference.
3 ,1 For further discussion o f narrative and striptease see Barthes' The Pleasure o f the Text.
' I borrow this term from Christopher Prendergast, and we would do well to retain his
emphasis on the double meaning o f order as both a command and an arrangement. The mimesis of
desire functions as an order in both these senses— it commands interest by telling us what is
interesting, and it arranges interest by propelling it along a chain o f plot that throws characters into
various interesting situations or relationships.
3 8 Adrian Poole has discussed Mrs. Touchett in similar terms with respect to the temporal
effects o f the novel's original serial publication, claiming her belief in the sufficiency o f the present
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makes her "a perfect anti-model for the reader, in her effort to live not only without expectations
but without memories" (146).
An important early dissenting view comes from Arnold Kettle, who argues that James
sacrifices Isabel to an ideal o f martyrdom.
4 1 1 Campion solves James’s problem beautifully by ending with Isabel running from
Caspar— and the camera— then hesitating at the door o f Gardencourt. As she turns toward the
camera, harried and weary, no longer sure where to run, we must finally realize that it is time to
leave her alone.
4 1 For an expanded discussion o f narrative interest in terms o f investment, see Tan.
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Chapter 2
On (not) Reading Clarissa: Fantasies of an Epistolary Female Network
At a distance, female netw orks are at once more important and more
v ulnerable than face-to-face gossip. No text could make this case more
persuasively than Samuel Richardson’s enormous epistolary novel Clarissa, which
sustains interest for the majority o f its fifteen hundred dense pages by representing
the vitality of a single female correspondence against a series of threats. Stuck
between the horrible family who would sell her to the highest bidder and the
charismatic suitor who cannot be trusted, Clarissa Harlowe’s only links to the
world outside this tug of war are her letters to her friend Anna Howe, and no one in
the novel fails to understand the importance of these letters. Her family attempts to
censor their content and eventually to stop their production altogether, while the
ultimate threat eventually comes from Lovelace, the notorious rake who will make
Clarissa his prisoner. Forging a letter in Anna’s handwriting, Lovelace has “Anna”
tell Clarissa that she thinks Lovelace will finally behave honorably and marry her,
thus threatening the network from within by simulating the essential function of
screening suitors that we saw in my discussion of Moll Flanders and Persuasion.'
In the face of all this adversity Clarissa is by no means passive; her
countermeasures include a full range o f tactics as well, from stashing spare writing
materials to employing secret messengers. Thus a great deal of the plot of Clarissa
is simply about the struggle to write in hostile territory, with each letter taking on
the status of military intelligence.
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But for a writer as prolific as Clarissa, letters must be understood as going
well beyond tactical considerations. They are indeed the space o f her life, insofar
as she is able to sustain it in any positive sense, where her fantasies can escape
circumstances that so painfully contradict them. Lovelace is a tremendously
prolific writer himself, and his fantasies, which include a famous metamorphic
dream and an elaborate conceit about murdering his conscience, certainly flourish
under the conditions o f epistolarity as well, conditions defined first by the
expectation o f privacy and second by the experience o f waiting at a distance.2 In
Bernhard Siegert's materialist analysis of letters, the invention of the fold leads to
the invention o f privacy, which in turn leads to the invention o f the soul. Souls
come about, in other words, as the hallucination of interiority, custom fit to justify
retroactively the material conditions of privacy. But what does the soul do while it
waits for the next letter? In the long gaps between letters the materiality of writing
(pens, ink, paper) and sending (envelopes, seals, messengers) disappears for the
lonely epistolary subject. Indeed many writers. Clarissa Harlowe among them, fill
this void by getting out their supplies and w riting some more. Reading the novel,
of course, we can't do this. Our curse as readers of epistolary fiction is that we
can't write back. And yet, as the critical record will show, we do. It is the law—or
perhaps the anarchy—of letters that we fill the gaps in space and time with
fantasies that go well beyond the compulsive rediscovery o f the soul.
There is a sense in which it is too late for me to write about Clarissa. I
don't mean the fact that the eighteenth century can feel awfully remote, or that an
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avalanche o f criticism has filled what was once a major critical chasm— though
both of these obstacles are daunting enough to the aspiring commentator. What I
mean is that I've finished the novel; I know how it ends. Indeed, like most people
who have spent much time around an English department, I had quite a bit of
information about the novel before I ever picked it up. If we want to study reading,
this is not the ideal position to be in. To be sure, it is the position to which we’re
accustomed, even for less famous novels. In our classes and reading groups, we
finish all but the longest books before meeting for discussion. Books, articles and
conference papers as a rule treat the act of reading— soberly, responsibly—as a
completed event (though for the occasional sneak this is no doubt a fiction). But
Clarissa would have been an ideal novel to write an account of from the middle—
or better still, a series o f accounts as a kind of special correspondent working my
way through. After all, it is a novel that necessarily remains unfinished for a
sizeable chunk o f the reader’s life, and, more importantly, a novel that continually
dramatizes the speculative richness of the unfinished condition. It is this richness
that I want to describe and, with some reservations, champion in this reading of
Clarissa. Given that it comes, as I’ve suggested, “too late,” I will not attempt to
approximate a faithful and complete account of reading the novel. What I do hope
to convey, through the more usual blend of enhanced memory, forgetting, and
rereading, is a sense o f what is at stake in Clarissa’s story beyond how things
eventually turn out.
Following Dorothy Van Ghent’s famous lead, Clarissa's critics have been
somewhat preoccupied with the plot, focusing most attention on the bitter
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circumstances of the heroine's demise as if that were all Richardson’s remarkable
novel had to offer. Van Ghent opens her account by drawing a contrast between
Clarissa and Moll Flanders, noting that Clarissa seems to proceed with far less
action and “very little subplot.” (45-47). Van Ghent is certainly right to see great
differences between these two early novels, but her description obscures a key
feature of Clarissa, that this is a novel that devotes enormous (perhaps unequaled)
space to considering different plots, to speculation. The actual plot seems so
meager not because Clarissa isn't about plotting, but because most o f the plots in
the novel remain unrealized fantasies. The epistolary form is especially well-suited
to representing the fantasies of characters, for what else does one write about once
the news of the day is covered? Indeed, how is the news of the day even made
narratable except in relation to what a character might have wished to occur—that
is to say, the content o f her fantasies and, ultimately, her vision o f the future?
Unlike the typical narrator of later novels, a letter-writing character looks forward
with as much ease as she looks back, and indeed a difference along these lines has
not gone unnoted.' Picking up on Lovelace's famous claims of writing “lively,
present-tense” (882) accounts “to the moment” (721), critics have focused on the
immediacy of writing in the letters and the lack of secure reflection available to the
characters as they narrate events.4 But less attention has been focused on how
heavily Clarissa is invested in the future tense, in the rampant and irresistible
speculation about what might happen. Paradigmatic is Anna’s much-quoted
daydream: “How charmingly might you and I live together and despite them all”
(133). As the characters look to the future, so, we might suspect, does the reader.
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producing a reading experience that has as much to do with daydreaming as it does
with attending to the words on the page.5
In its structure as a “double yet separate correspondence” (35), the novel's
three principal fantasists are Clarissa, Anna, and Lovelace, though indeed there are
others. Belford, Lovelace's correspondent, is a conspicuously reluctant fantasist,
and indeed his continual failure to act can be seen as a rather damning indictment
of passive, non-speculative reading, of just waiting to see what happens. Among
the other characters, first and foremost is Clarissa's brother, James, whose greedy
fantasy sets the plot in motion as Clarissa seeks an escape from marriage to the
repulsive Solmes. In James's “happy ending" Clarissa marries Solmes, adding
wealth to the family estates and confirming James's status as the de facto head of
that family. This inaugural fantasy of Clarissa's future generates a plot that is
precisely a fight for that future, as she so clearly sees: “I should not give up to my
brother's ambition the happiness of my future life” (105). Early on, though,
Clarissa’s own tendency is to resist fantasizing altogether, for her epic struggle
with her family has less to do with realizing an alternate future than with a simple
refusal, the right to her “negative” (307). Not unlike Isabel Archer, to whom she is
sometimes compared, she seems to find fantasy oppressive in part for its
singularity, the way in which it forecloses other possibilities.6
But fantasy is never really absent from Clarissa's life as she reports it.
Rather, it is distorted into a death wish that would seem to be a kind of anti-fantasy,
representing the desire for absence above all else. Already in her first letter
Clarissa is contemplating death: “I have sometimes wished that it had pleased God
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to have taken me in my last fever, when I had everybody’s love and good opinion”
(41). Consider, however, the progression of Clarissa’s fantasy life as her family
besieges her:
About Solmes: “I had rather be buried alive, indeed I had, than have that
man!” 101
To Solmes: ‘T will even consent to enter into the awful vault of my
ancestors, and to have that bricked up upon me, than consent to be
miserable for life...” 305
Clarissa’s dream: “[Lovelace] stabbed me to the heart, and then tumbled
me into a deep grave ready dug, among two or three half-dissolved
carcasses; throwing in the dirt and earth upon me with his hands, and
trampling it down with his feet” 342-43
The fantasy grows steadily more specific and detailed, suggesting that her death
wish has more content than a simple desire for absence. In fact it offers a clear
psychic economy, allowing her to avoid imagining her “future life” without giving
up imagination, to assert her social negative while reveling in her bodily negation.
And indeed this economy may serve a more directed psychic function. Tania
Modleski has pointed out that “death can be a very powerful means of wreaking
vengeance on others who do not properly "appreciate’ us...” and several critics echo
her in attributing revenge fantasies to Clarissa (Loving 18). Moreover, when
communicated to her oppressors, these fantasies become threats—rhetorical acts in
a strategy of resistance. If Clarissa is going down, she lets the world know, she is
taking others with her.7
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It is Anna, however, who dares to entertain more positive fantasies:
"If you allow of it. I protest I will go off privately with you. and we will live and
die together... London. I am told, is the best hiding-place in the world” (331).
When Clarissa rejects this and falls under Lovelace's power, Anna steps up her
efforts to imagine a way out. Her most ambitious plan summons the figure of Mrs
Townsend, a great smuggler who, Anna promises, can smuggle Clarissa away with
"a whole ship's crew at your devotion” (622). Much like Clarissa’s fantasies, this
one grows over time, so that when Anna again presses the issue she writes: “[Mrs
Townsend] is sure she can engage them, in so good a cause and (if there be
occasion) both their ships' crews. in your service” (860). Here is an early and
prime example of a female network imagined as a response to patriarchal
oppression. In this fantasy of multiplying sailors, men o f course play a part, but
only as a sort of vague mass—a malleable supply o f power and pleasure. It is the
women who recognize the problem, find the solution, and mobilize the resources.
Beyond the level of plot and character, though, this fantasy points to Anna’s role as
Clarissa's main correspondent, her main reader, and reveals the way she shares that
role with the reader o f the novel. As I have argued in the first chapter, there are
ways in which reading itself can be seen to establish a kind of female network. In
the context of letters, to read as if in a female network is to fill letters—and the
gaps between them— with wildly generous fantasies.
Female friendship announces itself loudly in Clarissa— so loudly, in fact,
that there might be a tendency to mistake it for a form o f politeness or wishful
thinking. Lillian Faderman’s scholarship, however, persuasively situates this type
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of rhetoric within an important tradition o f what was called “romantic friendship.”8
Her point is that claims o f intimacy should be taken at their word—that is, to
dismiss them as the showy language of a sentimental culture is to miss the
profound bonds women often formed with female friends. Taking this rhetoric
seriously, then, we can go beyond affirming these relationships to inquiring about
their psychological status. I want particularly to consider how their metaphors
reveal a certain fantasy of subjectivity—one at odds with the emerging
individualism of the eighteenth century that Ian Watt has described with reference
to this same novel. He in fact sees Clarissa as “The heroic representative of all that
is free and positive in the new individualism” (222). Watt makes this claim,
however, in the same breath in which he declares Clarissa “without allies,”
strangely ignoring the one great alliance that draws so much attention in the novel.
He indeed seems interested in letters mainly as a formal problem for Richardson,
and therefore less in terms of how they define Clarissa as an epistolary subject. But
it is precisely our sense of Clarissa in alliance with Anna Howe that complicates
Watt's theory of individualism.
Anna is indeed the novel's most committed anti-individualist, as a short list
of quotations should make clear:
“when your concerns are my concerns? when your honour is my honour?”
(40)
“we have but one mind between us” (131)
“If it be possible, more than myself I love you!” (356)
“Let your Anna Howe obey the call of that friendship which has united us
as one soul and endeavor to give you consolation” (577)
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“ ‘[Clarissa] is my soul!— for I now have none!—only a miserable one.
however!— for she was the joy, the stay, the prop o f my life! Never has
woman loved woman as we love one another!” (1045)
The feeling, moreover, is clearly mutual, as in these lines from Clarissa:
“you. my dear, who are myself, as it were” (236)
“that sweet familiarity, which is one of the indispensables of the sacred tie
by which your heart and mine are bound in one” (359)
“the more than sisterly love which has for years uninterruptedly bound us
together as one mind” (1163)
“[Anna.] whose love to me has passed the love o f women" (1338)
The language of these friends is saturated with terms of sharing and merging on
almost every level imaginable, whether social (“honour”), bodily (“heart,”), or
spiritual (“soul”). Moreover, such language may be contagious, infecting critical
discourse as in Terry Eagleton's description of Anna, in which she ends up buried
in the heroine's psyche: “humorous and debunking, unswerving in sisterly
solidarity yet astringently critical. Anna is part of Clarissa’s own unconscious, able
to articulate that which it would be improper for the heroine herself to voice” (78).
Lovelace himself anticipates this sort of phenomenon, though with his usual
resisting irony: “And why should it be thought strange that I. who love them so
dearly, and study them so much, should catch the infection o f them?” (790).
Perhaps as the rhetoric spreads, we see the antidote to individualism. In the case o f
Clarissa and Anna, we become unable to think the one without the other.
Female friendships, however, are not all glamour. It is not insignificant that
Clarissa's first words to appear in the novel are “How you oppress me, my dearest
friend...”(41) (nor are Lovelace's first words inappropriate: “in vain”). Both
characters place tremendous burdens on each other. Anna, for instance, insists on
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total divulgence from a friend whose exhaustion from relentless writing hastens her
own death: “Pray inform me o f everything that passes between you and him”
(407). Clarissa is at times no less intrusive or demanding: “Had you married on
your mother's last birthday, as she would have had you, I should not, I dare say.
have wanted a refuge that would have saved me so many mortifications, and so
much disgrace" (524). It is no wonder that a relationship carrying such emotional
weight can sometimes feel claustrophobic.9 Moreover, critics have been quick to
observe how the relationship eventually wanes: “After literally hundreds o f pages,
Clarissa and Anna virtually cease to correspond. The friendship seems to have
written itself out— and off... An explanation of this breakdown is an explanation of
the novel itself' (Ostovich 158).1 0 While it is crucial to recognize the limits o f their
friendship, to explain the novel as a breakdown is to reduce reading to a state of
completion, to collapse the “hundreds of pages” of heroic struggle against destiny
into its eventual failure. Clarissa might as well have died on the first page.
We should return, then, to details of those fantasies that boldly imagine a
different destiny, and to the kind o f reading those details suggest. To do this most
effectively, I would like to linger briefly on some basic questions of how the reader
encounters the novel. Film theorist Stephen Heath has argued that to understand
how novelistic representation works is primarily a function of locating the viewing
(or reading) subject in space and time: “Realism is only ever, and above all in its
innocent proposals as straight transmission, an image—the final figure—o f the
representation system in which it is engaged; a system which, positioning and
effecting, is a ceaseless performance o f the subject in time fo r the reality given, o f
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subject-time" (116). Similarly, he asserts that “events take place, a place for some
one. and the need is to pose the question o f that 'one’ and its narrative terms of film
space” (69). Since Heath explicitly labels his theory o f film “novelistic,” what
would it mean to locate subject-time and subject-space in a novel, particularly this
one?
At least three moments in time are invoked simultaneously as we read a
letter in an epistolary novel: the time o f the events narrated, the time of narrating,
and the always invisible but always implicit time of reading by the recipient. As a
result there is no stable “here and now” in epistolary fiction. In long stretches of
narration, the effect of this instability on our reading can be somewhat muted, but
self-reflexive moments can be disruptive, as in Clarissa’s frequent references to the
writing and sending of her letters. For example, when she wants to entreat her
parents in full humility she writes “on my knees I write this letter,” hoping, of
course, that they will picture her in this posture when they read it (1180). A similar
logic governs the way she closes a letter to Anna: “If I am prevented depositing
this and the enclosed, as I intend to try to do. late as it is, I will add to it, as
occasion shall offer. Meantime, believe me to be— Your ever affectionate and
grateful Clarissa Harlowe” (312). Her “meantime” o f course creates a paradox:
Anna cannot know what she is supposed to believe in the meantime until the letter
arrives, but once the letter arrives the meantime has passed. It would seem there
are two ways of explaining why Clarissa writes this passage: the first is that it is
written strictly for herself, for her own fantasy of an audience; the second is that it
is written for Anna as a special and sophisticated kind o f reader, one capable of
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undoing the paradox by engaging in a retrospective fantasy o f being with Clarissa
as she wrote the letter. But to an extent these two explanations amount to the same
thing: a fantasy of intimacy that each correspondent has o f the other.
The question of space in Clarissa is perhaps still more vexed.11 Leo Braudy
has described the space these characters inhabit as an “almost non-visual world”
(“Penetration” 194). Indeed, what has become the customary novelistic
descriptions of the characters’ surrounding environment is strikingly absent from
the novel. Margaret Anne Doody attributes the sparseness of description in
Clarissa to a principle o f economy: “There is never any detail to distract us from
the main effect.. . . The major impression here is one of enclosure” (Natural
193).1 2 But the deep claustrophobia o f this novel produces correspondingly far-
flung fantasies— fantasies of hiding in London or settling in America— that appeal
in part because they invoke a vastness beyond description. What we find in
Clarissa, then, is not simply a sense of tight spaces, but a sense that description can
create a claustrophobic effect independent of such content by the mere fact that it
confines the mind to a specified image. To ignore this distinction is to collapse the
effect of what is not described into the effect of what is described. While in a given
scene, minimal description may indeed create a focused effect, the reader’s
cumulative disorientation in the face o f undescribed space does not so much
eliminate distraction as invite it.
We might say that virtually no space is described in Clarissa, but that this
blank space has a kind o f positive value, and is in fact a well-functioning Nowhere.
And perhaps the function o f this Nowhere is precisely to be the best place for
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fantasy. We might recall Freud's famous essay on beating fantasies and the
amplified analysis o f Laplanche and Pontalis.1 3 While situated vaguely in a
“schoolyard," the fantasies Freud analyzed are stripped down to a basic
grammatical level— no time is wasted in descriptions of the schoolyard scenery.
Instead, the fantasist seems to float free o f constraints, is in fact so fluid that she
easily trades roles, so fluid, even, that she can become the action itself. Laplanche
and Pontalis explain this fluidity with respect to the seduction fantasy “A father
seduces a daughter.” In this scenario, “nothing shows whether the subject will be
immediately located as daughter; it can as well be fixed as father, or even in the
term seduces.” William Warner had described a similar process in Richardson's
fantasies of correspondence: “anything too inert and physical, anything that is
resistant to the subject is filtered out...” (101). Perhaps it is no surprise, then, that
Richardson supports the intimate fantasies of characters and readers with a
narrative space as flexible and yielding as his narrative time.
Have we then liberated the Heathian novelistic reader, stuck as she was in
space and time? Nowhere Woman is, to be sure, still interested in these
dimensions, only now it is she who rewrites the laws of narrative physics. Spelling
these rules out would be a considerable task, but extrapolating from Elizabeth
Ermarth's discussion o f Nobody as the narrator o f realism, we may at least establish
the right trajectory. Ermarth calls this narrator Nobody for two reasons: first, since
it comes into being as a result of consensus, it is a plural entity and not an
individual: second, since it possesses an impossible aggregate vision, it is not
corporeal (65). Thus the narrator is literally no one— in no one place, at no one
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time, with no one perspective. To find a similar dispersal in the reader, however,
may raise the stakes even further, for if the reader can become Nobody then
perhaps “the new individualism” has carried the means of its own undoing all
along. In political terms, the fantasy life gained by becoming Nobody may be the
life-blood of female networks. Anna’s aforementioned sailor fantasies do seem to
pass the tests of vagueness and fluidity, even as they focus on a clear strategic goal.
Moreover, as a reader. Anna is figured as an interventionist, not detached (like
Belford for much of the novel) but involved, heavily invested in speculation about
the future. Anna's reading is indeed a kind of writing, one that recalls some of
Richardson's first readers and special beneficiaries of the unfinished condition, his
“female coterie,” arguing for an ending that would suit their fantasies.1 4
But historically, the most public readers of Clarissa—the critics—have
generally failed to acknowledge their participation in this kind of reading. By now
a small forest has been devoted to Clarissa criticism, most of which displays
considerable learning and sophistication. What is lost, however, is much record o f
the critics as emotionally involved readers, leaving us with a model of reading that
is all attention and no daydreaming. In fact, critics often actively bury the traces of
their daydreaming—their stolen, guilty moments o f pleasurable speculation— in
abstractions such as the discourse o f realism. Ian Watt, for instance, usually quite
attentive to the experience of reading, is content to suggest that Clarissa’s rape is
“perhaps the least convincing incident in the book” without offering an explanation
(227). '■ At a key moment of dissatisfaction, instead of considering the criteria for
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such a judgment, he offers a big blank covered up by an empty gesture toward
verisimilitude. Similarly, William Warner claims that it is Richardson’s notorious
villain Lovelace, “not Clarissa, who gives us the novel’s most convincing versions
of human attachment” (37). Unlike Watt, Warner does explain his belief, but in a
way that continues to beg the question: Lovelace’s friendship “seems more
genuine for being largely concealed,” which conforms to “a masculine code.”
Since Warner makes a comparison across gender, how can he base his judgment on
an appeal to a strictly masculine code? Where is the “feminine code” we need to
measure female friendships?1 6 It doesn’t seem unfair to say that part o f why
Warner is more “convinced” by Lovelace is simply because Warner is a man with
fairly transparent male desires.1 7 When unreflexive, the discourse of realism tends
to turn argument into bickering by disguising desire as belief. We cannot get
around such impasses until we are willing to admit that what we find convincing,
credible, realistic is related (if not identical) to what we want to believe— and while
most of us would probably prefer to avoid overly indulgent displays o f these
desires, acknowledging their presence guards against the temptation to invoke “the
credible” as a critical power-play.1 8
Desire in reading, however, takes us beyond the question of realism to the
question of the real. That is, it is not only our sense of plausibility at issue when
we read, but also our sense o f what actually happens in the novel, plausible or not.
Leslie Fiedler, a prominent reader, once made the rather imaginative assertion that
“Lovelace is killed in a duel by his closest friend” (63).1 9 Most attentive readers
who have gotten to the end o f the book will think this just plain wrong. It is wrong,
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to be sure, but maybe not so plainly. Now perhaps Fiedler never read Clarissa at
all. But I'd prefer to imagine him less the irresponsible big shot (though that would
have its rewards) and more like one o f us. a reader who has grown a little tired by
the end of what still seems the longest book in the English language and has
relaxed the attentive part of reading in favor of daydreaming. And maybe one of
these daydreams seemed awfully '‘convincing” in his memory as he went to write
his book, perhaps years later, and found its way into his plot summary as fact. This
makes sense to me because part o f me felt that Lovelace’s best friend, Belford,
ought to have killed him in a duel. It was one of my own speculations about how
things might go, and in some ways I still prefer it.2 0 Instead of Cousin Morden, the
largely unknown avenger, swooping in from Italy, I leaned toward Belford, a
reader of Clarissa’s story much like myself, perhaps because it was his involvement
I felt. Given the limits o f memory and self-knowledge, my best reconstruction is
that I wanted to believe that the ties o f narrative sympathy I experienced were
stronger than the novel’s generally oppressive ties o f blood, that Clarissa was really
on to something when she argued that “the world is but one great family” and the
“narrow selfishness” o f familial obligation is “but relationship remembered against
relationship forgot” (62). Belief in the possibility that Belford would be stirred to
action on her behalf helps sustain the possibility that I would have been so moved.
Being wrong can make for a pretty good fantasy. The unkind term for this
condition is, of course, delusion, but such dismissiveness comes less easily in cases
where facts and fantasy seem less distinguishable. Consider, for instance, Judith
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Wilt's famous claim that Lovelace did not rape Clarissa.2 1 Terry Castle's response
is telling:
Wilt's view has been disputed.... but one must concede that nothing in the
text definitively refutes it. Clarissa’s account o f her ‘usage’ is decorous to
the point o f obfuscation, and Lovelace's hints afterwards to Belford that
Clarissa may now be pregnant can—if impotence is indeed the issue—be
seen simply as compensatory male-to-male bravado. I read Clarissa with
the belief that a heterosexual rape does take place, with Lovelace as rapist,
yet I am also aware that, technically speaking, this is as much a
'construction’ o f what happens as is Wilt's revisionist proposal. (166n)
What is the difference between Castle reading with the belief that rape takes place
and Fiedler reading with the belief that Belford kills Lovelace? Mainly this: that
Fiedler's belief most likely cannot be sustained beyond a close look at page 1488
(when Lovelace's death at the hands of Morden is reported), or after much
conversation with other readers. Castle’s belief is much more secure because
Wilt's essay may well be the only challenge. But what is striking to me is not only
that Castle admits to being “aware” that her reading is a “construction”—that is to
say. a fantasy—but the assumed sufficiency of that awareness. Is she simply
falling back on the security of participating in a fantasy shared by the majority of
readers? Or, quite to the contrary, is there an implicit belief that a privileged
critical awareness licenses fantasy? What are the connections between awareness
and fantasy, consciousness and desire?
If Clarissa’s rape, as many critics claim, is at the center o f both the novel
and the scholarship about the novel, then this center is marked by an odd confusion,
one that stems precisely from the issue of consciousness—both Clarissa’s and the
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critics." Is Clarissa unconscious or not during the rape? Watt claims that the rape
occurs “when Clarissa is unconscious from opiates,” and many have followed him
in this belief (227).2 3 But Mark Kinkead-Weekes has countered that “The drug
makes her alternately drunken and numb, but not unconscious” (230). Clarissa's
description of the scene seems closer to his version:
Let me cut short the rest. I grew worse and worse in my head; now stupid,
now raving, now senseless. The vilest of vile women was brought to
frighten me. never was there so horrible a creature as she appeared to me at
the time.
1 remember, I pleaded for mercy— I remember that I said I would be
his—indeed I would be his— to obtain his mercy— But no mercy found I!
My strength, my intellects, failed me!—And then such scenes followed—
Oh my dear, such dreadful scenes!—fits upon fits (faintly indeed, and
imperfectly remembered) procuring me no compassion—but death was
withheld from me. That would have been too great a mercy!
THUS was I tricked and deluded back by blacker hearts o f my own
sex. than I thought there were in the world; who appeared to me to be
persons of honour: and. when in his power, thus barbarously was I treated
by this villainous man!
I was so senseless that I dare not aver that the horrid creatures of the
house were personally aiding and abetting: but some visionary
remembrances I have o f female figures flitting, as I may say, before my
sight; the wretched woman's particularly. But as these confused ideas
might be owing to the terror I had conceived o f the worse than masculine
violence she had been permitted to assume to me, for expressing my
abhorrence of her house; and as what I suffered from his barbarity wants not
that aggravation; I will say no more on a subject so shocking as this must
ever be to my remembrance. (1011)
It might be reasonable to believe that Clarissa had moments (“fits”) o f
unconsciousness, but clearly this account derives from some state o f awareness,
and clearly there is more that she withholds. She has memory, but it is imperfect;
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she has ideas, but they are “confused.” This state o f semi-consciousness is actually
a tidy solution for Richardson, letting him have things two ways: Clarissa is
unconscious enough to avoid the charge of complicity and consent, but conscious
enough to remember.2 4 In this way her status as the heroine remains intact, for, as
Tania Modleski has succinctly put it: if you are a heroine “to be alive and
conscious is to be suspect” (Loving 52). Indeed the account’s very vagueness is
something Modleski identifies as a recurrent technique in romance novels: “more
specific language would destroy the reader's complex relationship with the
heroine—causing us either to identify with her too closely or to become too
detached” (42). Clarissa’s memory may be necessary too, for it motivates her
decisive withdrawal from Lovelace and the world at large, allowing the novel to get
on with the business o f her death, of turning her not only into an example for “the
youthful reader” (34) but also a ringing indictment of her society.
Her memory has another effect as well. After the rape is first reported,
Clarissa is lost to us. I is not for 128 pages after Lovelace tells Belford “the affair
is over” that we get Clarissa’s account, a structure that demands a protracted and
excruciating readerly unconsciousness.2 5 Elizabeth Ermarth has astutely remarked
that “The experience o f reading Pamela or Clarissa, as compared with the
continuous past-tense narrations of the nineteenth century, closely resembles the
heroines* own struggles to maintain consciousness and memory against
overwhelming odds” (101). Indeed, it is Clarissa who fares better in this part o f the
struggle. Her reemergence is impressive in many ways, but her reticence about the
rape effectively separates her from the reader, shattering our epistolary intimacy.
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The resulting distance, however, should not be seen as any gain for the reader.
Critics of the “bash the romance” school have linked it to Richardson’s well-known
pedagogical impulses, describing the movement of the novel as a readerly
education away from the seductive plots and rhetoric o f the romance novel towards
this supposedly sophisticated new detachment.2 6 But I would counter that the
readerly detachment that characterizes the end of the novel is more of a psychic
liferaft than a pedagogical achievement. If, following A nna's cue, readers tend to
withdraw from Clarissa to a certain extent, it is not because they have now
“graduated” and learned to resist romantic fantasies, but because they have lost
hope for her and must now, after what have likely been exhausting trials,
resignedly invest their psychic energies elsewhere.2' This may ultimately be the
reason for all the critical talk about Clarissa's unconsciousness: imagining her
conscious is simply too horrible. Thus critics are rewriting the novel, not only in a
way that matches their missing experience, but in a way they can bear.
To read on to the grim conclusion of this novel is to kill the fantasy of a
female network in both its aspects: we must give up plotting to save Clarissa just
as we must give up our readerly intimacy. Female correspondence wanes in favor
of letters between men. In Lovelace's words we are “all Belforded over” (823), left
to witness the spectacle o f Clarissa's death and its aftershocks largely through
Belford’s passive, worshipful eyes. As Raymond F. Hilliard suggests in his
provocative article “Clarissa and Ritual Cannibalism,” Belford’s role is
“prophylactic,” shielding us with talk of personal reform from the recognition that
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the novel may be “itself a ritualized cultural institution, [with] each novelist
supplying at least one avatar of the female sacrificial victim and inviting readers to
assume the stance of spectators, at once deploring and relishing the 'fate.' often the
rape and death, of a persecuted woman” (1093. 1083). Hilliard understands this
ritual as a bridge between the psychological and the social, substituting a
cannibalistic spectacle for “the original desire to devour the mother” (1094). This
conception leads him to portray the female characters of Clarissa as a gallery of
cruel, persecuting mothers, gnashing their teeth at the daughter who would demand
their sympathy. Seen in this light, the saving potential of female networks would
seem slight indeed, for the older women who might offer support to Clarissa must
instead sacrifice her to sublimate their own aggression. But there is a strange
inversion at work in this account of the ritual, because if it is the older women who
come to occupy the position of the aggressive child in the sadistic oral phase, then
it must be that Clarissa is in the position o f the “guilty” mother, blamed by the
child for her withdrawal. Thus what Hilliard fails to make entirely clear is that, for
the ritual to make sense in these terms, Clarissa must be misread as a mother.2 *
The question, then, is how much this misreading is indeed the work of the novel,
and how much it is Hilliard's.
There is no doubt that the novel devotes considerable space to imagining
Clarissa as a mother, whether in Lovelace's grotesquely vivid fantasies (“a twin
Lovelace at each charming breast” [706]) or the widespread speculation about her
pregnancy towards the end of the novel. What remains doubtful is whether this
fantasy is a primary one for the reader, for even if the process of sublimation
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obscures the role o f the mother to the point where Clarissa need not (or must not)
be consciously recognized as one, we must ask if Clarissa does in fact suffice, does
in fact succeed in galvanizing readerly aggression. Hilliard’s claim implicitly turns
on this process: “the writing and reading of a narrative about a woman broken in
pieces by more or less unanimous blame...might...be construed as a further
communal sublimation o f the primary ritual action” (1094). Does the reader blame
Clarissa? Certainly some have, though only rarely to any great extent.2 9 By no
means, however, has there been such a consensus, and what is the status of ritual
w ithout consensus?
Perhaps the best statement of Hilliard’s case w ould introduce something
like Rene Girard's notion of sacrificial crisis: Clarissa indeed sets something like
ritual cannibalism in motion, but the ritual doesn't work, “the mechanism of
substitution has gone astray, and those whom the sacrifice was designed to protect
became its victims” (40). Hilliard comes close to such a formulation: “Far from
halting the impetus toward projective violence in the world o f Clarissa, the
heroine's sacrificial death incites a frenzied hunt for a new scapegoat, a ‘chorus’ of
mutual recrimination..." (1093). But there is a difficulty in locating the reader’s
stake in this ritual in that the reader has likely sung in this chorus since the
beginning of the novel. It is a small one, to be sure, led mainly by Anna and
Clarissa's nurse Mrs Norton, but one that loudly deflects blame from Clarissa.
Moreover, part of w'hat characterizes the voice of protest is its insistence that
Clarissa be a daughter, not a mother, as in Anna’s wistful daydream: “were I ever
to marry, and to be the mother of a CLARISSA...” (860). Mrs Norton in particular
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is firmly established as the “mamma” in the rhetoric she shares with Clarissa to the
point where Clarissa calls her nurse her “more natural mother” (1405).
Conspicuously absent from the group, however, is Clarissa’s birth mother, Mrs
Harlowe. and it is her role that must ultimately illuminate the status o f the mother
in this novel.
Terry Castle has described Mrs Harlowe as the novel’s “original non
mothering mother.” and unfortunately there is much to fuel this hostility (98).
Overcoming the sympathy she feels for her daughter. Mrs Harlowe's policy
throughout the novel is, as she says, to “sail with the tide” (1154), enforcing the
family's hard-line position for Solmes and against Lovelace. The high emotional
cost of this policy is most clear early in the novel in a series of agonizing
confrontations with her daughter. On Clarissa’s side, resisting her mother's pleas
involves a double rejection, for she must not only reject what her mother says, but
the conditions that make her mother say it; she must reject, ultimately, her mother’s
destiny as one acceptable for herself: “Would anybody, my dear Miss Howe, wish
to marry, when one sees a necessity for such a sweet temper as my mamma’s either
to be ruined or deprived of all power?” (92). It is not surprising, then, that Clarissa
repeatedly proposes to her family that she remain single, hoping that this will at
least satisfy their hatred for Lovelace. Their rejection of this proposal is equally
predictable. For them, a single woman represents an unfinished story, as her
mother explains: “While you remain single, Mr Lovelace will have hopes—and
you. in the opinion of others, inclinations” (111). To a certain extent Clarissa
exhibits what Nancy K. Miller calls the “danger o f singularity,” in that her efforts
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to negotiate seek out “a language, an idiolect, that...break[s] with the coded rules of
communication” (351 ).3 0 There is no way for her to mean what she wants to mean
with marriage plots lurking in the wings, threatening to devour any alternatives she
can dev ise. On the other hand, the “coded rules o f communication” are exactly
what is in crisis in the novel, so drastic measures are needed to prevent her
enormous narrative efforts from irrupting into full meaning. Thus, as Castle points
out. these early dialogues are also characterized by Clarissa’s violent interruption—
Clarissa’s words are perceived as such a threat that they are best not heard at all
(63-66).
But there may be more to be said about these conversations, particularly in
those where the interruption is a bit less one-sided:
Let me not have cause to regret that noble firmness of mind in so young a
creature, which I thought your glory, and which was my boast in your character. In
this instance it would be obstinacy, and want o f duty— Have you not made
objections to several—
That was to their minds, their principles, madam— But this man—
Is an honest man. Clary Harlowe. He has a good mind—He is a virtuous
man.
He an honest man! His a good mind, madam! He a virtuous man!—
Nobody denies him these qualities.
Can he be an honest man who offers terms that will rob all his own relations
of their just expectations?—Can his mind be good—
You, Clary Harlowe, for whose sake he offers so much are the last person
that should make this observation.
Give me leave to say, madam, that a person preferring happiness to fortune,
as I do; that want not even what I have, and can give up the use of that as an
instance of duty—
No more, no more of your merits!—You know you will be a gainer by that
cheerful instance o f duty, not a loser...For it is not understood as a merit by
everybody, I assure you, though I think it a high one; and so did your papa and
uncles at the time—
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At the time, madam!— How unworthily do my brother and sister, who are
afraid that the favour I was so lately in—
1 hear nothing against your brother and sister—What family feuds have 1 in
prospect, at a time when I hoped most comfort from you all! (92)
O f course Castle's point holds for this exchange, since on balance Clarissa is still
the one being bullied. But recognizing a pattern of mutual interruption allows us to
see their relationship in a different light. It is important to remember that Mrs
Harlowe insists on her own suffering, no matter how selfish or unmotherly it seems
that she does so, because this insistence is a sign of the fundamental opposition
between a mother and daughter in the social structure they inhabit. As Doody
observes. Mrs Harlowe's “sphere o f activity has narrowed to a constant attempt to
keep the peace and placate her husband.” so that to her “[t]he good...means the
serene” (102). Married to a thick-headed man, Mrs Harlowe has found life most
tolerable by not opposing him. and her happiness, to the extent it can be called that,
depends upon Clarissa's quiet capitulation to his will. In a way Mrs Harlowe does
assume the position of a needy child, demanding that Clarissa sacrifice her superior
independence (which is an independence not only of mind but, thanks to her
grandfather’s will, of fortune) to take care of her. What becomes clear is that
nobody wants to play the mother in this relationship, and with good reason. Thus
we might say that Clarissa and her mother disrupt any full articulation o f the other’ s
point of view because this state o f interruption actually suspends, if only for the
briefest moment, the greater violence that seeks to define both o f them as mothers.
Indeed, to listen to each other's full stories would be to endure a mutual erasure— if
one finishes, the other is finished.
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What the novel never succeeds in imagining is the rescue of Mrs Harlowe—
or. for that matter, any o f its suffering women not named Clarissa. It works
essentially as an extrapolation of the grandfather’s will, singling out Clarissa to
inherit a special destiny— and attention— that no one else can deserve. Clarissa,
we might say. is a novel that loves only one of its daughters. Indeed, coupled with
the Christian issue of how to transcend a bad life with a good death, such focused
interest leaves little room as the novel nears the end for exploring the social issues
raised earlier.3 1 Thus the conclusion “supposed to be written by Mr Belford,”
which reports on the fates of most the characters, reveals nothing of an emerging
feminist consciousness. Mrs Harlowe of course dies a perfunctory death about two
and a half years after Clarissa, while Anna tamely marries Hickman, a suitor who,
despite his canine loyalty, is no intellectual match, and whose erotic credentials
would never pass muster in an Austen novel. The conclusion ends oddly with Mrs
Lovick. a character so minor as not to merit an entry in the list o f forty-one
“principal characters” at the front, and whom we have had little opportunity to care
about for her own sake. It seems her value lies in the kind attentions she pays to
the dying Clarissa, and, as the conclusion has it, in her ability to persevere in a
motherly role: “the worthy Widow LOVICK continues to live with Mr Belford;
and by her prudent behaviour, piety, and usefulness, has endeared herself to her
lady, and to the whole family” (1494). Thus this novel so deeply restless about
female destiny finally settles on the most banal of characters, as if all we have to
wish for is a society that would produce more mothers like her.
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And yet there is a way in which ending with Lovick points to other
possibilities for women, affording a glimpse of novels Richardson did not write,
but which he helped make imaginable. As a widow, Lovick represents her
culture's most accepted model o f female independence. She has gone through the
narrative dead-end of marriage and come out the other side, and there is a latent
implication that new stories could await her, however little energy goes here to
pursuing them.3 2 It is, moreover, Richardson's own apparent need to recuperate
motherhood that brings Clarissa to this threshold and holds it back. Indeed Norton,
the novel's other favorite mother, is also a widow, as if to suggest women must
actually be freed from marriage for mothering—though not yet other things— to
take place.3 3 Their example brings Mrs Harlowe's abjection into sharp relief,
suggesting that family relationships may be the first enemies o f female networks
insofar as they generate conflicts of interest among women’s closest contacts.
When it is finally time to stop reading Clarissa, therefore, and pursue a female
network in another novel, the next version of the heroine is often imagined an
orphan.
In the Shadow of Clarissa
In the course of my life as a reader, the next novel was Francis Burney's
Evelina. and the effect of this sequence was startling: I felt like I was reading a
strange continuation of Clarissa, a projection into an alternate fictional future
(Clarissa: The Next Generation) defined largely by the same issues and roles, but
with an urgent sense that things could, indeed must, turn out differently. We could
indeed mount an impressive case that Evelina was, in fact, an explicit
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continuation/revision o f Clarissa. The form, of course, remains epistolary, and the
basic outline of the story is the same: a heroine entering the marriage market must
struggle for virtue (and with a desire she cannot admit) in the face of a relentlessly
hostile—and relentlessly seductive— world. The backstory of Evelina carries the
resemblance further: facing the prospect of a forced marriage, Evelina's mother
(Caroline Evelyn) eloped with the libertine Sir John Belmont, married him
privately, and became pregnant, only to have him deny their marriage when it
brought less financial gain than he expected. Bitterly disappointed, Caroline grows
weak and dies giving birth to Evelina, whom Belmont never acknowledges. The
similarity between Caroline’s and Clarissa’s story is unmistakeable until Evelina
comes into the picture. Evelina, in other words, is very much the daughter that
Clarissa would have had if all the rumors of her pregnancy had proved true.
The two novels are moreover clearly written in the same idiom, as Evelina
frequently echoes Clarissa's concerns in nearly identical language. For instance, I
challenge readers to guess the source o f the following quotations:3 4
1. “my wish is to remain quiet and unnoticed”
2. “she sat like a cypher”
3. “Sir, vouchsafe but once to bless your daughter”
4. “Yet in what terms,—oh most cruel of men!— can the lost [heroine]
address you, and not address you in vain?”
5. “in this last farewell, which thou wilt not read till every stormy passion is
extinct,—and the kind grave has embosomed all my sorrows”
Indeed the similarity of language extends to the names, as Belford becomes
Belmont (suggesting that there is not much difference between the rake and the
rake's friend?) and Lovelace becomes Lovel. (Lovelace in fact abbreviates his
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name Lovel. in a letter he writes to Belford about an encounter with Morden on
page 1279). And the names Clarissa and Caroline also share four o f their eight
letters, including the crucial C. Whether this case is ultimately convincing,
however, is less important to me than that we accept the case for comparison.
Regardless of whether Burney was absolutely thinking o f Clarissa as she wrote her
novel, she was responding to the issues that are best captured by Clarissa— what
we might call the “Clarissa problem,” the problem of women writing in a world
where men control the official circuits of discourse, of whether it is safer for a
woman inside or outside, and finally of the status of epistolary female networks.
On the surface then, Evelina seems, if anything, a step backward from
Clarissa's unfinished fantasy of a female network: the mother is not weak, she’s
dead: the w idow is not unrealized, she is ridiculed in harsh detail; and the main
correspondence is not between the heroine and a female friend, but between the
heroine and Villars, her male guardian. And certainly as a work of speculation,
Evelina falls far short o f Clarissa, shying away from the latter’s numerous detailed
fantasies in favor of vague and foreboding references to the future like “There is to
be no end to the troubles o f last night” (34). Perhaps this is an inevitable pressure
of casting a story as a romantic comedy— what it loses in diverse speculative
energies, it makes up for in the concentrated realization o f its main fantasy, in this
case the marriage of Evelina and Lord Orville.3 5 O f course their disparate social
standing requires a detour through Family Romance, and it is here that the novel’s
speculative impulses enter most strongly, as when Evelina learns that someone else
occupies her place as the daughter and heiress of Sir Belmont: “what a field of
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conjecture to open!” (315). Even then, Evelina does not spend much time
investigating this field— she is, we should stress, no detective. Indeed, much of
Evelina smells of a cover-up, from the whitewashing o f Belmont’s crimes to the
mysterious accusations against Villars to all the letters we never see, and more is at
stake in this cover-up than the feminine decorum Evelina upholds when, for
instance, she writes that Orville inspires “sensations— which I dare not mention!”
(334).
It seems that pulling off a marriage plot requires a policy o f careful
forgetfulness that governs even the most obsessive acts of memory. Consider the
strategy adopted by Evelina and Lord Orville to consolidate their love:
We have had, this afternoon, a most interesting conversation, in which we
have traced our sentiments of each other from our first acquaintance. I have
made him confess how ill he thought of me, upon my foolish giddiness at
Mrs. Stanley’s ball; but he flatters me with assurances, that every
succeeding time he saw me, I appeared to something less and less
disadvantage. (389)
Love—or a certain harmony of narratives—secures itself through a ritual of
retrospection that subdues the errant past.3 6 Evelina’s appearance “to something
less and less disadvantage” corresponds to her progress through the narrative of
education many critics have observed, a narrative that makes the past bearable by
making it necessary.3' Once Orville did not love Evelina, but his delicate blend of
confession and assurance soothes the sting of that fact by implying essentially that
the unloved Evelina was not the same (educated) Evelina he now loves. All the
suffering she endured as she made her way through the plot is retroactively
transformed into the “lessons” she needed to become worthy of him.
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What is also forgotten, but never accounted for, is the waywardness of her
own desire. Evelina's relationship with Maria Mirvan is much like the “romantic
friendship’ of Clarissa and Anna Howe, with the same rhetoric o f intimacy. For
instance, at one point Evelina declares: “As to Miss Mirvan, she is my second self,
and neither hopes nor fears but as I do” (122), and later she describes her as “the
friend of my heart” (159). This intimacy could become a threat to the marriage plot
if it were ever allowed enough narrative space, but there are no sailor fantasies
here, because the one who would articulate them is kept silent.3 8 Indeed, despite the
fact that Evelina corresponds with Maria more or less continuously, we never read
a letter Maria writes. As Julia Epstein observes “there is a second novel here, over
which Evelina rests like a palimpsest: the novel that Evelina’s letters and
conversations with a peer, another young woman, would comprise” (102).
Epstein's point, however, is that the contrast between Evelina’s letters to Maria and
her letters to Villars underscores the limited view of events from his position.
Anything Evelina writes to Villars, Epstein reminds us, must be taken in light of
her dependence and consequent need to please him.
Does a female network then lurk beneath the palimpsest? Has the fantasy
simply gone underground? Epstein seems to think so, arguing for instance that
Evelina “divulges her real thoughts and feelings only to Maria” (101). But even if
we could suppose this were true (and it seems oversimplified) we should stress that
the reader never benefits much from it—on the contrary, our knowledge o f Maria
creates not a sense of intimacy, but of loss, of being left out.3 9 References to
Maria’s unseen replies, such as “You accuse me o f mystery, and charge me with
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reserve” (255) and “I MUST own myself somewhat distressed how to answer your
raillery..." (259) emphasize how much goes on that we’re not privy to.4 0 More
importantly, the correspondence itself is not described as the privileged site
Richardson imagined. In contrast to the fantasies o f intimacy Clarissa and Anna
share, Evelina stresses the distance a letter signifies: “My sweet Maria will be
much surprised, and, I am willing to flatter myself, concerned, when instead of her
friend, she receives this letter;— this cold, this inanimate letter, which will but ill
express the feelings o f the heart which indites it” (253).4 1 Thus even what little we
do see of this buried correspondence serves to shut us out.
What makes Evelina ultimately difficult to situate, both in terms of the
status of female networks and for feminist criticism generally, is that it exerts
repressive energies in multiple directions. “Feminine decorum” in its broadest
sense does account for one thrust, as we imagine Burney as a young author
struggling for respect on masculine terms, and certainly the demands of a marriage
plot create negative pressure as w ell4 2 If a feminist strategy can be discerned on
these fronts, it must be to serve up the whole romantic enchilada and hope for some
indigestion. Finally, though, what Evelina seeks to repress is Clarissa, or more
precisely, what the older “mother novel” represents and what it leaves for its
heirs.4 3 In doing so, it buries much of Clarissa's fantasy of a female network, but
this does not mean that the repression of Clarissa can be reduced to that effect, as if
to make Richardson the better feminist.4 4 Instead, it is worth considering what
exactly Burney resists in Richardson’s “feminism,” and how this resistance forms a
critique of the earlier novel.
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This critique gets articulated with considerable directness in the preface
when Burney describes what it means to follow her literary predecessors: “I
presume not to attempt pursuing the same ground which they have tracked;
whence, though they have cleared the weeds, they have also culled the flowers, and
though they have rendered the path plain, they have left it barren” (9). The
resounding weight o f “barren” as the last word specifically calls to mind the
childless Clarissa, particularly in light of Burney's statement that her heroine will
be "no faultless Monster, that the World ne’er saw” (8). Hardly a source of
inspiration. Clarissa seems rather for Burney a spectre of impossible and
destructive virtue. The bar—and the price— has been set completely out of reach.
If Burney cannot find a literary model her heroine would want to emulate, then, as
Margaret Anne Doody puts it. “the inheritance of woman is...no inheritance at all”
(51 ).4 ' Richardson’s conclusion is so apocalyptic that it fails to transmit a strong
principle of continuity, of how to carry on. Far more than Richardson, Burney is
concerned with the fate of women past eighteen. A crucial example is the infamous
"old lady race” that a group of Evelina’s male acquaintances stage to settle a bet.
This scene has been widely discussed as Burney’s indictment o f a cruel and
misogynistic culture, though another glance at the preface suggests that the
metaphor of the race has still further resonance for Burney:4 6
while in the annals of those few of our predecessors, to whom this species
of writing is indebted for being saved from contempt, and rescued from
depravity, we can trace such names as Rousseau, Johnson, Marivaux,
Fielding, Richardson, and Smollet, no man need blush at starting from the
same post, though many, nay, most men, may sigh at finding themselves
distanced. (7)
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If writing is a race (and a futile one at that), then perhaps the spectacle o f the old
lady race represents Burney’s most haunting image of her own efforts— it is not
hard to picture Burney as a young author imagining the mockery of her audience
(indeed, this is veiy much the anxiety of the novel's dedication “to the authors of
the monthly and critical reviews”), or even feeling that this audience, like gamblers
organizing a race, entirely dictates the terms of her performance. With this in
mind, we might read with a different emphasis: no man need blush at starting at
the same post, but the exposure of publication may indeed prove embarrassing for a
woman.
Nevertheless, Burney does, of course, enter the race, writing a novel that to
most readers fits snugly enough into the tradition.4' On the other hand, to use her
other metaphor for writing, she also breaks new ground, not in any flamboyant,
immodest way that could only exacerbate her exposure, but through a strategy of
resenv. This strategy is most striking if we consider the trajectory o f her early
career. We recall she burnt her first novel, The History o f Caroline Evelyn. without
seeking publication. While the motives for this act were no doubt complex, it
raises an intriguing perspective on novel writing as a solipsistic activity, one that
Burney herself suggests when she claims that she wrote the first novel only “for her
private recreation.”4 8 In this context the later decision to publish Evelina
anonymously suggests a similar, if less extreme, withholding, setting up a game
quite different from Richardson's collaborative writing process, one in which
Burney knows more than her readers. The contrast seems fundamental:
Richardson imagines the reader as female and draws her in; Burney imagines the
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reader as male and shuts him out. Moreover, as I suggested earlier, this process
does not end with the revelation o f Burney's authorship, since Evelina's epistolary
structure and rhetoric subtly circumscribe the reader's participation in the story.
Thus in an important sense Burney did not publish Evelina— not, that is, the
intimate uncensored Evelina a novelistic culture had come to expect. And why not
when one's image o f audience is a cruel man screaming at an injured old woman to
get up and finish the race? Returning to this particular “scene of the crime." we see
that Burney also places a different kind of spectator on the scene, and this is
Evelina herself—no passive Belford, but a bold, critical interventionist. When the
old lady falls down, Evelina reports, “I sprung forward to assist her” (3 12).4 9 As
both the best reader and the main writer of the novel. Evelina represents an
implosive narrative tendency in which writing loses its communicative dimension
and becomes private, a way of talking to one’s self. Like Mrs. Elton. Villars—and
the reader he stands in for—remain out of the loop, even as the ending promises
closure and reunion. As the readers of the final letter, we cannot be at the wedding.
Indeed, whatever tidings a letter brings always include the message “you are not
here." The closing sentence of the novel can only compensate for an intimacy that
remains out of reach: “I have time for no more; the chaise now waits which is to
conduct me to dear Berry Hill, and to the arms o f the best o f men” (406).5 0
It may feel a bit like I have a hundred-pound claim dangling on a forty-
pound line. Obviously, the reader’s exclusion is not the only thing to be said about
a novel that offers romantic pleasure of the first order. After all, as Julia Epstein
points out, many readers have seemed fully convinced that they get the whole
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story. My point, however, is that the “whole story” is finally a representation of
the danger that produces reserve in women. In episode after episode o f female
“trials.” Burney dramatizes her own frustration and terror, makes it the experience
of the reader, insists, moreover, that this is the experience with which readers must
come to terms. Most importantly, this experience inverts Clarissa in a crucial
sense, as the earlier novel’s claustrophobia gives way to a more pervasive
agoraphobia. Thus while in Clarissa carefully guarded interiors are the space of
female fear and humiliation, in Evelina this space is the garden, the park, or the
ditch. If Clarissa tells us that the scapegoat's place at the center of culture is no
place to be. then Evelina insists it can’t be worse than being outside and exposed,
where the degradation, if less concentrated, is more regular. Bumey briefly turns
the tables in the novel’s final dramatic scene, taking the principle of humiliation, as
embodied by Captain Mirvan and his stylish monkey, and applying it to Lovel, the
first thoughtless suitor to embarrass Evelina. As I have already suggested, revenge
against Lovel sounds a lot like revenge against Lovelace, and indeed against
Richardson, who in the final analysis has altogether too much Lovelace still in him,
remaining committed to a narrative that reduces woman to virtue and puts her to
the test. Evelina’s tests, on the other hand, tell us not about the nature o f woman,
but about the male-dominated world— and it is not a happy tale. Indeed, Orville’s
vague benevolence remains the exception that proves the rule of masculine
ruthlessness. What Bumey must have wanted is something like a female post
office, an underground network for women’s writing free from the sadistic eyes of
men. And so to picture Evelina in the shadow of Clarissa is finally to capture the
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enormous frustration of a woman trying to participate in masculine culture—a
culture at this moment so powerfully defined by a man who, despite an enormous
interest in the potential of woman, cannot finally bring himself to believe she is not
a witch, until she drowns.
NOTES
I We will see this seductive tactic again, as a more central and sustained strategy, in Pillow
Talk (chapter 3) and Y ou\e Got Mail (chapter 5).
' Lovelace's dream begins on page 920; he murders his conscience on page 848.
’ For an illuminating discussion o f how the work o f the narrator in the realist novel is
inherently backward-looking, see Elizabeth Ermarth's Realism and Consensus in the English Novel.
particularly page 88.
4 See for instance John Preston's The Created Self, pages 50-53.
5 D.A. Miller has noted parenthetically “the immense amount o f daydreaming that
accompanies the ordinary reading o f a novel” in The Novel and the Police (215). Miller remains
content to let it serve as a pointed example o f an “open secret," though he might easily go further to
consider how this daydreaming might itself be part of his story o f disciplinary subjects.
I I For the comparison with Isabel see for instance lan Watt’s The Rise o f the Novel (225).
John Preston invokes this comparison in his book and also links Lovelace and Osmond (87).
Moreover, as Watt suggests, when it comes to sexual fantasies, feminine delicacy acts as a powerful
brake: the “modem sexual code...makes Clarissa withhold her sexual feelings from Anna Howe,
and even from her own consciousness" (228-229).
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O f course we might follow the geography o f Christianity more faithfully by saying “if
Clarissa is going up, she's taking others down.”
I I Faderman's book is Surpassing the Love o f Men. She describes such relationships on
page 84: "Women w ho were romantic friends were everything to each other. They lived to be
together. They thought o f each other constantly. They made each other deliriously happy or
horribly miserable by the increase or abatement o f their proffered love. They were jealous o f other
female friends (and certainly o f male friends)... They vowed that if it w ere at all possible they w ould
someday live together, or at least die together...”
9 My point echoes Nancy Chodorow's discussion o f similar personal relationships in The
Reproduction o f Mothering: Psychoanalyisis and the Sociology o f Gender. “When people have
extreme needs for emotional support and a few very intense relationships (whose sole basis is
emotional connection, ungrounded in cooperative activity or institutionalized non-emotional roles)
to provide for these needs, these relationships are liable to be full o f conflict” (213).
I I I Judith Wilt also stresses Clarissa's abandonment in “He Could Go No Farther: A
Modest Proposal about Lovelace and Clarissa."
1 1 For a different account o f space in the novel, see Edward Copeland’s noteworthy essay
"Remapping London: Clarissa and the woman in the window.” Copeland shifts his understanding
o f space in Clarissa to an allegorical level in describing how the novel's geographical references
effectively combine with the movements o f the characters to remap London. Instructive as it is.
such a reading is o f course available only to readers who possess both an eye for allegory and a
detailed know ledge o f London in the mid-eighteenth century, and while it represents a potentially
w onderful enrichment o f the reading experience, my interest is primarily in riches that are more
accessible and reading experiences that are more widely shared.
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Indeed, this claustrophobic feeling is only heightened by the epistolary form, which
produces a kind o f Gaslight effect in the w ay it frequently postpones any verification o f events for
the reader.
1 J "A Child is Being Beaten” Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis "Fantasy and the
Origins o f Sexuality" in Formations of Fantasy, edited by Victor Burgin. James Donald and Cora
Kaplan (22-23).
u Terry Castle frequently stresses similar points in Clarissa s Ciphers. See for instance
page 149.
1 5 It is possible to read this comment as referring not to the incident's plausibility but its
reality w ithin the fiction— that is. to argue that Watt anticipates Judith Wilt's argument that the rape
does not occur (and perhaps his comment gave her the idea).
1 6 A historically specific description of this "code" may have not been available until
Faderman’s Surpassing the Love o f Men was published in 1981. but Smith-Rosenberg's
groundbreaking "The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth-
Century America" could have provided a starting point had Warner been looking for one.
1 Warner received considerable critical fire for his claims in Reading Clarissa, particularly
from feminists. To his credit, his later article "Reading Rape: Marxist-Feminist Figurations o f the
Literal" is much more sensitive to the status o f his own involvement with the novel, and brilliantly
suggests some covert involvement o f other critics.
1 8 In this sense, to consider Leo Bersani's phrase, realism has less to do with the fear o f
desire than the satisfactory staging o f desire. (See his well-known essay "Realism and the Fear of
Desire” in A Future for Astyanax. New York: Columbia University Press. 1984). Bersani finds this
"fear o f desire" primarily at the level of character, working outward from there. But it seems to me
the discourse o f realism hovers more insistently over events than characters, and that perhaps a
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better purchase on the issue can be gained by starting with the reader and working inward. Even so.
Bersani's phrase continues to resonate, for we might say that realism is about the fear o f desire,
because it is what we talk about when w e re afraid to talk about desire.
1 1 1 I’m by no means the first to spot Fiedler's revision. For instance. Mark Kinkead-
Weekes discusses it in his 1973 book Samuel Richardson: Dramatic Novelist: “The significance o f
Fiedler's splendid gaffes, like the belief that Pamela is a governess (later corrected), and that
Lovelace is killed by Belford (uncorrected), is not merely the strong suspicion that he has not read
the books: it is that for this kind o f criticism the barest plot outline, or less, will suffice" (500n).
2 0 The only pleasure it occurs to me that would be sacrificed in this alternate ending is the
somewhat meager intellectual one o f recognizing that Morden had to be the killer (and the harbinger
of Clarissa's death) because o f his name— a pleasure which, in my obtuseness. I failed to enjoy for
over a thousand pages.
2 1 Wilt makes this claim in “He Could Go No Farther."
" For example, this claim that the rape is central is the basis for Eagleton's entire book.
2 2 Frances Ferguson echoes Watt's choice o f words in “Rape and the Rise o f the Novel"
(100). as does Angela Carter (48).
2 4 Ferguson outlines in her article the importance o f consciousness or “psychology" with
regard to issues o f consent and rape. Although I am ignorant o f the relevant law. I believe her
argument w ould not be damaged by an acknowledgment o f Clarissa's semi-consciousness during
the rape, since the presence o f the drug should itself be enough to “negative” consent.
2 5 Ermarth observes that the epistolary form indeed structures a similar readerly
unconsciousness betw een every letter: “The epistolary form thus confines the reader’s
consciousness to a discontinuous medium that jeopardizes it at every step" (Realism 101). Preston
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makes the point slightly differently: "it is precisely the reader who best understands, who suffers, in
fact, the crucial lesions in experience, the lapses, the moments o f vacancy” (47).
I'm thinking particularly o f Nicholas Hudson's article “Arts o f Seduction and the
Rhetoric o f Clarissa." Similar narratives o f "overcoming” reading can be found in Watt and
Preston, while Stephen Melville gives it a rather different spin in "Taking Clarissa Literally: The
Implication o f Reading."
' Watt, for instance, registers this desire for separation: “to devote nearly one-third o f the
novel to the heroine's death is surely excessive" (216).
Rene Girard has argued that such misreading characterizes ritual in general: "Sacrificial
substitution implies a degree o f misunderstanding. Its vitality as an institution depends on its ability
to conceal the displacement upon which the rite is based” (5).
We might indeed say that William Warner's strongly “anti-Clarissa” reading was so
upsetting precisely because it was so unusual.
3 0 Stephen Melville gets at much the same point.
3 1 In fact. Kinkead-Weekes has argued that, coinciding with its three-part structure, the
novel's concerns move from the social to the moral to finally the religious (124).
3 * Lovelace recognizes Widow Lovick's potential (however ironically) when he
recommends that Belford marry her (1442). O f course this fantasy has found a hospitable genre in
detective fiction, which, among other things, promotes widowhood by murdering a lot o f husbands.
It is also capable o f generating considerable backlash, as strikingly represented by Uncle Charlie's
rage against widows in Hitchcock's Shadow o f a Doubt.
3 3 Toni Bow'ers makes this point in The Politics o f Mothering with respect to Norton, Mrs
How e, and Mrs Sinclair "the singleness o f these mothers seems to promise greater maternal
autonomy than Mrs. Harlowe could possibly enjoy” (214)
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'4 They're all from Evelina, pages 173. 340. 383. 338. 340. In the fourth and fifth
quotations the writer is actually Evelina's mother. Caroline Evelyn.
'5 Emma is in many ways explicitly about the tension between speculation and the
marriage plot, and offers some sense o f w hat would be lost if speculation gave way entirely.
A similar conversation occurs between Anne and Captain Wentworth at the end o f
Persuasion. In this case the ritual is even more thorough insofar as all o f Wentworth's unexplained
behavior is accounted for in terms o f his love for Anne.
' See for instance Julia Epstein's The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics o f
Women's Writing, especially page 99. Edward A. Bloom's introduction to the Oxford edition of
Evelina, and Margaret Anne Doody’s Frances Burney: The Life in the Works (45).
s In this light, we can’t help but see the vicious prankster Captain Mirvan as a repudiation
o f the idea that the sea is a space o f freedom.
Not only does this formulation credit Evelina w ith a clarity o f mind she may not always
have, it imagines their relationship as essentially beyond rhetoric, despite the fact that Evelina's
desire to please Maria may be just as strong— if for different reasons— as her desire to please
Vickers.
40 It could be argued that this editing simply facilitates the flow o f narrative events, though
I actually found it rather jarring; in any case, there is no reason to assume these effects are mutually
exclusive.
4 1 Janet Altman argues that the potential for this sort o f contrast is inherent in the
epistolary' form: “Given the letter's function as a connector between two distant points, as a bridge
between sender and receiver, the epistolary author can choose to emphasize either the distance or
the bridge" (13).
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4: For arguments along these lines, see Susan Staves and to a lesser extent Julia Epstein
(95-6) and Judith Lowder New ton (76). Kristina Straub reminds us that these plots have a certain
value despite their obvious costs: “Evelina's fairy-tale romance with Lord Orville, who saves her
from a society full o f dangers to young women, suggests that such beleaguered young women— be
they heroines or novelists— are sometimes forced to look beyond the realities o f their society to find
the emotional support that means personal safety. Evelina's sallies into the brighter air o f
imagination are not without consciousness that she is. in a sense, dreaming, nor. I suspect, were
Bumev's" (162)
4 3 “Mother-novel" is Margaret Anne D ood ys term for Caroline Evelyn. Burney's first
novel that she burned, the story o f which made up the backstory o f Evelina. (Frances 37).
4 4 Others have argued against the viability o f female networks with respect to other aspects
o f the novel. For instance. Judith Lowder Newton, observing how other female characters do
nothing about Captain Mirvan's assaults on Madame Duval, reflects that “Bonding between
w omen, it would seem, is futile..." (83). while Kristina Straub notes “the failures o f the mature
women in the text to nurture or defend Evelina" (26). Straub is ultimately more generous: “Yet in
pointing out w here Mrs. Selwvn fails Evelina. Bumey seems to suggest potential success, if only
the mature woman were less blinded by the attractive light of male power" (28)
4‘ Doody is referring here specifically to Evelina's embarrassing grandmother. Madame
Duval. (Frances 51)
4 6 For discussions o f this scene in terms o f violence and gender, see Doody (Frances 56),
Epstein (114-5) and Straub (43). For historical background on racing in the eighteenth century, see
Earl R. Anderson (56-68).
4 See in particular Martha G. Brown's polemic against feminist accounts o f Evelina in
“Fanny Burney's "Feminism-: Gender or Genre?" (29-39). Brown rightly situates Evelina in a long
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tradition o f romance: in doing so. howev er, she distorts feminist claims considerably, subjecting
them to a highly reductive form o f accounting, as in "the numbers o f villainous men and women
are roughly equivalent" (35).
^ Quoted in Edward A. Bloom's introduction to the Oxford edition, page viii.
4 1 1 As critics have pointed out. even Orville remains passive in this scene, saving his
interv ention, rather dubiously, for the rescue o f Lovel from the monkey at the end.
5 1 1 In another documented case o f a critic fantasizing ahead o f the story. Mary Poovey
refers to Evelina ''[rjetuming to Berry Hill...on her honeymoon trip.” which o f course has not yet
happened at the novel's end. and for all we know, never does (92).
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Chapter 3
Telephonic Film
Narrative film loves the telephone—and not just the usual suspects like Dial
M for Murder, Pillow Talk, or When a Stranger Calls, but films that may not
advertise their phones: The Big Sleep, It's a Wonderful Life, Chinatown. As our
favorite way into the homes and offices of fictional characters, the telephone serves
novelistic interest, affirming that individuals are indeed worth watching. Our
gossipy desire to know becomes a desire for the phone to ring, or to place a call
ourselves. And the phone accommodates an old and deep cinematic desire to be in
two or more places at once, to transcend the limits o f our individuality.1 We might
indeed ask then if the phone is not to the cinema what the letter is to the novel: the
vehicle for the incorporation o f multiple positions from which to narrate—the
somewhat wobbly vehicle that, in its inherent vulnerability to interception, delay,
misunderstanding, or disguise, dependably delivers the conditions o f instability that
make narration possible.2
In exchange, film gives the phone eyes, transporting our vision to the other
end of the line.3 Consider how rarely in film we share the limited vision of a
character on the phone, and how often we see what that character cannot. But this
visual supplement ultimately does the phone no favors, for it subjects the claims of
the voice to a visual verification that could at any moment decide that the phone is
not to be trusted, while reserving for the camera the authority to verify. In this
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respect telephonic film is less like the fully epistolary novel o f the eighteenth
century (for which the exact analogy might be a telephonic radioplay such as
Lucille Fletcher's Sorry. Wrong Number, where all narrative information comes
through the phone) and more like the nineteenth-century novel, with its occasional
letters embedded in a larger narration capable of supervision and correction.4
But it remains useful to remember the letter’s literary importance if we are
not simply to take the presence of phones in the movies for granted as the modish
furniture of the modem world, as simply one object among many in the careful
composition of mise-en-scene. O f course the filmic phone has not gone entirely
unnoticed, but critics have perhaps been too quick to assimilate it into larger
theories of the cinema. Two studies in particular deserve mention: Michel Chion’s
The Voice in Cinema and Tom Gunning’s “Heard Over the Phone: The Lonely
Villa and the de Lorde Tradition o f the Terrors of Technology.” Gunning
perceptively contrasts D.W. Griffith's film about the rescue o f a besieged family
with its darker antecedents in French theatre, unfolding a rich spectrum of narrative
effects as the telephone either tortures the absent father with the dying voices of his
family, or summons him home in the nick of time. By the end o f the essay,
however. Gunning has scattered these telephonic issues in a more general field: the
phone serv es as an emblem for all modem technology, while the viewer of early
narrative film becomes “a switchboard operator of narrative messages” (195).
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Chion, meanwhile, begins what he calls “a typology o f telephonic figures in film,”
considering the various possibilities of what the viewer can see and hear of a filmed
phone conversation, only to abandon the analysis as merely amusing (65). What
really interests him is the “relationship between the vocal connection, umbilical
cords, and telephone cords,” and so the complexity o f his typology collapses into a
model of regressive telephony (62). All of these ideas are highly suggestive. After
all. to be a switchboard operator is, against the expectations o f much film theory, to
be a woman, and we are reminded of the force that binds the telephone to the
maternal every time our culture exhorts us to call our mothers.5 But in letting the
phone itself drift into metaphoric status, both studies allow it to recede from view
just as it was getting interesting.6 To explore the full importance o f the telephone
for film, we may then wish to recast the formulation of Bernhard Siegert. who has
gone so far as to proclaim literature “an epoch of the postal system” that occurs “in
the (selO-restraint and prolongation of the mail”( 13). If the telephone replaced the
letter and became the ubiquitous modem instrument for pursuing business or
pleasure at a distance, and film replaced literature as the dominant narrative form,
what would it mean to think o f cinema as an epoch o f the telephone system?
I will argue that this question has particular urgency for feminism, for “Ma
Bell's" phone system has from almost the beginning been a heavily female domain.
Not only are the stereotypical gossiping housewife and teenage girl among its most
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avid users (perhaps most memorably captured in The Women (1939) and Bye-Bye
Birdie (1963). respectively), but the twin female occupations o f operator and
secretary install an anonymous female network at the very heart o f male telephone
traffic. That these positions hold considerable power and trust, moreover, can be
confirmed in films such as The Blue Gardenia (1953) and Bells are Ringing ( 1960),
which show the female phone worker drawn into the lives of the callers she serves.
Indeed. Friedrich Kittler's epic media analysis would locate the female office
worker in general at the center of modem discourse. For him, though, what is most
noteworthy is how the rhythm of modernity bounces its female subject back and
forth between the typewriter and the cinema: “Every night the movie-continuum
has to treat the wounds that a discrete machine inflicts upon secretaries during the
day” (175). As striking as this pairing of film and typewriter is, in omitting the
telephone it surprisingly ignores half the insight of Kittler’s fellow prophet (and
acknowledged influence) Marshall McLuhan: “The typewriter and the telephone
are most unidentical twins that have taken over the revamping o f the American girl
with technological ruthlessness and thoroughness” (266). Indeed, what story of the
American girl and the movies would be complete without the telephone by which
she waits, and on which she makes plans, compares notes, confides her desires?
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The telephone and the cinema share a parallel history: bom in the late
nineteenth century, each achieved a certain kind o f stability in the first half of the
tw entieth century, and each has now entered a period of mutation and complex
interconnection with other technologies. For the purposes of this essay I am
interested in the middle period of relative stability, when (supposedly) movies w ere
movies, and phones were phones.8 This confidence reflects nothing more than the
predominance o f certain uses over others, and the growth of institutions that
support those uses. As we shall see, it is a confidence easily shaken. The
normative model of telephone use became o f course the private dialogue, banishing
to the margins o f culture such alternatives as telephonic concerts or party wires.9
The corresponding stability in the cinema came in retrospect to be called Classical
Hollyw ood Cinema, defined above all by the systematic effacement of the
technology of production in the service o f ideological interests.1 0 If such critical
terminology has come under fire in recent film theory, I would suggest it is
nonetheless worth bearing in mind long enough to discover the Classical
Hollywood Telephone, even if this theoretical object should give way in its turn.
The point, then, will be to consider what our fantasies of the phone and our
fantasies of the movies have to do with each other.
The Classical Hollywood Telephone
"Few Americans found the telephone dramatic beyond about 1910” - Claude S. Fischer
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The closer the telephone comes to perfection, the more we forget about it.1 1
Understood as communications technology, the ideal telephone disappears into the
content o f the message it transmits. Moreover, it always reaches the person you
want, when you want, without exposing you to unwelcome interruption. Its sound
is clear. And it represents us as well as—or better than— we could represent
ourselves, conferring advantages not unlike those of correspondence by letter,
which the shy Samuel Richardson notoriously preferred to face-to-face
conversation. Much like letters, telephone conversations seem more subject to
control, and more capable of perfection, than exchanges that depend on our whole
bodies. As a critic o f the great epistolary novelist has put it, “anything too inert and
physical, anything that is resistant to the subject is filtered out...” (Warner 101).
Such analysis lies in close parallel to the rhetoric of one telephone enthusiast: “The
telephone was the first device to allow the spirit of a person expressed in his own
voice to carry its message directly without transporting his body” (Boettinger 205).
What quickly becomes apparent is how the fantasy of limitless self-extension
through technology calls forth an equally idealized self to be extended.
But the catch is that this ideal self is always understood to be at least in part
a lie or evasion, an assertion of the speaker’s control o f discourse at the expense of
the listener's knowledge. There is thus not much room in this fantasy for other
people, other desires. At its limit, the dream of perfect communication, of an open
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and balanced dialogue, turns into its opposite: a monologue, with a line that runs in
only one direction. Conversations turn into competitions over who will control a
meaning that remains always singular. Indeed, these high stakes may account for
the considerable affective charge, both positive and negative, that the telephone is
capable of carrying, and that allows it to erupt out of quotidian dormancy into
dramatic significance. ’* Corresponding to the poles of affect, the ideal phones of
Classical Hollywood Cinema speak endless messages of love and death. This
spectacle entrances viewers with a sense that entire worlds are somehow literally
“on the line,” without necessarily drawing any special attention to the apparatus
itself, and is thus well-suited to genres that deliver those messages as a matter of
course. The Classical Hollywood Telephone appears in full force in The Big Sleep,
and my chapter will begin there, going on to chart a path o f increasing deviation
from this ideal in other films, moving from the tidy disavowal of the ideal in It's a
Wonderful Life to the genetically messy disavowals of I Saw What You Did and
Pillow Talk and finally to the utter negation of the ideal telephone in Lady in a
Cage and Chinatown.
Perhaps no film deploys a more classical telephone than the notorious
hybrid of romance and detective film: Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946), in
which Humphrey Bogart’s Phillip Marlowe, that most idealized of selves,
dispenses love, death, and other ostensibly just desserts through his consummate
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mastery of the telephone. It is a well-known story that the film deviates from
Raymond Chandler's novel with the express purpose of advancing the team of
Bogart and Lauren Bacall as a star vehicle.1 3 The main changes were thus a plot
more flattering to the couple o f destiny, and more scenes for Bacall, two o f which
involve important phone calls. In the first. Bacall’s character (Vivian Rutledge, nee
Stemwood), blackmailed over a compromising photograph o f her sister, comes to
Marlowe's office to discuss what to do. When he asks why she didn’t go to the
police, she calls his bluff, and picks up the phone. As she is about to identify
herself to a cop. Marlowe grabs the phone and begins talking a game of nonsense,
passing the phone to his “mother”— Vivian— who now willingly carries on the
game. As a reward for her participation, Marlowe announces that, while still loyal
to her father who hired him, he is “beginning to like another one o f the
Stemwoods.” Thus the telephone ushers in the love plot, though not in the equal
way many have claimed for the film, as Marlowe entirely sets the terms of the
game he initiates and concludes.1 4 If anything, Vivian’s romantic eligibility lies in
her capacity to appreciate his abilities and follow his lead.
This point is confirmed by the other important phone call that Hawks adds,
by which Marlowe arranges the final encounter with the gangster Eddie Mars,
deceiving him about his location to set up a deadly ambush. Here Vivian’s role is
reduced to that of redundant commentator, reflecting back to Marlowe—and the
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viewer—the obvious fact that he is “taking an awful chance.” Indeed, for Marlowe
and other classical heroes, using the telephone is a high stakes game. But a critical
look at The Big Sleep can show us precisely what disappears into the intimacy of
the classical phone: any sense o f what might be at stake outside that intimacy. Not
only will Eddie Mars join the long list of casualties at the film's end for reasons
that look a lot like personal revenge, the film achieves its final coupling at the
expense o f the bad half o f the Stemwood sisters, since Vivian’s loyalty must be
pried from her sister, who w ill be institutionalized.
Gerald Mast has called the telephone the “perpetual means o f telling lies
and spinning strategies in the film,” but we should stress that this fact makes the
representation of the telephone no less idealized, for its potential threats to the
narrative’s double generic program are always diffused (294). When Vivian twice
attempts to deceive Marlowe over the phone, for instance, he is not fooled. Never
jeopardizing his control o f either the romance or detective plots, the phone is
Marlow e’s friend. And so this happy partnership is one o f mutual cover. As an
audience, we can forget that Marlowe needs the phone to be master o f his situation,
and we can forget that our fantasy o f an ideal phone needs Marlowe as a front.
Leaving us to our fantasies of mastery, the telephone goes quietly about its
business.1 5
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We might say that with the Classical Hollywood Telephone there is a very
powerful way in which the medium is indeed the message, in that when we see a
character grab a phone in a movie, the fact that she has picked up the phone
potentially tells us more, without any thought on our part, than whatever she has to
say. It tells us that the scene is receptive to the singular messages of genre,
signifying in turn a character’s availability, or her vulnerability. In other words,
when the phone disappears from notice, it returns as the repressed to exercise a far
more powerful and economical narrative function. My claim is that the economy
achieved by forgetting the telephone is therefore achieved at high cost, and that
necessary critical gains can be made by calling attention to the phone, and breaking
the spell.
Fortunately, some films tell us a different story about the telephone if we
know how to listen, reminding us above all that the phone traffics in coincidence. I
don't just mean by this the common telepathic sensation o f calling someone only to
have her say something like “I was just about to call you.” Even if we routinely
plan calls, subjecting them to all the rationalized coordination of clocks and time
zones, we must understand each call as ripe for the occurrence of multiple,
contingent events. We could dial a wrong number, or pick up a neighbor’s call, or
simply get disconnected. And when everything goes right with the phone itself,
there is still the question of controlling our immediate environment, for despite our
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breathless concentration, enhanced by phone booths and cued in the movies by the
close-up. we are not just a mouth and an ear when we talk on the phone.1 6 Our
whole body remains open to an unpredictable world, to noise, interruption, or even
assault. Nor is our participation in physical space merely passive. Indeed, to
describe phone conversations as only “point-to-point” communications belies the
very nature o f sound, for of course we cannot easily confine our voice to the
mouthpiece. It will tend to bounce around the room, subjecting us simultaneously
to the hazards of disturbing others and to eavesdroppers—an enormous issue even
before we consider the extension, the party line, or the wiretap. When films notice
all of this they risk giving away the secret tryst between cinema and the telephone.
But as we shall see, this risk can be assumed if a film is prepared to disavow its
own telephonic sophistication. Such is the case in a film with which any discussion
of Classical Hollywood Cinema must come to terms, Frank Capra’s I t ’ s a
Wonderful Life (1946).
In It's a Wonderful Life destiny arrives through the telephone. Famously
tom between desire and duty, adventure and community, George Bailey’s fate is
sealed by a remarkable phone call that interrupts a stormy visit to Mary, the woman
he loves but so desperately does not want to marry. As romantic phone calls go, it
is hardly typical. Instead of protecting the privacy of the romantic dyad, this
telephone call opens up to no fewer than four major parties—George and Mary
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sharing an old-fashioned phone, her boyfriend Sam in New York, and her mother
eavesdropping on and off the extension upstairs—all talking at cross purposes.1 '
Mary wants to marry George, but her mother wants her to marry Sam. Sam wants
George to invest in soybean plastics, while George wants nothing to do with any of
it. If anything, of course, this cacophony is far more erotic than the typical
telephonic duet: for George numerically because of the confrontation with his
rival, for Mary because of the dependably stimulating effects of maternal
disapproval. And of course it is above all the old phone technology, with its
separate transmitter and receiver, which allows them to share the conversation and
thus stand so close together. As the scene's erotic intensity overwhelms the couple,
the phone literally drops out— we hear it bang on the floor and then George
launches into his passionate denial that turns into an embrace. In fact the scene
represents a triple rejection o f audio technology in all its voices, beginning when
Mary smashes a record before answering the phone, and ending with George’s
refusal of Sam's offer, “the biggest thing since radio.” Modem temptation strikes
out.
Thus the telephone both puts George in contact with what might have been
and represents the alternative that must be rejected. That is to say, George not only
hears the voice of the big city over the phone, the phone becomes the emblem of
that voice, particularly as we notice that Sam speaks on a more modem phone (the
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one we have come to know, with receiver and transmitter in one unit), and has two
telephones to spare on his desk.1 8 In case we miss this detail in the short and single
appearance of Sam's office on screen, the pattern repeats: the phone George uses
in the Bailey Bros. Building and Loan is also old-fashioned, while the evil banker
Potter issues his threats and directives from a modem phone. And yet some
sleight-of-hand is at work in establishing this low-tech bias. After all, the only
character to demonstrate more than a naive awareness of the telephone is Mary,
with her keen sense of how to manipulate the positions of multiple listeners. But
this female agency is dangerous to a story bent on proving only the vital
importance of George, as is the mere fact that Mary also has choices to make over
the phone. A full recognition o f George's debt to the powerful alliance of the
telephone and female agency is intolerable because that alliance itself is intolerable,
for if in I t ’ s a Wonderful Life the telephone represents the seductive call of the great
modem world, then Mary must be the opposite, standing for the redeeming hearth
and home of a bygone age. It finally takes nothing less than the film's Dickensian
magic to convert Mary from a trap into a reward, for it is only in the vision o f her
as a spinster in a world without George Bailey that she is the dependent he needs to
imagine her.1 9 George’s disavowed debt will nonetheless continue to accrue, for it
will be Mary’s quiet rallying o f support, beginning with a phone call to her uncle,
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which achieves George’s financial rescue behind the scenes while Clarence the
wingless angel rescues him spiritually.
At the end the film does acknowledge communications technology, but only
in the form of Sam’s telegram from London: a generous loan offer reduced by the
town’s outpouring of support to a kind of redundant homage to the “richest man in
tow n”. This putting of technology in its place prepares us for the ultimate fantasy
of a perfectly idealized—and archaic—telephone that speaks only one message. As
George comes to leam, “every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings.” In such
intimate contact with a divine elsewhere, George can finally lay down his travel
brochures. Thus the film concludes, like its great television rival, The Wizard o f
Oz. that there is no place like home, and we don’t need E.T. to tell us that this
message comes not from heaven, but from science fiction and the telephone
system.
Dial in Generic Confusion
If It's a Wonderful Life is science fiction cleverly disguised as melodrama,
then the telephone, we might say, is the give-away, the tell-tale object that must be
hidden for generic satisfaction. Indeed whatever temporary alliance the cinema
may achieve with the phone is always apt to be undermined by the phone’s
versatility. The vast channels o f female networking opened up by the telephone put
enormous pressure on romance in particular, the genre whose function historically
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is to regulate the necessary but risky business of setting a woman in motion, so as
to transfer her from her father’s to her husband’s house.2 0 Many of a culture’s fear
tactics go to making sure that a woman’s one fully sanctioned journey is speedy
and straight, lest she never find her way to her proper place. So perhaps it is not
surprising to find a cinema that regulates telephonic romance with a “healthy” dose
of telephonic terror, and to find that the intensity of this regulation increases in
direct proportion historically to gains in women's mobility. I want to single out
two films on the cusp of the social upheaval of the late sixties for their strange
mixings of comic romance with much darker elements: William Castle's I Saw
What You Did (1965) and Michael Gordon’s Pillow Talk (1959). Generally
speaking, of course, generic alchemy can produce a great deal of narrative energy
and critical perspective. What concerns me about these films, however, is that their
considerable unruly energies give way to abrupt closure, foreclosing the space of
telephonic coincidence in which feminism can take hold. The critical value of
whatever generic parody we might discern in this abruptness must be weighed
against the cost of these narrative resolutions—in both cases, the phone, as the
agent of generic contamination, gets repressed, and with it any sense o f the female
characters' independence and well-being. We should not applaud a hybrid genre
whose function is at once to menace women and deny that it is doing so.
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I Saw What You Did (1965> is obsessed with the phone, and one of the most
wonderfully tone-deaf films I can remember seeing. Its off-key effect comes from
a seeming inability to decide if it is a light teen-comedy or a vicious horror flick, an
indecision betrayed by a rapid oscillation between the two moods, as cued
especially by some very obtrusive music. But the result of this confusion is that the
film effectively stages a generic contest that turns on the interpretation of the
telephone, and reveals the reluctance to see the phone outside the love/death binary.
Recall the plot: Libby, a teenage girl, invites her friend Kit to spend an evening
with her and her little sister Tess at their house outside of town, during which the
girls amuse themselves by making crank calls. Most of the calls do little beyond
possibly stirring up some marital discord, until they begin saying to their unknown
victims: “1 saw what you did. 1 know who you are.” As it happens, one man they
call has just brutally murdered his girlfriend and buried her body. What is
interesting, though, is not just the fact of this remarkable coincidence, but how the
girls* response to the killer's barely-contained panic resists any rapid assimilation
of coincidental events into a single meaning. When the killer says he wants to meet
her, Libby describes him with glee as both a “swinger” and a “sex maniac,” though
of course his sole purpose is to eliminate the apparent witness to his crime. Thus,
in her generic confusion, Libby hears sex when the killer means murder.
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This misreading sets off a chain of events that confronts Libby and Tess
with the killer at the end, only to have them saved by Kit’s father and a policeman
in the nick o f time. With the killer apprehended, / Saw What You Did wastes no
time in reverting back to a comic tone. When Tess seems unduly upset by the
consequences of this terrifying attack, Libby’s responds with a strange speech o f
reassurance: “they can fix the window. But we’re not going to be using the phone
for a long, long time." By the time she speaks the word “phone" a smile has spread
over her face and her tone is again that of innocent teenage mischief. As soon as
she delivers the line, the two immediately prance off to the return o f the comic
music. Neither adult intervenes to correct their attitude or otherwise insist on the
seriousness o f what has transpired. Why is Libby so happy and shameless? Is
being stalked by a killer not enough to give a teenage girl pause?2 1 Moreover,
without the use of a phone, and living in a remote house, is there any reason to
assume she can enjoy a successful social life? If horror vanishes with the
telephone, doesn't romance as well? The film is not prepared to tell us.
A trailer for the film can perhaps shed some indirect light on this resolution
by giving us a clearer idea of what the film is selling us. In this trailer, we first see
a phone book and are told with alarm that “Your name is in this book! It could
happen to you!” It is strange that the phone book is made to represent the
vulnerability o f us all, even though in the movie it is only the killer who suffers, via
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the crank call, for having his name in the phone book. You could presumably
avoid the problem o f ‘'it" happening to you by not killing anyone. Thus it would
seem that this trailer is a bad fit, an advertisement for the wrong film, but in fact the
very looseness o f its logic closely mirrors the film’s own complex representation of
the telephone. For indeed if we take the phone book in a more general way as an
emblem of the telephone as a rationalized system, then clearly the film as much as
the trailer wants to show the dark side of this system, a network o f fearful
proximity to unpleasant coincidence. Moreover, in its generic juggling act. the film
wants a logic o f displacement and reversibility to replace one of stable, secure
production o f meaning. It wishes to show the telephone to be too complex for the
kind of sense-making I have been attempting, so that the story does not have to
make any sense. As a recipe for depicting senseless horror, this strategy works
fine, but it does not work for the film’s unearned retreat into senseless romance.
The trailer ends with a series of ringing phones, then another, more
fundamental displacement: “Don’t answer it—see it!” As revolving pronouns
continue to proliferate, the telephone becomes identified with the film at the same
time as we are prepared for the correct choice o f movies over phones. The
telephone then becomes the scapegoat of the film, its banishment at the end in
Libby's speech meant to restore a happier teenage world, one in which girls can
safely leave their homes to spend disposable income on horror flicks. In this
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sacrificial economy, two things remain sacred: happy-go-lucky, movie-going
teenage sensibility and the movies themselves. The trailer sells in advance a story
in which the phone will become responsible for the film’s own excesses. But the
unredeemed gothic side o f the story cannot be banished so easily. What we saw on
the other end of the line is a story that should continue to haunt any alert teenage
girl: two women brutally stabbed in the belly—acts o f raging misogyny.
Moreover, both murders are presented as triggered, if not caused, by the girls’
crank calls. Tormented by technological female reproduction, the furious man
strikes back at the site of biological female reproduction. It is as if he finds he must
counteract the displacing effects of technology— in particular his inability to
maintain a desired distance from women—by marking the “place” o f women as
primitively as possible. And how different, finally, is this criminal from the
filmmaker who cuts the girls’ phone cords at the end o f the film? The girls’ game
of crank calls gives way to the boys’ game of moviemaking, for one rule o f the
boys' game is to cut off any unruly female communication that disrupts the
profitable recycling o f meaning that we call genre. This rule means suppressing the
coincidental nature o f the telephone, but in I Saw What You Did this suppression
comes far too late. Its repressive impulses come as fits o f violence rather than as a
coherent narrative strategy. When genre works, as it clearly does not here, it works
to understand its calls as single events with single meanings.
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This would seem, for instance, to be the progress o f Pillow Talk, one of the
most popular phone films o f all time: the first phone call o f Gordon's film is
clearly an unfortunate coincidence to the heroine. Jan Morrow, an interior decorator
and single woman forced to share a party line with playboy songwriter Brad Allen.
Jan picks up the phone in the morning to call her office only to find Brad already
on the line with a young woman. For him the call is seduction and song-testing; for
Jan. it is a provocation that offends her morals and prevents her from conducting
business on the line. The call is presented in a rare triangular split-screen, with
Jan's wedge dividing Brad and his prey—a strategy that emphasizes not only that
she comes between them, but also the multiplication o f spaces and events that
compete over a party line. But as the film unfolds and the phone calls add up, this
complexity is ground through the mill of romantic convergence. Jan becomes the
target of Brad's seduction and the calls are between them alone. Moreover, the
now-ordinary split-screen reveals a closely matched mise-en-scene, suggesting a
compatibility that sharply narrows what the phone calls can mean. It is almost as if
the phone is no longer overcoming distance because the apartments it connects are
the same place. In any case, there are no apparent coincidences, nothing else
happening but the flirtation on the phone. This tendency culminates in the famous
bathtub scene, where Brad and Jan lie toe-to-toe in perfectly mirrored positions.
There is in fact a moment where Brad moves his foot and Jan draws hers back as if
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in response to being tickled, for an instant dissolving the split entirely, and seeming
to achieve a playful fusion of space and event through telephonic fantasy.
But the fantasy is Jan’s and Jan’s alone. Indeed, Jan’s ticklish foot becomes
the butt of a romantic joke, and a lesson about romantic fantasy and the telephone.
We laugh of course because Jan and Brad are not in the same space, however
“close” she might feel him to be over an idealized phone line. We laugh at Jan.
moreover, because we know something that she does not, that she is talking to
Brad, the guy she can't stand. Brad has after all been pretending to be someone
else—a rube from Texas named Rex—to seduce her. How can their conversation
mean only one thing when there are different versions of who is talking? Nothing
spoils singularity like duplicity.
Indeed, our introduction to Brad should have alerted us not to expect sexual
or telephonic monogamy from him. When we meet him he sings “you are my
inspiration, [your name here]” over the phone to a series o f interchangeable young
women. As a writer of romantic songs, seduction is his business, as is his use of
the party line if we take his victims to be a kind of unwitting focus group. Thus
from the start his phone conversations have a kind of double meaning that only gets
elaborated when he invents Rex. Jan’s telephonic needs are also hard to separate:
her business, interior decorating, is also her pleasure, rehearsing her assumed goal
of taming male space through the cohabitation of marriage. But this apparent
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symmetry between the characters’ relationships to the phone grows increasingly
asymmetrical as the film invokes the ideal of a coincidence-free telephone as a
naive, feminine fantasy into which even the most resistant woman will dependably
retreat. It is interesting in this light that the film retains the split-screen strategy for
the phone calls as the romance plot moves forward, instead o f resorting to the
cross-cut close-ups so many films use to represent the characters’— and demand
our— undivided attention. Through this insistent visual strategy, we are never
allowed to forget that Brad’s double-dealing gives the lie to Jan’s fantasy of
romantic convergence, and that the distance she would dream away remains open
to exploitation.
What semblance o f acceptable romantic closure the film does achieve
becomes possible, then, only by avoiding the telephone. Brad never has a
successful romantic call with Jan while playing himself, and must eventually bridge
the distance between their apartments rather violently, by marching into her
apartment, picking her up against her will, and carrying her down the street to his
place in her pajamas. There is much good criticism about how Rock Hudson’s
status as a partly-closeted gay man strains the film’s romantic closure." I would
add only that some such strain o f cultural categories should be the expected result
of a film that is ultimately less interested in heterosexual coupling than it is in the
telephone. To notice the telephone. 1 would argue, is to notice it splitting events
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and making coincidences, including the wonderful coincidence described by
Richard Dyer as “Here is this gay man (Roy Scherer Junior, Rock's real name)
pretending to be this straight man (Rock Hudson) pretending to be this straight man
(the character in the film) pretending to be a gay man (for the sequence or gag in
the film)" (31). Moreover, as vexed as Brad’s participation in marriage may be, it
is hardly more so than Jan's. For all the rhetoric of marriage as a man-trap, there is
little question whose autonomy is really on the line, as captured in the fact that Jan
must forever give up her dream o f her own phone.2 3
The film is indeed guilty o f many sins of gender politics, as have already
been pointed out by critics.2 4 First, Jan is presented condescendingly as the only
one who does not know her own desire (she tells her maid she likes being single
only to jump at Brad’s proposal); then, she disappears from the end o f the film
(instead the film picks up a running gag about a doctor who thinks Brad is
pregnant). What I would add is emphasis and a certain perspective. Much as in /
Saw What You Did, there is something wrong with the tone o f Pillow Talk: it
cannot come to terms with the sinister implications o f its plot. What I want to
suggest is that Jan is a gothic heroine trapped in a comedy. Again, the telephone
enacts generic confusion, routing romance through danger.2 5
There is something disturbingly familiar about Jan’s situation in Pillow
Talk. As E.L. McCallum puts it, “what marks Jan’s singleness and autonomy more
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128
than anything is the absence of parents or kin; she is the modem subject in the
urban space, ostensibly free from traditional family networks and expectations”
(“Mother” 77-8). With a mother in Milwaukee and no female peers in sight, Jan
lives in radical isolation from supportive female networks. Indeed, in a movie full
of phone calls, Jan never talks on the phone with a woman!2 6 Her only female
friend is her older maid, Alma, who amounts to little more than a double agent in
the war of the sexes, delivering on cue the battle cry: “If there’s anything worse
than a woman living alone it’s a woman saying she likes it.” O f course when we
meet Jan, she is doing just fine in spite of these conditions. Thanks largely to the
poise and energy o f Doris Day’s performance, our consistent impression is that Jan
is a woman who can handle herself. She has no trouble fending off the attempts of
her rich friend Jonathan to buy her love, or the more aggressive advances of a
“Harvard man.” But once Brad puts on his Rex act, Jan is faced with the
epistemological difficulties o f a gothic heroine. Her situation bears a haunting
resemblance to the classic scenarios of Gaslight or Suspicion, where the husband
isolates the wife and systematically challenges her perceptions. What happens to
the heroines of these films can be described in terms of a denial o f triangulation, of
reference to the perspective of a third party who could confirm the heroine’s own
perceptions, and hence her sanity. Brad can forgo this process because Jan has
isolated herself twice over— first in moving to the city, second in talking on the
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129
phone with him. Though verification by phone remains a resource for Jan (she
could, for instance, try to contact some of “Rex’s” associates in Texas), her need to
believe in a romantic phone fantasy seems far stronger than any appropriate
paranoid caution she might summon. Brad manipulates this self-imposed isolation
with insidious cleverness, providing the illusion of triangulation by pretending to
“interrupt” her calls as himself to criticize Rex, thus allowing Jan to confirm her
ideas about Rex through a kind of negative verification (i.e. Brad suspects Rex, so
Rex must be all right). It is this trick that insures Jan does not recognize the gothic
character of her situation until it is too late, and keeps her moving toward romantic
closure.
But since this trick is not played on the audience, something else must
induce us to look the other way. to trade away Jan’s autonomy for generic
satisfaction, and allow the film to proceed toward closure without protest. This
other maneuver is very familiar, and has much in common with the tried-and-true
alibi of much sexist humor: it’s just a joke. And so Brad’s Rex-routine is just a
game. But feminism has little patience for games that women don’t get to play.
There is, however, one joke that Jan gets to play on Brad before she accepts his
proposal, which therefore bears a great deal of weight in the film’s attempt to
restore the balance necessary between the partners o f a modem relationship. I am
referring of course to Jan’s outlandish makeover of Brad’s apartment as a parody of
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the seducer's lair. But as much as we may admire this blow she strikes against the
predatory male, how can it be enough? First, the joke is in some sense also on
herself, since Brad planned to have her move in with him. Second, and more
important, there are still enormous obstacles to this marriage. Put most simply. Jan
knows nothing about him, except that she cannot trust him. There is therefore no
way to account for her (or our) instant acceptance of his proposal, except to say that
she remains trapped in a maxim that Samuel Richardson set out to disprove in
Clarissa over nvo hundred years earlier: “that a reformed rake makes the best
husband.”2 7 According to the logic of this hard-dying maxim, the mere fact of a
marriage proposal is proof o f reform. Indeed, all Pillow Talk offers beyond Brad’s
proposal as proof of his reform is another gag, letting us witness the dismissal of
his comically heartbroken girlfriends over the phone—an action, moreover, that Jan
is not there to witness, so it cannot count as evidence for her.
The critics have been right, however, in emphasizing that something else is
going on at the end of the film, a kind o f hysterical displacement that troubles the
serene singularity o f romantic union. In the last scene the film returns us to one of
its most vexed sites: Brad’s body.2 8 The scene reprises a running gag in which,
due to a string of coincidences, an obstetrician thinks Brad is pregnant, and wants
him corralled for observation. Brad had ducked into the office in the first place to
avoid being seen by Jan and Jonathan, their only mutual friend and therefore the
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one person who could blow Brad’s cover. Once inside, he claims vague symptoms
to explain his presence. There is a clear sense here o f multiplying duplicity, of the
way lies create the need for more lies. Brad’s body, moreover, becomes vulnerable
to identification and abduction by the medical staff because he has lapsed into play
acting without the protection o f the telephone, thereby falling victim to his own
telephonic habits. But at the same time, the sheer volume o f telephonic issues
swirling around this scene suggests that such a rational explanation will take us
only so far. Beyond Brad’s immediate behavior lies the question o f the scene’s
weird spatial density (why is Jonathan's office down the hall from the
obstetrician?), and the way it raises the difficulty o f locating the proper limits of
science and technology (the doctor admonishes his skeptical nurse with the
declaration that “medical science still has many unknown regions to explore”). It is
as if the serial displacements o f telephonic promiscuity call down a
corresponding—and overcorrecting— fantasy of punishment: the impossibly over
embodied space of the pregnant male body.
Against this most literal fantasy of male reproduction, the film continually
opposes a different, but still fantastic, version of Brad’s body in terms of its
enormous size and strength. Indeed, in an analogy he offers his friend he comes off
with nothing less than the stature of a tree:
Jonathan, before a man gets married, he’s like a tree in the forest, he stands
there independent, an entity unto himself, and then he’s chopped down, his
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branches are cut off, he’s stripped of his bark, and he’s thrown into the river
with the rest of the logs. Then this tree is taken to the mill. And when it
comes out it’s no longer a tree. It's a vanity table, a breakfast nook, baby
crib, and the newspaper that lines the family garbage can.
This other v ersion of Brad's body is of course hyper-masculine, with conventional
castration anxiety and fear of domesticity, but it is unclear from the rest of the film
how such a body will fare in an urban environment, whether it will dominate or get
its branches lopped off. We see. for instance, how the awkwardness of his
squeezing his bulk into a foreign sports car becomes the ease with which he slings
the "Harv ard man” over his shoulder, or carries Jan down the street.2 9 What kind of
body is this that Jan finds so attractive (her word for it is "marvelous”), and what
problems does it pose for understanding this attraction in generic terms?
While the humor in all of these scenes may preserve the confidence of an
adoring public in the myth of Rock Hudson's All-American masculinity, an
understanding of Jan's predicament requires that we substitute a gothic reading o f
Brad's body for a comic one, and register the menace behind the film’s smiling
assurances.3 0 Jan’s own prior assessment should be our cue as we recall her
reaction to the considerate attentions of Rex: “what a relief after a couple of
monsters like Tony Walters and that Brad Allen!” If her other suitors are monsters,
what then is left for Jan once Brad’s exposure reveals Rex as a fantasy? We might
say finally that the film can't decide if Brad is Frankenstein or Frankenstein’s
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Monster. Is he a genius o f male reproduction, not only in his many incarnations on
the telephone, but in his own body? Or is he a cruel brute of monstrous physical
prowess? Indeed the film most forcefully raises the classic question for the gothic
heroine: man or monster?3 1 Since it does little work to resolve this question, we
can only wonder if poor Jan, the gothic heroine in denial, finally has lost her mind
to accept Brad in such incoherent fashion. This bad news is finally all that Pillow
Talk has to say about the fate of the female subject on the telephone.
Telephonic Nightmares
By the time of Lady in a Cage five years later, this subject would be in full
retreat, an exotic—and highly endangered— species exhibited for the amusement
and curiosity of predators. Walter Grauman’s horrific film places Olivia de
Havilland alone with a broken hip in the large house she shares with her son
Malcolm, leaving her entirely dependent on technology in the forms o f a cane, an
elevator, and the telephone. When the power shorts out, de Havilland’s character,
known only as Mrs. Hilliard, finds herself trapped in the elevator between floors.
The elevator is equipped with an alarm that rings outside the house, but her calls
are ignored, and in fact draw attention to her vulnerability. (This is a film that likes
to make a point, and one o f its many heavy-handed points is that the world is a
callous place). She soon falls prey to a series o f home invasions— first by an older
generation of petty thieves, followed shortly by a far more vicious young gang,
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who are led by a thug named Randall—James Caan in a role that makes Sonny
Corleone look tame. Mrs. Hilliard eventually escapes the gang, but not before she
has been subjected to an extended ordeal o f equal parts frustration, terror, assault,
and blame. And while the film does finally turn its sadism against Randall, running
over his head with a car. his death only makes a further spectacle o f Mrs. Hilliard’s
abjection by drawing a crowd of on-lookers. We last see her sitting outside under
her air-conditioner, laughing as its dripping water tells her the power has finally
been restored. But as the signal that communicates this ironic message, the drip
looks an awful lot like Chinese water torture. Information in Lady in a Cage is
indistinguishable from pain.
Deeply unpleasant as it is, I want to discuss this film because of the
apocalyptic discourse it mobilizes around the figure o f the technologized woman, a
discourse w hich shows just how threatening that figure must be to the forces of
reaction. Much of this discourse takes the form o f a generalized ambience of
hysteria: a voice on the radio shrieks, “Have we an anti-satan missile? While
we've been conquering polio, and space, what have we done about the devil?”; a
drunk shouts “graven images!” and “repent!”; and indeed the camera itself frames
the narrative proper with a series of disturbing and disorienting images, from low-
angle shots o f traffic to a dead dog.3 2 But as the story moves forward, the terms of
this vague unease become increasingly well defined. “I am a human being, a
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thinking, feeling creature,” Mrs. Hilliard protests to the gang as they take over her
house, and what becomes abundantly clear is that the category of the human is
under siege in this film, caught between two alien forces, the animal and the
machine.
It is machines which allow Mrs. Hilliard to navigate and defend her home,
but which also betray her when she needs them. Not only does she get trapped in
her elevator, but it is her confidence in the phone that leads her to ignore the danger
in her son's departure for a holiday weekend. “I'll call Nellie if I need her. you if I
need you, [the] ice company if I need ice, the coal company if I need coal, and the
happiness company if I need happiness,” she tells her son before he leaves, and in
so expressing her assumed telephonic omnipotence she articulates the full promise
of the telephone for women. Indeed most basic is the promise o f the telephone to
end gothic isolation.3 3 We can imagine a world in which continuous sympathetic
contact among women would eliminate domestic terror. Thus in a revisionist
gothic story such as Angela Carter's “The Bloody Chamber,” the heroine can call
home and her mother, intuiting something is wrong, will ride to the rescue. But the
long cinematic history of telephonic terror does indeed suggest a sustained interest
in throwing this security into doubt. We might say it could only be a naive
optimism that drives a character such as Vargas in Touch o f Evil to leave his wife
in a remote motel on the assumption that he can keep in touch over the phone. O f
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course the telephonic rescue o f women has been frequently represented on film
(most dramatically perhaps in The Slender Thread and When a Stranger Calls), but
typically only after subjecting them to a torturous experience of the tenuousness—
or invasiveness—of the link. Rescue is rarely so routine as to live up to the
promise of the telephone.3 4 Moreover, the dialectic of the phone is such that it
encourages the isolation it ostensibly alleviates, thus producing scenarios in which
disconnection spells doom.
Such is the case for Mrs. Hilliard. As the petty thieves ransack her kitchen,
the phone rings far below her cage, where she can’t reach it. When she cleverly
throws a bar from the elevator to knock the phone off the hook and shout for help,
the thieves simply cut the cord, greatly diminishing the possibility of rescue. Not
knowing that they have done this, Mrs. Hilliard remains intent on getting to the
phone, and when she finally gets her chance the film gives us one o f the more
terrifying images o f telephonic disconnection in cinematic history: stretched face
dow n on the floor, she pleads desperately for the operator, only to look up (and
here we share her low-angle perspective) at the ripped-out cord down the hall. It is
not the first time her hopes have been dashed in the film. One of the older thieves
(a prostitute named Sade) is a woman, as Mrs. Hilliard realizes by smelling her
perfume. Thinking a woman might be more receptive to her appeals, there is a
brief moment of hope for the trapped heroine, but this old-fashioned female
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networking fails to o /' The film's architectural scheme is clear: inside the cage is
the human: outside are only treacherous machines and unfeeling animals.3 6
Indeed if humans are the animals that use language, Mrs. Hilliard certainly
qualifies.3 7 It is as the young gang takes over her house that Mrs. Hilliard launches
the film's rhetorical frenzy, calling them monsters, creatures, animals. Her
distressed internal monologue reveals with some eloquence her besieged position
between what she calls "our god kilowatt” and an encroaching animality: “we
made cities and towns and thought we had beat the jungle back, not knowing we
had built the jungle in.” Randall's taunting call to his gang becomes something of
a slogan for the inverted carnival culture of these conditions: “come and watch the
human being be sick in a cage.” And here the film enforces the raw deal that
shadows the arrival o f women as a class on the stage o f history: women only get to
be human once the human becomes exotic.3 8
When it comes time to assign blame for this dire situation, therefore. Lady
in a Cage spurns feminist critique for an old story about the family. It is a shrill
cautionary tale, set amidst the ruins of patriarchy— for there is no father in this
movie, only the cliched mother whose love smothers her son, as the letter Malcolm
leaves for her makes clear:
I'll be thirty next Wednesday, and I won’t have many more chances in life.
Every time I try to leave you, you add a room, or dress up the house, or
charm me. Give me my half of what’s in the living room safe. Release me
from your generosity. Release me from your beauty. Release me from your
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love. p.s. think it over. I’ll call in a little while. Please make it yes, or
quite simply. I’ll kill myself.
Without the father to guarantee the human as a patriarchal category, it seems the
son cannot take up his destiny. The mother’s pre-Oedipal role makes her an enemy
of the differentiation civilization requires.3 9 Indeed, her alignment with the forces
that blur distinction becomes most apparent in the moment o f reading the letter.
Having found it upstairs in Malcolm's desk, the gang delays killing her in order to
learn about the location of the safe he mentions. Randall reads the letter aloud
slowly, comparing her to his own “holier-than-anything old crow of a
grandmother,” in order to make a further spectacle of her life and justify the gang's
crimes. As Randall nears the end of the letter, Mrs. Hilliard begins strangely to
respond to him as if he were Malcolm. It is as if the pain of this sudden rift with
her son (and the rift is heightened in her mind by the fact that Malcolm
communicates by letter) causes a madly overcompensating collapse of difference, a
collapse that stands as both the cause and allegory of the film’s larger crises. By
the time she comes to recognize her assigned role in the film (“It’s all true. I’m a
monster,” she says to herself), the category o f the human has been fully vacated— it
is apparently what happens when you replace a husband with a telephone.
When home remains unredeemed, even a working phone can only reach the
uncanny. Such is the lesson for Jake Gittes, the lonely detective of Roman
Polanski's Chinatown (1974), whose investigations begin with the wrecked homes
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of div orce cases and move toward incest, perhaps the most intimate crime o f all.
Set back in the thirties. Chinatown follows on the heels of a migration in the sixties
of the representation o f the telephone. No longer largely confined to the private
and the domestic, the phone becomes an emblem of male paranoia and cold-war
hysteria, as seen in such notable films as The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Fail
Safe (1964), and Dr. Strangelove (1964). Indeed Chinatown appears just after
Watergate, and in the same year as the very apex of cinematic audio paranoia.
Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation. At the time of its release, then, it was
certainly no longer possible to sustain an ideal view of the phone, or to pretend, as
in It's a Wonderful Life, that the phone could conveniently disappear. Indeed
Polanski brings this skepticism to the project of re-envisioning the classical period
through what John Cawelti has called “generic transformation.” If The Big Sleep
found a way to pursue both romance and detective work through the telephone,
Chinatown takes up that double pursuit and follows it to a telephonic dead-end.
Both the love plot and the detective plot derail due to telephone calls.
When the phone calls Evelyn Mulwray out of bed with Jake, it delivers him a
choice that is essentially a choice of genres: trust Evelyn, as she asks, and find
love, or investigate her and solve the mystery. When Gittes continues to
investigate, that route is also blocked by a phone call from the police in the middle
of the night: they have found his home number on the wall o f a murdered woman,
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and will hound him until the end of the film. Unlike Marlowe, who kept the phone
under his sole control. Gittes finds himself perpetually open to the calls o f others.4 0
As Avital Ronell argues in The Telephone Book. “the telephone belongs to the
artwork both as parasitical inclusion and as its veiled receiver, the opening from
which invisible vents are directed, quietly co-occupying the scene with the voices
of commanding phantoms.” (213). We might moreover understand these voices as
speaking the law of genre, and very much in Derrida’s double sense that genres are
at once “not to be mixed” and subject to a prior law of contamination.4 1 For Gittes,
detection and romance are as irreconcilable as knowledge and ignorance; they
represent two different ways of being in the world. At the same time, his
investigation— in a woman's pay, into a woman's mystery— has romance as its
very ground.
Cawelti argues that Chinatown represents generic transformation in the
mode of “demythologization”, pointing up the inadequacy o f the myth of the
private eye in the kind of world Gittes inhabits (194). What must be added is how
heavily this perceived inadequacy is a result of his entanglement in feminine
discourse—and not only in that the detective’s use of the phone means a
considerable reliance on a female work force, but that a great part o f the business of
investigation looks an awful lot like gossip. Indeed, what Gittes and Marlowe
share is an interest in their scandalous cases in explicit excess of their professional
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obligations.4 2 Both continue investigating well after they have been paid and asked
to stop, and Jake's nosiness is the cause of a famously literalized punishment at the
hands of Polanski himself.4 3 What haunts Jake’s supposedly rational investigation,
the uncanny lure that whispers his name through the telephone (and deems that
name comically unpronounceable), is in fact the mystery o f his own curiosity.
What Jake finds so fascinating is the shadowy world of female networks.
The film’s deepest mystery turns precisely on the problem of relationship between
women, as Evelyn cannot designate the woman who is both her sister and her
daughter. It shows in a world o f patriarchal crime just how tangled a woman’s
entry into discourse can be. Moreover, Jake only comes to know this world
through his owr n progressive emasculation: as is often pointed out. the police,
agents of masculine authority, won’ t listen to him by the end when it matters
most.4 4 What Chinatown cannot do is bring itself to believe in the power of female
discourse. It is a film that questions profoundly the novelistic desire to know-
personal secrets, and the pow er of such know ledge to do any real good, thus
implicating not only the detective, but also the culture that loves him. But perhaps
the film ends in despair because it pursues a novelistic interest in personal scandal
from a male perspective, disavowing the historically feminine association of this
interest. The detective genre, we might suspect, could only remain a political dead
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end until the detective, a telephonic subject and incorrigible gossip, owned up to
her discursive status, and became a woman.4 5
NOTES
1 Tom Gunning, for instance, has claimed that: “early filmmakers incorporated recent
technology into the plots o f their film s to naturalize film's power to move through space and time.
The telephone supplies a particularly powerful example” (187).
' Although he shows little interest in film. John Brooks does consider the consequences for
narrative of the technological shift from letters to phones, speculating briefly about the possibility o f
a novel consisting o f nothing but phone calls— only to announce, quite prematurely in my opinion,
that "the telephone as a subject for the creative imagination has been exhausted” (223).
We should be tipped o ff to the dubiousness o f this trade by the fact that there is much
resistance to the picturephone.
4 An excellent example o f this would be Frank Churchill’s letter in Jane Austen's Emma.
which becomes the object o f a communal and narrative scrutiny.
' The groundbreaking essay about the gender o f the viewer was o f course Laura M ulvey's
“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The trope o f calling one’ s mother receives play in many
films. Noteworthy examples include: The Thin Man (1934), Bells are Ringing (1960), The Misfits
(1961). Nashville (1975), and Mother (1996).
6 E.L. McCallum is among the few critics to make the kinds o f claims I am making for the
narrative centrality o f the telephone. In her essay about The Crying o f Lot 49 and The House o f
Seven Gables (a novel which o f course predates the telephone), she argues that the importance o f
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"wired communications [in these texts]...goes further than simply topic or style, implicating their
very structure and interpretation" (65).
Regarding operators, Kenneth Lipartito reports that “[s]ince the 1880’s, the telephone
companies employed women almost exclusively in this position, a practice also followed in other
nations" (1082). For further discussion o f operators see Maddox.
s Swedish scholar Jan Olsson has conducted exhaustive research on the telephone in early
cinema, and a version o f his findings should be available in English soon. I had the opportunity to
speak with him, and he reports that the telephone o f early cinema is usually represented as a positive
marvel, though some films already use the phone to deliver “highly unwelcome, hair-raising
messages." He makes clear that the question o f what should be seen during a filmed phone call was
by no means obvious, demonstrating that many films adopted the “split-screen solutions" of post
cards, often including a middle panel that represented the space bridged by a phone call even as it
emphasized the distance between parties.
g For an excellent discussion o f the many different ways the telephone has been used, see
Marvin.
1 0 See Williams for a critical discussion o f this terminology.
1 1 Henry Boettinger has speculated that the phone has disappeared from notice because “no
other device can be used (in safety) with such total disregard o f the thing itself' (200). While his
claim for the importance o f safe use should not be ignored, clearly he goes too far in singling out the
telephone from a long list o f "dangerous” inventions. Can anyone recall a telescope, to name one o f
his examples, causing a serious accident? But a consensus remains that the telephone is typically
seen, as Clause S. Fischer puts it. as an “anonymous object” (259) with a “shortage o f charisma”
(253).
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u Avital Ronell makes a similar point: "the telephone puts you at risk, or it figures the
language o f risk-where is your own risk (at your own risk)" (357).
1 3 For a discussion o f these changes, see Gerald Mast (269-274).
In taking this position I extend the objection o f Raymond Bellour. who in his famous
frame-by-frame analysis o f Marlowe and Vivian's love scene in a car. finds a profound gender
asymmetry in the fact that it is Vivian “whose magnified face sim ultaneously and wholly expresses
and receives the admission o f love" (15).
1 5 For a discussion o f The Big Sleep as male fantasy, see David Thom son (Acme 125: Big
46-7).
My own attention was called to this idea by Kittler's discussion o f Flugo Munsterberg's
early writing on film: "Close-ups are not just ‘objectivizations’ o f attention; attention itself appears
as the interface of an apparatus" (162-3).
1 There are at least two more people in Sam's office who can hear w hat he is saying. One.
an attractive young w oman, drapes herself over him as he speaks, clearly signaling that we can let
George steal Mary away without guilt. The other is a faceless man who at on e point can be heard to
contribute the word "jellybeans" to the conversation.
I S George uses what appears to be a version o f “the old stand-up B ell model o f 1914,"
which lasted "officially until 1927 and in out-of-the-way places long after that” (Stem 35).
1,11 refer o f course to the fact that the basic idea o f using im possible visions to induce a
change o f heart comes from Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Howard Rosenberg has observed the
unlikeliness that someone as attractive as Donna Reed could find no one e lse — and a reader o f his
points out that the bigger insult is that the life o f a single woman is the ultimate horror in this male
fantasy.
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2 0 It is not that women aren’t in fact moving around all the time, or even that this
movement fails to achieve representation (think, to name just a single important example, o f the
w anderings o f Esther Summerson in Bleak House), but that this movement rarely gains the narrative
dignity o f a male journey.
'' Keep in mind, this is nearly three decades before Buffy. The Vampire Slayer.
" See especially Fuchs and Cohan.
McCallum ironically observes that Brad and Jan acquire a private line at the end “by
marrying their party-line party” (“Mother” 83). I would also add that a married woman keeping a
private line is taken as a sure sign that something is wrong with her— a sign o f excessive, even
predatory, independence— as with Joan Crawford's character in The Women.
2 1 McCallum is particulary astute about these issues in “Mother Talk: Maternal Masquerade
and the Problem o f the Single Girl."
“ Perhaps the purest example o f this effect of the telephone on narrative is Edgar G.
Ulmer's Detour, in which Al Roberts thinks the phone will bring about the romantic connection he
has lost, but it instead calls forth a gothic plot. His doom is sealed when he strangles the woman
with a telephone cord. The space o f the road works in very much the same way in the film (it
should take him to his beloved, but it exposes him to harmful chance encounters). We might say
that the road merely manifests the logic o f the phone, that once the phone has been engaged, the
road can only lead him astray.
2 6 The one woman who tries to call her. the secretary from her office, gets a busy signal.
Jan is indeed too busy negotiating patriarchal seductions to make even such a minor connection to
the independent existence this call symbolizes, both in its reference to her work and in its
connection to another woman.
2 Clarissa. 36.
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:s Many critics have observed the film's strange interest in this issue. Most relevant for my
purposes is McCallum's argument in “Mother Talk." which explicitly links issues o f the body to
technology.
J > This scene exaggerates Hudson's capabilities. Cohan reports that Hudson was rigged so
he could support the not-so-petite Doris Day. In fairness to Hudson's physical prowess. Brad only
had to carry Jan down the street once, while Hudson apparently carried Doris through twenty takes.
1 0 Fuchs, for instance, sees the comic presentation o f these ideas as recuperative.
'! Moreover, as Shelley herself makes clear, that question itself presupposes an untenable
faith in those categories, since Frankenstein's Monster may be less monstrous than his master. The
problem becomes more that o f locating the monster without or within, a problem which I will return
to in my concluding chapter.
’■ These images are always accompanied by highly discordant sound effects, to let us know
we should be disturbed.
” See for instance Martin (148). Rakow is quick to point out that, in furthering the
separation o f public and private spheres “the telephone may have been implicated in creating the
very conditions from which it was praised for having rescued women” (209).
” 1 This problem has been addressed more recently in Public Enemy's famous rap song
"91 l's a joke.” which represents the phone as a failed promise o f equal technological security.
” 5 Sade does eventually make the only successful phone call o f the film from an upstairs
phone, calling a fence to let him know about the loot and save her from the younger gang. While
this call does inadvertently save Mrs. Hilliard's life, it remains a purely selfish act. and cannot
qualify as female networking.
' ,< l For the human, the "thinking, feeling creature,” the cage is o f course more than the stuck
elevator. It is also her house, her assumptions, and especially, with her broken hip, her body.
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3 Humans are also the animals that make tools, and it is this more practical activity that
occupies Mrs. Hilliard when she is not fruitlessly using language to rhapsodize about the decline o f
civilization or to appeal to her tormentors. Her first effort is to turn her cane into a true "extension
o f man.” (McLuhan's phrase) tying it to a bar from the elevator and stretching out to knock the
phone off the hook. But Lady in the Cage certainly has no time for the triumph o f the human spirit.
She waits an agonizingly long time for the phone to ring, and when it does her plan fails. The
limitation of her tool is that, like most crude technologies, it loses much in extension. She cannot
dial the phone, or even hang-up it up, with a cane, and must finally watch in frustration as the cane
slips out and clatters to the floor. Her second effort, announced by the battle cry “stone age here I
come,” involves removing parts o f the elevator to serve as little knife-like weapons. When first
tried, these weapons prove painfully inadequate (another dashed hope and mortification o f the
heroine). By the end she does finally use them to jab Randall in the eyes and get away from him.
but this delayed success hardly does credit to her human capacities as a tool-maker.
,k Indeed the rapid spiral o f feminism into "post-feminism” may have no more to do with
internal difficulties on the Left— reconciling the many strands o f identity politics, accommodating
the other groups struggling for the rights and dignity of the human— than with the ascendancy o f
evolutionary narratives that leave the human behind. Whether it is the animal (in the form o f genes)
or the machine (in the form o f digital technology) that would now drive history, it may be that the
slow death o f humanism, so crudely represented in Lady in a Cage, leaves still crueler mythologies
in its wake.
3 g The film’s oedipal thematics are reinforced by a motif o f blindness: first the drunk
thinks he has gone blind when the gang put a sack over his head, then Randall is in fact blinded by
Mrs. Hilliard during their struggle.
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4 0 Despite cultural fantasies o f telephonic mastery, Jake’s vulnerability seem s to more
accurately reflect our historical submission to the telephone. Jan Olsson reports that, as a rule,
characters in early films answer the phone unless physically unable. Later films suggest the
persistence o f the ringing phone’s commanding power: at one point in The Maltese Falcon (1941)
the police conclude without hesitation that Sam Spade was not at home because they called and he
didn't answer. More famously, the entire plot o f Dial M for Murder ( 1954) presupposes that Grace
Kelly will get out o f bed to answ er the phone.
4 1 Derrida, (Law 55-7).
4: John Belton argues similarly that Gittes “ remains more intent on satisfying his own
curiosity than on fulfilling his professional obligations to his clients,” and that the “desire for
know ledge which characterizes the detective genre as a whole is translated by Polanski into virtually
pornographic interest in sexual misconduct" (942).
4 5 The director plays a thug who slashes Gittes's nose with a knife. The detective appears
subsequently in the film with a ridiculous bandage on his nose.
4 4 See for instance Belton (944) and Linderman (194).
4 5 In a marvelous comic piece on Sherlock Holmes and the telephone. Robert E. Robinson
suggests that Holmes avoids the phone because he fears it is controlled by his nem esis, the arch-
criminal Professor James Moriarty. Holmes nonetheless made full use o f long-distance
communication systems in the form o f the telegraph, as Siegert notes, citing in particular “The Five
Pips" (143-4). We might say that the detective’s independence from the telephone was as short
lived as the telegraph's, which according to Siegert was technologically subsumed in 1915 when the
inv ention o f the “wave filter" allowed telegrams to be sent over telephone lines (189).
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Chapter 4
Voices Carry: Film and Telepathy
"Under the conditions o f high technology, literature has nothing more to say. It ends in cryptograms
that defy interpretation and only permit interception.”— Friedrich Kittler
The definitive film about the telephonic investigations o f a woman is
Anatole Litvak’s gothic masterpiece. Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), which
chronicles the last evening in the life o f an invalid named Leona Stevenson. As
important as this film has been to feminist film criticism, and as seriously as its
phones have been taken, it has not been understood in its full telephonic
complexity. The fact that most of this film's narrative information comes through a
woman on the phone implicates our investment in the diegetic truth o f the images
we see. and hence in the detective plot that seems to unfold before us. This plot
begins with a shot o f a phone off the hook in the office of one “Henry J.
Stevenson,” a shot that poses two simple questions: who is Henry J. Stevenson,
and why is his phone off the hook? The second question will be displaced, and
likely forgotten, in a series of more pressing questions that arise during the course
of the film. The first will be quickly, if inadequately, answered by the appearance
of the bedridden Leona on the other end of the line, trying to reach her husband.
And w hile Leona will now take over the film's present, making and receiving the
calls that make up the bulk of the film, Henry’s absence structures the film until he
calls Leona twice from a phone booth at the end. Indeed, Henry’s inaccessibility is
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what installs Leona immediately in the position o f the detective; in tracking down
her husband, she pursues the questions of the film, questions that will at once take a
dark and serious turn.
The plot thickens when Leona is mistakenly connected to another
conversation and overhears two men plotting a murder for 11:15 that night. As a
clock by her bed reads 9:23, the questions of who will die and why come to shape
and intensify the film’s detective structure, and hence Leona’s activities. But as
she tries to rescue the unknown victim, she also continues to search for Henry,
calling his secretary to begin reconstructing his day and figure out what happened.
Gradually, the plots dovetail. Along with Leona, we come to realize that the
murder will be her own, and that her husband arranged it. We never learn why the
phone was off the hook, but we learn all too well who Henry Stevenson is.
Thus much like the investigations of Jake Gittes, Leona’s proceed from, and
toward, a fundamental unrest at home. Indeed for the duration o f Sorry\ Wrong
Number, Leona is not at home in at least two ways: from Chicago, she finds
herself alone in a house in New York City, and, as a so-called “cardiac neurotic,”
Leona is not at home in her own body. Appropriately, Leona finds herself at home
only in the state of disembodiment called talking on the telephone. Thus, the
technology that mocks George Bailey for his lack of mobility compensates Leona
for her far closer confinement. And yet in her insistent reliance on the phone,
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Leona falls into a most vicious stereotype of aggressive or foolish women callers
tying up the lines. In doing so, she risks alienating everyone she speaks to, and the
viewer as well.1 Indeed, despite a degree of glamour unavoidably borrowed from
the presence of Barbara Stanwyck, some critics have not hesitated to register their
disgust with Leona— hence this film’s reputation as a portrait o f the controlling
“Bitch Goddess,” to quote the title of an article that prominently features her image
(Farber). Understood in the context of telephonic dependence that the film
develops, this representation becomes the portrait of a cultural swindle, standing for
the systematic denial o f all that the telephone should mean to women.
In Sorr\\ Wrong Number the gothic in fact seems to overwhelm and even
incorporate the phone that would ostensibly be its technological antidote. Certainly
the essential gothic trappings are all there: isolation in a big creepy house, a
husband as the possible source of terror, and the heroine's investigation o f that
terror. The gothic, moreover, precisely defines a space where the ideal telephone
breaks down, for in the recurring figure of the suspected husband, the messages of
love and death become hopelessly mixed. Thus the film will not depict the phone
as an extension of rationality, but instead invoke a phone o f the darkest
superstition, one that initiates an inexorable gothic plot through the most eerie force
of coincidence. We are offered an image of this nightmare phone in the opening
titles of the film: it is the huge, menacing shadow phone looming above its
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ordinary counterpart. Litvak's film, moreover, sustains a darkness that is rare even
in the gothic, for the eventual triumph of rationalism that we find in novels like The
Mysteries o f Udolpho or Dracula never comes. Instead, the fateful crossed line of
Leona's first phone call marks the film's permanent shift to this register o f what we
might call a telephonic unconscious. From this moment the film’s main business,
as carried out through Leona's relentless telephonic investigations, will be to try to
bring us back to the light o f day. to rationalize this event and domesticate the
phone. But like her husband Henry's second call home at the end, this assurance
does not get through, for the film cannot finally untangle her from its telephonic
nightmare.2 The killer who invades her house on schedule appears, apart from his
white-gloved hands, almost entirely in shadow, an avatar o f the nightmare phone.
Henry's final call represents the last attempt to bring the phone to some rational
account, and that call, or so the voice of this shadowy killer tells us, is a wrong
number.3
The explanation Leona does manage to reconstruct comes from a variety of
sources: six calls that trigger flashbacks o f increasing complexity, a telegram, and
her own memory.4 Most baroque is the structure o f a call to her doctor, which
includes a flashback within a flashback where Henry tells his version o f their
marriage to the doctor who in turn tells it to Leona, and hence suggests all the
transmission problems o f a game o f telephone. Pared down to essentials, the
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account goes something like this: Henry resents her because she took him away
from his girlfriend Sally, stuck him in a token job at Cotterell's, her father's drug
company, and continued to manipulate him through continual phone surveillance
and occasional well-timed fits o f cardiac neurosis. When Henry tries to find work
on his own, her father uses his connections to block him, insisting that Henry's
only job is to take care of Leona. Desperate to achieve independence, Henry starts
to skim from the company, gets squeezed by mobsters, and puts a contract on
Leona's life to get the insurance money. As tidy as this account may seem in
retrospect, it remains unsatisfying because it ignores many of the real mysteries of
the film: the flood o f coincidences that defy explanation, and the feeling that
making sense of them is itself difficult and dangerous. These coincidences are so
central to Leona’s experience on the phone this fateful night, and likewise to our
viewing experience, that to overlook them is to neglect the full import o f what the
film is doing.
Sorry, Wrong Number is in fact a film that presents itself in terms of
coincidence from the very beginning. As we look at the titles, not only do we see a
phone itself doubled, as I’ve mentioned, by its larger shadow, but we also hear a
busy signal—perhaps the most basic representation o f telephonic coincidence, of
too much talk clogging up the system. This busy signal, moreover, seeps into the
musical score, producing a corresponding instrumental echo. Returning soon with
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the film’s first interior shots of the phone off the hook in Henry's office, this echo
simultaneously evokes and refuses the illusion o f matching sound.5 Coming before
we meet Leona, this tantalizing mismatch is important because it establishes an
unusual dynamic between story and discourse, between the world the film evokes
and the mode and manner in which that world is presented. It suggests that we
should not expect the discourse to leave the story alone, that this film will be
"busy" in a way that jams the system—and not just the phone system, but the
system of the movies itself. Indeed this is what we get in the next eighty-nine
minutes, for Sorry, Wrong Number is above all a noisy movie—not only in the
sense that the soundtrack tends to be quite loud, but also that information comes at
the viewer with such speed and density as to border on sensory overload. Thus if
there is a message in the eventual death of the talking woman in the film, we should
be careful not to assume that it comes through loud and clear, as if over a Classical
Hollywood Telephone. What 1 want to suggest, then, is that while the story of the
film, the one Leona pieces together that seems to account for her death, is shot
through with misogynistic tropes, the discourse participates in something feminine,
a certain saturation or busyness that worries easy listening in a male key.
For this reason I believe that feminism has given up on the film too soon.
The two important feminist critiques of the film hold Leona’s account against the
film by connecting it to pervasive patterns o f how cinema functions at the expense
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of women. In an extended and subtle analysis. Amy Lawrence links Sorry. Wrong
Number to the generic requirements o f film noir to punish acquisitive, powerful
women, who in controlling discourse “talk too much and must be silenced.”6 Thus
for her the female discourse of the phone gives way to a male discourse of the
camera that records the victory o f visible over audible knowledge. Kaja Silverman
discusses the film in The Acoustic Mirror, her landmark study o f the female voice
in cinema. Silverman bases her critique on a contrast between two versions of
Leona: the powerful woman of the flashbacks who demonstrates “symbolic
mastery.” and the helpless woman of the present who exhibits increasing verbal
incompetence, reverting finally with her scream at the end to the infantile condition
in which Patriarchy prefers her. This account is powerful, and resonates deeply
with the larger cinematic pattern o f containing the female voice that Silverman
elucidates. That Sorry, Wrong Number makes the resulting male satisfactions
available is no doubt a reasonable cause for complaint. But if the film takes a peek
in the acoustic mirror, I would suggest it does so in no clean or sustained way, but
rather as one of a series of glances at the problem of knowing the subject
retrospectively—the same problem that drives Silverman’s work.7 Moreover, even
as her critique challenges the representation of the speaking woman, it sustains the
fantasy o f an ideal phone transmitting clear, singular messages.
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Lawrence in fact questions the objective status of the film's flashbacks,
noting how the film grows “increasingly expressionistic, both visually and on the
sound track” (136). Since it is the flashbacks that establish Leona’s domination o f
Henry as the source o f her culpability, their status has considerable bearing on the
credibility of that account. In discussing the most complicated flashback, in which
the doctor reports Henry’s own narrative, Lawrence raises a possibility that should
place Leona’s account in an entirely new light:
The question, however, is whether or not this is Henry’s view of himself,
represented subjectively in his memory, or the doctor's view of Henry. The
question of who is ‘authorizing’ Henry’s flashback leads to a third
possibility— that we are seeing Leona’s images. (She listens to the doctor
and supplies images to both his story and his version of Henry’s story.) 137
We might wonder if this insight is quite consistent with Lawrence’s own
conclusion that the film works as typical film noir in its punishment of the femme
fatale. Is this not rather film noir working against itself, noir style throwing noir
substance into doubt? If we can read the flashbacks as a product o f Leona’s
imagination, then her culpability is not necessarily the film’s verdict at all. Instead,
we could be witnessing the distortion of Leona’s own psyche as, tragically, she
blames herself for conditions beyond her control.
O f course the flashbacks themselves complicate this noir story, as they
show her almost classical Oedipal struggle for individuation from paternal
authority and maternal inheritance, thus finding room for blame in the preceding
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generation as well. The father’s symbolic power is everywhere in the flashbacks,
from his name on the side of a building to a shot of him hovering between Leona
and Henry during their wedding, and is made manifest in the one moment Henry
tries to get a job on his own, only to be squelched by her father’s influence among
his business associates. Moreover, whatever subjective distortion paternal
authority undergoes in the flashbacks is diminished by the way it carries over into
the present tense o f the film, as for instance in the portrait of her father in her
bedroom. Against this authority Leona's only weapon is to become her mother.
Whenever she finds her desires blocked she suffers attacks—attacks she believes
come from a heart condition she inherited from her mother, who died giving birth
to her. Unfortunately, this strategy leads to its own complications. Is dying during
labor the ultimate female disappearing act, subsuming a woman into the role
culture assigns her? Or is it the ultimate refusal, the total rejection o f the kind of
responsibility motherhood entails? From a daughter’s perspective, perhaps it does
not matter. Dead is dead, and that is no fate for Leona to look forward to. In the
second generation, then, “cardiac neurosis” takes the place of a physical heart
condition as the purer symbol of a culture that diagnoses a reluctance to be a
mother as a failure o f “heart.”
But as I suggested above, this Oedipal nightmare does not quite take hold in
the film. Like the noir story that stops the buck at the inscrutable evil of the femme
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fatale, the story of Leona's individuation fails to transmit without noise and
distortion.8 We should recall an odd. almost throwaway scene that occurs before
the flashbacks begin and situates them in a skewed frame. Having just heard the
murder plot, Leona has the operator connect her to the police. At the station, the
phone rings and the lone officer says to a young black girl “maybe that's your mom
calling for you”—a startling whiff of miscegenation in a film where the only black
man works at the Bingo parlor, though not so startling once we come to see
Leona's marriage to Henry as itself a kind of taboo mixing across divisions of
class. In this film, arriving when Hollywood was just beginning to represent
racism, there is perhaps a hint o f the power Avital Ronell describes when she
claims that “the telephone has also flashed a sharp critique at the contact taboos
legislated by racism” (7).9 Here, moreover, the potential collapse of racial
separation figures as part of a broader implosion o f meaning that the phone lets in.
Little more than a toddler, the girl is virtually buried in symbolic objects—a prize
ribbon, a pocket watch, an American flag—that all converge at the site, or sight, of
another American daughter. The problem of visual proportion in this scene
captures the problem of thinking about the scale o f the telephone, how it can mean
either the most intimate of connections, as to one’s mother, or the most remote kind
of encounter across the vast physical and social divisions of post-war America.
The possibility that any call might be the girl’s mother opens the film up to
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coincidence, raising questions that blur the focus and trouble the scale of its tidy
mystery plot: Where is this girl's mother? When is her time? What America is she
inheriting?1 0
This scene also allows the film to define its own problem as the problem of
the missing mother (very much in contrast to Lady in a Cage)— a problem that
turns out to be two problems, since as clearly as this film’s daughters need their
mothers to look after their interests, so the law is looking for mothers to take their
appointed places. In the absence of mothers, daughters compete with each other for
an authoritative male attention that can only come at a price. This scene of
competition is in fact staged twice more in the film, as we see women attempt to
interrupt Leona’s conversations with her father and the doctor. In the police station
Leona is the loser, as the officer dismisses her saying: “I’ve got a couple of other
things on my desk that require my immediate attention.” But the attention the little
black girl wins, like her over-sized ribbon, may not be worth winning. The cop’s
idea of taking care of her is to swing the pocket-watch in front o f her like a
hypnotist, suggesting that male authority works by trying to keep the daughter
mesmerized. O f course this cop's weak ploy seems more desperate than anything,
caught as he is in the vortex o f need and identification that occurs with the random
crossings o f female networks.
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Indeed female networking has haunted the film since the prologue.
Betw een the shot of the doubled phone and the tracking shot into Henry’s office we
see a row of female operators working a switchboard. Against this image the
following epigram scrolls up the screen:
In the tangled networks of a great city, the telephone is the unseen link
between a million lives... It is the servant of our common needs— the
confidante of our inmost secrets...life and happiness wait upon its ring...and
horror... and loneliness... and ... deathVA
Within this fairly typical recital o f telephonic ambivalence, we notice “confidante”
in the feminine form. The telephone, at least in its most intimate modes, is female,
though any fantasy of confidential dialogue we might entertain is undercut by the
sound of the busy signal.1 1 When we meet Leona, we learn she is responsible for
that signal. She has been trying to reach Henry, and her assumption that this will
be possible reflects a split between male and female domains precisely at the point
of participation in the telephone system. A busy signal, as the name suggests,
signifies ostensibly that the phone is being used, and so Leona assumes that Henry
is on the phone with someone else, making it worth her while to keep trying to
reach him. The one thing alien to Leona, the telephonic subject, is a phone off the
hook. But consciously or not, the man has begged off.1 2 Let loose from the
discourse, he is out making trouble in the story.
This trouble makes its presence felt immediately when, as she continues to
try to reach Henry', Leona’s line gets crossed, and she overhears the killers plotting
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the murder that will turn out to be her own. When Leona asks the operator to trace
the call, she finds herself locked into a complex double role of detective and victim
that unleashes a flood of explanation and commits her to an essentially reactive
position. A trace is indeed a repetition of lines already drawn— here they have not
been drawn in her favor, and will double back upon her. But Leona is not for all
that a single-minded phone-user. In this very first exchange, where she asks for the
trace, she is already asking for something else as well: she gives the operator a
great deal of extra information, explaining her situation and describing what
hearing such a frightening call meant to her. In an emergency, such digression
certainly counts as “talking too much,” but we should note the need for sympathy
behind this inefficiency, and the view of the phone that makes Leona seek it here.
Leona’s position amounts to an insistence that the phone remain personal, allowing
for sympathetic attention, or the world will become all business.1 3 It stands in
direct contrast to her characterization o f male phone conversations at their most
lethal: when the operator asks if the killers might still be on the line, Leona scoffs
“they weren't exactly gossiping.” We might take Leona’s dismissive statement as
the strongest objection a film could raise against a male discourse that liquidates
the personal.
But feminist criticism has read Leona's work on the phone as a failure.
Lawrence observes the extent o f female networking in the film, but emphasizes its
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ineffectiveness: “The women talk, but they cannot do anything. Sally cannot stop
her husband's investigation, and Leona cannot make Henry call her back” (133).
Silverman’s judgment is stricter still, deducing Leona’s “verbal and aural
incompetence” from “her inability to get even a simple message straight” (79). We
must take issue with this description at once, for Leona receives nothing remotely
resembling a “simple message." The character who asks her to take a message is
Henry 's cohort Waldo Evans, and while his speaking style, complete with
numbered points, does preserve all the outward forms of a “simple,” logical
message, it is in fact extremely confusing to both Leona and the viewer because the
field of reference we need to understand it has only begun to come into focus.
Even as Evans goes into further explanation of her husband's descent into crime,
we can understand the difficulty o f Leona’s comprehension because the story is so
surprising and painful to her. There is an odd way, then, in which both Lawrence
and Silverman accept the male business criteria of efficacy and efficiency in
judging Leona’s performance. Obviously this assessment is fair as far as it goes,
since an ability to fight men on their own terms might have saved Leona. But it
also entails a certain refusal to identify with the heroine that, while understandable,
limits what a feminist reading of the film might perceive.1 4 If the business o f the
film lies in recovering its plot, this business is nonetheless conducted through the
personalized channels o f female networks.
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What a more personal understanding of Evans’ phone message reveals is its
deeply gothic character. Not only does Evans convey the terrifying news that her
husband has turned into a monster, he speaks, as Lawrence observes, from the
shadows, and this darkness makes a mockery of Evans' reasonable, businesslike
phone conversation (137). Why should we accept, for instance, his request for her
to read his horrid message back to him as the simple observance of protocol? Is it
not rather gratuitously sadistic of him to solicit her participation in this way,
making sure she registers the nightmare fully? If Evans’ sadism is not clear at
once, it certainly is by the time the conversation ends and Leona follows up on
Evans' cryptic clue that she might reach her husband at “Bowery 2-1000.” As she
soon learns, this is the number of the city morgue, and her call gets her nothing but
gallows humor at her own expense. Thus in retrospect we see her exchange with
Evans for what it is: an obscene phone call. Working against this encroaching
telephonic nightmare is Leona's own phone project, which I would argue clearly
succeeds: to replace telephonic sadism with sympathy. In a world o f such dark
connections, there is indeed a strange way in which the possibility o f sympathy
arriving through the telephone becomes the most mysterious possibility o f all. It is
this mystery that takes us to the far end of the telephonic imagination, an end that
goes under the name of telepathy, and that demands some reconsideration o f how
we experience a great number of films, but particularly telephonic films.
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Telepathy is the telephone in a state o f perfect dematerialization—no
apparatus, no sound waves, no ear. Thoughts simply move from one mind to
another without static, delay, or the need for translation. The only thing that can go
wrong is the mind itself, as Hitchcock shows us in Shadow o f a Doubt (1943), in
which a young girl's telepathic connection with her favorite uncle turns into a
dangerous link to a deranged killer. But narrative film in fact stimulates telepathic
fantasy as a part of its usual course of operations, making us long for telepathy
whenever we identify with a character and urgently wish to communicate with her.
It is not surprising that Hitchcock, who often foregrounds the dynamics of viewing,
has captured an analogous situation in a scene in The Birds ( 1963), where witnesses
in a diner look through a window at a man who is about to drop his cigarette butt in
gasoline, opening the w indow too late for him to heed their shouts of warning.1 '
Indeed, horror and romance, with their heavy traffic in love and death, seem to
produce the purest examples, prompting viewers to think “kiss her already!” or
“look out!” When we actually vocalize these messages we slip back into the
telephonic, and the tendency of such utterances in some viewing contexts to prove
either funny or embarrassing has much to do with their incongruous status between
the primitive mechanism o f the unaided voice and the desire for an impossible
technology that motivates the outburst.1 6
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Of course our telepathic conversation with a film runs both ways, and
indeed the technical means o f film have at times seemed as clunky as our own.
How, after all, does a film tell us what a character is thinking? The list o f options
is relatively short, and represents the choice between textual, oral, and what is
sometimes called audiovisual communication. The first option would be something
like the cartoon bubble or other written messages relaying a character’s thoughts to
the audience. The oral option is the voice-over, in which either characters address
us or we overhear their thoughts. But the consensus winner as the most elegant and
"cinematic” solution is simply to show us what a character thinks, particularly as
the hokey visuals o f the old-fashioned dream sequence give way to more
sophisticated techniques.1 7 But o f course this technique founders whenever a
character’s head is filled with something besides the easily rendered scenes of
fantasy or dream. Indeed what is impossible to represent in this way is precisely
abstract thought.1 8 Consider then in light of these choices the striking declaration
of Chris Marker that the voice-over is “the destiny o f cinema: it is soliloquy, it is a
telephone system to the inner self.”1 9 It is an extraordinary claim to find the
destiny of this supposedly visual medium in the realm o f sound—and particularly
in the long-standing cinematic embarrassment that is voice-over narration, with all
its baggage as verbal storytelling. Marker indeed installed this magic phone line in
his remarkable La Jetee, in which a voice-over narrator offers a quite abstract
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meditation on time, love, and death. Marker’s vision o f cinema cannot dispense
with the power of language, or indeed with the fantasy that the most abstract
thought might be shared through cinematic means. For him it would seem that film
cannot purify itself of literature without terrible loss, a loss felt perhaps most
keenly as a diminishment of telepathic scope.
Indeed, telepathy is central enough to the experience of both film and
literature that a comparison that works through this key term will prove
illuminating. If we return to Richardson’s fantasies o f epistolary intimacy, we can
see how they launch a certain history o f the novel along a trajectory o f increasing
telepathic sophistication. The rhetorical insistence on a shared mental (especially
emotional) world in Clarissa has by the time of Austen become the special
privilege of the reader as insatiable gossip: to know what characters are thinking is
by then so much the point of reading novels that it seems hardly necessary to reflect
on its ethics or on the subtle narrative technology that delivers the goods
(particularly her virtual invention and complicated deployment o f a most elusive
“free indirect discourse”).
But the telepathy of reading is not one-way. Our imaginary invasion of the
fictional thoughts of characters only distracts us from the real invasion that defines
the scene of reading. Stephen King, for instance, understands reading as receiving
information telepathically from the writer: “All the arts depend upon telepathy to
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some degree, but I believe that writing offers the purest distillation....! sent you a
table with a red cloth on it, a cage, a rabbit, and the number eight in blue ink. You
got them all, especially that blue eight. We’ve engaged in a real act o f telepathy.
No mythy-mountain shit; real telepathy” (103-6).” And perhaps King’s claim
points toward a fuller way of understanding the novelistic endgame played out by
James. As our access to the mind o f characters grows ever more sophisticated, as it
threatens to leave off mere figural representation and replicate consciousness itself,
the telepathic privilege of reading rebounds upon a reader no longer capable of
separation.2 0 As Georges Poulet puts it, writing merely of fiction generally: “the
opposition between the subject and its object has been considerably attenuated....
You are inside it: it is inside you; there is no longer either outside or inside” (54).
Poulet further argues that in the act of reading not only am I “thinking the thoughts
of another.” (55) but also “the / which I pronounce is not myself (56, emph. orig.);
“A second self takes over, a self which thinks and feels for me” (57). To read is
then to be possessed— a condition to which our motionless silence testifies as
clearly as the head-spinning ventriloquism o f The Exorcist.
This gothic description o f possessive reading is fully in character with the
w ork of Garrett Stewart, w ho argues for instance that a novel “gains domestic
access to us only at the invitation o f our interest” (11). Reading is a kind of genie
in a lamp. In opening a book, we let it out and it fulfills wishes— though as always
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happens with genies, there is much doubt as to whether these wishes will make us
happy, or if they are even truly ours. Indeed representations of telepathy as
nightmare rather than fantasy have long recognized the danger of a collapse of
distance between self and other. Telepathic invasion haunts characters from recent
episodes of The X-Files and Buff}-, the Vampire Slayer back to George Eliot's The
Lifted Veil, where in each case telepathic sensitivity summons audio overload, a
barrage of alien voices crowding consciousness. Jacques Derrida confesses an
inverted form of this anxiety, where it is the self that cannot help destroying the
distance it requires:
what I always have difficulty getting used to: that non-telepathy is possible.
Always difficult to imagine that one can think something to oneself [a part
soi]. deep down inside, without being surprised by the other, without the
other being immediately informed, as easily as if it had a giant screen in it.
at the time o f the talkies, with remote control [telecommande] for changing
channels and fiddling with the colours, the speech dubbed with large letters
in order to avoid any misunderstanding. For foreigners and deaf-mutes.
(Telepathy 13-4)2 1
This fear exposes a deep irony, in that it turns the very perfection of telepathy
against us in the service of endless exposure. Such exposure is of particular
concern to women, as we might recall from my argument about Evelina, where
publication and authorship are in fundamental tension with a feminine modesty.
This is why Burney downplays Richardson’s fantasy of epistolary access,
addressing the reader on the outside of a gap between what her heroine thinks and
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what she writes. It amounts to a morally principled, and politically strategic,
refusal of the fantasy of telepathy.
But while Burney shields her heroine by burying her novel's female
networks under an exemplary feminine epistolary performance, Litvak does no
such thing. In fact, if we seriously entertain the idea that most o f the images in
Sorry, Wrong Number are representations of Leona’s thoughts, what could be more
intrusive? Is this film not her nightmare of exposure to countless unknown others?
The most important feminist objection to this film may finally be that it refuses the
dignity of privacy to its heroine. If such an extensive telepathic fantasy is to be
redeemed, this sacrifice must serve something more than a recuperated male
subjectivity.
In some w ays Sorry-, Wrong Number performs one o f the recurring tasks
that I have attempted in this dissertation, to direct an unwavering sympathetic
attention toward female characters when it is unpleasant to do so, or even when
they seem unworthy of the effort. While Silverman seems to have been disgusted
with Leona's helplessness at the end, this does not seem to be a fair reaction. How
many of us would fare much better against a professional assassin? And if
Lawrence is right that visuality triumphs in the end, is this triumph not duly
recorded as the brutal revenge that it is? After all, if, as Lawrence observes, the
camera that outlives Leona performs impossible feats, is it not as supernatural as
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the nightmare phone?“ If some films naturalize genre. Sorry, Wrong Number
supematuralizes it. Genre itself becomes nothing more than superstition, with
Leona and Henry tragically caught up in it as star-crossed lovers, only here it is not
the stars that are crossed. When Barbara Stanwyck screams “Henry, he’s coming
up the stairs!” into the phone at the end. what I hear in her voice is not
incompetence but the most reasonable distress of a thinking and feeling subject in
mortal danger. Instead of simply deriding her punishment by masculine forces, we
should recognize that Leona's situation at least produces the basic sympathy
necessary to begin female networking in a new genre.
The dream o f this new genre has much to do with the dream o f telepathic
film, a dream in which the problem of gothic isolation gives way to sympathetic
connection. To see this dream begin to take shape we should reconsider the end of
Sorry, Wrong Number, where Leona is on the phone with Henry as the killer he
hired arrives at her house. It is difficult to imagine many viewers watching this
scene with satisfaction, for it is all about the viewer's frustration— particularly
Leona's compulsive decision to answer the phone even after she has heard the
killer downstairs, and her subsequent paralysis when Henry tells her to go to the
window and scream. For a brief moment it seems Henry speaks for us, sharing our
helpless concern and desire to save Leona— that is, until he reveals in a panic that
he is only concerned about getting the chair, now that the authorities are closing in
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on him. Selfish to the end, Henry is therefore not so much our surrogate on the
phone as in the way. Thus the killer's mocking final words—“sorry, wrong
number”—speak no more to Henry's failed call than to our own undeliverable
messages: we want to call Leona, but the line is always busy. As the echo o f the
film’s title reminds us that our calls were never going to get through, Leona’s
telephonic nightmare becomes ours as the audience of a cinema that has yet to open
itself up to new connections. Indeed, her fatal paralysis is perhaps not physical but
technological, a refusal to give up her habitual connections, and might make us
think twice about how healthy our own paralysis is the next time we find ourselves
at the movies, glued to our seats.
Double or Nothing
It is this complex understanding o f the ambivalence of telepathy that I want
to bring to the critical discussion of Shadow o f a Doubt. Everyone agrees that
Hitchcock's great film of small town America is about telepathy—and indeed the
dialogue raises the issue explicitly— but few critics have much to say about what
telepathy is. what it has to do with the film’s obsessive interest in reading, or
indeed with this film's ultimate comment on its own medium.2 3 But whatever truck
Hitchcock's film has with telepathy, it is clearly not in the business of offering a
fantasy of telepathic knowledge to the viewer. Of the techniques I have listed for
representing the thoughts of characters in film, Hitchcock avails himself o f only
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one. the voice-over, and this for only a single moment at the beginning. Uncle
Charlie, the suspected “Merry Widow Murderer” who will soon flee across the
country to hide at the home of his sister’s family, looks out a window at a pair of
detectives who have staked out his room in a boarding house. We hear his thoughts
as a voice-over: “What do you know? You’re bluffing. You have nothing on me."
Uncle Charlie then proceeds to flaunt his invincibility, leading the detectives on a
wild goose chase through the neighborhood. Indeed as viewers we are led on a
similar chase throughout the film, pursuing the elusive villain, never sure what we
know. The only thing in the entire movie that we are sure Uncle Charlie thinks is
that we cannot know what he is thinking. Thus this voice-over we supposedly
overhear is also a form o f direct address. Hitchcock’s telepathic lure communicates
nothing but its own impossibility.
O f course Uncle Charlie will continue to transmit signals throughout the
film—indeed his modus operandi is nothing if not to act outrageously guilty. But
these messages remain in a taunting mode, defying us to build a case against him
beyond a reasonable doubt. The first of Uncle Charlie’s notorious rants, for
instance, is filmed so as to suggest a soliloquy. Sitting at dinner with his sister’s
family, he seems to lose himself in a trance as he reviews the supposed sins o f
widows. As his voice gets lower and closer— as if to approximate a voice-over—
the camera draws in tightly on the side of his face. Before the speech is finished,
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however, the camera pulls back abruptly to show the scene as a whole, with the
resonance of his voice again reflecting the acoustic space o f the room. This switch
undercuts the telepathic status of the speech. What from one angle looks like a
spontaneous irruption of a killer’s unconscious looks from another angle like the
calculated rhetoric of a merely verbal terrorist. Even Uncle Charlie’s other
seemingly transparent self-betrayals, such as the two occasions on which he
involuntarily clenches his hands, remain signs that must be read, thus always
falling short of the standard of perfect knowledge that Hitchcock holds out with his
initial voice-over.
If this is our dilemma, it is certainly the dilemma of Uncle Charlie's
presumed telepathic partner in the film as well. Charlie, his niece and namesake,
must gradually confront the way her intuition is insufficient, even wrong, and resort
to earning her knowledge of her uncle the old-fashioned way.2 4 Our problem in
crediting her investigation is similar to the problem o f accepting the case Leona
puts together in Sorry\ Wrong Number, with one crucial difference: Charlie sees
far less of her uncle's suspicious behavior than we do. Indeed, when he challenges
her at one point near the end of the film it becomes clear that she might have
difficulty convincing the authorities of his guilt. Thus her considerable agency as
the real detectiv e of the film (the official detectives who turn up accomplish
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nothing) should not cause us to overlook how much the camera itself is
investigating—or framing— Uncle Charlie independently.2 5
To understand the extent o f this investigation, which includes but far
exceeds Charlie's own observ ations, it is worth taking the time to re-assemble the
film's relentless circumstantial case against Uncle Charlie. He is first seen on the
east coast being followed by detectives. He gets on a train, where he pretends to be
sick so as to remain unseen in his compartment, and travels cross-country to Santa
Rosa, hoping, it seems, to lay low at the house of his sister’s family. On the first
night at dinner, the tune o f the “Merry Widow Waltz” pops into his niece’s head,
and he spills his water as a diversion when she is about to remember the title.
Uncle Charlie gives everyone gifts— gifts which include an apparently expensive
fur stole for Emma, his sister, and a ring for Charlie. Charlie notices this ring is
engraved “TS from BM," which is somewhat discomfiting news to her uncle. After
dinner. Uncle Charlie finds a reference to the “Merry Widow Murderer” in the
newspaper and contrives another diversion so he can remove the page, building a
“red bam” out of the paper to amuse the children. Before bed, Charlie visits him in
her room, where he is staying, to tell him that she figured out his trick with the
newspaper, at which point he grabs her wrist violently, telling her “it’s none of
your business.” The next day, undercover detectives arrive and seek access to the
house to do a “national public survey.” Uncle Charlie is unreasonably opposed to
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the idea of the survey, and slips down the back stairs when the men enter the house.
When he returns, to taunt them or see what they are up to. one o f them takes his
picture, a photograph that we later learn has been wired back east so a witness can
identify him, though we will curiously never hear the results.
The other detective. Jack Graham, falls for Charlie and takes her out on the
town. She figures out in an uncanny flash that he is a detective, and he explains that
her uncle is one of two suspects in a national investigation, with the other fugitive
still on the loose in Maine. That same night she goes to the library to look up the
newspaper article Uncle Charlie concealed, learning that the initials on her ring
match the initials o f the victim in the article. At dinner the next night. Uncle
Charlie delivers his diatribe against widows, the most damning in a long list of
misogynistic and misanthropic comments. Herb, the friend o f Charlie’s father Joe
and a fellow crime buff, comes over and they take up their on-going discussion o f
how best to murder each other. Charlie runs out in disgust and Uncle Charlie
pursues her. pulling her into the ‘“ Til-Two” bar for another diatribe and some
violent twisting of a cocktail napkin. In this scene Charlie removes the ring he
gave her, and he surreptitiously takes it from the table. The next morning is
Sunday: Charlie goes to church; her uncle does not, and indeed he underscores his
unholy ways by greeting her with a sardonic comment about attendance upon her
return." When Joe walks by with Herb, Uncle Charlie overhears that the Merry
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Widow case is closed, because the other suspect died trying to get away. His initial
jubilance lasts for a few seconds, until he looks at his niece's accusing face. The
next shot shows him alone at the window in her room. As he looks down on his
niece, who doesn’t look up, his hands clench and he drops his cigar.
From this moment on the film accelerates along a dark trajectory. Twice
Charlie nearly dies, with Uncle Charlie clearly framed as the culprit for our
exclusive benefit. She slips on the stairs; he appears furtively to see the results.
She gets trapped in the garage with the car running without a key; he has the key,
and knows to kick aw ay the piece of wood wedged in the door. Later Charlie
retrieves the ring from his room and wears it publicly, threatening him with
exposure. The next day he gets on a train to leave, but manages to trap Charlie in a
Final confrontation. As the train starts moving, he holds her by an open door,
getting ready for what appears to be a Final, decisive murder attempt, only to fall
out the door himself in front of an onrushing train.
Add to all of this information the Film’s many noir effects (menacing
shadows, oblique and extremely close camera angles, startling movements of the
camera and the actors), and our impression o f Uncle Charlie’s guilt goes far beyond
Charlie’s. To watch this film is to be constantly reminded o f both his guilt and how
little his niece knows about it. And yet it seems she knows plenty. As Tania
Modleski argues in The Women Who Knew Too Much, her landmark book on
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Hitchcock and feminism: “Charlie is a typical Hitchcock female, both because her
close relationship to her mother arouses in her a longing for a different kind of life
than the one her father offers them and because she seems to possess special,
incriminating knowledge about men” (13). In this remark lies the basis for an
important reconsideration of the film. Why does the film not follow up on the
photograph Jack’s partner wires back east, contenting itself with the half-baked
verdict (delivered by amateurs, no less) that the other fugitive must have been
guilty because he died fleeing? Because the investigation o f Uncle Charlie,
understood in terms of proof, male detectives, and the law, is a great red herring.
Whatever her telepathic connection with her uncle amounts to, Charlie is far less
afraid of becoming him than of becoming her mother, whom she wants to be “a real
lady.” but who instead “works like a dog” and wears a shabby hat. Charlie does
detective work, to be sure, but her investigation proceeds on its own terms, and
returns, as I will show later, to confront the problem of the mother. This is not to
say that Charlie wouldn’t love to have a little help from the professional detectives,
but it is part o f the film’s sadism to tease Charlie, and us, with the prospect of a
little hard evidence, only to throw her back on her own resources.
In this light, I would argue that we can productively pose the central
question of Shadow o f a Doubt as the question o f whether the heroine reads too
much or not enough. It is a question the film cannot resolve, because reading itself
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remains such a term of ambivalence— particularly, as we shall see, for a woman
whose need for access to the wide world, especially if she lives in Hitchcock’s
Santa Rosa, is as acute as that world is dangerous. Like Emma Woodhouse.
Charlotte Newton has outgrown her little community. When Charlie gets the idea
that she might make use o f a worldwide (female) communications network to
summon relief, her mother's immediate response can only be “Who do you know
to send a telegram to?” Who indeed. As it turns out. o f course, Charlie knows her
Uncle Charlie. Not unlike Frank Churchill, he will sweep into town and put the
heroine's reading skills to the test.
But a crucial difference between Shadow o f a Doubt and Emma is that
Charlie need not wait passively for male entertainment to arrive. Instead she
summons her uncle and namesake telepathically (or so she comes to think). And
while clearly Uncle Charlie possesses all the charms o f the itinerant gentleman,
there is something more behind Charlie's desire to bring him to Santa Rosa—
indeed both this desire and the power to exercise it come from a mysterious source.
Critics of the film have made much of the bond, both erotic and existential,
between this pair who are “more than an uncle and niece,” exploring the idea of
incest or the double.2. The idea of the double is most important for our purposes—
not to downplay the erotic tension, which is powerful, but in order to consider this
bond precisely as an effect o f reading. Indeed, if the modem mind is prone to the
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uncanny experience o f doubles, it is only because that mind has been trained to
open itself to the telepathic experience that is reading novels. As Friedrich Kittler
has argued, by “introducing a hero like you and me.” the novel trains readers in
techniques o f hallucinatory recognition, o f seeing doubles (90). For him the
frequent appearance of the double as an overt theme in 19th Century literature
"simply serves to program readers in identificatory reading” (89). Cueing
identification, the double plays a special part in the novelistic fantasy o f telepathy.
It is the external sign of the invisible telepathic effect. We might even see the
double as the most intense incarnation o f the telepathic partner, carrying not only
the dream o f impossible intimacy, but the corresponding nightmare of exposure—
hence the double is repeatedly found in some direct relationship to the scandalous
secret self: he either is that hidden self (Stevenson's Mr. Hyde) or he is the
conscience that pursues that self (Poe’s William Wilson).
Kittler’s point, however, is that we should never forget that the double of
the imagination is simply a technical effect: “In order to see one’s Double as the
'phantom o f our own ego.’ the cunning strategies by which others produced it must
be thoroughly masked” (88). And indeed we can catch a similar trick at work in
Shadow o f a Doubt. Charlie's “knowledge” o f the telepathy she enjoys with her
uncle has in fact no meaning except through the technological relays that confirm
it. Going to the post office to telegraph her uncle “the normal way,” she has no
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thought o f circumventing the usual channels. Her superstitious belief that she and
her uncle are doubles who enjoy a telepathic connection only occurs once she finds
that a telegram already awaits her, telling her that her uncle is on his way.2 8 The
double occurs in a moment of charged recognition o f the externalized self, the self
in extension, or most simply, of technology. Deeply loaded with affect, riven with
desire, it at once stands for an ideal telepathic partner and threatens to collapse
telepathy back upon the self, for if the double, produced in the exercise of
identification, always turns out to be oneself, then any dream of telepathy with the
double becomes a mere projection of the mind's internal memoranda (note to self:
make sure that telepathy isn't all in your head). This doubt will become
particularly serious over the course of this film as Charlie has to separate her
fantasies from the dawning truth about her uncle. But as we shall see, this doubt is
perhaps the lesser half o f the double bind of reading Charlie finds herself in, for if
telepathy is the error o f the overeager reader, the reluctant reader has her own
blindness.
Elsie B. Michie has argued that, as an eligible young woman, Charlie is
positioned between her long-married mother, Emma, and her pre-adolescent sister,
Anne. This structure exists for the film in another sense as well, for the three
female members of the Newton family form a continuum o f possible readers.2 9
The great reader of Shadow o f a Doubt is Anne, whom we see reading obsessively,
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in any number o f strange positions and locations, throughout the film, fulfilling her
announced quota o f two books per week. Marked clearly as a female quixote,
Anne seems to get all her information about the world from books, and to her mind
“they're all true.” But despite her librarian’s glasses and lecturing tone, we should
not be deceived into dismissing her as an irrelevant pedant. Michie points out that
the maxims Anne gets from novels would prepare Charlie quite well as she faces
courtship and marriage, and that her very practical advice about the library plays a
decisive part in her sister’s investigation. But we should recognize at the same time
Anne's deeply intuitive response to the world outside o f books. When it comes to
reading Uncle Charlie, she twice seems uncannily prescient. The first moment
occurs when the phone rings to announce his arrival. Absorbed in Ivanhoe, Anne
ignores it. This self-sufficiency immediately sets her apart from her sister upstairs,
who, in a romantic mood for a savior and a double, yells down at Anne to answer
the phone. Complying reluctantly— and without setting down her book— Anne
however refuses to take the message when she can’t find a pencil to write it down,
saying, ‘i ’m trying to keep my mind free of things that don’t matter.” How should
we understand the irony of her dismissive attitude to what turns out to be news o f
Uncle Charlie’s imminent arrival? If Anne’s remark, despite her choice of
literature, seems unromantic, it also expresses what turns out to be a very healthy
lack of interest in Uncle Charlie. Indeed, what if Anne's sixth sense, rather than
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absent, is in advance of her sister’s, her apparent boredom concealing a deeper
distrust? Her second moment bears this idea out. Before dinner on the evening
following Charlie’s horrifying discovery at the library, with no warning or
explanation. Anne asks to sit next to her mother, away from her uncle. It is here as
if she is the real telepathist, tuning effortlessly into her uncle’s guilt—or her sister’s
knowledge. There is then every reason to think her reading has prepared her well.
Indeed Dracula is the other novel we know Anne has read, and when held up with
Ivanhoe it captures the great ambivalence generated by Uncle Charlie as an
outsider.3 0 Anne knows better than to assume every man of mystery is Richard the
Lionhearted, returning to save the country, and not a vampire.
On the other end of the reading spectrum is Emma, who thinks Anne “has
too many foolish ideas.” Emma is not a stupid person— she takes note o f the world
around her and recognizes patterns, but she does not read these patterns, no doubt
because the interpretive possibilities are too painful. When she first hears that her
brother is coming, she puzzles briefly over the coincidence that Charlie has just run
off to send for him. But the thought trails off. She is not interested, perhaps, in
pursuing any ideas that would lead her toward acknowledging the nature of the
bond between her brother and her daughter. More crucially, on the last evening
before Uncle Charlie’s final departure, she sits in a cab fretting about her
daughter’s two successive brushes with death, and for a moment it looks as if she
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w ill muster an appropriately sinister reading o f this much darker coincidence. But
the cab drives off. and the film lets her off the hook, teasing us with the possibility
of the mother's know ledge. It is something Uncle Charlie has cleverly taught his
niece to fear, saying it would kill Emma to know the allegations against him. but it
is also something deeply desired as the sympathetic and strategic support o f a
female netw ork. Without it, Charlie will continue to bear the work of reading— and
the pain of knowing— alone.
O f course uncorroborated reading, as I've had occasion to mention before,
is the plight of the gothic heroine, who drifts into carefully orchestrated insanity.
Thus for her reading is always shared or worthless, double or nothing. Perhaps this
is why Charlie eschews A nne's solitary reading habits and is drawm to her uncle. It
is certainly why Charlie asks Jack to come to the funeral at the end (and perhaps
why so many critics assume she will marry him). While his knowledge o f her
ordeal is hardiy total, he at least knows that Charlie holds her knowledge o f her
uncle as a burdensome secret. But perhaps this invitation also acknowledges what
she has learned from Jack, who has shown her the value o f the hunch, and a
w illingness to bet. When Jack first investigates the Newtons undercover as a
reporter, he challenges Charlie when she tries to bar his access to her room on the
grounds of protecting her uncle's privacy:
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'T il bet you 50 cents your uncle isn’t in there.”
"Oh. betting is silly. All you want to do is photograph my room. Besides. I
know my uncle is in there”
“All right. I’ll still bet he isn’t’”
Charlie is of course wrong twice over: her uncle is not in the room, and, as a
detective. Jack couldn't care less about photographing it. But in staking a
suspicious reading o f her uncle he makes it possible for her to see that the transition
from desiring Uncle Charlie to investigating him can be as smooth as a transition
from her sister's classics to her father's potboiler detective fiction. We need only
recall Dupin’s technique of identifying with his adversary to see that the founding
operation of literary detective work is a fantasy o f telepathy, and so Charlie has
been a detective all along in her desire to know her uncle’s secrets. Moreover, just
as Dupin publishes his success both to his defeated opponent and to the narrator of
Poe’s tale, so Jack and Charlie can attempt to come together over a reading of her
uncle.
But it is interesting that the sexual instincts o f Charlie, the "good girl.” are
at this stage far in advance of her detective skills. Erotically speaking, Uncle
Charlie is in her bedroom, and Jack wants to displace him, so in this sense her
remarks are perfectly accurate. But in framing this vexed choice o f erotic objects,
they point to the difficulty a woman’s desire has here in finding a home. I don’t
mean by this merely the usual reading that contrasts the dashing but doubly taboo
uncle (as criminal and blood relative) with the stuffy detective who preaches
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normalcy and wants to marry her and turn her into her mother, for there is a sense
in which Uncle Charlie and Jack are very similar. Charlie is just starting to leam at
this moment that her desire for her uncle was misplaced, that he did not hear her
telepathically and answer her call, and that he has been pursuing his own terrible
interests all along. In fact, the message Charlie would have sent, had Uncle
Charlie's telegram not intercepted her, would have gone to the wrong place: she
and her mother understand him to live in Philadelphia, but her father later calls him
a “New York man,” and indeed that is where the film’s opening shots would seem
to place him. Jack, meanwhile, leaves town after the case is closed, telling Charlie
“you have the addresses”—plural. Apparently the roving single men of this film
are not to be pinned down to a single place, not to be known in so basic a way.
More disturbing is the fact that Jack is unavailable the first time Charlie tries to get
him on the phone: after the near-fatal incident in the garage, she tries three times to
reach him before giving up and taking action herself by searching for the dead
widow’s ring. As it turns out, her hope for untangling knowledge and sexuality lies
not in summoning men to save her, but in seizing the incriminating objects they
leave behind.
The ring captures this tangle from its first appearance as Uncle Charlie’s
gift to his niece. As many critics observe, her acceptance of it amounts to a kind of
betrothal, and yet o f course as soon as she finds someone else’s initials engraved on
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it a space for a different kind o f knowledge opens up. When Charlie later removes
the ring in the 'Til-Two bar, it becomes an object of interest for the waitress
Louise. Louise has already clearly separated herself from Charlie in her comment
that “I never thought I’d see you here,” and as a waitress serving soldiers during
wartime the insinuation of her sexual experience is clear. Her remarks on the ring
then are telling: “I’d just die for a ring like that...notice I didn’t even have to ask if
it was real. I can tell. / can.” Sexual women know the price o f things. Once
touched by such knowledge, the good girl can only follow the symbolism of the
ring right into marriage, the only respectable place for women’s sexual knowledge.
We enforce this oppressive logic, moreover, if we insist that Charlie will marry
Jack at the end, even though she has stated no intention to do so (she in fact gives
him the classic dismissal of wanting to be friends). But in making the issue the
ring's symbolic and not material authenticity, and therefore criminal rather than
sexual knowledge, Charlie has a chance to escape. When she finds the ring at the
end and wears it publicly, she takes control o f its signification, sending Uncle
Charlie the clear message to leave town or be exposed. He gets the message and
boards a train the next day, but only to insist on one last expression of his deep
anxiety about “fast” women. Indeed this colloquial metaphor for female sexuality
has become quite literal over the course of the film, suggesting an important
slippage in the film’s psychic economy. As Uncle Charlie holds his terrified niece
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by an open door o f the accelerating train, he tells her to “let it get a little faster, just
a little faster, faster.” thus leaving her with a final warning not against too much
knowledge, but too much speed.
The sister o f the woman who knew too much is the woman who moved too
fast. The confusion in Uncle Charlie’s mind between knowledge and speed can in
fact be traced back to the childhood accident Emma refers to when Charlie finds an
old photograph of her uncle shortly after his arrival. Apparently Charles got a
bicycle one Christmas, went riding and “skidded into a streetcar." Smelling a trite
“bump on the head” explanation for Uncle Charlie’s criminality, critics were at one
time quick to interpret this episode metaphorically as premature sexual
awakening.3 1 But by now the interpretations of pop psychology are surely no less
trite, and while Uncle Charlie clearly has sexual problems, it is worth slowing
down to consider this episode in its full literalness.3 2 At the time of the accident in
the early 20th Century, bicycles were not the harmless toys of children—they were
fast. Their design had improved, their price had dropped, and they made people
nervous.3 3 And clearly for such a powerful machine to collide with a still faster,
and far larger, streetcar was a major crisis o f speed for a previously unaccelerated
body. Indeed, more interesting than the sexual allegory might be the political one,
for this accident must date close to World War I. the crisis o f speed that shell
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shocked a great many young men, dividing the fallen present from the good old
days. But the response o f young Charles, oddly, is not to give up movement, but to
give up reading. As Emma recalls his youth, he was a great reader up until the day
of the accident. It would seem he confuses transportation with communication,
displacing his anxiety about moving bodies onto a fear of moving ideas. This
displacement, moreover, is exactly the strategy of the film itself.
All the fuss about reading in Shadow o f a Doubt, and particularly at the
moments where it is treated as a suspect activity, merely distracts viewers from the
subject truly at hand, which is film. I want to propose Uncle Charlie's psyche as a
significant model for understanding the choice between film and literature. Giving
up the novel for film means giving up something of the fantasy o f telepathy in
favor of speed, particularly speed understood at its limit as the dream o f being two
places at once, since if we approach a destination with infinite speed we are already
there. With its famous rhyming shots o f the two Charlie’s at the beginning, the
film represents two sides o f America without the viewer leaving her seat, and
indeed the lingering knowledge of a killer on each coast maintains something of
this split presence. Hitchcock's transcontinental sensibility, as manifested by wire,
rail, and double, suggests film’s special power to deliver a thick experience of bi
locality.3 4
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All we have to do is subtract the idea of a destination and we can see that
speed is closely connected to being nowhere.3 5 His life an endless series of
escapes. Uncle Charlie has no sure address. Of course the fact that being nowhere
is desirable may not seem so strange to those trapped in an unpleasant place, as
Charlie clearly is at the beginning of the film. But here the escapes of women gain
no foothold in representation. Is it too much to say that Amelia Earhart, the lost
woman who helped connect the coasts, casts her shadow over this film? Might we
imagine Charlie’s vague stirrings occasionally finding form in the great haunting
figure of female mobility who disappeared, amidst much doubt, over the Pacific in
1937, just four years before Shadow o f a Doubt takes place?3 6 Airplanes are
indeed heard from in this film, with speed again figured as highly traumatic, even
castrating: Uncle Charlie’s stand-in on the east coast gets sliced up by a plane’s
propeller while fleeing the authorities. In any case, this film certainly unleashes
more female speed than Uncle Charlie can stand, or it can contain. It is an anxiety
clearly foreshadowed—and misplaced— in the reaction o f Charlie’s father upon
hearing the family had received a telegram: “I knew there’d be trouble if your
Aunt Sarah got her driver’s license.” It is o f course the movements of Uncle
Charlie, not Aunt Sarah, that bring trouble to the Newton family, and so with Joe’s
comment the film acknowledges that the fear of female speed is at once widespread
and ill-founded.
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Uncle Charlie's ideal woman is his sister Emma, the hard-working, self-
denying housewife, and the first words he speaks to her in the film are “don't
move.” The slippery man from who-knows-where clearly wants women to remain
where he likes them. Unfortunately for him, his niece proves less willing to stay
put. As Michie points out. Charlie is inherently mobile as the only member of her
family who knows how to drive (40). Even on foot, moreover, the film notes her
pace as transgressive, for she is twice stopped by a traffic cop for a moving
violation. On the night she storms away from dinner. Uncle Charlie knows he can
catch up with her. but his pursuit is not quite effortless— her speed, much like her
knowledge, is just enough to strain his nonchalance. Once her knowledge grows to
the point of becoming a threat he must deal with, every attack occurs at a site of
potential female mobility: the back stairs, the garage, the train.3 7 It is as if Uncle
Charlie is re-staging his childhood trauma in reverse: instead of suffering from
speed and turning away from knowledge, he suffers from knowledge and lashes out
at speed.
Of these three key sites, o f course only the back stairs are an entrenched
feminine space. Connected directly to the kitchen, and by association and
proximity to the proverbial “back fence” of gossip, these stairs are used exclusively
by women in Shadow o f a Doubt—except, that is, for the brazen incursions of
Uncle Charlie. After her frightening fall, Charlie goes out at night with a flashlight
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to investigate the stairs, only to be confronted by her uncle at the top landing. It is
in this crucial encounter that Uncle Charlie ridicules his niece’s case against him
and announces his intention to stay in Santa Rosa. But Charlie is having none of it:
"'I don’t want you here. Uncle Charlie. I don't want you to touch my mother. So
go away. I’m warning you. Go away or I'll kill you myself. See? That’s the way I
feel about you.” Challenged on her own stairs, she defends her turf. If since Woolf
the thinking woman has required her own room, we see in this film the woman of
action demanding a free path: a staircase, a sidewalk, a road o f her own.3 8
Pursuing the logic o f the double, critics have made much o f how in
threatening to kill her uncle, Charlie takes a step toward becoming him, and some
have even gone so far as to consider her self-defense on the train as at least
morally, if not legally, on par with her uncle's homicides.3 9 But this criticism has
never come to terms with the peculiarities of this doubling across gender and
generation. The protagonist and his double in 19th Century literature are always
men, and the generational issues, as Otto Rank observes, tend to sw irl around the
possibility of extended or eternal youth, as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or The
Picture o f Dorian Gray.4 0 Here something far more complicated is going on. At
the beginning, perhaps, Charlie is something like a romantic double to her uncle,
dogging him like a conscience with her unwanted knowledge and morality. But by
the time of her ultimatum on the back stairs, the dynamic has developed
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considerably. As doubles often do, the two Charlies compete for the same object:
Emma.4 1 The difference, however, is that they compete not only for her affection,
but also for the very right to define who she is.
The film itself in fact continually presents the mother in a kind o f double
vision. It is easy to view her as something of an idiot, the butt of a kind of running
joke on domesticity. Surely Hitchcock was one to enjoy such a joke, and surely
Uncle Charlie, for his own safety and comfort, would like her to be a simpleton.
But nearly all of her naive or obtuse moments, when looked at carefully, contain a
seed of critical consciousness. Her children, to take just one example, reproach her
for talking too loudly when she calls the post office for Uncle Charlie’s message at
the beginning: “Mamma you don’t have to shout. Really papa, you’d think
momma had never seen a phone. She makes no allowance for science. She thinks
she has to cover the distance by sheer lung-power.” But whatever her technical
ignorance, this conversation also includes, in the style o f Leona Stevenson, some
extra exchange o f information between women, since Emma agrees with the
telegrapher, Mrs. Henderson, that Uncle Charlie is the spoiled youngest o f the
family.4 2 Clearly her adoration of her brother is not without a sense of his flaws, as
when she later tells him he was never one to help out, or when she turns one of his
self-important (and defensive) pronouncements against him, saying “If today’s the
thing, then you'd better finish your breakfast.” Charlie needs to break through to
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this smarter, critical Emma, but circumstances are against her. The crucial
encounter occurs when they are getting ready to go out as a family to hear Uncle
Charlie speak at Emma’s women’s club. Wearing the fur stole her brother gave
her. and indeed basking in the prospect of his oratorical glory. Emma seems at this
moment well within his grasp. But Charlie pulls her aside hurriedly in a spare
moment, asking her quickly, without explanation, to ride with her, so she won’t be
alone with Uncle Charlie. Her mother gives no answer as Charlie hurries out the
door, simply turning toward the camera with an unexpressive look on her face.
Indeed. Emma never has to decide, for Charlie will get stuck in the garage and end
up staying home (and finding the ring) while everyone else goes to the club. As in
the moment in the cab that soon follows, Emma is let off the hook by the film,
never having to choose between her daughter and her brother.
Thus the real reason the end of this film feels so heavy is not that Charlie
will inevitably marry the stifling Jack (why do we want to believe this?), and
certainly not that Uncle Charlie’s devilish charisma is gone (though we may feel
inclined to review the splendid career of Joseph Cotten), but that Charlie remains
alienated from her mother. We should keep in mind that at the end Charlie must
have lied to the authorities to account for her uncle’s death, since o f course the
town treats him as a hero at the funeral. Here Charlie stops being a reader and
starts being an author, and no doubt her prime motivation is still to protect her
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mother. What I want to suggest is that Charlie may be wrong about the necessity
for this subterfuge—her mother may be fully ready to know everything, may
almost know it already. In imposing his view o f Emma as fragile and helpless.
Uncle Charlie has won after all. Indeed the whole town will remain the innocent,
ignorant, sexist place he wants it to be. For want o f any penetration into her
mother's mind, for want of a little genuine telepathy, Charlie, and through her
Shadow o f a Doubt, passes off a crippling failure as a necessary fiction.
If Charlie finally fails as a reader, then we should ask if film culture offers
her something else, particularly in light of Jack's comment in their final
conversation at Uncle Charlie’s funeral that “sometimes [the world] needs a lot of
watching.” As the male detective insists that vigilance is enough to make the world
right, Charlie looks unsure; her final words dwell on her uncle’s hateful vision of
the world. It seems that the desire for film that Shadow o f a Doubt leaves us with
has a lot less to do with the reassurance of surveillance than with the possibility of
escape. It is film as transportation rather than communication, speed rather than
knowledge. If the telepathic breakthrough o f Sorry, Wrong Number only comes at
the price of Leona's wrenching and fatal immobility, here we see the tradeoff in
reverse: Charlie can purchase mobility only by abandoning the consolations of
shared knowledge, whether with her mother or, less promisingly, with Jack. He in
fact offers Charlie a cheapened version of Leona’s deal— a slower death in
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marriage (as James B. McLaughlin asks o f their meeting at the funeral “is the
implication that wedlock really is deadlock?”) in exchange for a very limited
intimacy. All we can hope is that Charlie has the courage to see through this rotten
bargain, that her uncle’s final act of terror on the train has not scared her into the
false safety of stasis. Better to go out like Amelia Earhart, who must have known
as well as anyone that there are worse things than flying solo.
NOTES
1 Farber has suggested that her fate is deserved: "we feel she almost deserves the brutal
murder that [her husband] plots for her at the end o f the film. It is her own ruthless possessiveness
that leads to her violent death” (10). The hated woman on the phone is nowhere more forcefully
depicted than in Maggie Greenw aid's film The Kill-Off ( 1990). in which another female invalid
rules a small town via the telephone by her bed. Possessed o f a mysterious and possibly telepathic
access to the secrets o f others, she w ields this knowledge as a ruthless blackmailer and informer.
The w hole town wants her dead, and much o f the suspense o f the plot turns on who will actually be
the one to kill her.
: In Detour the femm e fatale dies literally tangled up in a phone cord. But in other respects
this film keeps its telephonic nightmare further below the surface— the hero, a would-be Phillip
Marlow e, alw ays seems carefully in control o f his phone conversations.
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' J.P. Telotte makes the compelling observation that, given the general paranoia that
characterizes film noir, "one never really reaches any ‘wrong numbers' in the noir world” (87). We
might contrast this claim with one made by Nicholas Royle in a discussion o f Raymond Chandler’s
The Little Sister, in which the telephone gives us "always the wrong voice; the telephone is always
contaminated with otherness..." (178). But perhaps these insights are not inevitably in opposition.
To say that the telephone is contaminated with otherness is another way o f stating the telephone s
openness to coincidence; the phone is thus always “wrong” in that it cannot sustain the narcissistic
feedback loop o f what I am calling an ideal phone. At the same time, to the paranoid noir subject,
there are never any wrong numbers for this very same reason, because the phone always delivers
coincidence (to which the paranoiac always replies “I think not”).
4 The telegram is from Henry, and the choice is significant, for the archaic form precludes
her talking back to him.
■ Altman argues that matching sound represents an essential sleight-of-hand or
"ventriloquism” in the function o f narrative film; “Using the ideology o f the visible as a front, the
sound track remains free to carry on its own business" (76). In these terms, we might say that Sorry.
Wrong Number exposes the soundtrack so that its business becom es available to criticism.
" Lawrence 130.
For instance, in her critique o f Michel Chion's work. Silverman finds that the woman's
voice “poses a threat to the one who occupies this subsequent temporal and spatial advantage; in
short, to a fully constituted subject” (75), and returns to the point later: “I must stress once again
that this metaphoric drama unfolds from a time and place other than those occupied by the child—
that it is riven through and through with retrospection" (76)
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* A striking exam ple o f this figure occurs at the end o f Raymond Chandler's The Little
Sister, in which Marlowe describes one o f his femme fatales as "Utterly beyond the moral laws o f
this or any world I could imagine." (278)
Q Such notable films as Gentleman's Agreement and No Way Out appeared in 1947 and
1950. respectively.
1 0 Lady in a Cage not only echoes Sorry. Wrong Number in its main scenario (helpless
w oman as victim o f home invasion), but in its odd and fleeting image o f a young black girl. In
Graumann's film, however, she roller skates over a man's leg.
1 1 Ronell argues that “technology in some way is always implicated in the feminine. It is
young: it is thingly. Thus every instrument o f war is given a feminine name" (207).
'* The film w ill later show phones o ff the hook on two occasions. One is taken off
deliberately (Sally takes the phone off the hook in her apartment before leaving to call Leona from
the drug store where her husband won't hear): the other is knocked off accidentally (Henry knocks a
phone off the desk o f Leona's doctor in frustration when he learns o f her diagnosis as "merely”
neurotic).
1' The Slender Thread turns this model o f phone use on its head. Having taken an overdose
o f pills. Anne Bancroft calls a suicide hotline where Sidney Poitier is working. In this emergency
the business o f his call is sympathy. Clearly the sin here would be to talk too little, as Poitier must
keep Bancroft on the line until he can convince her to reveal her location.
I J Lawrence discusses the cost o f identification with Leona in the final scene: "If we
identify with Leona, our listener/surrogate, we identify with the victim. The establishment o f an
alternative identification w ith the camera allows us to escape at the cost o f rejecting Leona and the
auditory identification in favor o f classical cinema and the primacy o f the image” (144).
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1 5 Another example from Hitchcock would be the scene in Rear Window (1954) when
Grace Kelly goes snooping in Raymond Burr's apartment. As Jimmy Stewart and Thelma Ritter
watch in horror from across the courtyard. Burr returns to the apartment while Kelly is still inside.
Deprived o f the power o f telepathy. Stewart cannot warn her. and must resort to the inferior
expedient o f alerting the police by phone. Following Hitchcock, w'e might say that the desire for
telepathy comes in particular from the feeling o f suspense, as in his famous example o f the view er's
apprehension of a bomb under a table (Truffaut 73).
There is a most painful example o f this in Lady in a Cage. Having prepared her crutch to
stretch out and knock the phone o ff the hook. Mrs. Hilliard tries to w ill someone to call, staring at
the phone and saying “call...me...up” in superstitious desperation.
1 A state-of-the-art example would be a scene in High Fidelity, where John Cusack
imagines, and we see, various possible responses to the arrival in his record store o f his absurd rival,
as played by Tim Robbins. Bruce F. Kawin calls this technique mindscreen, and indeed conceives
o f the category quite broadly, allying any number o f subtle expressionistic techniques with first-
person narration.
I ! i Pier Paolo Pasolini makes this observation in "The Cinema o f Poetry” (547). His
analysis does not take up the question o f telepathy because he remains interested in the director's
personal expression rather than the view-er's fantasies.
Quoted from unpublished work in Thomson ("Telephones," 30).
Consciousness, as Sharon Cameron makes clear in her excellent discussion o f James,
occurs between people, and indeed between people and texts (77).
Royle also quotes this passage (12). and notes that “the history o f the term ‘telepathy' is
intimately related to that o f the concept o f sympathy” (4).
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" Lawrence describes one scene in particular
Later, knowing Henry is about to be arrested, Leona calls for a nurse to come stay
with her. In the middle o f her hysterical pleas for help, the camera indulges in a
slow retreat, pulling back from the bed, dollying out the bedroom w indow. sinking
tw o storeys past a tree to reveal a man's shadow against the house....The
extravagance o f this gravity-defying move is pointed: it is. in fact, the return o f
the repressed. After an hour and some minutes, the camera forcibly reestablishes
the preeminence o f the visual discourse over the heretofore verbally dominated
narrative structure (144-5).
' Patrick Crogan's essay is an interesting exception, analyzing the tune o f the "Merry
Widow Waltz.” and the recurring title image o f dancers, in terms o f telepathy.
'4 To avoid confusion I will consistently refer to the uncle as “Uncle Charlie” and the niece
as “Charlie."
2 5 In this regard Shadow o f a Doubt goes still further than Suspicion, its clear companion
piece. See Rothman’s discussion on pages 178-9.
He remarks that “the show has been running such a long time I thought attendance might
be falling off.”
2 Discussions o f incest can be found in Robin Wood. The most extensive discussions o f
the double are those o f Barbara M. Bannon, Leo Braudy. and Patrick Crogan.
~ s Our own knowledge as viewers o f course exceeds Charlie's. In addition to the bare fact
o f both Charlies wanting Charles to come to Santa Rosa we see. as is often noted, other
correspondences, such as their similar postures in bed as we meet them. Like Charlie, if we choose
to credit this coincidence with occult significance, we should not do so without recognizing that o f
course the doublings only exist through the relays of film technology.
In these names there is also an echo o f a female literary tradition. If Hitchcock was not
thinking of the Bronte sisters when he named these characters Charlotte, Emma, and Anne, he was
at least using very prominent names from the history o f the British novel.
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Dracula is o f course also a novel about female telepathy. As the band o f Englishmen
track Count Dracula from Mina’s visions, the question remains whether her telepathy is contained as
an instrument o f male knowledge, or if it remains an unassimilable effect o f her desire for the
vampire.
Paul Gordon and Robin Wood both ventured such readings.
‘ Donald Spoto reports that Uncle Charlie's accident was “exactly modeled" on one in
Hitchcock’s own childhood (273).
" Stephen Kern places most o f the decisive changes in the bicycle industry around 1890,
and documents anxieties about bicycles well into the twentieth century.
'’ l O f course it is again the telephone that serves as a justification o f this filmic fantasy,
producing the ultimate experience o f simultaneous location with the split screen. We might say that
telepathy and bi-locality are on the opposite ends o f the telephonic spectrum: telepathy is radically
disembodied telephony, whereas bi-locality places the caller in an imagined state o f total re-
materialization.
' Paul Virillio discusses Howard Hughes' obsession with speed as profoundly linked with
his eventual withdrawal from the world.
? < ’ Earhart completed the first round trip coast-to-coast flight in 1928.
’ Charlie’s mobility is threatened in the garage at another time as well, as it is here that
Jack confesses his love for her. bringing marriage into the picture.
Is O f course A Room o f One's Own is itself very much about the relationship between
movement and thought. Charlie’s encounter with a library door may w ell remind us o f the famous
snub at "Oxbridge” that W oolf describes.
J g McLaughlin and Rothman have both made this claim. Paul Gordon has quite rightly
challenged this idea, though not from a feminist perspective. Indeed, his view that Emma is
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"happy" is to my mind as distorted as the view that Charlie is guilty (273-74). Leo Braudy has more
interestingly read the possibility o f Charlie's guilt as an allegory o f American w ar guilt.
4 0 See for instance his discussion o f Wilde's novel on page 18. Rank does not mention
Stevenson's novel in this context, though clearly one o f Hyde's essential characteristics is that he is
younger than Jekyll.
4 1 Rank makes this point throughout his study, perhaps most forcefully on page 75: "the
double is the rival o f his prototype in anything and everything.”
4: A woman in Mrs. Henderson's position would normally have been unmarried. Her
married status in the film is therefore curious, betraying perhaps an anxiety that communications
networks remain domesticated.
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Chapter 5
The Space of Crime
"Dear Miss Morland. consider the dreadful nature o f the suspicions you have entertained. What
have you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which w e live. Remember that
we are English, that w e are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense o f the
probable, your ow n observ ation o f what is passing around you -D oes our education prepare us for
such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in
a country like this, w here social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is
surrounded by a neighbourhood o f voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing
open? Dearest Miss Morland. what ideas have you been admitting?" (199-200)
Henry Tilney’s famous reproach of Catherine Morland in Northanger
Abbey lays out all the terms one needs to banish the gothic: probability, ideological
reassurance (whether nationalistic or religious), and a well-coordinated system o f
surveillance. But ever since Gilbert and Gubar located the true horror of
Northanger Abbey' in a laundry list, we cannot be confident that Austen fully shares
her male character’s views. Indeed, her satire of the gothic is clearly double-edged,
only dispelling the sensationalism of Radcliffe’s genre so as to make room for a far
more pervasive gothic of everyday life.1 My own sense is that feminism must keep
in contact with these two poles o f subtle intimidation and gruesome acts,
illuminating a gallery o f male criminals as diverse as Brad Allen, Robert Lovelace,
Gilbert Osmond, and Uncle Charlie. At either end, the gothic poses the problem o f
locating crime, constantly redrawing the lines between home and abroad, inside
and out, in search o f an elusive security.
I want to begin this final chapter by moving from Tilney’s benchmark of
male rationalism to survey an ongoing debate about the space o f crime. It is a
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debate first about the possibility and significance o f isolation. Perfect solitude
admits no crime. But since that is hardly possible or desirable, what remains is a
range of complex strategies— geographical, architectural, technological—that
attempt to regulate the right combination of separation and connection. My
examples are deliberately eclectic and far-flung, because my point is at once to
show a full range of ideas about crime as a function of isolation and simply to
demonstrate a consistent interest in this problem. I should reiterate that both this
survey and this dissertation span a crucial revolution in communications
technology, one that made the law's arm long indeed, as now the innermost rooms
of the private home and the outermost regions of the countryside were within its
grasp. The first manifestation o f this revolution— the telegraph— was of course
used in celebrated cases to catch criminals speeding away on trains, and indeed the
law’s reach would soon cross oceans with undersea cables and wireless
telegraphy.2 One of our greatest literary detectives, Sherlock Holmes, availed
himself o f this technology in the apprehension of more than one villain, and I
would like to pursue my survey first with his exposition on the space of crime.
Consider for instance a conversation between Holmes and Dr. Watson in “The
Adventure of the Copper Beeches,” as the detective and his sidekick travel through
the countryside on a case:
“Do you know, Watson,” said he, “that it is one of the curses of a mind with
a turn like mine that I must look at everything with reference to my own
special subject. You look at these scattered houses, and you are impressed
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by their beauty. I look at them, and the only thought which comes to me is
a feeling of their isolation and o f the impunity with which crime may be
committed there.”
“Good heavens!” I cried. “Who would associate crime with these dear old
homesteads?”
“They always fill me with a certain horror. It is my belief, Watson, founded
upon my experience, that the lowest and vilest alleyways in London do not
present a more dreadful record o f sin than does the smiling and beautiful
countryside.”
“You horrify me!”
"But the reason is obvious. The pressure o f public opinion can do in the
town what the law cannot accomplish. There is no land so vile that the
scream o f a tortured child, or the thud o f a drunkard’s blow, does not beget
sympathy and indignation among the neighbours, and then the whole
machinery o f justice is ever so close that a word of complaint can set it
going, and there is but a step between the crime and the dock. But look at
these lonely houses, each in its own fields, filled for the most part with poor
ignorant folk who know little o f the law. Think o f the deeds of hellish
cruelty, the hidden wickedness which may go on, year in, year out, in such
places, and none the wiser... It is the five miles of country which makes the
danger" (323)
Holmes basically agrees with Henry Tilney about the civilizing powers o f England
as manifested through public surveillance, only for him this civilization is not co
extensive with England's borders, failing to reach “lonely houses” where people
“know little o f the law.” It is as if the awareness of modem communication
systems only draws attention to the gaps in the network, the stretches o f landscape
still uninterrupted by telegraph wires. No longer exiled to Italy and other exotic
locales, the gothic regains a foothold on English soil, though only insofar as that
space remains remote.3
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O f course, from the perspective of a certain gothic sensibility, all houses are
lonely. The mere presence o f walls is more than enough to thwart the
"neighbourhood of spies” on whom the law depends, technologically enhanced or
not. If we back up slightly, we see the problem of detection put more forcefully,
particularly when crime is more psychological. Thus in a famous passage of
Dombey and Son Dickens’s narrator asks for a saving glimpse inside homes:
Oh for a good spirit who would take the house-tops off, with a more potent
and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian
people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to swell the retinue
of the Destroying Angel as he moves forth among them! For only one
night’s view o f the pale phantoms rising from the scenes o f our too-long
neglect: and from the thick and sullen air where Vice and Fever propagate
together, raining the tremendous social retributions which are pouring
down, and ever coming thicker! (738)
This vision, we should note, turns surveillance against itself. It has not yet become
detectives exposing villains, but Christian people searching their own consciences,
and thus by implication the narrator rejects Tilney's appeal to religious
exceptionalism. Christians can be criminals too. It is, moreover to the domestic
scene that Dickens turns to account for the existence of crime, a scene he can
imagine redeemed only through a dramatic spatial reconfiguration.
Houses suffer a similarly fantastic violence in Uncle Charlie’s famous
speech to his niece in Shadow o f a Doubt, a film that turns to the domestic scene
again to explore crime.4 As he imagines looking into houses, Hitchcock’s dapper
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serial killer summons not the God’s-eye view, but the piercing stare o f a self-
appointed social critic who sees through “fronts”:
“What do you know really? You’re just an ordinary little girl living in an
ordinary little town. You wake up every morning o f your life and you know
perfectly well that there’s nothing in the world to trouble you. You go
through your ordinary little day and at night you sleep your untroubled,
ordinary little sleep filled with peaceful, stupid dreams. And I brought you
nightmares. You live in a dream. You’re a sleepwalker, blind. How do
you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do
you know that if you rip the fronts off houses you’d find swine? The
world’s a hell. What does it matter what happens in it? Wake up Charlie.
Use your wits. Learn something.”
It is a long way from Austen’s England to Hitchcock’s America, and yet they both
find crime, as they most differently define it, everywhere, and the world something
of a hell. Both Austen and Uncle Charlie, we might say, expand the space of crime
by expanding the definition of crime, if in opposite directions. After all. Uncle
Charlie's “swine” are not serial killers like himself, but simply people who, he
thinks, consume more than they produce, the “faded, fat, greedy” widows of his
earlier rant at the dinner table. It is female independence that makes the world for
him a hell, and that prompts his murderous rage.
This independence returns us to the question o f technology. More
important for women than the outward spread of the law was its new availability in
the home through the telephone. As Carolyn Marvin explains “If the lone woman
at home seemed especially vulnerable to predators, she could also lift the telephone
to sound the alarm, in many stories a device by which help was quickly dispatched
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to thwart thieves, murderers, and frustrated suitors” (93). Thus a certain backlash
against this security, a reassertion of the gothic, can be detected, as I have argued,
in the culture of telephonic terror and other challenges, like Shadow o f a Doubt, to
female spaces. This culture turns stories of women's security into lies, much like
Henry Stevenson’s phony reassurance of Leona at the end o f Sorr\\ Wrong
Number: “you're right in the heart of New' York City and a telephone's right by
your bed.”
But if Leona’s murder respects the expected relationship o f inside and
outside, with the killer entering her house on schedule through the wdndow
downstairs, the famous opening sequence of When a Stranger Calls turns this
typical invasion scenario on its head. In this film a babysitter gets repeated calls
asking her if she has checked the children, calls which she first interprets as
random creepiness until she realizes the caller must be able to see her and gets very
afraid. In a classic gothic scenario, to have the bad guy on the phone is somewhat
reassuring in an odd way. because at least he is tied dowm to a phone somewhere.
It is w hen he hangs up that the real terror begins. Indeed phones signify distance so
powerfully that it is always a surprise to be called by someone who can see you.
Thus terrified, the babysitter now calls the police, and they attempt to trace the call.
The sequence ends with a cop calling her back in horror, telling her that they have
traced the call from inside the house. It turns out a killer was upstairs with the
now-dead children, calling from a second line to lure her to her doom. When a
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Stranger Calls turns the space of crime inside-out, or rather outside-in. But rather
than sustaining the most intense danger in the present tense, since the babysitter
quickly escapes, the effect of the cop’s warning is retrospective, imparting the
haunting knowledge that the killer was in the house all along. Thus even if the
phone can no longer be counted on to signify a safe distance, it remains nonetheless
the essential link to safety.
Perhaps the ultimate expression of the nightmare (and the end of my
survey) is The Terminator. It as if the evil machines o f the future watched the
movies of the last half century, mastering a wide repertoire o f telephonic terror.
The vulnerability of a phone book listing in I Saw What You Did comes back as the
Terminator rips out the page with Sarah Connor’s name on it and tracks her down
(randomly killing a different Sarah Connor first). Then the Terminator tricks Sarah
by reproducing her mother’s voice on the phone, an impersonation that in its
technical fidelity makes Brad Allen's playacting in Pillow Talk look like amateur
hour. But the final insult has to be when the police chief has Sarah sleep on a
couch in the police station, promising “You’ll be perfectly safe. We got thirty cops
in this building.” After all, he speaks as the guarantor o f telephonic security, the
one we call to deal with a threat. By the time the Terminator is done shooting up
the police station, however, Sarah is beginning to think she had better rely on
herself (as we discover at length in T2). Perhaps women must resign themselves to
the wisdom o f Miss Marple. who knows that “Murders...can happen anywhere.
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And do” (Christie, 26). If the law offers no protection at the very home of
enforcement, it is time to give up on the dubious security men offer and hook up to
a female network.
This is the choice made by Violet in the Wachowski Brothers’ Bound
(1996). abandoning her “work" (her word) as girlfriend to the mob in favor of a
new alliance with Corky, the butch fix-it woman who works in her building. This
film deserves a longer look for the way it recasts the terms of gothic isolation, for
showing what happens to the space of crime when women stop trying to be safe
and start trying to be happy. Here happiness in fact depends not only on the
acceptance, but on the enjoyment, of risk. What begins, at least for Corky, as a
tentative if highly charged sexual relationship evolves into a criminal partnership,
which Corky says requires still more trust. Their plan is not just to get Violet out
of the mafia, but to get her out with a huge cash bonus. Their opportunity comes
when a mob accountant gets caught embezzling S2.176 million, enraging, we are
told, another gangster who shoots him on the spot, splattering the money with
blood. When Violet’s boyfriend Ceasar becomes responsible for cleaning and
counting the cash, the women plot to steal it before his boss shows up to claim it.
If they can get Ceasar to think his rival stole the money to set him up, perhaps he
will panic and run away, convincing the mob he was the thief while freeing them of
suspicion.
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In representing a female partnership as unambiguously criminal and sexual,
Bound articulates a vision of female networking fully independent o f men, subject
neither to male law nor male desire. It is this independence that enables Violet to
reply, when Ceasar asks what Corky did to her, “everything you couldn’t.” But
Bound's deployment o f male desire in particular has been the subject o f critique,
with the specific objection that Violet and Corky's soft-core sex scene early in the
film plays into an established genre o f lesbian pornography for the benefit of male
viewers.'’ And in a sense, there is no getting around this scene as a sexual
spectacle, for no matter how it is framed in the narrative, there is nothing to prevent
a viewer from fast-forwarding (or simply skipping, on DVD) to the dirty parts. But
1 do think it is worth noting that there is something strange going on in how this sex
is framed, and that this strangeness has interesting implications for the film as a
whole. The scene begins with Corky and Violet making out in Corky’s truck, then,
without an obvious cut, the camera pans up through the floor of a room where we
see them having sex in bed. It is as if the truck were somehow the room below and
we have just floated up in the space where a wall should be. Thus the camera
stages the pornographic male gaze as impossible— impossible, moreover, precisely
in spatial terms. And this impossibility does not support a male fantasy of
omniscience so much as contribute to an overall argument of the film that men are
naive about space, letting their desires determine what they see.
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Until the very end. Ceasar thinks that all the important action o f this film
takes place in the space o f his apartment, and that he controls that space. He is so
fatally overconfident, in fact. that, in a remarkable scene, he hangs SI00 bills,
newly washed of blood, all over the apartment to dry. then irons them one by one.
all with Violet as his only companion. After all, as Corky and Violet discuss, and
Ceasar must reason, few people are brave, or foolish, enough to steal from the mob.
Contemptuous of the police, whom he calls “just cops,” fairly sure that he is
smarter than his fellow mobsters, and confident, finally, in the ultimate authority of
his gun. Ceasar feels he can handle just about anything that happens in his
apartment until his discovery of the missing money throws him into a panic. Even
then he remains resourceful and. he thinks, in control of his fate, so long as he stays
at home and doesn't “run.”
But Ceasar's apartment is in fact a highly porous space, hemorrhaging
desire, information, and money behind his back. The walls are thin and the pipes
conduct sound, so that Corky gets a pretty clear idea o f what is going on (and these
events range from sex to dismemberment) while working, or waiting, next door.
Moreover, Ceasar has far less control of the phone, the door, and the elevator than
he thinks—the crucial links for regulating his exposure to the outside world. Violet
m ice betrays him in the elevator, eyeing Corky behind his back in their first
encounter, and later ratting him out to his bosses on a cellphone. And Corky
continually enters the apartment through the only door, coming first for sex, then
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money, then finally to save Violet. There is also a strange moment when Corky
appears from out of nowhere in the kitchen with Violet, just after Ceasar brings the
bloody money to the apartment. It is not clear if there has been an ellipsis, or if we
are supposed to think Ceasar is totally oblivious, or indifferent, to her presence, but
in any case the effect is the same: Corky's access to this space seems effortless and
uncanny. Ceasar does nearly catch Corky and Violet having sex, but
becomes relieved to see that it is Corky in the darkened apartment with Violet
instead of a man. Unable to conceive o f Corky as a sexual rival. Ceasar is much
quicker to see Violet as a femme fatale. Indeed it is Violet’s more conventional
role as the duplicitous woman on the telephone that Ceasar first gets wise to.
Violet twice uses the phone in the bedroom to call Corky next door, letting
her know how the plan is going. The second time, they linger briefly on the line,
putting their hands up to the wall that separates them (as if by telepathic
understanding) and intimating their strong feelings for each other. This delay
proves costly, as Ceasar catches Violet hanging up. At first glance the film here
seems to cast Violet as a Leona Stevenson who doesn’t know the difference
between urgent business and mere desire. In this view, the film punishes her for
the non-business part o f the call, for an exchange of affection that went beyond the
information necessary to the plan. On the other hand, the plan is useless without
trust, and therefore the personal connection was in fact the most essential business
of the call, especially from Violet’s position. After all, when this call is made
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Corky is sitting in the next room with S2.176 million, with nothing but attraction
and loyalty to stop her from abandoning her partner. In any case, Ceasar does
reclaim control o f his phone line at this moment— he is not so stupid as to neglect
to hit re-dial, and now the thin walls work against Corky, for Ceasar hears the
phone ringing through the wall. Asking Violet who is over there, he begins to
understand that he has misperceived the space of crime. Ceasar in fact discovers
the violations o f his apartment in reverse order, first noticing the missing money,
then the leak o f information. What Ceasar never gets wise to, and what proves his
undoing, is the flow of desire.
At one level of rhetoric, desire in Bound is little more than a question of
taste. Thus people seem to express what they want first through a pre-determined
range of consumer choices. Leading Corky through a ritual of self-disclosure to
learn that she drinks her coffee black, drinks beer, and drives an old red truck,
Violet responds to each revelation with the same confidence in her predictive
powers, saying “o f course” or “I thought so.” Ceasar’s rival, Johnny, will later
attempt a poor imitation of this come-on, insistently drinking the same “T&T” as
Violet. But never is the desire to drink really in question. One has to choose from
among the available options as a sign of sociability. Only the impotent police
suffer outside the loop, declining drinks because they are on duty and not allowed
to express desire (only the expression of need is permissible, as one of them asks to
use the bathroom). Taste is the kind of desire Ceasar can understand— it is what
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leads him to make sure the mob boss will have Glenlivet, his favorite scotch, when
he visits. But such understanding is not enough for him to anticipate the desires of
Violet and Corky.
Sexuality for Violet and Corky cannot be reduced to a matter of taste— not
to the consumer logic of male pornography, which makes of sexuality a kind of
smorgasbord of fetish objects— nor is it fair to say that they have a mere taste for
crime. To be sure, they play a typical game o f displayed desire, not just in
discussing drinks and cars, but with their tattoos and clothes. The coy signification
of these displays, however, quickly gives way to far more serious communication,
culminating in Violet’s passionate confession of desire: “I want out.” It is a
normal enough response to gothic conditions, for a heroine trapped in the space of
crime. But her desire to be out is clearly doubled, to be out not only as a general
negation o f all that she is in, but out, also, o f the closet, and into an open ownership
of her desire. Of course the irony is that when Violet speaks her desire, the more
openly lesbian Corky has been literally in the closet for the whole film. In typical
noir fashion, Bound is framed as a flashback, proceeding backward from a shot o f
Corky tied-up in a closet to account for how she got there. The masochism of this
retrospective framing, with its suspense and its suggestion of bondage, is, as Chris
Straayer points out, not without its countervailing energy, for we also flash-forward
through much of Corky and Violet’s plan as they hash it out (151). And yet we
never forget that we will eventually catch up with Corky bound on the floor.
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But if there is something o f a death wish lurking in Corky and Violet’s
daring plan (and it might be worth speculating about whether they will ever steal
again), the chief pleasure of this film ultimately enlists both anticipation and
retrospection in the service o f heightened present consciousness. Bound imagines
desire largely in terms of secrets, o f knowledge hoarded and, more rarely,
knowledge shared. The continual hiding of money and bodies has less to do with
any practical concern for the future on the part o f the characters than with their
need, and the film’s, to stage the experience of the secret repeatedly, and in new
combinations. What Corky and Violet love—and love to share— is the knowledge
of putting one over on Ceasar. In this respect they have the same kind of desire
that he trumpets with such parodic excess. Recall his horror at the thought that
Johnny is setting him up (he repeats the phrase “laughing at me” obsessively), or
his insane gloating over Johnny’s dead body once he knows he has won (“Who’s
dead, fuckface? Guess again...”). What Ceasar revels in as a winner is the same
thing he can’t stand as a loser: surplus knowledge. But what the women know
who undermine him in his own space is that what he takes for his knowledge is
really just wishful thinking, really just desire. Thus Corky anticipates him
beautifully: “the second he opens up that case, he’s gonna know in his gut that
Johnny fucked him.” Of course how he reacts to this “knowledge” comes as a bit
of a surprise to Corky, as he proves just slightly smarter than she thought. But even
once Ceasar catches on to their plan, he has not in fact closed the gap in
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knowledge, for he does not learn Violet's last secret until too late: “You don't
want to shoot me, do you Vi? Do you? Do you? I know you don’t.” Violet’s
response, and the stream of bullets that accompany it, might well speak to all men
who underestimate the range o f female desire: “Ceasar, you don’t know shit.”
What remains to be considered is how female networking, and male
ignorance, fare in the face o f new communications technology. A minor male
character in Sliding Doors articulates his anxiety that such technology clearly
serves women:
“All this new technology. This number if you want to know who called.
Another one if you don’t want them to know’ you called. Itemized bills,
take away the first number you've thought of. I mean they are single-
handedly condemning the average red-blooded Englishman to a life of
terminal monogamy. What are they after, the Nobel Peace Prize?”
But if women have new powers of surveillance—and we do see this represented, as
for instance in Happiness when a woman is able to call back and confront her
obscene caller—these powers hardly go unpunished. Answering machines, for
instance, often serve the narrative purpose o f exposing female networking that
would otherwise remain behind the scenes. Both Singles and Walking and Talking
have scenes in which prospective boyfriends overhear a discussion of themselves
on a woman’s answering machine, revealing a new weakness in the technology o f
female networks at the point o f extension through time. These relatively benign
exposures take a harrowing turn in Denise Calls Up when the matchmaking
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busybody (Emma Woodhouse minus the charm) is fatally impaled by her own
phone in a car crash. As if the mere idea of this accident is not a sadistic enough
revenge against the speaking woman, the horror is doubled when we discover that
this humiliating and grotesque death has been recorded on her friend’s answering
machine. It is a painfully literal example of Kittler's maxim that recording
technologies “expand the realm of the dead.” If answering machines allow phones
to defeat time as well as space, they do so only at the price o f a heightened sense of
loss.
A similar ambivalence can be seen in the representation of cellphones, and
even an exuberant film like Clueless cannot manage to be wholly optimistic.
Cher's cellphone may succeed, as I suggested in my introduction, in delivering
uninterrupted narcissism, but it is not enough to prevent her from being mugged
when a boy abandons her late at night in the Valley. Indeed the mugger steals the
phone, knowing perhaps the darker possibilities of this technology. No longer tied
to a hard line, the telephonic criminal roves about in the dark and peers in
windows, like Tim Robbins as the stalking anti-hero of The Player. This stalking
effect reaches its apotheosis in the opening sequence of Scream (a film,
incidentally, which continues the gothic tradition of the boyfriend as suspect). As
Drew Barrymore finds herself tormented by threatening calls, the sense of ubiquity
created by the portability of phones exceeds all rational bounds. We learn later, of
course, that this terrifying effect was the calculated plan of two killers’ coordinated
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efforts. But this revelation fails to dispel a lingering doubt that we have not yet
contained the uncanny power of cellphones to explode our sense of space once and
for all. Indeed, fiction has not outdone the real stories of cellphones putting us in
helplessly close contact with almost unimaginable spaces of fear and death— recall,
for instance, the story of Rob Hall, the climber at the summit o f Mt. Everest who
calls his wife at home in New Zealand when he realizes he cannot get down, or
most recently the calls from the passengers o f hijacked planes and workers in
burning towers on September 11th.6 Mountains, planes, and towers, moreover, are
all in these devastating moments suddenly far too high for human beings. Catching
us complacently overextended in space, the cellphone does as much to confirm as
eliminate our forgotten vulnerability. It is in this sense like the gothic itself, the
genre which insists that we not get too comfortable, and which I would like to
invoke in one last long reading, crossing the boundaries o f genre to shed light on a
new space of crime, the strange new space o f the Internet, where writing and phone
lines meet.
The Godfather has Mail
Outside the gothic, in the everyday civilization believed in by people like
Henry' Tilney, new telephone technology is not so much terrifying as simply
unmannerly. For some, people who talk on their cell phones in public are rude.
For others, the inconsiderate are those who interrupt their conversations for call
waiting, or screen our calls with their answering machine, or put us on
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speakerphone. It is all very offensive. You've Got Mail. Nora Ephron’s 1998 film
of manners, would avoid this vulgarity by avoiding the telephone. In fact, phone
calls are very much what don't occur in You ve Got Mail. Instead, the story
develops through a series of anonymous e-mail exchanges, as the title promises, in
ironic counterpoint with face-to-face encounters. Thus in real life Joe Fox is a
third-generation business tycoon whose mega-store puts Kathleen Kelly's quaint
little children’s bookstore out o f business. But in cyberspace, Kathleen's
"shopgirl" and Joe's “NY 152” are unwitting confidants. And at no stage in the
unfolding romance do they use the phone. There are a few in-coming calls in
Kathleen’s shop (all so inconsequential that we never actually see anyone on the
phone), and one interesting call for help from inside a stuck elevator, but beyond
that there is not a single phone call in the film—and nothing involving the
cellphones or answering machines that we might expect to find in a movie
supposedly concerned with technology. Needless to say, this is a strange picture o f
New York in the nineties. Indeed it contrasts markedly with the one we get in
Denise Calls Up two years earlier, which, shunning You ve Got Mail's breezy
neighborhood charm for claustrophobia, depicts the lives o f New Yorkers as
pathologically telephonic. But You've Got Mail nonetheless participates in
telephonic fantasy in a covert way, for much like epistolary films before it, it
cannot represent e-mail without the complicated deployment of voice-over,
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translating the written message into a private call between the characters that is
overheard by the viewer. An early voice-over o f Kathleen’s sets the terms:
“What will NY 152 say today. I wonder? I turn on my computer. I wait
impatiently as it connects. I go on-line and my breath catches in my chest
until I hear 3 little words: you’ve got mail. I hear nothing, not even sounds
on the streets o f New York, just the beat o f my own heart. I have mail.
From you.”
Her passion for e-mail speaks nothing o f inscription or typography, but rather the
telephonic language o f saying and hearing, o f breath, and it all runs on the same
phone lines that have carried affairs of the heart for the last century.
But it is not just that You've Got Mail subsumes the telephone in its fantasy
of e-mail. Several times phone calls come up in Ephron’s dialogue as precisely the
thing that has not happened. For instance, one character’s anxiety about his
published articles gets expressed in telephonic terms: “a week goes by and the
phone doesn’t ring.” Or Joe discusses with Kathleen the alternate universe in
which “if only” they had met as something other than business rivals: “I would’ve
asked for your number. I wouldn’t have been able to wait twenty-four hours before
calling you up.” Here the telephone finds itself in league with wistful fantasy, the
link to a better world. But its capacity to bring worlds together is also a source of
great anxiety for You've Got Mail. ' Thus the most extended discussion o f the
telephone occurs at precisely the point where cyberspace and physical space begin
to collapse. Shopgirl and NY152 decide to meet, but when Joe shows up and sees
that shopgirl is Kathleen, he decides not to reveal his identity. Later, discussing her
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disappointment with her staff, Kathleen cushions the blow o f being stood-up with a
series of fantastic scenarios, all to explain why he did not call her: he was in a
subway accident and there was “no phone:” he was in a car accident that left his
elbows in splints “so he couldn’t really dial;” he was the just-captured rooftop
killer, and used his one call to call his lawyer. Similarly, as Joe writes an e-mail to
account for the failure of NY 152 to appear, the first lame excuse he concocts (and
deletes) is that he was stuck in a meeting and the electricity went out “and the
telephone system blew too...amazingly enough.” In a world o f global telephone
networks, only an emergency or an act of rejection can prevent communication,
and the emergency, for this film, would be the lesser disaster. In its odd role here
as the technology that must fail on command, the phone simultaneously threatens
and keeps at bay the violence of these compensatory fantasies, and so the genres
that unleash that violence. If comedy is the genre that puts danger in its place, then
the telephone is a trope through which comedy taps that place: the dangerous
w orlds of other genres.8
To be without one, then, is to be stuck in genre, as Joe would be stuck with
Patricia, his soon-to-be ex-girlfriend, were it not for an uncooperative elevator and
its emergency telephone. As I said above, this scene contains the film’s only phone
call of any significance, and indeed the scene accomplishes a great deal of work. It
begins with Joe’s call for help, during which Patricia betrays her character by
grabbing at the phone and shouting profanity into the mouthpiece. As they wait for
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help with tw o other passengers, they participate in a ritualized game of “what I will
do if I get out alive.” a game which Patricia loses badly. Her failure is a failure to
observe the rules of genre: her own comments are not suitably romantic (she says
she would get her eyes lasered), and then she steps on Joe's lines, searching sulkily
for her tic-tacs as he prepares his big revelation. Her failure at this ritual is,
moreover, simply an elaboration o f her telephonic shortcomings. Absorbed in her
anger and her impatience, she does not take turns. To a boyfriend who is cheating
on her electronically, this rudeness is by comparison all-too damning, for what
defines his e-mail romance above all is precisely the orderly and luxurious taking
of turns. Unlike phone calls, e-mail transmission can be delayed for revision and
even deletion, allowing Joe to compose his thoughts, manage his mood, and only
send his best self.
In its most baroque forms, then, the film’s voice-over representation of e-
mail unfolds a new' kind of telephonic fantasy, one that incorporates desirable
delays. During most of the film's e-mail exchanges, we merely hear the voice of
the person typing, allowing the voice-over to act as if by telephone, without delay.
But sometimes we hear that voice as the other reads its message, invoking the
multiple moments of writing, reading, and narrated events implicit in all wrritten
correspondence. We are reminded o f what until the answering machine remained
an advantage of wTitten communication over the telephone: it transcends time as
well as space. Telephone calls transmit, but letters transmit and record. Their
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relative permanence buys time, maintaining even in the face of electronic
transmission something of the rhythm o f the post. To this rhythm shopgirl and
NY152 dance, as does the film they inhabit. Banishing the telephone to the realm
of bad surprises. You've Got Mail revels in protracted epistolary suspense.
And yet when compared to Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner
(1940). the source for Ephron's script (and the name of Kathleen’s store), it
becomes clear that much epistolary richness is lost in You’ ve Got Mail. Lubitsch's
film features not only a kinky epistolary rhetoric, as when Jimmy Stewart tells
Margaret Sullavan to “Take your key and open post office box 237 and take me out
of my envelope and kiss me,” but reminds us of how much the pleasures o f mail are
not only anticipatory but reflective. Correspondents re-read their letters. This is of
course true in Pride and Prejudice as well, another source for Ephron’s film and a
book Kathleen makes Joe read. But You've Got Mail infantilizes reading,
relegating both Lubitsch and Austen to a charming but silly world that must be
given up. like a children’s bookstore, for adulthood. The fact that Kathleen has re
read Pride and Prejudice some two hundred times is in this film a sign of
weakness. Joe supposedly earns credit for slogging through the novel once, but he
cannot resist expressing his impatience, and so we can only wonder why the film
tolerates a masculinity so totally cut off from the pleasures of one of the most
delightful novels in the English language. With so little evidence of love for the
written word, we have to ask again just what this film thinks e-mail is.
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The key lies in one of Grandpa Fox’s lines. Revealing to Joe's surprise that
he had corresponded with Kathleen's mother long ago, he dwells fondly on her
“beautiful penmanship.” What is important here is less the elevation of style over
substance, since Joe and Kathleen's e-mails themselves are hardly substantive, but
penmanship as the mark of a fixed individuality that can be celebrated as beautiful.
However much letters allowed for games of identity, identity remained the name of
the game. E-mail, by contrast, revels here in a much fuller typographic anonymity,
and threatens to replace the temporary suspension of identity with perpetual flight.
It is a technology of disappearance. Consider, for instance, what happens when,
during a typical scene of writing e-mail, Kathleen speaks above her voice-over.
What does she say with her real voice? Sentence fragments that include the words
"blank." “who recently belittled my existence.” and “nothing.” In some
fundamental way the question the film must resolve for romantic closure, and that
creates its only real suspense, is not about who the hero will turn out to be, but
about how much of herself the heroine can delete.
Three obstacles delay closure in You’ ve Got Mail: Kathleen's boyfriend,
Joe's girlfriend, and their own differences. As it happens in the film's tidy
economy, what Joe and Kathleen must each overcome, with not a little sleight-of-
hand. is exactly what their current partners represent. Kathleen’s boyfriend Frank
is a writer whose political posturing we are meant to take as so much vanity. “I
could never be with someone who doesn’t take politics as seriously as I do” is the
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225
line that removes him from romantic contention, and so stakes the film's claim that
a certain brand of leftist political statement always begins with “I.” Frank's
blinding narcissism gives Kathleen the excuse she needs to shut her eyes to
political issues she once held dear.9 Patricia, whose essential characteristic is less
her much-remarked caffeine jitters than her tendency to interrupt Joe's speech and
thought, represents crass commercialism (she likes Kathleen because she can
predict the value of a book) and its concomitant decline in manners, as we saw
from her performance in the elevator. But the film’s prestidigitation occurs in the
suggestion that these conversions are symmetrical and therefore adequate to
romance in the age of feminism. The film is in fact uncomfortable with the
implications of rejecting Frank's politics, and so covers this disturbing lesson with
the pseudo-feminist claim that Kathleen is learning to be rude and speak her mind.
But what she is really learning is not to care at all that her seducer is a powerful
mogul who, in treating books as “vats of olive oil" (his own words, meant to
preempt her criticism), opposes everything she believes. On the other hand, Joe’s
curriculum, blessed with the winner's prerogative, gets to be deceptively
straightforward, in that it simply pretends there are no political issues to be
rejected. He learns little more than to mind his manners, and not with Mr. Darcy’s
deep sense of communal good in Pride and Prejudice, but because it makes for
better seduction.
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In this regard Joe's tiny identity crisis, as expressed in one of his e-mails to
shopgirl, moves along a telling trajectory:
"Do you ever feel you’ve become the worst version of yourself? That a
Pandora's Box of all the secret, hateful parts—your arrogance, your spite,
your condescension— has sprung open? Someone provokes you, and
instead of just smiling and moving on, you zing them. Hello, it’s Mr.
Nasty.”
Joe's evil twin is not named, say. "Fox III” (the name of his boat) but "Mr. Nasty.”
a cartoonish villain whose tragic flaw is not greed or corruption but rudeness.
Thus the dynamic of this passage, routing existential questions through manners,
works greatly to his advantage. Manners can be polished, but money can only be
laundered. That Joe starts out as a bit of a gangster is clear enough from a scene at
a party, where he scoops large quantities of caviar off a dish it is garnishing. This
is a man who helps himself to what he wants; he is not aware that there might be a
limit to his share. We should note, moreover, that the task o f improving Joe's
manners falls less to him than to the film itself, which puts him in a better light
largely by putting women in a worse one. The first such scene is in the checkout
line at a grocery store, where Kathleen has absent-mindedly stood in the cash-only
line without any cash, and Joe, spotting her from a few lines over, comes to sweet-
talk the cashier into letting her through. I must admit I was surprised to learn from
Ephron's commentary that she meant the scene to show how frustrating it is for
women that some men can charm their way through life, and that this scene was
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227
based on an actual encounter she witnessed. Perhaps this explanation, invoking the
principle that truth is stranger than fiction, accounts for the total improbability that
any cashier above the age of four would find Joe’s knock-knock shtick amusing,
but it does not account for what this scene is doing in the movie. What the movie
needs is Kathleen to be guilty of a breach of etiquette to take the heat off Joe.
Indeed, the scene savors Kathleen's social humiliation, subjecting her to a look
from the cashier and barbs from other customers even after Joe has “saved” her.
But it is not until a third scene, the ostensible climax o f Joe’s conversion, that the
stigma of bad manners gets fully foisted on to w om en.1 0 The phone scene in the
elevator, intended to separate Joe from Patricia, does no such thing for anyone who
is listening closely. She may be louder and less patient, but her frustration is in
some ways more forgivable than Joe's controlled condescension as he tells “Juan”
to call “the fire department, that's right.” 1 1 There has been no conversion, for that
voice speaks the same sense of entitlement as the hand that swiped the caviar.
It is no accident then that You’ ve Got Mail makes obsessive joking
reference to The Godfather, for Coppola’s film, with its unchecked criminal
masculinity, represents the unconscious of Ephron’s comedy. The gangster’s
slogan, that his crimes o f business are “not personal,” is what Kathleen comes to
accept, despite her protests to the contrary. When Joe visits her sick at home after
her shop has failed, she reacts to his plea that “it w asn't personal” with a sharp
critique: “All that means is that it wasn’t personal to you. But it was personal to
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228
me. It's personal to a lot of people. And what is so wrong with being personal
anyway? Whatever else anything is it ought to begin by being personal. My head
is starting to get fuzzy.” Unfortunately, whatever cogency this speech might have
for a feminism rooted in the personal trails off into that concluding fuzzy-
headedness, a sickness that infects the remainder of the film as its upbeat resolution
cannot contain the dark generic contagion its conflicts have unleashed. Nothing
makes this clearer than Ephron's commentary on this scene, in which Joe invades
Kathleen's apartment and finds his way to her bed: “It’s almost like taking Omaha
Beach, as I said to [Tom Hanks] in rehearsals. Since he had just done Saving
Private Ryan I thought that metaphor would be the sort of thing he might enjoy.”
The metaphor is startling in its honesty, as is the idea that a female director would
proffer it so matter-of-factly to promote a romantic comedy. As the scene unfolds
and Joe puts his hand on Kathleen's mouth to stop her insulting him—a moment
which, incidentally, gives the lie to the claim that the film is really interested in
bringing her to speak out— Ephron's commentary sustains the coupling of
seduction and violence, while reversing the vector of the metaphor: “When he puts
his hands on her mouth what I said to Tom was ‘this is a kiss.’” And so seduction is
violence, and silencing is love. You've Got Mail would be bold and insightful
indeed if we were not supposed to be charmed by these discoveries.
I want to insist again on reading the film’s resolution as sleight of hand,
remembering that magic is all about distraction, about keeping our attention on the
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229
wrong thing. What must first be noted is that the rest of the film consists of
nothing but Joe and Kathleen appreciating their neighborhood together, continuing
to exchange e-mail under alias, and discussing those e-mails in person. Joe has
known since the aborted meeting in the cafe that Kathleen is shopgirl, but Kathleen
does not know for sure that Joe is NY 152. though he has given her clues, and there
are indications that she suspects the truth. The film focuses all of our attention, as
well as Kathleen's, on the ensuing game they create out of the tension between his
tw o personas, as he and Kathleen playfully speculate about who NY 152 might be.
It is a somewhat different game than the one Rock Hudson’s Brad plays in Pillow
Talk, w hich it nonetheless clearly resembles. While the advantage of certain
knowledge remains firmly on the man’s side, Kathleen’s pan is greatly expanded
from the ultimately thankless role played by Doris Day’s Jan.1 2 Compared to Jan’s
sudden capitulation at the end of Pillow Talk, You've Got Mail takes the question
of what Kathleen wants seriously. Its answer, we should stress, has nothing to do
w ith content. It is not as if Kathleen reveals a list o f tangible desires to NY 152 that
Joe can then magically satisfy in person.1 3 What little content there is in her e-
mails merely becomes fodder for their banter—Joe teases her, for instance, about
her taste for Joni Mitchell, a taste which she feels no need to defend while enjoying
the greater pleasure of Joe’s attention. What Kathleen wants, and seems to get in
the last scenes of the film, is a man to identify with her, to share her perspective,
and consider her interests.
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But this may be just a way o f saying that the seduction in You ve Got Mail
is more convincing than in Pillow Talk, rather than that Kathleen's seduction
avoids the gothic implications o f the earlier film. After all, from the moment Joe
wanders into Kathleen's store at the beginning, he has deceived her. Initially
suppressing his last name to avoid a confrontation, he graduates to more complex
deceptions when he learns that Kathleen is shopgirl, culminating in the elaborate
games of the conclusion. He lies despite the admonition he hears from Nanny
Maureen, the caretaker o f his prepubescent aunt, that one should “never marry a
liar"—a statement that resonates as a principle of opposition to the film’s main
course of events, for Maureen will later take part in the film's only female escape
from Fox patriarchy, running off with Joe's new stepmother. As Kathleen makes
her own peace with the Foxes, she has no evidence that the lies will stop, only that
they may start to match up with her own, for she lies too, if much more subtly, and
it is her evasions that bring us closest to the troubled heart of the film. The telling
moment is when Kathleen and Frank break up. When he asks her if she has a new
love, she denies it, claiming only to harbor “the dream of someone else.’’ O f course
it matters little that she deceives Frank, as he has happily moved on to a woman
w ho better feeds his vanity. In a loose sense Kathleen even tells the truth, since the
unreality of cyberlove could be taken for a dream, and in a more abstract reckoning
this powerful expression of desire is the truest thing she could say. But its
ambiguity nonetheless allows Kathleen to deceive herself. What if her dream is
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231
less of having someone else than of being someone else? Her language allows her
to pretend she has the easier of the two problems, as “someone else” inevitably
becomes Joe. And which Joe? It is this second ambiguity, the choice between Joe
and NY 152, that distracts her—and us— from the possibility of her choosing some
man who is not Joe, or of choosing, like Nanny Maureen, not to have a man at all.
Thus the film steers existential longing into a collision with Joe, leaving us
to sort through what will become of Kathleen. You've Got Mail in fact offers two
models of what happens when a big fish and a little fish come together. There is no
doubt that Joe will consume her; the question is what exactly this entails. The first
model of consumption is the prevailing belief of Kathleen’s bookstore, in which, as
Frank says, “you are what you read.” According to this model, Joe cannot
assimilate Kathleen without being changed by her, without perhaps even becoming
her. If we consider the source of this optimism, we have to admit that it is the
losing ideology, though the film clings lamely to a diminished version of it in Joe's
ironic comment that employees in the Fox Books children's section now need
Ph.D.’s. In playing this model out to such insulting lengths, the film avoids
looking squarely at its other model of consumption, which is that Kathleen is such
a small fish as to be caviar, a fine garnish for Joe to devour, and that she will
disappear without a trace.
Indeed, as You've Got Mail saunters toward closure, the supporting
characters drop out, leaving Kathleen in isolation, with little connection to who she
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was before Joe. Thus the female networking with her friends in the shop ends, just
when she needs it most. The disappearance of these relationships is all-too
consistent with the film's dark subterranean logic: they are gone because the shop
is gone, and the shop is gone because Joe destroyed it. No wonder the film is so
resolutely forward-looking. This is one couple that won’t be telling the story of
how they met. O f course the economic warfare is greatly muted by the fact that
everyone is middle-class, and therefore no one will be going, as Joe’s black flunky
Kevin puts it: “back to the projects with food stamps.” The film is careful to let us
know that two of Kathleen’s employees will be financially solvent, though a third
may have to face economic consequences, and leave paradise for Brooklyn. But
even to ask whether these minor characters will be all right without Kathleen is a
convenient way o f not asking if Kathleen will be all right without them.
You ve Got Mail has from the beginning worked far harder than Pillow Talk
to displace the gothic, to push it out of the frame of interest and into the colorful
background. The signs of the hero’s monstrosity that are so obvious with Brad, his
grotesque physicality and his rapacious appetites, are all carefully displaced when
it comes to Joe. Joe is very average looking—it is his father, as played by Dabney
Coleman, who is the image of a monster, gnashing peanuts and spewing rhetoric
like an ogre. Similarly, Joe’s seductive talents are channeled safely into the
business. Indeed the only time seduction gets mentioned in the film is when Joe
describes his business strategy: “We are going to seduce them with our square
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footage, and our discounts, and our deep armchairs...and our cappuccino." All
sexual excess gets pinned on the older Foxes, as their penchant for younger women
spawns a distorted family portrait: as I’ve said, Joe's aunt is a young girl. Such
generational disavowal again finds its source in The Godfather. where Michael
Corleone tells his girlfriend "That's my family. Kay. It’s not me.” Ephron seems to
take Michael at his word, and thinks it easy for men to avoid becoming their
fathers. Coppola, o f course, thinks otherwise, and increasingly adopts Kay's point
of view as The Godfather ends to show the horror of Michael’s absorption into the
mob.
Sadly, there is more to connect Kathleen and Kay than the alliterative
potential of their first names. Both You've Got Mail and The Godfather funnel
their heroines toward a fake moment o f truth, what we would do better to call a
moment of fiction. For Kathleen, this moment arrives when a date with Joe
threatens to make her late for her appointment to finally meet NY152. Joe laments
the circumstances o f their acquaintance, and Kathleen is left with the choice of
forgiving Joe on the spot, or leaving to see NY 152. It is a funny kind of choice,
and Joe's prior sardonic comments about patrons of Starbucks echo painfully at this
moment:
“The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision
making ability whatsoever to make six decisions, just to buy one cup o f
coffee: short, tall, light, dark, caf, decaf, low-fat, non-fat. etc. So, people
who don't know what the hell they’re doing or who on earth they are can.
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for only S2.95. get. not just a cup of coffee, but an absolutely defining sense
o f self.”
Kathleen has in fact been a loyal Starbucks customer from the beginning (so much
for her aversion to chains). And we have to ask if Joe, who understands seduction
so well, has not provided her with just this kind of false decision, to be mulled over
by a sham self. After all, once you are thinking about caf or decaf, you are no
longer thinking about whether you want coffee.
O f course the fact that Joe asks for forgiveness is not insignificant, since an
admission of wrongdoing is more than we get from. say. Michael Corleone. But
the timing of the scene, just as the pressure o f the NY 152 mystery has built to its
apex, buys Joe this credit cheap. Unable to confront the plot of forgiveness
directly, the film routes it through the plot of curiosity. Thus Kathleen chooses to
avoid Joe's request, and meet NY 152 instead. This curiosity should return us to
Kay's most painful moment in The Godfather, when she presses Michael about his
involvement in murder. After some of his usual resistance to her interest in his
activities, Michael sees an opportunity to put an end to her questions: “This one
time. This one time I’ll let you ask me about my affairs.” The absurd denial that
follows matters little to Kay, for she has won his participation in the sustaining
fiction that he is good, and they are intimate. Kathleen’s curiosity, like Kay’s,
seeks intimacy, not knowledge. She goes forth to meet NY 152 because he is her
confidant, and she hopes he will be Joe because that will unite her fantasies with
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235
the man who takes such an interest in them, enveloping her in the benevolent
plenitude of narcissism. In The Godfather, Kay’s bliss lasts all o f a minute.
Having left the room to prepare a drink (hoping to seal their new bond), she is shut
out when one o f Michael's henchmen closes the door in her face. It is this
wrenching image of exclusion that ends the film. You Ve Got Mail ends out in the
park, with a clinch and a dog, to tell us all is right. But the lasting image is Joe’s
shrug just before, as Kathleen sees the truth. If romance is to be this resigned, w hat
is the use of having romance? Joe of course gets what he wants, gets in fact to
have his cake and eat it too, since Kathleen and shopgirl are one. When Kathleen
greets him at the end with “I wanted it to be you,” we are meant to believe her
desires are as easily reconciled. And yet somewhere back in cyberspace, the dream
of someone else gathers dust, colonized by a man who wouldn’t know' a dream
from a vat of olive oil.
NOTES
1 Gilbert and Gubar make this point as follows: “Austen rewrites the gothic not because
she disagrees with her sister novelists about the confinement o f women, but because she believes
women have been imprisoned more effectively by miseducation than by walls and more by financial
dependency, which is the authentic ancestral curse, than by any verbal oath or warning” (135).
' D.S.L. Cardwell explains that “what the early railway system was to the telegraph, ships
w ere to w ireless. It w ill be recalled that the first instance o f the use o f wireless to catch the
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236
attention o f the general public was the arrest o f Dr. Crippen when his ship docked in Canada
(1910). Two years later wireless played a vital role in the rescue o f the survivors o f the Titanic
disaster” ( 187n).
5 Shortly after Henry's speech, Catherine seems to have internalized his views, and exiled
the gothic to the remote com ers o f Europe:
Charming as were all o f Mrs. Radcliffe’s works, and charming even as were the
works o f all her imitators, it was not in them perhaps that human nature, at least in
the midland counties o f England, was to be looked for. O f the Alps and Pyrenees,
with their pine forests and their vices, they might give a faithful delineation: and
Italy. Switzerland, and the South o f France, might be as fruitful in horrors as they
were there represented. Catherine dared not doubt beyond her own country, and
even o f that, if hard pressed, would have yielded the northern and western
extremities. But in the central part o f England there was surely some security for
the existence even o f a wife not beloved, in the laws o f the land, and the manners
o f the age. Murder was not tolerated, servants were not slaves, and neither poison
nor sleeping potions to be procured, like rhubarb, from every druggist. (202).
J O f course the other striking connection between Dombev and Son and Shadow o f a Doubt
is that Dickens and Hitchcock both run over their villains with trains.
5 See for instance page 190 o f Cortiel’s essay. This analysis is not a blanket condemnation
o f the film, however, stressing most importantly perhaps that “Violet and Corky’s triumphantly
successful sexual relationship provides a plot template whose impact for lesbian culture cannot be
overestimated” (193).
6 This story is most famously chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s best-selling book Into Thin Air.
The phone has long been imagined a link between worlds, in particular betw een the
living and the dead as in Bunuel’s The Phantom o f Liberty, where a man gets a phone call from his
dead sister, an episode o f The Twilight Zone called “Long Distance Call,” where a young boy’s
grandmother calls him to join her beyond the grave, and Waking the Dead, where a young man
speaks on the phone with the ex-girlfriend he thought was dead, and whose status remains a
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237
mystery o f the film. Other fantastic phone connections can be seen in The Matrix. 12 Monkey s. Lost
Highway, and episodes o f Dr. Who.
s Northrop Fry e has commented on the close relationship o f com edy and danger in
Anatomy o f Criticism, noting that o f course however strongly com edy invokes disaster, it always
averts it. even if improbably, and at the last minute (178-79). Thus com ic closure works to expel
danger, putting it back in its proper, far away place.
1 1 Indeed, the film will at the same moment go so far in separating politics and romance as
to treat her grandmotherly accountant's possible affair with Franco as sim ply exotic.
This commentary is part o f the special features on the D V D version o f the film.
" Another example o f this dynamic occurs in this same scene, just before the elevator gets
stuck. Patricia critiques Joe's attitude toward Kathleen, only to deflect that critique back on to
herself: " -You know. I love how you've totally forgotten that you ’ve had any role in her current
situation— so obtuse, so insensitive. Reminds me o f someone. Who. who does it remind me of?
Me! Ha ha ha."
’■ A film that reverses the advantage o f knowledge is Return to Me. in which a woman
leams that her new heart came from the dead wife o f her boyfriend. The generic difference is
crucial here, for while the film is a romance, it plays more as melodrama than as comedy. Taken
reasonably as a very serious issue, the heart transplant does not becom e fodder for a game of
deception, but must be painfully and honestly confronted. Thus the know ledge that gives a man a
romantic advantage becomes a burden to a woman.
I ? Two films come to mind that do offer a seducer special access to a specific list o f
desires. In Tootsie, o f course, the joke is that when offered exactly what she says she wants, the
woman rejects it. Everyone Says I Love You offers a different twist: the woman is indeed seduced
according to script, but then walks away, satisfied at having her fantasy realized.
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238
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Creator Schantz, Edward Frank (author)

Core Title Gossip, letters, phones: The scandal of female networks in film and literature

School Graduate School

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English (Film, Literature, and Culture)

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Cinema,literature, English,OAI-PMH Harvest,women's studies

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Modleski, Tania (committee chair), Braudy, Leo (committee member), Kincaid, James R. (committee member), Kinder, Marsha (committee member)

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