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The joy of censorship: strategies of circumvention in novel and film

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THE JOY OF CENSORSHIP:

STRATEGIES OF CIRCUMVENTION IN NOVEL AND FILM

by

Nora Gilbert

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(ENGLISH)

December 2010

Copyright 2010 Nora Gilbert
ii
Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank my dissertation chair, Hilary Schor,
without whose careful readings and insightful feedback my project would not be what it
is now; I was extremely fortunate to have found in her a Victorian specialist who enjoys
classical Hollywood films (almost) as much as I do. I must also thank the rest of my
committee for their words of kind encouragement and always constructive suggestions:
Leo Braudy, Jim Kincaid, Tania Modleski, and Michael Renov. During one particularly
formative semester of graduate coursework, I was simultaneously inspired by a Law and
Literature class on the First Amendment co-taught by Hilary Schor and Nomi
Stolzenberg, an independent study with Dana Polan in which I developed some of my
foundational ideas about film censorship, and a class on James Joyce’s Ulysses taught by
David Lloyd for which I wrote my first paper exploring the “productive” nature of
censorship. I would also like to thank the USC Graduate School for awarding me two
fellowships—a Louis D. Beaumont Fellowship for work in the humanities and a Final
Summer Dissertation Fellowship—and the USC Center for Law, Humanities, and Culture
for awarding me a pair of fellowships that allowed me to perform archival research in
London and present my work at a national law and humanities conference. My work has
also benefited greatly from the help of Jenny Romero and the rest of the archival staff at
the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles. I am grateful for the intellectual and
personal camaraderie that I received from my fellow USC graduate students, including
but not limited to Natasha Alvandi Hunt, Ruth Blandon, Beth Callaghan, Jenny Conary,
iii
Mariko Dawson Zare, Laura Fauteux, Alicia Garnica, Yetta Howard, Kevin Pinkham,
Michael Robinson, Kathy Strong, Alice Villaseñor, and Erika Wright.
On a more personal note, this project also owes much of its impetus to the taste
and influence of my parents, Arnold and Janice Dicke, with whom I may not be able to
discuss religion or politics without encountering some major points of contention, but
with whom I will always be able to discuss great classic novels and great classic films.
Lastly, I would like to express my deepest appreciation for the love and support that I
have received from the (soon-to-be) four men of my life: my husband Josh, my sons
Grady and Quinn, and my third little man who is on the way. I could not have written a
200-page treatise on the subject of “joy” without you.
iv
Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ii

Abstract v

Introduction: The Joy of Censorship 1

Chapter 1. The Sounds of Silence: W. M. Thackeray and Preston Sturges 17

Chapter 2. For Your Eyes Only: Jane Austen and George Cukor 61

Chapter 3. Beyond Censorship: Charles Dickens and Frank Capra 112

Chapter 4. The Thrill of the Fight: Charlotte Brontë and Elia Kazan 158

Postscript: Oscar Wilde and Mae West 198

Bibliography 207

v
Abstract

In this interdisciplinary project, I argue that we can better understand the implicit,
unofficial modes of regulation that governed the Victorian novel by studying them in
conjunction with the excessively explicit, overwritten regulatory procedures of another
narrative genre that is often critiqued for its seeming acquiescence to the dictates of
censorship: Hays Code-era Hollywood film. These dictates were primarily moral in
nature, intended to prevent the highly popular art forms of the novel and the cinema from
corrupting the “susceptible” minds of their lower-class—and female—audiences. They
were also, importantly, extra-legal: Hollywood filmmakers chose to embrace the
directives of the Code in order to forestall legal battles at the state and Supreme Court
levels, while Victorian novelists chose to censor themselves in order to appease the “Mrs.
Grundy” element of their book-buying public and avoid legal confrontations altogether.
Both types of narrative artists were, then, affected not by the political censorship of
tyrannical governments, but by the more insidious censorship of public opinion, of
middle-class morality, of the marketplace. And, in response, both sets of artists
employed similar strategies of censorship resistance: strategies such as subtlety,
visuality, ambiguity, and wit. The Joy of Censorship is in the unseemly position of
defending censorship from some of the central liberal allegations that are traditionally
leveled against it by demonstrating that, for all its blustery self-righteousness, censorship
can actually be “good” for sex, politics, feminism, and art.
My chapters are arranged thematically, each using two artists (one British
novelist, one Hollywood director) to investigate the theme at hand. I consider, for
vi
example, the perverse and paradoxical role that scandal plays in the works of W. M.
Thackeray and Preston Sturges, sophistication in the works of Jane Austen and George
Cukor, excessive purity in the works of Charles Dickens and Frank Capra, and repression
in the works of Charlotte Brontë and Elia Kazan. Ultimately, my project reveals that the
allusive, subtextual style of storytelling demanded by censorship is, in many ways,
precisely the style best suited to telling tales of sexually and socially subversive desire.
1
Introduction:
The Joy of Censorship

The origins of this project are romantic in nature. Having long been infatuated
with two distinct narrative art forms—the nineteenth-century British novel and classical
Hollywood cinema
1

1
This term was first coined by David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson in The Classical
Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1985). In it, the authors set out to describe the “distinct artistic and economic phenomenon” that occurred
in Hollywood between 1917 and 1960, but they also break up their discussion into pre-1930 and post-1930
chapters, thereby acknowledging that a major shift took place in 1930, the year that the Production Code
was first formally put into use.
—I began my dissertation journey armed only with the knowledge
that I wanted to write about both genres simultaneously. When I tried to identify what
attributes the genres had in common, I came up with a romanticized list indeed: wit,
subtlety, ingenuity, sophistication, passion, subversion, sexiness, style. But then I
thought of one other commonality that was significantly less appealing to the ear: the
attribute of being shaped by the demands of moral censorship. The classical Hollywood
films that I enjoyed the most were, I realized, all made between 1930 and the early 1960s,
the exact timeframe during which Hollywood was regulated by the pseudo-legal
censorship document known as the Production Code, while the majority of my favorite
nineteenth-century novels were written in the notoriously prim and proper Victorian era.
Was this timing pure coincidence? Or was there something about censorship itself that
caused the works I loved to be worth loving? I looked over my list again. Subtlety,
ingenuity, sophistication: it made sense, on an intuitive level, that censorship would
encourage such attributes to flourish. But passion? Subversion? Sex? Everyone knows
that censorship is a repressive force that results in fewer and duller representations of
2
human sexuality. Censorship squelches political and ideological protest. Censorship
suppresses and domesticizes women. Censorship undermines and infantilizes art. The
following dissertation is in the unseemly position of defending censorship from each of
these traditional allegations by showing that, for all its blustery self-righteousness,
censorship can actually be “good” for sex, politics, feminism, and art.
As much as Victorianism has been equated with repression and prudery in the past,
relatively few scholars have devoted their energies to exploring the Victorian novel as a
specifically “censored” commodity. This critical omission is, no doubt, largely due to the
indirectness and intangibility of the Victorian literary censorship process. In his
comprehensive History of England written in the mid-1850s, Lord Macaulay traced the
origins of this intangibility back to 1695, when the House of Commons first opted not to
renew the Licensing Act that required books to be approved by the government before
they were published and England first obtained an ostensibly “free” press:
From the day on which the emancipation of our literature was
accomplished, the purification of our literature began.... During a hundred
and sixty years the liberty of our press has been constantly becoming more
and more entire; and during those hundred and sixty years the restraint
imposed on writers by the general feeling of readers has been constantly
becoming more and more strict. At this day foreigners, who dare not print
a word reflecting on the government under which they live, are at a loss to
understand how it happens that the freest press in Europe is the most
prudish.
2

In this project, I argue that we can better understand the implicit, unofficial modes of
regulation that governed the Victorian novel by studying them in conjunction with the
excessively explicit, overwritten regulatory procedures of classical Hollywood cinema.

2
Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England from the Accession of James II (Philadelphia:
Porter & Coates, 1881), 4:485.
3
Or, put another way, I contend that the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 reified
the unspoken rules of mainstream Victorian fiction.
These rules were primarily moral in nature, intended to prevent the highly popular
art forms of the novel and the cinema from corrupting the “susceptible” minds of their
young, lower-class, and female audiences. They were also, importantly, extra-legal:
Hollywood filmmakers chose to embrace the directives of the Code in order to forestall
legal battles at the state and Supreme Court levels, while Victorian novelists chose to
censor themselves in order to appease the “Mrs. Grundy”
3
I am not the first to identify a parallel between the Victorian novel and classical
Hollywood cinema; indeed, critics have been mulling over their similarities ever since
element of their book-buying
public and avoid legal confrontations altogether. Both types of narrative artists were,
then, affected not by the political censorship of tyrannical governments, but by the more
insidious censorship of public opinion, of middle-class morality, of the marketplace.
And, in response, both sets of artists employed similar strategies of censorship resistance:
strategies such as double speak, visuality, ambiguity, and humor. Rather than being
“ruined” by censorship, the novels written during the Victorian era and the films
produced under the Production Code were stirred and stimulated by the very forces meant
to restrain them. Ultimately, my dissertation demonstrates that the moral censor’s effort
to sanitize works of art paradoxically leads to the proliferation of ever-expanding avenues
of more complicated, because forbidden, artistic rebellion.

3
Mrs. Grundy was originally a character in Thomas Morton’s 1798 play, Speed the Plough, who never
appeared but was frequently referred to in the phrase “I wonder what Mrs. Grundy would think?” During
the Victorian era, her name came to signify “an unseen censoring element.”
4
the 1944 publication of Sergei Eisenstein’s seminal essay “Dickens, Griffith, and the
Film Today.”
4
In particular, many film historians who write about classical Hollywood’s
elaborate system of self-censorship point to its “Victorian” ancestry at some point in their
analyses: Thomas Doherty, for example, argues that an “amalgam of Irish-Catholic
Victorianism colors much of [the Code’s] cloistered design,” while Francis Couvares
connects the Code’s fear of “arousing strong desires and strong antipathies in an
untrustworthy public” back to the concerns brought on by “the emergence of the dime
novel, the penny press, and the popular theater in the nineteenth century.”
5
What such
historians do not focus on, however, is the degree to which the Production Code
illustrates and exemplifies the “discursive explosion” that has recently come to be
identified as the true hallmark of the Victorian era. For in sifting through the copious
Production Code files that are now accessibly housed in the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, one is struck not by the
Code administrators’ hegemonic silencing of all controversial content, but rather by “a
determination on the part of the agencies of power to hear [such content] spoken about,
and to cause it to speak through explicit articulation and endlessly accumulated detail.”
6
I am quoting here from Michel Foucault’s introduction to The History of
Sexuality, a work that has fundamentally altered the landscape of censorship theory.

4
Sergei Eisenstein, “Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today,” in Film Form: Essays in Film Theory (New
York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1949). In this essay, Eisenstein compares Dickens’s use of “detailed
description” with Griffith’s use of the close-up, Dickens’s “atmosphere” with Griffith’s cinematographic
effects, and Dickens’s style of slightly “exaggerating” his character depictions with Griffith’s style of
directing his actors.
5
Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-
1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 6; Francis G. Couvares, Movie Censorship and
American Culture (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996), 2.
6
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 18.
5
Prior to the History, those who discussed censorship tended to fall into two distinct
camps: there were the pro-censorship, or “conservative,” advocates on the one hand, and
the anti-censorship, or “progressive,” protestors on the other. Then, in the wake of
Foucault’s call for a rejection of the “repressive hypothesis” (“A censorship of sex?” he
scoffed, “There was installed rather an apparatus for producing an ever greater quantity
of discourse about sex”
7
), more and more scholars began to question the validity of the
repression/expression divide.
8
But in spite of the abundance of contemporary criticism
which has reconceptualized censorship as a productive force—insofar as it produces
discourse as much as it is suppresses it—there continues to be something of a critical
taboo against viewing censorship as “productive” in a more positive, pleasurable sense.
This taboo is, of course, understandable, since extolling the benefits of censorship can
come dangerously close to encouraging or excusing acts of oppression and silencing.
Indeed, as Robert Post points out in his foreword to a collection of post-Foucauldian
censorship essays, one of the primary pitfalls of this new scholarship is its tendency “to
flatten variations among kinds of struggles, deemphasizing the difference between, say,
the agonism of poets and that of legal aid clients.”
9

7
Foucault, History of Sexuality, 23.
I would like, therefore, to emphasize
at the outset that I do appreciate this difference, and to acknowledge that the majority of
my claims about the subversive pleasures of censorship in the Victorian novel and
8
See, for example, The Administration of Aesthetics: Censorship, Political Criticism, and the Public
Sphere, ed. Richard Burt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), Censorship and Silencing:
Practices of Cultural Regulation, ed. Robert Post (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute for the History of
Art and the Humanities, 1998), Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film,
1928-1942 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), and John Kucich, Repression in Victorian
Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1987).
9
Post, Censorship and Silencing, 4.
6
classical Hollywood cinema hold true precisely because nineteenth-century England and
twentieth-century America had established a foundational level of discursive “freedom.”
This is not to say that the censorship histories of these two periods are entirely
without interest or incident. In the midst of the Victorian era, for example, Parliament
signed into law Lord Campbell’s Obscene Publications Act of 1857, which most legal
historians regard as the first modern obscenity statute; in it, English magistrates were
authorized to seize “works written for the single purpose of corrupting the morals of
youth and of a nature calculated to shock the common feelings of decency in a well
managed mind.”
10
A decade later, the definition of obscenity was altered in a slight but
important way. According to the verdict of Regina v. Hicklin (1868), the original
“purpose” or “intent” of the material was no longer what mattered; instead, “The test of
obscenity is whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and
corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences and into whose hands a
publication of this sort might fall.”
11
England’s “Hicklin” standard was soon adopted by
the United States and rigorously enforced by its notorious turn-of-the-century moral
watchdog, Anthony Comstock, who used it over the course of his vice-suppressing career
to justify the destruction of over fifty tons of “obscene” books and nearly four million
“obscene” pictures.
12

10
20 & 21 Vict. c. 83.
The Hicklin definition of obscenity remained in effect until it was
superseded by Roth v. United States in 1957, at which point the Supreme Court modified
it to include only that material whose “dominant theme taken as a whole appeals to the
11
LR 3 QB 360.
12
Anna Louise Bates, Weeder in the Garden of the Lord: Anthony Comstock’s Life and Career (Lanham:
University Press of America, 1995), 13.
7
prurient interest”—a step forward from the Hicklin test, which allowed controversial
passages to be judged out of context so that a novel like James Joyce’s Ulysses, for
example, could be legally deemed “pornographic.”
The Hollywood film industry, meanwhile, was subjected to an even steeper set of
legal regulations than the literature of its time. In Mutual Film Corporation v. Industrial
Commission of Ohio (1915), the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment could not
be used to defend the content of motion pictures. Because the movie industry was “a
business, pure and simple” and could so easily “be used for evil,” the Court declared, it
did not consider the censorship of the cinema to be “beyond the power of government.”
13

This decision would not be overturned until Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v. Wilson (1952),
commonly known as the Miracle Decision because it dealt with the banning of Roberto
Rossellini’s “sacrilegious” short film The Miracle.
14
In this decision, film was finally
determined to be a “significant medium for the communication of ideas” that deserved to
be granted the Constitutional right of free speech. Over the course of the following
decade, the proscriptive powers of state and local censors were gradually dissolved by a
series of Supreme Court verdicts, so that, as Garth Jowett has noted, “by the mid-1960s,
the American motion picture industry had effectively been freed from the strictures it had
operated under since 1915.”
15

13
236 U.S. 230.

14
The reason that religious groups found The Miracle to be so offensive was that its plot centered around a
vagrant stranger seducing and impregnating a peasant woman by convincing her that he is Saint Joseph, so
that she believes she is a second Virgin Mary and her child is another product of immaculate conception.
15
Garth Jowett, “‘A Significant Medium for the Communication of Ideas’: The Miracle Decision and the
Decline of Motion Picture Censorship, 1952-1968,” in Couvares, Movie Censorship and American Culture,
271.
8
As important as these legal developments were to the construction of the
artistically “forbidden,” the novels and films that I will be exploring in this project were
in little danger of being seized or banned on legal grounds. But there was another form
of censorship that affected even the most mainstream and respectable of literary and
cinematic texts—the de facto censorship of the marketplace. The more that
industrialization and capitalism flourished in nineteenth-century England, the more a
book’s “literary merit” came to be dependent upon its anticipated “bottom line.”
Publishers simply would not publish what they thought would not sell, which included
material that might be deemed objectionable by squeamish or conservative readers.
Moreover, as literacy began to extend to the working classes who could not afford to buy
their novels, library owners like Charles Mudie were given an even more specific type of
censorious power: if the “notoriously straight-laced, hymn-writing Mudie”
16

16
J.A. Sutherland, Victorian Novelists and Publishers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 27.
did not
approve of a given novel’s moral tone, he could withhold it from general circulation and
more or less ensure its financial failure (as he did with George Meredith’s The Ordeal of
Richard Feverel, for example.) The most outspoken attack on this system of censorship
can be found in George Moore’s 1885 polemical pamphlet, Literature at Nurse, or
Circulating Morals. In it, Moore heatedly condemns the restrictive policies of Mudie’s
literary “monopoly,” and insists that “the old literary tradition coming down to us through
a long line of glorious ancestors, is being gradually obliterated to suit the commercial
views of a narrow-minded tradesman. Instead of being allowed to fight, with and amid,
9
the thoughts and aspirations of men, literature is now rocked to an ignoble rest in the
motherly arms of the librarian.”
17
In early Hollywood, the most influential set of “motherly arms” belonged to a
small cohort of Catholic men, who gathered together in the fall of 1929 to compose a
formal document that would lay out specific moral rules for Hollywood to follow.

18

Objections to the “debauchery” and “degeneracy” of the film industry had been markedly
escalating in recent years, so that when Will Hays, then-president of the Motion Picture
Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), saw the document, his “eyes nearly
popped out” with delight; “This,” he would later write, “was the very thing I had been
looking for.”
19
Ever since Adolph Zukor had approached Kuhn, Loeb and Company for a
loan to purchase theaters in 1919, the studios and the investment bankers
had been partners, and in the late 1920s the banks poured dollars into
Hollywood…. In the clouded atmosphere following the October 1929
Wall Street crash, however, public protests and congressional legislation
threatened the bankers’ investments. Along with distributors and theater
The document was, of course, the Motion Picture Production Code
(frequently referred to as the Hays Code), whose primary goal it was to bring a more
“Victorian” aesthetic to the morally depraved world of popular film. But even though, as
Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons explain in their detailed history of early Hollywood
censorship, the content of the Code “concerned morals, the adoption of the Code
concerned money”:

17
George Moore, Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals: A Polemic on Victorian Censorship (Sussex:
Harvester Press, 1976), 18.
18
The primary authors of the Production Code were Catholic publisher Martin Quigley, Father FitzGeorge
Dineen, and Father Daniel Lord, though they also sought out the informal advice of Joseph Breen and
Father Wilfrid Parsons during the drafting stages. During the classical Hollywood era, then, there existed a
very specific religious dynamic: Jewish producers were censored by Catholic moralists for largely
Protestant audiences.
19
Will H. Hays, The Memoirs of Will H. Hays (Garden City: Doubleday, 1955), 439.
10
managers, the money men called for restraint. In February 1930, the
moguls approved the Code.
20

At the time of the Code’s initial implementation, the moguls believed that publicizing
their compliance with this new system of self-imposed censorship would satisfy the
complaints of their opponents without requiring them to make any significant changes to
the way they ran their businesses. By 1934, however, moral protestors were on the
offense again, insisting that the Code was not being sufficiently enforced and that
Hollywood films were as “indecent” as ever. To avoid proposed boycotts, Hays changed
the name of his censorship division to the Production Code Administration (PCA) and
brought on a new, more pugnacious leader to tighten that division’s reins: Joseph Breen.
Under Breen’s direction, the Code became a more conservative and effectual censorship
tool, and what is now regarded as the most stringent epoch of cinematic purity began in
earnest.
With so many legal and marketplace forces working against them, one would
imagine Victorian novels and classical Hollywood films to have been creatively stymied
to the point of suffocation. And, indeed, there were some characters and ideas that the
two genres were forced to censor virtually out of existence; as compellingly as
Postcolonial and Queer Studies scholars have explored the undercurrents of
multiculturalism and homosociality that trickled through such novels and films, for
example, it cannot be denied that the world presented within them was, for the most part,
a blindingly white, compulsorily heterosexual place. But there were other ways in which

20
Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the
Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 11.
11
the moral censor’s attempts to regulate the genres failed, and failed quite emphatically. It
is the goal of my dissertation to understand how and why such failures happened, and, by
extension, to pursue the aesthetic promise of Foucault’s ideological argument that his
History of Sexuality leaves unspoken: the promise of censorship as an artistically
beneficial force.
Although there is a long and troubling history of artists whose works were
severely damaged by censorious forces, my project concentrates instead on artists who
were able to outwit their censors more successfully—and whose names are not, therefore,
generally associated with issues relating to censorship. My chapters are arranged
thematically, each using two figures (one British novelist, one Hollywood director
21

21
My decision to focus on the directors who helmed the films in question draws heavily from the French
auteur theory that reads films as the personal vision of the man or woman “in charge”—a theory which has,
over the years, been the source of much critical debate. By choosing this novelist/director chapter
structure, I do not mean to deny the fact that the cinema is, by definition, a far more collaborative medium
than the novel, or to disregard the artistic contributions of producers, writers, cinematographers, costumers,
actors, etc.. I do feel that the directors of the films that I am discussing were the individuals who dealt most
directly with the mandates issued by the Hays Office, and were the ones responsible for finding ways of
combining the various cinematic threads together (dialogue, lighting, sound, framing, costumes, acting) in
order to fulfill the moral censor’s injunctions and the film’s artistic promise at one and the same time.
) to
investigate the theme at hand. The artists I have chosen to analyze are by no means the
only employers of the censorship evasion strategies in question; part of what I am
arguing is, in fact, that these strategies were so prevalent within Victorian literature and
classical Hollywood cinema that they achieved a sort of invisibility. What drew me to
this set of artists in particular were the specific texts they created—texts which are not
explicitly “about” censorship, but which frame the act of censorship for the reader/viewer
in carefully nuanced and metaphoric ways. I have paired the novelists and filmmakers
12
together based on the connections that I see between their texts, and between their
respective attitudes toward and responses to censorship as a whole.
In my first chapter on W. M. Thackeray and Preston Sturges, for example, I
introduce the strain of Foucauldian logic that provides the framework for my analysis:
the paradoxical “logic of scandal,” through which discourse is increased by feelings like
shock and moral indignation rather than stymied by them. Focusing on two of the artists’
most scandal-ridden texts, Thackeray’s Vanity Fair and Sturges’s The Lady Eve, I discuss
the ways in which the authors harness the perverse powers of this logic to their artistic
advantage. By repeatedly pointing out to their audiences all the things that they, in the
name of propriety, should not and will not say, Thackeray and Sturges are simultaneously
able to condemn, ridicule, and appease the “Grundy” sector of those audiences. Another
artistic trick that I explore in this chapter is that of manipulating the relationship between
a text’s visual and verbal elements in order to circumvent the rules of moral censorship.
Thackeray and Sturges are the ideal artists to demonstrate this point, Thackeray being the
rare novelist to draw his own illustrations and Sturges being the first director of the
Hollywood sound era to write all his own screenplays. Throughout their respective
works, words and images are played off of one another in a well-orchestrated juggling act
that allows the artists to show us that which they “cannot” tell us, and to tell us that which
they “cannot” show.
In my second chapter, I consider the relationship between censorship,
sophistication, and gender. The moral censor has traditionally defined “sophisticated”
content to be that which can only be understood by the adult, urban, and male members
13
of the audience, and has therefore encouraged writers and filmmakers to speak in a
carefully bifurcated language “from which,” as one Code administrator would put it,
“conclusions might be drawn by the sophisticated mind, but which would mean nothing
to the unsophisticated and inexperienced.”
22
In the archetypically “sophisticated”
romantic comedies of Jane Austen
23
Even though Eisenstein famously compared Charles Dickens to D.W. Griffith, in
my third chapter I locate more parallels between Dickens and Frank Capra: both artists
created stories that were sharply critical of social and political ills, but that still managed
to exude an impression of soft-hearted idealism, even sentimentalism. As conflicting as
these two ideological impulses within their works may appear to be, I see the latter
and George Cukor, however, the censor’s
presumptions about the inexperienced, vulnerable female mind are pointedly undercut by
the feminized inflection of the texts’ most allusive, suggestive discourse. This chapter
contemplates the discursive ramifications of sophistication in two such texts, Austen’s
Emma and Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story. Each is, in its way, a sort of bildungsroman
of sophistication—Emma Woodhouse must learn, over the course of her narrative, how to
target her communications in a more successfully sophisticated manner, while Tracy
Lord must learn how not to be an unsophisticated, judgmental prude. Sophistication, in
these works, becomes more than a strategy to make controversial content more palatable;
it becomes a means of freeing the female protagonist (and, in turn, the female reader/
viewer) from the social expectation of moral perfection.

22
Joy to James Wingate, 5 February 1931, Little Caesar Production Code Admistration file, Margaret
Herrick Library.
23
Though Austen is admittedly pre-Victorian, I argue in this chapter that “Victorianism,” as we now tend
to define it, had its roots in the complicated moral aftermath of the French Revolution—and that, from a
censorship perspective, Austen is central to this project.
14
impulse as a calculated strategy for achieving the former—in other words, I believe that
Dickens and Capra intentionally infused their texts with an inflated aura of innocence and
wholesomeness in order to dilute and excuse their more morally questionable material.
But I also believe that the texts in question actively teach their readers and viewers, in a
variety of subtle ways, how to read past the superficial purity that is ostensibly being
presented. This is particularly true of Dickens and Capra’s perennial holiday classics,
A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life, each of which offers the audience a warm,
inviting, “Christmassy” façade that artfully overshadows the dark and pessimistic
implications at its core.
For my fourth chapter, I delve into the psychological and libidinal pleasures of the
forbidden fruit by examining the highly-charged romantic encounters in Charlotte Brontë
and Elia Kazan’s texts to see how barriers of resistance work to perpetuate and propel
physical desire. This chapter draws upon various sexological theories that emerged
around the turn of the twentieth century; from Sigmund Freud’s assertion that “some
obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of the libido to its height” to Havelock Ellis’s belief
that men are sexually stimulated by the hurdle of “feminine modesty” and women are
constantly “longing for pleasure that is stolen or forbidden,” there has been little
theoretical disagreement about the allure of the illicit and the hard-to-get.
24

24
Sigmund Freud, Sexuality and the Psychology of Love (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997), 57;
Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (Philadelphia: F.A. Davis Company, 1908), 3:59.
The final
works that I examine in my project are, therefore, two intensely psychological stories of
women whose lives appear to be damaged and even destroyed by the forces of sexual

15
repression: Brontë’s Villette and Kazan’s film adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire.
But Lucy Snowe and Blanche Dubois are not only shown to be victimized by such forces.
They are also repeatedly shown to construct and reinforce sexual barriers themselves, in
an effort to heighten and enhance their own sensations of desire. Similarly, I argue,
Brontë and Kazan’s relationship with the moral censor is marked less by victimization
and oppression than by stimulation and inspiration—both artists were, in the end,
paradoxically motivated by the moral complaints lodged against them to communicate
their ideas in subtler, richer, and more powerful ways.
In an often-cited story from Charlotte Brontë’s childhood, we are given a key to
understanding the paradoxical nature of the restraint imposed upon Victorian writers and
their early Hollywood counterparts. Discussing his unconventional child-rearing
techniques with biographer Elizabeth Gaskell, Patrick Brontë recounts that,
When my children were very young, when, as far as I can remember, the
oldest was about ten years of age and the youngest about four, thinking
that they knew more than I had yet discovered, in order to make them
speak with less timidity, I deemed that if they were put under a sort of
cover I might gain my end; and happening to have a mask in the house, I
told them all to stand and speak boldly from under the cover of the
mask.
25

Though the goal of such moral censors as Charles Mudie, Joseph Breen, and Mrs Grundy
was certainly not “to make [artists] speak with less timidity,” the metaphoric mask that
their censorship efforts placed upon Victorian and classical Hollywood artists
inadvertently achieved that goal nonetheless. The novels and films that I examine in this
project still resonate today because they speak so boldly and eloquently from “under the

25
Qtd. in Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 94.
16
mask,” because they speak on so many different levels, because they require their readers
and viewers to think and question as they read and view. And that, in effect, is the gift of
censorship: by forcing certain narrative impulses underground, censorship creates an
open space, between text and subtext, where the agile interpreter within each one of us
can come out to play.
17
CHAPTER 1
The Sounds of Silence:
W. M. Thackeray and Preston Sturges

“Rather than a massive censorship, beginning with the verbal proprieties imposed by the
Age of Reason, what was involved was a regulated and polymorphous incitement to
discourse.”
—Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality

In the course of rejecting the modern world’s “repressive hypothesis,” Foucault
nominates the anonymous author of the Victorian pornographic confessional My Secret
Life to replace Queen Victoria as the “central figure” of nineteenth-century Western
sexuality.
1
The reason for this striking substitution, Foucault explains, is that “rather than
seeing in this singular man a courageous fugitive from a ‘Victorianism’ that would have
compelled him to silence, I am inclined to think that, in an epoch dominated by (highly
prolix) directives enjoining discretion and modesty, he was the most direct and in a way
the most naïve representative of a plurisecular injunction to talk about sex.”
2

1
There are many contemporary historians who believe the identity of this anonymous author to be Henry
Spencer Ashbee, but there are others who disagree with this conclusion.
But as
deliciously perverse as it may be to strip a sovereign queen of her iconic status in favor of
a nameless pornographer, I believe we can learn more about the ways in which the
Victorian era’s “directives enjoining discretion” both collided and intersected with its
“injunction to talk about sex” if we focus our attention on less naïve, less directly
marginalized material. To that end, the following chapter will nominate a very different
nineteenth-century writer to stand in as his culture’s discursive and ideological
representative: William Makepeace Thackeray.
2
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 22.
18
One reason that Thackeray’s novels serve as a particularly good point of departure
for my discussion of Victorian censorship is that so many of them point out and bemoan
the kinds of social and marketplace limitations that were implicitly placed upon writers of
his day; in Foucauldian terms, they are ostentatiously vocal about their inability to
vocalize the forbidden “truth.” Though the most famous example of this kind of noisy
silence can be found in the preface to Pendennis—“Since the author of Tom Jones was
buried,” Thackeray laments, “no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict
to his utmost power a MAN”
3
—the moment that interests me most occurs late in the text
of Vanity Fair. At the beginning of the sixty-fourth chapter of that novel, the narrator
explains that “We must pass over a part of Mrs. Rebecca Crawley’s biography with that
lightness and delicacy which the world demands—the moral world, that has, perhaps, no
particular objection to vice, but an insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its
proper name”
4
I defy any one to say that our Becky, who has certainly some vices, has
not been presented to the public in a perfectly genteel and inoffensive
manner. In describing this syren, singing and smiling, coaxing and
cajoling, the author, with modest pride, asks his readers all round, has he
(emphasis added). What follows this promise of delicate avoidance,
however, turns out to be one of the great literary rants on the subject of morally imposed
reticence; in it, Thackeray lambastes the “polite public” that makes up his audience for
priggishly closing its ears to the darker, more illicit elements of the true story he is trying
to tell. At the close of this rant, Thackeray articulates the strategy that he, like so many
Victorian novelists, has chosen to employ in response to this tacit brand of censorship:

3
W.M. Thackeray, Pendennis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), lvi-lvii.
4
W.M. Thackeray, Vanity Fair (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994), 637. Further references will
be given parenthetically in the text by page number.
19
once forgotten the laws of politeness, and showed the monster’s hideous
tail above water? No! Those who like may peep down under waves that
are pretty transparent, and see it writhing and twirling, diabolically
hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round corpses; but
above the water line, I ask, has not everything been proper, agreeable, and
decorous, and has any the most squeamish immoralist in Vanity Fair a
right to cry fie? (637-8)

It is the set of distinctions laid out for us here—between “text” and “subtext,”
between “appearance” and “reality,” between those who choose to look below the “pretty
transparent” surface and those who do not—that governs the majority of censorship-
based literary criticism; as a result, the work performed by such criticism is frequently
that of excavation, of detecting and unearthing the “real” tale that is submerged beneath
the metaphoric water line imposed by the repressive literary censor. In his introduction
to The History of Sexuality, however, Foucault reveals this set of distinctions to be a
series of false dichotomies that is used to bolster the excavator’s sense of audacious
power: “If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence,
then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate
transgression.”
5
The filmmaker I have chosen to pair with Thackeray in order to explore this
linkage is Preston Sturges, another mainstream artist whose works are not generally
considered to be shocking, obscene, or particularly “censorable.” Sturges may not share
As much as Thackeray’s rant may seem to be inviting us to view his
work in just such a repressed light, the following chapter will take seriously Foucault’s
portrait of a discursive system in which “free” speech and “repressive” censorship are
essentially and inextricably linked.

5
Foucault, History of Sexuality, 6.
20
Thackeray’s habit of conspicuously raising the issue of moral censorship throughout the
course of his storytelling, but he does share a similar authorial tone of sly irreverence that
is seen by many contemporary critics as a form of rebellion against his culture’s
restrictive, conservative values. But Thackeray and Sturges were not always considered
to be such rebels. In Sturges’s case, the earliest wave of “serious” criticism of his work
found it to be too “hollow” and “frothy” to be an effective mouthpiece for social change:
James Agee critiques Sturges for “his exaggerated respect for plain success” that leads
him to “produc[e] some of the most intoxicating bits of nihilism the screen has known,
but always at the expense of a larger excellence;” Manny Farber observes that his
“Barnum-and-Bailey showmanship and dislike of fixed purposes often make the typical
Sturges movie seem like a uniquely irritating pastiche;” and Siegfried Kracauer accuses
him of possessing “a conformist attitude” and of “us[ing] the tools of social criticism,
only to destroy its constructive power.”
6
But this image of Sturges—as talented
showman who failed to live up to his own artistic and political potential—has been
slowly chipped away over the years by a string of more appreciative French “auteur”
theorists, such as André Bazin, who feels that Sturges’s work “restores to American film
a sense of social satire that I find equaled only… in Chaplin’s films,” or François
Truffaut, who considers Sturges to “share a very particular style and a subversive way of
thinking” with the likes of Luis Buñuel, Akira Kurosawa, and Alfred Hitchcock.
7

6
James Agee, Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies (New York: Modern Library, 2000),
330; Manny Farber, “Preston Sturges: Success in the Movies,” in Negative Space: Manny Farber on the
Movies (New York: Praeger, 1971), 91; Siegfried Kracauer, “Preston Sturges or Laughter Betrayed,” Films
in Review 1.1 (February 1950), 47.

7
André Bazin, The Cinema of Cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock (New York: Seaver Books, 1982), 44;
François Truffaut, introduction to The Cinema of Cruelty, xii.
21
Sturges now retains the peculiar status of a sort of cult mainstream figure: many of his
films are considered, as Turner Classic Movies would put it, “The Essentials,” and yet his
name is much less recognizable to the contemporary public than the names of other
classical Hollywood auteurs such as Hitchcock, Orson Welles, or Billy Wilder. Those
who do discuss him today, though, almost always agree with the French theorists’ more
complimentary appraisal of his works; he is considered “radical,” “visionary,” and
“subversive,” when considered at all.
Thackeray’s image, too, has undergone a series of transformations over the past
century and a half. By his contemporaries, he was generally regarded as a shrewd, often
scathing social satirist; Charlotte Brontë even went so far as to see him “as the first
social regenerator of the day—as the very master of that working corps who would
restore to rectitude the warped system of things.”
8
After his death, however, more and
more critics began to complain of the lack of continuity and unity in Thackeray’s novels;
like Sturges, Thackeray’s “showmanship” and “dislike of fixed purposes” made many
critics accuse his works of feeling like mere “pastiche,” or worse—N. N. Feltes, for one,
has condemningly labeled Henry Esmond “a commodity-book, of which bourgeois
moralism is a distinctively intrusive ideological determination.”
9

8
Charlotte Brontë, qtd. in Thackeray: The Critical Heritage, eds. Geoffrey Tillotson and Donald Hawes
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), 169.
The problem,
according to Catherine Peters, was that Thackeray posthumously came to be “revered as
the typical exponent of Victorian middle-class values,” so that when those values came to
be seen as stuffy and outdated, “Thackeray’s reputation suffered a decline from which it
9
N.N. Feltes, Modes of Production of Victorian Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 35.
22
has never really recovered.”
10
Although Thackeray’s reputation may not be now what it
once was, Foucault’s reassessment of “Victorian” values has inspired recent critics to
reassess Thackeray’s political and moral emphasis; indeed, the vast majority of post-
Foucauldian analysis of Thackeray’s work tends to focus its energy on demonstrating
how very much that work was able to “get away with.” Nina Auerbach, for instance, has
professed that she “can think of no mid-Victorian novel more incisively outspoken” on
the subject of “the dispossession of actual women” than Thackeray’s Henry Esmond, and
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has seen in the same text a “radical and ahistorical critique of
patriarchy.”
11
Along the same lines, Peter Shillingsburg has found Thackeray’s
“psychological realism” to be “profoundly subversive to the establishment,” Barbara
Hardy has hailed Thackeray for being “radical in the way of his great ancestors in moral
satire, Juvenal, Bunyan, Swift, Johnson,” and Ann Monsarrat has congratulated him for
“stripping naked ... the hollow household gods of middle-class respectability and
aristocratic superiority.”
12
The current critical trend is, then, to credit Thackeray and Sturges with the same
kind of “courageous fugitivism” from Victorian prudery that the pre-Foucauldian modern
world attributed to the anonymous author of My Secret Life. But I consider this view of
Thackeray and Sturges to be as misleading as Foucault finds the corresponding view of

10
Catherine Peters, Thackeray: A Writer’s Life (Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 1999), x.
11
Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1982), 100. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 148.
12
Peter L. Shillingsburg, Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and W.M. Thackeray (Charlottesville:
University Press of Virginia, 1992), 209; Barbara Hardy, The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in
Thackeray (Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburg Press, 1972), 21; Ann Monsarrat, An Uneasy Victorian:
Thackeray the Man 1811-1863 (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1980), 174.
23
his nameless English pornographer to be. Whereas most modern critics applaud
Thackeray and Sturges for their ability to say so much in spite of the restrictions imposed
on them by their cultures’ censorious attitudes, this chapter will demonstrate the extent to
which those attitudes paradoxically inspired the artists to produce an ever greater quantity
of discourse—indeed, a veritable Foucauldian “discursive explosion”—relating to
subjects that were purportedly silenced. By closely examining two specific texts written
by Thackeray and Sturges—and, in particular, two of the alluringly ambiguous characters
brought to life within those texts—this chapter will attempt to detangle the complex
relationship between censorship, discourse, and perverse pleasure in narrative art.
________________________________________________
Since so many critics have used the respective biographical backgrounds of
Thackeray and Sturges to bolster their arguments about the artists’ brazen radicalism, I
will begin with a brief foray into those biographies myself—each one of which contains
enough drama and “plot” to make for a rather good novel or film of its own. Thackeray,
for one, was born into the middle of a stereotypical romance novel scenario: his mother,
Anne Becher, had fallen madly in love with a dashing young army officer when she was
only fifteen, but her family disapproved of the financially imprudent match so adamantly
that they falsely informed her that he had died of a sudden fever. Broken-hearted almost
to the point of physical illness, Anne was sent off to find a more “suitable” mate in India,
where she eventually succumbed and married Richmond Makepeace Thackeray, a
wealthy (though not particularly dashing) secretary to the East India Company’s Calcutta
Board of Revenue. The couple welcomed their only child William less than a year later
24
in 1811, but it was shortly after his birth that Anne’s romance plot came to a climax when
her husband inadvertently invited her long-lost lover, still very much alive and now living
in India, over for dinner. Anne soon confessed the whole story—including her continued
feelings for the officer—to Richmond; when she did, it is said that “he listened gravely,
said little, but was never the same to Anne again.”
13
Although a proper romance novel would surely end on this note of connubial
bliss, young William’s story was just beginning, and beginning on a rather painful note:
at the tender age of five, he had to return to England alone while his mother remained in
India and married her lover. (Five was, in truth, a rather late age for this separation,
according to prevailing colonial custom.) William was devastated by the sudden loss of
his beloved mother’s companionship, and his misery only grew as he was tossed into the
“suddenly stern world” of the English public school system that was so very different
from what he had known in Calcutta.
That “never” was not particularly
long, however, as Richmond died of a (real) fever of his own only three years later. After
a suitable period of mourning, Anne and her lieutenant were officially free to wed at last.
14
Thackeray’s early sense of skepticism towards
the British way of life was reinforced several years later by his mother when she finally
joined him in England but pronounced its social climate to be “sadly selfish and
censorious compared with the close communities of India” and its rigid class system to be
“intolerable.”
15

13
Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1955), 63.
Nevertheless, Thackeray was sent on to continue his very British
education at the renowned Charterhouse boarding school and, eventually, at Trinity
14
Monsarrat, An Uneasy Victorian, 13.
15
Ibid, 15.
25
College, Cambridge, where he floundered in mediocrity for a year and a half, lost a large
sum of money gambling, and then dropped out. Soon thereafter, Thackeray realized that
most of his patrimony had been whittled away, and suddenly found himself in need of a
real job.
This need was only compounded when, in 1836, he married a poor Irish girl by
the name of Isabella Shawe while living the life of a struggling painter in Paris. Isabella
was shy and quiet and gentle and delicate—to a fault, as he would soon discover. For
Isabella was, in effect, too “delicate” to handle life; she suffered severe bouts of
postpartum depression after the births of each of the three daughters she bore him, and
the last bout was so severe that she never recovered from it. Thackeray did everything in
his power to help her, but ultimately he found it necessary (due to her suicidal and even
homicidal tendencies) to put her in an institution for the rest of her life. His wife’s
insanity would prove to be the central emotional tragedy of Thackeray’s life—not only
did he lose the woman he loved, but he was also prevented (both legally and, from a
Victorian point of view, morally) from finding anyone new to take her place. Here,
again, his life story sounds strikingly similar to a work of fiction: Jane Eyre, to be exact,
whose unhappy hero Mr. Rochester was for a time believed to be based on Thackeray
himself when Charlotte Brontë, not realizing that he had a real-life “madwoman” in his
“attic,” dedicated the second edition of the novel to him.
In spite of his personal struggles, however, Thackeray had by this point become
one of the most respected and celebrated novelists in England. Yet it is important to
acknowledge that his journey to get to that position had been shaped more by financial
26
need than by the artistic pull of his own literary genius. In fact, Thackeray only turned to
novel-writing after he had failed at several other vocational ventures, including the law,
painting, and an early stab at owning and running his own newspaper. Even after
Thackeray had achieved the kind of success he was hoping for with the publication of
Vanity Fair, monetary considerations continued to play a key role in his creative
endeavors. For as much as Thackeray the writer may have wanted to critique and satirize
the hypocritical society in which he lived, Thackeray the father, husband, and man
wanted even more for the members of that society to keep buying his books. And buy his
books they did: by the time of his sudden death at only fifty-two, Thackeray had
accumulated enough wealth to leave his daughters and his wife (who, ironically, survived
him by thirty years) a fair inheritance indeed.
Whereas the basic financial trajectory of Thackeray’s life was, then, that he went
from rich to poor to rich, the trajectory of Preston Sturges’s life was precisely the
opposite; he went from poor to rich to poor. Life started out for Sturges in the Irish
section of Chicago, where he was born in 1898 to an attractive and vital (though not
particularly well-off) young woman named Mary Dempsey and an alcoholic traveling
salesman named Edmund Biden. Within a year of his birth, however, his parents’
marriage dissolved and Sturges found himself being whisked off to live in Paris with his
mother, who was sure she was meant for a grander life than could be found in Illinois.
Soon after arriving in Paris, Mary met and became best friends with another Irish-
American expatriate, the dancer Isadora Duncan, who Mary believed “saved” her young
baby’s life by giving him large doses of champagne when he came down with a bad case
27
of pneumonia. For several years, Mary and Isadora somehow managed to care for young
Sturges while still living the Bohemian life that Mary had come to Paris to experience.
After a while, however, funds began to run scarce, and Mary decided to accept an old
suitor of hers back in Chicago, a successful stockbroker named Solomon Sturges. After
their marriage in 1902, Solomon legally adopted Mary’s son, changed his name from
“Edmund Preston Biden” to “Preston Sturges,” and told the boy from then on that he was
his real father.
One condition of this marriage was that Mary would still get to spend six months
out of every year in her beloved Paris, and so Preston was thrown into a bi-polar sort of
existence; half of his childhood was spent gallivanting around Europe with the likes of
Isadora Duncan, Enrico Caruso, even the King of Spain, while the other half was spent
living a calm, solid, rather mundane Midwestern life. Hence, as a child, Sturges was
exposed to two very different ways of thinking: his mother’s way revolved around art
and passion and excitement, his father’s around business and financial security.
Interestingly, when Solomon and Mary decided to divorce seven years later and Preston
was asked to choose between his mother and his father, he did not hesitate before
selecting his father. It was only at that point that Mary informed her son of the truth
about his parentage, which meant that his “choice” was effectively made for him already.
The rest of Sturges’s youth was spent entirely with his mother and Isadora in Europe,
although he did get to put some of his father’s business acumen to use in his late teen
years after his mother opened “the first modern beauty salon” and he started working as
manager of several of its branch operations. After a brief stint in the Air Reserve during
28
World War I, Sturges invented and patented a “kiss-proof” lipstick to be sold in his
mother’s salons, and in 1922 he married a girl named Estelle Mudge and tried to settle
into a safe, quiet life as a freelance inventor. Five years later, however, his marriage was
over, his inventions had failed to take off, and he suffered a bout with acute appendicitis
that almost ended his life. While in the hospital convalescing, Sturges on a whim wrote
his first play; within a couple of years, he had written his first smash Broadway hit.
Sturges spent the next decade writing plays and then screenplays, some of which
were successful and some of which were not.
16
But it was his 1940 foray into
directing—and, more specifically, into directing what he himself had written—that turned
Sturges (at age 42) into the new Hollywood “boy wonder.”
17

16
For two examples of Sturges’s successful screenwriting ventures before he became a director, see
Mitchell Leisen’s Easy Living (1937) and Remember the Night (1940).
The string of critical and
financial hits that were to follow within a time-span of only a few short years, including
The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, The
Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero, was unprecedented. By
1943, Sturges was the most touted director in the country, and had the paycheck to prove
it. But this success was not to last long, for 1943 was also the year that Sturges got into a
contract dispute with his home studio, Paramount, and decided to leave them in favor of
becoming his “own boss.” To that end, he joined forces with the similarly eccentric and
entrepreneurial Howard Hughes to create the California Pictures Corporation, which
Hughes was to finance and Sturges was to run. The venture was, however, an
unmitigated failure, and the two parted ways after only a couple of years without
17
Sturges is generally credited with being the first true Hollywood “writer/director,” though his 1940 debut
in that role was quickly replicated by the likes of Orson Welles (who directed and co-wrote Citizen Kane)
and John Huston (who adapted and directed The Maltese Falcon), both in 1941.
29
releasing a single film. Sturges’s next move was to Twentieth Century Fox, where he
was given an enormous salary and creative carte blanche. But his good fortune seemed
to have run out, as the first two films he made there were both box office disasters and
Fox decided to let him go. And that was pretty much it for Sturges—he moved back to
Paris after Hollywood gave him the cold shoulder, where he wrote a play here, a
screenplay there, but never made quite enough money to pay for his expensive habits and
all the alimony he owed to the four ex-wives that he had accumulated over the years. In
1959, he visited New York in the hopes of getting a Broadway engagement for his latest
play and died suddenly of a heart attack in a mostly unpaid-for room at the Algonquin
Hotel.
These biographies may appear at first glance to have little in common other than
sheer theatricality, but if we consider them in terms of their potential influence on the
artists’ attitudes towards moral censorship, we discover many analogous elements. For
example, the fact that Thackeray, as a native of Colonial India, and Sturges, as an
infantile American expatriate, could both simultaneously identify as “insiders” and
“outsiders” of their own cultures has been used by many critics to account for their ability
to excoriate those cultures in a uniquely empathetic way.
18

18
See, for example, Ann Monsarrat’s biography of Thackeray, An Uneasy Victorian, or James Agee’s
many biographical references to Sturges’s half-American, half-European upbringing in his various reviews
of his works in Agee on Film.
Other critics, meanwhile,
have found the influence of Bohemian Paris on both artists’ formative years to be the root
of the more sophisticated, more “cosmopolitan” treatment of characters and sexual
30
matters in their works,
19
while still others have focused on the string of unhappy,
unsuccessful marriages that Thackeray and Sturges either witnessed or experienced
firsthand to explain their narratives’ frequently scathing depictions of the nuclear family
ideal that so clearly contradicted one of moral censorship’s basic commandments: “The
sanctity of the institution of marriage and the home shall be upheld.”
20
In particular, the
dissolution of Thackeray and Sturges’s parents’ marriages—which led, in both cases, to
the more prominent position of “mother figures” in their lives—is often credited with
inspiring the artists’ surprisingly strong, surprisingly radical concern for “women’s
issues.”
21

19
See R.D. McMaster, Thackeray’s Cultural Frame of Reference (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1991) or Leslie Brill, “Redemptive Comedy in the Films of Alfred Hitchcock and Preston Sturges:
‘Are Snakes Necessary?’” in Alfred Hitchcock Centenary Essays, ed. Richard Allen and S. Ishii Gonzales
(London: British Film Institute, 1999).
But Thackeray and Sturges were also, of necessity, deeply concerned with
financial issues, and were always highly conscious of balancing their desire to make good
art with their desire to make good money. They both very much wanted to be successful,
popular artists—even if that meant complying with the conventions of moral censorship
on a surface level. Or, viewed another way, moral censorship can be said to have
actively helped Thackeray and Sturges achieve the popularity they desired: by officially
following the moral guidelines demanded by the Charles Mudies and Joseph Breens of
the world, the artists were able to ensure that their works would be circulated and
20
The language quoted here is taken from the 1930 Production Code, but easily applies to Victorian moral
standards as well. For examples of critics who focus on the artists’ dealings with unhappy marriages, see
Micael M. Clarke, Thackeray and Women (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1995) or Diane
Jacobs, Christmas in July: The Life and Art of Preston Sturges (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992).
21
See Katharine M. Rogers, “The Pressure of Convention on Thackeray’s Women” in Modern Language
Review 67.2 (April 1972) or Jacobs, Christmas in July.
31
marketed as mainstream, accessible, acceptable texts and would attract the broadest
audience possible.
We can, then, take a certain amount of circumstantial evidence from Thackeray
and Sturges’s biographical backgrounds to explain why they would have wanted to rebel
against the dictates of moral censorship—and a certain amount to explain why they
would have wanted to adhere to those dictates. Even more conflicting is the evidence
found in their personal letters and papers: Sturges complains at one point in his semi-
autobiography
22
that “Efforts to make all motion picture plays suitable to all ages from
the cradle to the grave have so emasculated, Comstocked and bowdlerized this wonderful
form of theatre that many adults have been driven away from it entirely,”
23
but he insists
at another point that anyone who was offended by his most controversial film, The
Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, must have been reading it incorrectly, since his “intention”
in telling the story was simply “to show what happens to young girls who disregard their
parents’ advice and who confuse patriotism with promiscuity. As I do not work in a
church, I tried to adorn my sermon with laughter so that people would go to see the
picture instead of staying away from it.”
24

22
Sturges’s “semi-autobiography” is an amalgamation of diary entries, letters, and snippets of an
unfinished autobiography that his final wife cut and pasted together after his death, and published as
Preston Sturges (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990).
Thackeray’s letters, meanwhile, make him
sound at times like a staunch opponent of the judgmental self-righteousness of moral
censorship (“And it seems to me hence almost blasphemous: that any blind prejudiced
sinful mortal being should dare to be unhappy about the belief of another; should dare to
say Lo I am right and my brothers must go to damnation—I Know God and my brother
23
Sturges, Preston Sturges, 301.
24
Ibid, 300.
32
doesn’t”
25
); at times like a pious moralizer in his own right (“And indeed, a solemn
prayer to God Almighty was in my thoughts that we [novelists] may never forget truth &
Justice and kindness as the great ends of our profession … [which] seems to me to be as
serious as the Parson’s own”
26
Although there are other texts by Thackeray and Sturges that are more explicitly
about the artistic process (i.e., Pendennis; Sullivan’s Travels) or that contain more
explicitly “objectionable” material (i.e., Catherine: A Story; The Miracle of Morgan’s
Creek), I will be focusing my analysis on two works that speak to the issue of artistic
censorship in a particularly helpful, though indirect, manner: Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
). Since we cannot find a concrete answer to the question
of how Thackeray and Sturges “really” felt about moral censorship in their private
papers, we must turn to the artists’ fictional narratives to help us understand their
attitudes more fully.
27

25
Thackeray, The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, Ed. Gordon N. Ray
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1945-6), 2:206-7.

and Sturges’s The Lady Eve. The most obviously subversive element that The Lady Eve
has in common with Vanity Fair is the discomfiting presence of its morally ambiguous
anti-heroine, Jean Harrington (Barbara Stanwyck). Like Becky Sharp before her, Jean is
a female adventuress on the high seas whose narrative job it is to disrupt the order and
equanimity of the patriarchal Moral World. In Sturges’s telling, this World is personified
by the priggish millionaire with whom Jean falls in love, Charles “Hopsie” Pike (Henry
Fonda). Charles’s main problem is that he cannot see past the categories of “good” and
“evil” that the Moral World has prescribed for him; or, as Jean explains to him in what
26
Thackeray, Letters, 2:282.
27
Vanity Fair does contain several “direct” discussions of censorship that are found in Thackeray’s
authorial asides, but the diegetic story only addresses the issue indirectly.
33
becomes something of the film’s mantra, “You see, Hopsie, you don’t know very much
about girls; the best ones aren’t as good as you probably think they are, and the bad ones
aren’t as bad—not nearly as bad.”
This mantra is, of course, directly antithetical to that of the Production Code,
which insists that “evil” may only be “presented” in a Hollywood film if, “throughout,
the audience feels sure that evil is wrong and good is right.” Joseph Breen, the de facto
head of the Production Code Administration from 1934 to 1954, worked hard to rid The
Lady Eve of its blurry morality, and believed that the best way to do so was by making
moral improvements to the character of Jean. Because one of the worst crimes that a
woman could commit, in the eyes of the Hays Office, was the “crime” of promiscuity,
Breen’s most unbending demand was that Sturges “entirely eliminate” a scene from the
film that contained “the definite suggestion of a sex affair between your two leads,” as he
described it.
28

28
Breen to Luigi Luraschi, 9 October 1940, The Lady Eve Production Code Administration file, Margaret
Herrick Library.
Although, as we shall later see, Sturges did not heed all (or even most) of
Breen’s censorship recommendations, he did fully excise the scene in question from his
film, though the ramifications of that excision may not have been quite what the PCA
intended them to be. The scene was supposed to occur on the second night of Jean and
Charles’s shipboard romance, after Charles has made his long “I’ve always loved you”
speech and Jean has prevented her father from cheating Charles out of too much money
at cards. Following this card game, Charles was supposed to be called away from the
table by the ship’s purser, who would then show him an incriminating photo of Jean and
her father that labeled them as professional con artists. And it was at this point that
34
Charles was supposed to engage in the “definite sex affair” with Jean—after he knew of
her disreputable past, after he knew that marriage would not be in their future. In this
version of the script, Charles is guilty of the conniving cruelty that Jean wrongly
attributes to him in the final version: “If you were just trying to make me feel cheap, and
hurt me, you succeeded handsomely.” Yet as censorable as such extra-marital activity
may have appeared to Breen, the removal of that activity actually stripped the film of its
one moment of assertive male power; the one moment where the hero knows more than
the heroine and willfully controls the romantic interplay. By forcing Sturges to take out
this moment, the Code inadvertently helped to reinforce the film’s feminist tendencies—
in the final draft, Jean maintains her sexual control throughout the story and seeks
revenge not because she is a poor, damaged creature who has been taken advantage of by
a manipulative man, but rather because she wants to knock the man (her moral censor)
off his high-minded, sanctimonious pedestal.
Becky Sharp wages a similar battle against her culture’s self-righteous
censoriousness in Vanity Fair, though gender plays a very different role in her struggle.
Because Thackeray uses the image of the prudish, judgmental “Mrs. Grundy” figure to
personify the Moral World as he sees it,
29

29
See introduction, note 3 for a definition of Victorian Grundyism. Interestingly, in Thackeray’s
“Roundabout Papers,” he makes it clear that Mrs. Grundy’s censoring, silencing influence over him is not
quite as one-sided as one would expect. After one of his preemptive anti-censorship rants, he writes: “here
I am smothering dear old Mrs. Grundy’s objections, before she has opened her mouth.”
he pits Becky against an army of female
characters who are priggishly scandalized by her refusal to be quiet and submissive and
“know her place.” The list of Mrs. Grundies that Becky encounters throughout the course
of the story is a lengthy one indeed, and includes the likes of Miss Pinkerton, Mrs. Bute
35
Crawley, Miss Firkin, Miss Briggs, Miss Crawley, Lady Gaunt, Lady Bareacres, Lady
Southdown, Lady Steyne, even Amelia Sedley, whose first few lines of dialogue in the
text are all markedly Grundy-ish in tone (i.e., “How could you do so, Rebecca?”; “O
Rebecca, Rebecca, for shame;” and, simply, “Hush!” [10]) Although Amelia and Becky
spend most of the rest of the story far away from one another, leading their own separate
lives, the moral juxtaposition of their characters that is introduced in this opening scene
continues to serve as a central narrative concern. Many readers of Vanity Fair have
gleaned from this juxtaposition a similar lesson to that taught by The Lady Eve, about
“good girls” not being as good as people think they are and “bad girls” not being as bad.
For as much as Becky may officially function as the novel’s irredeemably corrupt
villainess, there is an unmistakable textual undercurrent that seems to give preference to
her characteristics of intelligence, humor, and cunning over Amelia’s attributes of
masochism, obsessive-compulsiveness, and hypocrisy.
In fact, as several critics have noted, Becky and Jean are given such preference
within their respective narratives that they are effectively granted a sort of surrogate
authorial status. Though Becky and Jean are not novelists like Arthur Pendennis or
filmmakers like John Sullivan, they are, unmistakably, artists of another variety: they are
both con-artists, performers, story-tellers par excellence. This “artistic” identification
does not, in and of itself, necessarily mark Becky and Jean as authorial stand-ins for
Thackeray and Sturges, but early moments in their respective texts do appear to draw a
specific parallel between Becky and Jean’s cagy artistry and Thackeray and Sturges’s
narrative art. A typical critical nod to the metaphoric importance of these moments can
36
be found in Stanley Cavell’s analysis of the scene from The Lady Eve in which Jean peers
through her rectangular, movie-screen-shaped compact mirror at the failed attempts of
her fellow female shipmates to capture Charles’s sexual attention. After describing all
the “directorial” powers that Jean is granted in the scene—from framing and blocking the
other characters’ actions to scripting and narrating the other characters’ lines—Cavell
concludes that Jean must be meant to “represent” Sturges, and to reveal his cynical,
skeptical attitude about the world at large:
That the woman is some kind of stand-in for the role of director fits our
understanding that the man, the sucker, is a stand-in for the role of the
audience. As this surrogate she informs us openly that the attitude the film
begins with is one of cynicism or skepticism, earned by brilliance, and that
she is fully capable of being thus open and yet tripping us up so that we
are brought from our privacy onto her ground, where her control of us will
be all but complete.
30

The fact that this scene so completely upends classical Hollywood’s tendency to present
its female characters as objects of the male gaze
31
In Vanity Fair, there is a comparable early moment in which Becky is permitted
to usurp Thackeray’s narrative—and illustrative—power, when she writes a pair of
lengthy letters to her “dear” friend Amelia satirically narrating all of her initial
experiences at Queen’s Crawley and includes a sketch caricaturing two of her female
—both by positioning Jean as primary
enactor of the gaze and by positioning Charles as the conspicuous object of all the female
passengers’ man-hungry glances—also bolsters the contemporary critical belief in
Sturges’s intended defiance of the unspoken rules of Hollywood cinema.

30
Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1981), 66.
31
Laura Mulvey originated the concept of the objectifying male gaze in her seminal essay, “Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3 (Autumn 1975): 6-18.
37
rivals for Rawdon Crawley’s attention. The fact that Becky’s sketch bears no visible
stylistic difference from the rest of the illustrations in the novel is rarely seen as a case of
poor craftsmanship on Thackeray’s part; it is, instead, viewed as a way in which
“Becky’s” mockery is subtly connected with Thackeray’s own mockery—as is Becky’s
distinctly Thackerayan epistolary tone. Thackeray is, however, careful to contradict this
implied connection on an “official” level: “Otherwise,” he defends, “you might fancy it
was I who was sneering at the practice of devotion, which Miss Sharp finds so ridiculous;
that it was I who laughed good-humouredly at the reeling old Silenus of a baronet—
whereas the laughter comes from one who has no reverence except for prosperity and no
eye for anything beyond success” (84). But the specific language of this passage, with its
references to Becky’s keen sense of “ridicule” and her “good-humoured” laughter, does
more to reinforce the Becky-Thackeray connection than to dismantle it. It is, rather
blatantly, a “protesting-too-much” sort of moment; in so adamantly denying that Becky’s
satirical view of the world has anything to do with his own, the narrator effectively calls
our attention to the possibility that her view is little more than a thinly veiled substitute
for his own view, dangerously irreverent as it may be. Thus, because the morally
rebellious heroines of Vanity Fair and The Lady Eve are so often and so obviously
aligned with their respective authors, their diegetic battles against moral prudery and
censoriousness would seem to be an accurate metaphor for Thackeray and Sturges’s
artistic struggles with those same forces.
Even if we accept this premise to be true, however, a closer look at the diegetic
battles in question reveals a far more complex relationship between the texts’ “rebels”
38
and “prudes” than a purely adversarial one. This is easier to see in The Lady Eve, since
its alleged moral adversaries do, after all, wind up falling passionately in love with each
other. Significantly, Jean’s romantic attraction to Charles seems to be directly related to
his prim, proper, schoolboy demeanor; the more he blushes and stammers, the more
sexually enticed she becomes. Although this could be said to stem from her desire to be
the one in “control” of the relationship—think, for example, of the “little short guy” that
she claims to envision as her romantic ideal, just so he’ll be forced to “look up” to her—it
could also be said to stem from the perverse pleasure she finds in trying to outsmart and
outplay the man her father describes as their self-“righteous,” “narrow-minded” moral
foe. When this perverse pleasure really kicks into overdrive, of course, is after Charles
romantically rejects her on, it must be noted, a very “moral” basis—as soon as he finds
out that she is a professional gambler, he no longer considers her to be morally qualified
to be his wife. From this point on, the motivation for Jean’s attraction to Charles is best
summed up in her cutting comment, “I need him like the axe needs the turkey.” This
comment proves, however, to be truer than Jean perhaps intended it to be: after she drops
her metaphorical “axe” by verbally cuckolding Charles on their honeymoon train ride,
Jean appears to feel an immediate sense of deflation and loss. Instead of reveling in her
triumphant revenge and enjoying the sight of Charles slipping in the mud while
deboarding the train, Jean watches his departure solemnly, almost sadly, as if she finds
herself missing her moral opponent—her turkey—before he has even stepped out of
sight.
39
But the sense of deflation in the face of victory that is hinted at through Jean’s
unhappy expression is explicitly described to us in Vanity Fair. For Becky’s great
moment of triumph comes not when she achieves romantic, marital, or even financial
success, but rather when she conquers Society—when all of her moral opponents (her
Mrs. Grundies) are finally forced to accept her into the most respectable, elite, upper
class social circles that England has to offer. Like Jean, however, Becky feels much less
actual pleasure in this moment than she had anticipated:
Becky has often spoken in subsequent years of this season of her life,
when she moved among the very greatest circles of London fashion. Her
success excited, elated, and then bored her…. Becky’s former
acquaintances hated and envied her: the poor woman herself was yawning
in spirit. “I wish I were out of it,” she said to herself. “I would rather be a
parson’s wife, and teach a Sunday School than this; or a sergeant’s lady
and ride in the regimental waggon; or, O how much gayer it would be to
wear spangles and trowsers, and dance before a booth at a fair.” (503-4)
32

Ironically, the end of the novel shows Becky performing at a very different kind of booth
at a very different kind of fair—it is, we are told, a stall at a “Fancy Fair” whose proceeds
are elicited “for the benefit of … hapless beings” (689). But her presence at this charity
event is, we are also told, part of her strategy for winning yet another bout with her moral
detractors—detractors who, in the face of her separation from Rawdon Crawley due to
allegations of adultery and her suspicious inheritance of Jos Sedley’s life insurance

32
It is interesting to note that this passage is one of the many examples of Thackeray toying with our sense
of who is speaking—although the passage clearly marks Becky’s comment about wishing to “dance before
a booth at a fair” as something that she “said to herself,” it is immediately followed by Lord Steyne’s reply,
“You would do it very well,” at which point we are told that Becky “used to tell the great man her ennuis
and perplexities in her artless way—they amused him.” This moment has much in common, incidentally,
with a scene from The Lady Eve in which Jean starts off by telling Sir Alfred her fantasy of how she will
reel Charles in and get him to propose to her for a second time, but after we see the scene that we thought
was merely a figment of Jean’s imagination, we realize that we have actually been watching what “really”
takes place next in the story. By so brashly tinkering with our sense of diegetic reality, both Thackeray and
Sturges provide a head-spinning additional layer of artistic ambiguity.
40
money, have more moral ammunition against her than ever: “She has her enemies. Who
has not? Her life is her answer to them. She busies herself in works of piety. She goes
to church, and never without a footman. Her name is in all the Charity Lists” (689). The
fact that Becky chooses to return to a life of clawing her way up the moral respectability
ladder after she has already discovered how dull it is to hang from the ladder’s highest
rungs demonstrates the degree to which Becky finds pleasure in the game of moral
combat itself, rather than in the rewards to be reaped by winning the game.
In a way, then, Becky and Jean’s perverse attraction to the more censorious
figures in their respective stories—Charles in The Lady Eve, the string of judgmental
Mrs. Grundies that Becky is constantly trying to win over in Vanity Fair—can be
understood in terms of the pleasure of contention, of taking on a difficult challenge. But
how are we to understand the censorious figures’ magnetic attraction to Becky and Jean?
In Charles’s case, of course, sex is involved; from the moment he meets Jean, he is, as he
puts it, “cockeyed” with lust. But this immediate attraction cannot be explained by her
redolent perfume and his recent trip up the Amazon (where “they don’t use perfume”)
alone—for until Jean violently forces herself into Charles’s acquaintance, he is shown to
be utterly devoid of lust, even in the face of the most overt seductive moves that his
female shipmates can muster (most of whom, one would imagine, are doused in as much
perfume as Jean is wearing, if not more.) Instead, we must assume that there is
something in Jean’s personality that Charles finds to be particularly alluring, perhaps
because it is so hard to define—indeed, the morning after they meet, he admits to Jean
that part of her appeal lies in her unpredictability and moral ambiguity: “I could imagine
41
a life with you being a series of ups and downs, lights and shadows, sometimes irritation,
but very much happiness.” Although Becky’s moral detractors might think that they are
deriving less “happiness,” more “irritation” from their encounters with her, the truth is
that they are as fascinated—and, even, as pleased—by her inventively slick social
maneuvers as Charles is by Jean’s sexy perfume and unpredictable nature. This is why
Becky, for all her dubious morals and dealings, is so much more socially visible, so much
more “talked about” than Vanity Fair’s sweeter, purer heroine, Amelia Sedley.
It is this attribute of Becky and Jean’s that interests me most: their “to-be-talked-
about-ness,” to paraphrase Laura Mulvey’s terminology.
33

33
Mulvey refers to the “to-be-looked-at-ness” of the objectified female in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema.”
Though this to-be-talked-
about-ness is partially related to their physical attractiveness (the very attractiveness that
Mulvey considers to be so objectifying in classical Hollywood film), it is also related to
the logic of scandal that Foucault finds to be so perverse and paradoxical in Victorian
culture—the logic wherein discourse is increased by feelings like shock and moral
indignation rather than suppressed by them. Before examining the ways in which the
logic of scandal plays out in Becky and Jean’s narratives, however, I want briefly to
consider another film of Sturges’s whose plot is quite explicitly concerned with the
discursive ramifications of scandal: The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944). In it, the
heroine (Trudy Kockenlocker) achieves such a high level of “to-be-talked-about-ness”
that she finds herself being vigorously discussed by newspapermen, governors, even
Fascist dictators like Benito Mussolini (who reportedly “resigns” when he hears her
story) and Adolph Hitler (who pugnaciously “demands a recount.”) This extreme
42
proliferation of discourse all stems from one morally ambiguously sexual act—Trudy’s
drunken elopement and one night stand with a soldier whose name she can’t quite
remember, resulting in her highly scandalous pregnancy. Ironically, “proliferation” is
precisely what saves Trudy and her feckless replacement boyfriend, Norval Jones, from
the permanent social damage that such a scandal would ordinarily inflict upon them:
because her sexual act yields so much fruit—sextuplets, to be exact—her town and state
and country all desperately want to be able to claim her medical miracle as their own.
And so, in a conclusion that demonstrates the power of patriarchal discourse while at the
same time exposing its slippery falseness, Sturges has Morgan Creek’s state governor
(and the governor’s conniving mob boss) unilaterally declare Norval to be the sextuplets’
real father, Norval and Trudy to have been married all along, and the “scandal” in
question to be null and void.
But as discursively resonant as The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek may be, The Lady
Eve is more pointed in its derision of the logic of scandal, thanks to its story-within-a-
story narrative structure. For although Jean is the victim of “scandal” in a fairly direct
way herself (her love affair with Charles is abruptly interrupted when the ship’s purser
hands Charles the picture that silently convicts her of belonging to the scandalous
profession of “con artist”), the film’s more memorable tale of scandal is told by Jean,
with the assistance of Sir Alfred, who specifically gives it the “gaslight melodrama” title
of “Cecilia, or the Coachman’s Daughter.” According to Jean and Sir Alfred’s story,
“Jean” and “Eve” are identical twins separated at birth, the product of an English
noblewoman’s illicit affair with a lowly coachman, “Handsome Harry,” who takes one
43
daughter with him to live the seedy life of a professional con artist (this, of course, being
our Jean), but leaves one daughter behind to grow up thinking she is the perfectly
legitimate heir to the Sidwich title and fortune (this being the Lady Eve.) As outlandishly
far-fetched as this saga may be, Charles “swallows” it—“like a wolf,” we are told—
because it allows him to “spiritually carve [Jean] in half, taking the good without the bad,
the lady without the woman, the ideal without the reality,” as Stanley Cavell has put it.
34
Interestingly, the sensational tale that Jean and Sir Alfred concoct for Charles is a
somewhat altered version of the short story upon which The Lady Eve was originally
based. In this story, first written by Monckton Hoffe as “The Two Bad Hats” but
significantly revised by Jeanne Bartlett before Sturges was given it to work on in 1938, a
wealthy English socialite does run off with a lowly horse dealer and give birth to twin
daughters, named Salome and Sheba—the first of whom is as “bad” a “hat” as her
disgraceful mother, the second of whom dies young, but is resurrected (via
impersonation) whenever the “bad” sister thinks it would be convenient to look “good.”
And this is where “The Coachman’s Daughter” begins to bleed into The Lady Eve; like

But Jean also succeeds with her palpably ridiculous ruse precisely because the ruse plays
on what Charles considers to be his canny intellectual skepticism. As he
condescendingly explains to his less intellectual (but far more perceptive) bodyguard
Muggsy, “If she didn’t look so exactly like the other girl I might be suspicious, but….
you see, you don’t understand psychology. If you wanted to pretend you were somebody
else you’d glue a muff on your chin and the dog wouldn’t even bark at you.”

34
Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, 61.
44
Jean, Salome falls in love with a proper, puritanical, wealthy young man (in “The Two
Bad Hats,” his name is Geoffrey Pallas rather than Charles Pike) and actively works to
show him the error of his moralistic ways. The way she does this is by alternately dating
Pallas under the guise of each sister—the angelic Sheba and the devilish Salome—and
showing him that the sister that he thinks is morally wrong for him is really the love of
his life. As Bartlett explains in her version of the story, “To love her as Sheba is only
loving himself, but to love her as Salome is honest love, because it’s against his every
conviction.”
35
I am, though, less concerned with the plot points from “The Two Bad Hats” that
made their way into Sturges’s screenplay than I am with the plot points that made their
way into Jean and Sir Alfred’s gaslight melodrama within Sturges’s screenplay. For the
key difference between Eve and “Cecilia” is that the latter is so blatantly marked for the
film’s viewers as a fiction of scandal, thereby allowing them to observe the discursive
results of that fiction from a more knowing, complicit standpoint. Hence, in spite of Sir
Alfred’s ostensible attempts to prevent Charles from repeating the details of his
“Coachman’s Daughter” scandal to anyone else (i.e., “You must never mention a word of
this to a soul,” and “Silence! To the grave! And even beyond!”), the audience
understands the extent to which Sir Alfred is precisely invested in the dissemination of
that story, since it will help to protect the sham identity that it has taken him so many
Much as Sturges may have strayed from Hoffe and Bartlett’s initial
treatments in his reconstruction of their story, he did choose to keep this perverse moral
implicitly intact.

35
Qtd. in Five Screenplays by Preston Sturges, ed. Brian Henderson (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1985), 326.
45
“years to build up.” Similarly, when Jean, as the honeymooning Lady Eve, unleashes the
litany of details about her allegedly “scandalous” past to Charles, both she and the
audience are aware that Charles’s belief in those details will lead to another form of
scandal that will publicly humiliate and shame him: the scandal of filing for divorce
within the first week of his marriage. And so, in yet another scene that involves a group
of high-powered men standing nervously around a telephone, debating how to respond to
the allegations of a woman’s sexual misconduct—think The Miracle of Morgan’s
Creek—we see Charles’s family lawyers trying desperately to keep Jean quiet; they
don’t want her to talk to Charles’s father (“We can’t allow that, that’s entirely
irregular!”), they don’t want her to talk to Charles (“It’s a trick!”), and above all, they
don’t want her to tell her story to the world at large (as Jean’s father explains, they are
offering her hush-money: “They’ll give you half when you leave for Reno and the
balance at the end of six weeks.”) Of course, in their efforts to silence the scandal, all
we see the lawyers do is talk, talk, talk—and the more they talk, the more Charles is
forced to feel the sting of his humiliation over and over again. What both Jean and Sir
Alfred seem to realize is that the invocation of an unspeakable scandal is one of quickest
ways to induce prolific discourse, since, as Foucault explains it, “silence and secrecy are
a shelter for power, anchoring its prohibitions; but they also loosen its holds and provide
for relatively obscure areas of tolerance.”
36

36
Foucault, History of Sexuality, 101.
The logic of scandal is a party to this
perverse paradox, enlisting the shocked indignation of the moral censor to help broadcast
and disseminate supposedly “forbidden” information. By having his characters
46
intentionally manipulate the logic of scandal for their own self-serving and vengeful
purposes, Sturges places particular narrative emphasis on the ironies and hypocrisies of
that logic.
It is difficult, meanwhile, to think of a fictional character who better illustrates the
logic of scandal than our own Becky Sharp, on both diegetic and non-diegetic levels.
Diegetically, a substantial portion of the novel is devoted to discussing the other
characters’ discussion of Becky. As Thackeray puts it in his description of her
triumphant performance in the charades at Gaunt House (a performance that is so talked
about that it even makes it into the Sunday papers): “All voices were for her” (515). Not
surprisingly, within almost every conversation about Becky there is at least one comment
that relates to her morally questionable upbringing or behavior; “Her mother was an
opera girl, and she has been on the stage or worse herself!” is a fairly representative
remark (168). Of course, all of the petty grievances about Becky’s Bohemian
background and flirtatious demeanor pale in comparison with the central moral complaint
that is lodged against her in the course of the story—the complaint of marital infidelity.
(This charge, incidentally, may or may not be true, although the truth of it does not really
matter, from a plot perspective; for, as Rawdon Crawley aptly puts it, “If she’s not
guilty, she’s as bad as guilty” [555].) But even after Becky has seemingly passed the
societal point of no return, we can see that she continues to play an active role in her
community’s discourse. When Rawdon walks out on Becky and their small home on
Curzon Street, for example, we are told that “the late fair tenant of that poor little
mansion was in the meanwhile—where? Who cared? Who asked after a day or two?”
47
(556) In spite of this insinuation that Becky has stopped being “talked about,” however,
we are subsequently told—a mere two sentences later—that “Some people said she had
gone to Naples in pursuit of Lord Steyne; whilst others averred that his Lordship quitted
that city, and fled to Palermo on hearing of Becky’s arrival; some said she was living in
Bierstadt, and had become a dame d’honneur to the Queen of Bulgaria; some that she
was at Boulogne; and others, at a boarding-house at Cheltenham” (556). Thackeray’s
decision to provide us with a myriad of gossipy narrative options rather than have his
omniscient narrator simply tell us where Becky has “really” gone is, I would argue, more
than just another example of his authorial caginess; it is also a subtle indicator that the
amount of Becky-related social discourse has not been too diminished by her new degree
of disrepute.
On a narrative level, too, the text of Vanity Fair talks as much as ever about
Becky Sharp after her fall from grace, in spite of Thackeray’s repeated assertions that he
is morally obligated to avoid such talk. It is, in fact, primarily in the postlapsarian
portion of Becky’s story that Thackeray practices the kind of “noisy silence” to which I
alluded at the outset of this chapter. For example, he tells us that “If we were to give a
full account of her proceedings during a couple of years that followed after the Curzon
Street catastrophe, there might be some reason for people to say this book was improper,”
and that “the less that is said about her doings [during those years] is in fact the better”
(638). But, again, these claims of self-imposed narrative reticence are contradicted by the
fourteen-page-long, fairly detailed chapter describing Becky’s post-Curzon Street life that
follows them, in which we are explicitly told “of the gambling, and of the drinking, and
48
of the going down on her knees to the Reverend Mr. Muff, Ministre Anglican, and
borrowing money of him, and of her coaxing and flirting with Milor Noodle, son of Sir
Noodle, pupil of the Rev. Mr. Muff, whom she used to take into her private room,” and
so on and so forth (644-5). Thackeray’s narrative strategy seems, here, to be a variation
on the logic of scandal—he tells us that he simply cannot discuss certain elements of
Becky’s life because they are too shocking, too dissolute, too immoral; then, after
showing himself to be on the “side” of the morally indignant, he goes right ahead and
discusses them anyway. As long as he keeps using words like “wicked” and “heartless”
and “monstrous” to describe Becky—and keeps depicting her in his illustrations as a
siren, a witch, a Circe, even (“greatest blasphemy of all”) a female Napoleon
Bonaparte—Thackeray is, it seems, free to talk about her crimes and misdemeanors to his
heart’s content.
But the “talk” about Becky does not stop there; as Margaret Oliphant would
snidely remark a few years after the novel’s initial publication, “there is nothing to be
said on the subject of Vanity Fair, which has not been said already.”
37

37
Margaret Oliphant, “Mr. Thackeray and his Novels,” Blackwood’s Magazine, January 1855, in Tillotson
and Hawes, Critical Heritage, 204.
Although the
logic of scandal must surely have played a major role in the proliferation of this
discourse—inasmuch as the more censorious members of the Victorian reading public
were licensed by such logic to talk vociferously about all of the flaws in Becky’s
character, in the name of moral condemnation—there is one review from the time period
that hints at a more complex relationship between Becky’s character and England’s
discursive practices. In this review, written by Lady Eastlake in 1848, we are told:
49
A remarkable novel is a great event for English society. It is a kind of
common friend, about whom people can speak the truth without fear of
being compromised, and confess their emotions without being ashamed.
We are a particularly shy and reserved people, and set about nothing so
awkwardly as the simple art of getting really acquainted with each other…
But there are ways and means for lifting the veil which equally favour our
national idiosyncrasy; and a new and remarkable novel is one of them—
especially the nearer it comes to real life. We invite our neighbor to a
walk with the deliberate and malicious object of getting thoroughly
acquainted with him. We ask no impertinent questions—we proffer no
indiscreet confidences—we do not even sound him, ever so delicately, as
to his opinion of a common friend, for he would be sure not to say, lest we
should go and tell; but we simply discuss Becky Sharp, or Jane Eyre, and
our object is answered at once.
38

Becky Sharp is, according to this description, more than an immoral character who
narrowly escaped being censored out of existence by the repressive sensibilities of
Victorian society; she is one of the central figures around whom private Victorian
discourse was generated.
Becky’s ability to generate discourse cannot, of course, be attributed to the
scandalousness of her behavior alone. Readers talk about her because she so “thoroughly
satisfies our highest beau idéal of feminine wickedness,” but they also talk about her
because she is so “excellently rendered,” because the novel in which she “fills so
important a place” is “one of the most original works of real genius that has of late been
given to the world.”
39

38
Elizabeth Rigby (later, Lady Eastlake), “Vanity Fair—and Jane Eyre,” Quarterly Review, December
1848, in Tillotson and Hawes, Critical Heritage, 77-8.
The final possibility I would like to consider in this chapter is,
therefore, that Thackeray’s—and Sturges’s—artistic “excellence” may also be indebted
to the dictates of moral censorship. We have seen some of the ways in which censorship
and censoriousness actively induce pleasure, and some of the ways in which they actively
39
Rigby, “Vanity Fair”; Oliphant, “Mr. Thackeray and his Novels”; John Forster, review in The Examiner,
22 July 1848, in Tillotson and Hawes, Critical Heritage, 81; 204; 58.
50
induce discourse. But what we are now in a position to understand is the extent to which
Thackeray and Sturges’s much-lauded moral complexity is, in effect, a function of
censorship—in other words, the extent to which censorship serves as an aesthetically
beneficial force. For the very ambiguity that I have been seeing throughout this chapter
as both the target and the result of censorship is, in point of fact, one of the primary
ingredients that readers and viewers have come to expect of their “great” art. Censorship,
that is, creates the need for subtext, the need for diverse and ever-shifting modes of
communication, the need for silences that speak louder than words. And it is here that we
begin to move away from Foucault. When Foucault discusses the “explosion of
discourse” that occurs in the wake of censorship, his focus is primarily on discourse as
speech; what he does not adequately consider is the extent to which censorship
encourages discursive practices that are evasively nonverbal in nature. It is easier to
recognize this kind of nonverbal discourse in the medium of film than in the medium of
literature, although, as we shall see, there are ways in which the novel is able to “speak”
in this alternate register as well.
Because Sturges has, over the years, garnered so much attention for his dialogic
agility—he is, for example, deemed by Andrew Sarris to be “by far the wittiest
scriptwriter the English-speaking cinema has known”
40

40
Andrew Sarris, “Preston Sturges,” in The National Society of Film Critics on Movie Comedy, ed. Stuart
Byron and Elizabeth Weis (New York: Penguin, 1977), 83.
—his inventive use of nonverbal,
indirect modes of representation is often underrated or outright ignored. We can,
however, get a sense of how much he contributed to the visual history of film by reading
reviews by his contemporaries. In a 1941 Variety review of The Lady Eve, for example,
51
Sturges was praised for “inject[ing] several new touches in the unreeling: comedy
animated cartoon background for main title decidedly novel; and the silent pantomimed
montage passage bridging proposal to wedding is also new technique.”
41
In addition to his visual manipulations, Sturges also relies on certain sound cues
to help him make his point—the steaming, erupting boat whistles that carry on a
suggestive conversation as Charles transfers from his womanless little launch onto the
libidinal S. S. Southern Queen, for example, or the similarly suggestive train whistles that
are interspliced with the names of Eve’s alleged former lovers as she reveals them to her
The reason that
Sturges allows the visual to take over during the latter montage is, in my opinion, two-
fold: on the one hand, he understood that the “sanctity of marriage”-defending Hays
Office would not look too kindly upon a prolonged wedding ceremony that the audience
would know to be something of a sham. On the other hand, however, by skimming over
the wedding—and spending as much time showing the servants preparing for the big,
extravagant reception as the bride walking down the aisle—Sturges subtly undermines
the importance of the ritualistic moment itself. The fact that the montage ends with Jean
looking up at Charles and then back towards the camera with a glint in her eye that he
reads as love (but we know to be vengefulness) brings us to another of Sturges’s key
visual ploys. Throughout the film, from the shoe-buckling scene to the card table scenes
to the horse-nuzzling proposal scene to the honeymoon revenge scene, Sturges repeatedly
positions the camera in such a way that the audience is made privy to Jean’s expressive,
often sardonic looks while Charles misses them entirely.

41
Unsigned review, Weekly Variety, 26 February 1941, The Lady Eve PCA file.
52
horrified new groom. Beyond these obvious audio effects, Sturges also takes advantage
of a subtler kind of sound—the sound of his actors’ voices, which is often able to relay
much more than what is found “on the printed page.” For example, the scene of Barbara
Stanwyck draping herself around Henry Fonda while running her fingers through his hair
is, thanks to its visual staging as well as the erotically charged vocalizations of the actors,
arguably one of the sexiest scenes of classical Hollywood cinema. Yet nothing in the
screenplay’s written dialogue appears to be particularly sexual or risqué, as is evidenced
by the fact that Joseph Breen gave the scene an uncontested green light when he read it in
October of 1940. After The Lady Eve was released, however, many state censor boards
ordered the scene to be excised, on the basis of its offensively “lewd” nature.
42
For although the Code did make some attempt to prohibit certain nonverbal forms
of representation—i.e., “Dances suggesting or representing sexual actions or indecent
passions are forbidden;” “Scenes of actual child birth, in fact or in silhouette, are never
to be presented”—its primary emphasis was unquestionably on the spoken word. This
can most easily be seen in the timing of the establishment of the Code, since, as it
mentions in the Code’s preamble, it was specifically “[d]uring the rapid transition from
What this
means, of course, is that Sturges essentially outsmarted Breen, since Breen considered his
job to be the weeding out of any material that state or religious groups might possibly
deem objectionable. Looked at another way, however, this scene could also be seen as a
prime example of the subtlety of filmic phrasing that came as a result of the Production
Code’s ever-looming threat of verbal censorship.

42
The states that censored this scene included Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, and Kansas, and possibly
others whose complaints were not preserved in the PCA archives of the Margaret Herrick Library.
53
silent to talking pictures” that Hollywood producers “realized the necessity and the
opportunity of subscribing to a Code to govern the production of talking pictures.” But it
can also be seen in the structure of the Code’s revision process itself: the vast majority of
the Code’s censorious “recommendations” were made when Hays Office administrators
read the screenplays of films in the pre-production phase of development, as opposed to
when films were viewed after they had already been shot. As a result, classical
Hollywood’s words were inherently subjected to a more rigorous censorship regimen
than were the nonverbal elements of its films.
If we look at what Breen wanted to expurgate from the original draft of The Lady
Eve that Sturges submitted to the Hays Office, for example, we can see that most of his
“recommendations” relate to what the movie should not say, rather than what it should
not show; among the recommended verbal cuts are offensive words such as “puke,”
“nuts,” and “damn,” and suggestive lines such as “Don’t you think we ought to go to
bed?” Statistically, Sturges followed about half of Breen’s recommendations—and
utterly disregarded the other half. (One example of a recommended cut that Sturges
chose simply to ignore was, incidentally, Sir Alfred’s aforementioned “Coachman’s
Daughter” scandal story, which Breen deemed to be “not acceptable, by reason of its
suggestiveness.”) It seems quite possible, in fact, that Sturges was employing a writing
strategy similar to the one famously described by Mae West: “When I knew that the
censors were after my films and they had to come and okay everything,” West boasted, “I
wrote scenes for them to cut! These scenes were so rough that I’d never have used them.
54
But they worked as a decoy. They cut them and left the stuff I wanted.”
43
One element of Sturges’s script about which Breen did not raise any objections
was the series of slapstick sight gags that were to take place over the course of the film.
Breen was, of course, quite accustomed to the tradition of slapstick comedy, which had
been popular since the advent of silent film and which was still very much alive in the
“screwball” romantic comedy genre to which The Lady Eve appeared so neatly to belong.
Brian Henderson has argued that Sturges’s decision to follow the “conventions” of
screwball comedy in The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story stemmed from a specific
defense strategy on his part: “That these are the most genre-typed films that he made
provides, besides their lightness itself, a built-in defense structure. No director is
responsible for the subject or even the plot of a genre film—they are taken as given.”
Though
Sturges never explicitly made this claim about his own screenwriting, the central plot
twist of The Lady Eve does hint at his appreciation for such smoke-and-mirror
maneuvers, insofar as it involves Jean successfully assuaging Charles’s qualms about her
disreputability by dangling the “decoy” of the Lady Eve’s “rougher,” more obviously
objectionable past before him.
44

43
Qtd. in Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the
Production Code (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001), 45-6.

Yet the physical comedy in Sturges’s version of screwball works quite differently than
the physical comedy in most of the other great models of the form. As Diane Carson
outlines in her essay on sexism in screwball comedies, there are screwballs in which
“[t]he central male character spanks the woman (It Happened One Night), knocks her out
44
Henderson, introduction to Sturges, Five Screenplays, 26.
55
with a punch (Nothing Sacred), kicks her (The Awful Truth), jabs her with a pin
(Twentieth Century), throws her under a shower (My Man Godfrey), or pushes her over
with a solid hand to the face (The Philadelphia Story).”
45
Although Thackeray, as a novelist, does not have at his disposal the same set of
nonverbal tools that are available to filmmakers like Sturges, part of why his satire is still
vivid to us today is because it is so visual in nature. A good deal of this visuality stems
The Lady Eve, by contrast,
starts off with Jean reversing the direction of the physical violence by intentionally
tripping Charles so that he falls flat on his face, and then continues to show Charles
falling and humiliating himself throughout the film—not because she keeps tripping him,
but because he simply cannot stop looking at her (which is, again, an important
reworking of the disempowering “male gaze” that feminist film critics have so often
criticized within classical Hollywood cinema.) The emasculation of Charles that is
carried out through this progression of ever messier and more painful pratfalls is, I would
argue, the same emasculation that Breen inadvertently helped Sturges achieve by
insisting that Charles’s “objectionable” act of sleeping with Jean out of wedlock be cut.
By knowing what would probably be able to make it past Code administrators (the visual)
and what probably would not (the overtly sexual), Sturges was able to use censorship for
his own artistic purposes—in this case, to upend gender stereotypes and provide his
heroine with a level of unchallenged autonomy almost unheard of in Production Code-era
film.

45
Diane Carson, “To Be Seen but Not Heard: The Awful Truth,” in Multiple Voices in Feminist Film
Criticism, ed. Diane Carson, Linda Dittmar, and Janice R. Welsch, (Minneapolis: University of
Minneapolis Press, 1994), 216.
56
from Thackeray’s ability to “paint a picture” with his words—if we return to the passage
describing Becky’s “hideous tail” below the water line that I cited at the outset of this
chapter, for example, we notice that it carefully differentiates between what Thackeray’s
writing will allow his readers to “hear” about Becky’s bad behavior (thanks, he tells us,
to the Moral World’s “insuperable repugnance to hearing vice called by its proper name”)
and what it will allow them to “see” (“Those who like may… see it writhing and twirling,
diabolically hideous and slimy, flapping amongst bones, or curling round corpses.”) In
addition to the skill of writing visually, however, there is one other narrative trick up
Thackeray’s sleeve that his fellow Victorian novelists did not possess: the trick of
providing illustrations for all his own novels. From the engraved vignette title page that
shows a court jester gazing despondently at himself in a cracked mirror while a smirking
Becky doll lies next to him on the ground, to the closing woodcut that shows a jester’s
stick now lying on the ground with the “famous little Becky puppet” in a sort of
miniature embrace, Thackeray’s illustrations are ripe for interpretation indeed. The
favorite illustration for this kind of interpretation seems to be that of “Becky’s second
appearance in the character of Clytemnestra,” as Thackeray incriminatingly captions it,
which depicts a terrified Jos Sedley pleading with Dobbin to rescue him from Becky’s
evil clutches as she lurks ominously in the shadows of the curtains nearby (686). The
majority of feminist criticism on Thackeray finds something to say about this particular
drawing—about the darkly subversive power it grants Becky, about its foreshadowing of
a more violent form of female rebellion, about its ability to “go where the text fears to
57
tread.”
46
It is interesting to compare this critical stance to the one taken by Lady Eastlake,
who is often criticized by feminist scholars for her Grundy-ish treatment of moral and
gender issues. In the final section of her review of Vanity Fair she does, after all,
“advise” her readers “to cut out that picture of our heroine’s ‘Second Appearance as
Clytemnestra,’ which casts so uncomfortable a glare over the latter part of the volume,”
and to cling to the belief that Jos Sedley died from perfectly natural, biological causes—
for, as she points out, the man had “been much in India…and his digestion was not to be
compared with Becky’s.”
For the most part, then, these critics are buying into the murderous implication
of the sketch; in much the same way that Charles, in The Lady Eve, allows the purser’s
photograph to act as judge and jury in his estimation of Jean’s character, these critics are
letting one silent yet evocative illustration convict Becky of a crime that the novel
specifically refuses to tell us whether or not she committed.
47
Before she arrives at this reactionary call for a sort of do-it-
yourself censorship, however, it is important to note that she actually thanks Thackeray
for the indirectness and ambiguity of the illustration in question: “We cannot sufficiently
applaud the extreme discretion with which Mr. Thackeray has hinted at the possibly
assistant circumstances of Jos Sedley’s dissolution. A less delicacy of handling would
have marred the harmony of the whole design.”
48

46
Lisa Jadwin, “The Seductiveness of Female Duplicity in Vanity Fair,” SEL 32.4 (Autumn 1992): 679.
Lady Eastlake is, for want of a more
flexible word, right; a more overt and unequivocal depiction of Jos’s murder would have
robbed Vanity Fair of the moral ambiguity that has been, and continues to be, one of its
47
Rigby, “Vanity Fair,” 85-6.
48
Ibid, 85.
58
greatest attractions. Whether Thackeray avoided telling a story that definitively ends
with a woman getting away with murder because he knew that such a story’s lack of
“compensating moral values” would have made it deeply objectionable to a host of
Mudies and Grundies the world over or because he artistically preferred such an ending
cannot, of course, ever be known. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, with
Thackeray being careful not to cross any lines that would make his book less popular or
profitable, but also very much reveling in the shifty ambiguity that was, in effect,
required of him. This can particularly be seen in an interview for “Appleton’s Journal”
that took place several years after Vanity Fair was published, in which Thackeray was
asked point-blank by the interviewer whether or not Becky killed Jos. In response, we
are told, Thackeray “smoked meditatively as if he was endeavoring to arrive at the
solution of some problem, and then with a slow smile dawning on his face, replied, ‘I do
not know.’”
49
Thackeray’s smile during this interview is, I would argue, the same cagy smile
that keeps figuratively appearing throughout his novels—the smile that we feel when he
is dangling various narrative options before us but refusing to tell us which is right, the
smile that we feel when he is exploiting the logic of scandal in order to tell us what he
“shouldn’t,” the smile that we feel even when he is in the midst of one of his scathing
anti-censorship rants. In Vanity Fair, this smile takes a more concrete form by appearing
on Becky’s face in almost every sketch that Thackeray draws of her; in many sketches,
in fact, a cunning grin is the only identifying feature to let us know we are looking at

49
Qtd. in The Two Thackerays: Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s Centenary Biographical Introductions to the
Works of William Makepeace Thackeray (New York: AMS Press, 1988), 42.
59
Becky at all (see, for example, the illustration of Becky as sorceress at the opening of
Chapter 63 or of Becky as Napoleon at the outset of Chapter 64.) Interestingly, one place
that the cagy smile does not appear is on the face of the court jester that Thackeray
repeatedly draws to signify “himself” throughout the text. There is even one illustration,
the tailpiece to Chapter 9, which is clearly a self-portrait of Thackeray, in full jester garb,
holding a smiling fool’s mask down in front of him to reveal the more contemplative
expression that he has been hiding behind the mask. Thackeray’s decision to assume the
role of the serious jester, who is able to speak more freely and audaciously about
controversial subjects because of his status as a jolly, harmless “fool,” can be interpreted
as yet another sign that Thackeray was doing everything in his power to combat the
restrictions of moral censorship. But it can also be interpreted in terms of its relationship
to the proliferation of discourse.
For Thackeray’s decision to fashion himself as a common Fool—along with his
decision to give Vanity Fair the thought-provoking subtitle of “A Novel without a
Hero”—anticipates not Foucault, this time, so much as Roland Barthes, who points out in
S/Z that “the Fool, dressed in motley, a divided costume, was once the purveyor of the
double understanding;” that this double understanding “far exceeds the limited case of
the play on words or the equivocation and permeates, in various forms and densities, all
classic writing;” and that “the reader is an accomplice, not of this or that character, but of
the discourse itself insofar as it plays on the division of reception, the impurity of
communication: the discourse, and not one or another of its characters, is the only
60
positive hero of the story.”
50

50
Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 145.
Although Barthes may here technically be speaking of the
relationship between “the reader” and “classic writing,” his description of discourse in all
its “various forms” could be applied to “the viewer” and “classic film” as well.
Thackeray and Sturges are, certainly, both double-dealing Fools in their own rights, and
the multivalent discourse of their texts can quite easily be seen as the true “hero” of their
narrative efforts. But, as I have hoped to show throughout this chapter, granting their
discourse this heroic status does not turn censorship into the texts’ patently degenerate
villain. Just as the dichotomies of Amelia as heroine/Becky as villainess and Jean as
“bad girl”/Eve as “good” prove to be overly simplistic and even just plain false, so too
does the discourse/censorship dichotomy that has been accepted by so many readers and
critics for so long. It is only if we look beyond this false dichotomy that we can see how
moral censorship, even in its subtlest state, transforms, complicates, and, sometimes
(most scandalously of all) improves narrative art.
61
CHAPTER 2

For Your Eyes Only:
Jane Austen and George Cukor

“I do not write for such dull Elves as have not a great deal of Ingenuity themselves.”
—Jane Austen

“Sometimes I think there was more sex within the Code than without it.”
—George Cukor

In the eyes of most Hollywood historians, the enforcement of Production Code
standards in the years between the Code’s implementation in 1930 and Joseph Breen’s
ascension to the PCA throne in 1934 was so inconsistent and ineffectual that those years
ought not even count as part of the Hays Code era; hence the misleading term “pre-Code
Hollywood” was born. But if the Code did not gain its teeth until Breen took hold of the
PCA’s reins, it did receive some of its most influential and most enduring features from
the man who preceded Breen as Hollywood’s self-censorship czar: the less dogmatic,
less conservative, less well-known Colonel Jason Joy. Joy was brought on as the head of
the Studio Relations Committee (the MPPDA’s original name for its censorship division)
in 1927, at which point he helped to compose a list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls” that
would eventually come to be subsumed by the more comprehensive Code of 1930. The
list contains less than half as many “Don’ts” as it does “Be Carefuls,” and this ratio is
representative of Joy’s overall sense of his role as film censor: his job, as he saw it, was
to make sure that a few specific subjects absolutely would “not appear” in Hollywood
films (“Pointed profanity,” “Any inference of sex perversion,” “Ridicule of the clergy,”
etc.), but also—and, to him, more importantly—that “special care [would] be exercised”
and “good taste [would] be emphasized” in the treatment of a great many more (i.e.,
62
“International relations,” “Sympathy for criminals,” “Man and woman in bed together.”)
When Breen took over in 1934, he viewed his role quite differently; his goal was to turn
as many of Joy’s tentative “Be Carefuls” into absolute “Don’ts” as possible—to banish,
in “thought, word, and deed,” any and all immoral material from the world of film. In the
face of such a rigid set of regulations, one might expect “post-Code” Hollywood to have
been left with nothing to produce but adaptations of Jane Austen novels. And, in fact, at
the very moment when George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story (1940) was being
subjected to the censor’s knife, Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was first making its way,
relatively unhindered, to the big screen.
1
The term “sophisticated” was frequently bandied about in early discussions of
film content, in a variety of different ways. On one hand, sophistication was something
to be avoided and feared, for, as film scholar Ruth Vasey explains, “‘Sophisticated’
material, often based on controversial Broadway plays, threatened to undermine the
status of the industry’s efforts to establish the cinema as ‘pure’ entertainment.”
But “thought, word, and deed” proved to be
more difficult to police than Breen anticipated, particularly in light of the censorship
evasion strategy that Austen had so successfully employed in her novels, and that Joy had
so vocally encouraged throughout his SRC tenure: the strategy of sophistication.
2

1
The one and only alteration that Breen demanded was that Mr. Collins be either stripped of his collar or
stripped of his humor, as it was against Code rules for any “ministers of religion” to be “used as comic
characters or villains”—the producers of the film opted for the former.
Yet at
the same time, producers and studio heads could not help but notice that “sophisticated”
movies were gradually becoming more and more popular (and, by extension, more and
more lucrative). As Lea Jacobs chronicles in her study of Hollywood in the 1920s, that
2
Ruth Vasey, The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1997), 100.
63
decade witnessed “a decisive shift in taste” away from films “that were dismissed as
sentimental or simply old-fashioned” and toward films “that came to be identified as
‘sophisticated,’ on the edge of what censors or more conservative viewers would
tolerate.”
3
The task set before Joy, then, was to negotiate a space between
“objectionable” sophistication and “desirable” sophistication, so that studios could
continue to reap the profits of sophisticated filmmaking without incurring the wrath of
state censors or public morality groups. The primary way that Joy did this, I would
argue, was by regularly asking the producers, writers, and directors under his domain to
speak in a specific cinematic language, “from which,” as he himself put it, “conclusions
might be drawn by the sophisticated mind, but which would mean nothing to the
unsophisticated and inexperienced.”
4
But if, under this formulation, content was supposed to be simultaneously geared
toward two distinct types of viewer—“sophisticated” and “unsophisticated”—it is
important for us to understand exactly what those two classifications were taken to mean
in Joy’s day. On the most accepted level, the distinction was meant to refer to age. In the
words of the Production Code itself, the conventional wisdom of the time was that
“Maturer minds may easily understand and accept without harm subject matter in plots
In other words, Joy worked hard over the course of
his SRC reign to set up a system of representation in which ambiguity and innuendo
would be valorized rather than demonized; in which controversial content would be
bifurcated rather than eliminated.

3
Lea Jacobs, The Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2008), 2.
4
Joy to James Wingate, 5 February 1931, Little Caesar Production Code Administration file, Margaret
Herrick Library.
64
which do younger people positive harm.” But the Code also makes reference to another
widely accepted differentiation—that between urban and rural audiences. In its list of
“Reasons Supporting the Preamble of the Code,” it directly makes the claim that “Small
communities, remote from sophistication and from the hardening process which often
takes place in the ethical and moral standards of larger cities, are easily and readily
reached by any sort of film.” Only slightly less direct, meanwhile, are the Code’s
allusions to a third distinction, this time based on class. When the Code complains that
“it is difficult to produce films intended for only certain classes of people” due to the
unfortunate fact that “the exhibitors' theatres are built for the masses, for the cultivated
and the rude, the mature and the immature, the self-respecting and the criminal,” we can
hear tacit echoes of the “sophisticated”/ “unsophisticated” divide.
One type of audience distinction that is conspicuously absent from the Code’s
field of vision is that of gender. But this does not mean that censorship discussions were
never framed along gendered lines during the classical Hollywood era. What it does
mean is that making overt comments about the different “sophistication” levels of men
and women was, even in the 1920s and 30s, considered to be politically incorrect. To
find proof that such differentiations were being made, we must, therefore, turn away from
official documents and look instead to some of the less guarded remarks of some of the
era’s less diplomatic moral censors. A case in point: the vociferous, eccentrically-named
head of Chicago’s local censorship board, Major Metellus Lucullus Cicero Funkhouser,
who in 1917 unapologetically declared that his censoring policy was to eliminate scenes
that “the male sex could stand” but that “might cause women to brood and lose their
65
reason.”
5
Along similarly protective lines, too, there was the case of an unidentified local
censorship official who refused to give in to a delegation of women that wanted him to
authorize the exhibition of a film based on Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
because, as he paternalistically explained to them, he did not want his daughter, or any
other young women, to find out what that wicked “A” stood for.
6
The relationship between gender and film censorship has always been a complex
one, and the years leading up to the implementation of the Code were no exception. In
his detailed study of Pre-Code Hollywood, Thomas Doherty outlines some of the
conflicting ways in which women were viewed by the moral censors of the time:
“Women and vice forged an inseparable link; they were its subject, they defined its
limits, and, bewilderingly enough, they were its core audience.”
Comments such as
these clearly place women in the same unsophisticated, corruptible category as the
“immature,” “rural,” and “lower-class” moviegoers that the Code considered it to be its
mission to “shield from harm.” (One is, in fact, reminded by this pejorative grouping of
the title of Frances Power Cobbe’s seminal feminist treatise of 1869: “Criminals, Idiots,
Women and Minors. Is the Classification Sound?”)
7

5
Qtd. in Frank Walsh, Sin and Censorship: The Catholic Church and the Motion Picture Industry (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 10.
For although there
were certainly a great many early Hollywood films whose primary “subject” was the vice
of men (particularly in the male-dominated gangster genre), the moral censors of the era
spent a disproportionately large amount of their time and energy worrying about the
6
Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (New York: Vintage Books,
1975), 128.
7
Thomas Doherty, Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-
1934 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 125.
66
abundance of female offences that were being memorialized on film. This bias even
comes across to some degree in the wording of the Code itself, as it singles out several
female-specific areas of concern (“The sale of women, or a woman selling her virtue,”
“Scenes of actual childbirth,” “Dances with movement of the breasts”), but no areas that
are exclusively related to men. At the same time, even though the wording of the Code
may have been composed by a small cohort of Catholic men,
8
the largest group of foot
soldiers in the battle against cinematic depravity (the battle to “define” vice’s “limits”)
belonged to the General Federation of Women's Clubs—a group that, at its peak, boasted
some thirty million affiliated members. As George Cukor explained in an interview
about Code censorship that he gave late in his life, “There were all sorts of rules that were
absolutely absurd. I know why they did it—they were scared to death of all the ladies’
clubs, which have since disappeared but which were then very powerful.”
9
But it is the third view of women described by Doherty that is the most relevant to
my discussion of gendered sophistication levels: the perception that women were also
the “core audience” for classical Hollywood films with illicit, salacious material. The
most direct evidence of the existence of this perception can be found in a frequently
quoted Variety article from 1931 entitled “Dirt Craze Due to Women,” which bluntly
proclaims that “Women love dirt. Nothing shocks ’em. They want to know about bad
women. The badder the better… Women are responsible for the ever-increasing public
taste in sensationalism and sexy stuff. Women who make up the bulk of the picture

8
See note 18 of introduction.
9
Douglas Edwards and David Goodstein, “A Conversation with George Cukor,” April 1982, in George
Cukor: Interviews, ed. Robert Emmet Long (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001), 180.
67
audiences are also the majority readers of the tabloids, scandal sheets, flashy magazines,
and erotic books. It is to cater to them all the hot stuff of the present day is turned out.”
10

Even if, as Lea Jacobs appropriately points out, “[t]he reporter’s statistics are dubious:
there is no solid evidence that women made up either the bulk of motion picture
audiences or the bulk of the readers of ‘flashy magazines and erotic books,’”
11
In an essay describing the “invention” of the Hollywood romantic comedy that
occurred in 1934, Kay Young specifically acknowledges the role that censorship played
in the genesis of the form:
the fact
that such an article was written—and given front-page trade-paper status—in 1931
demonstrates that the relationship between female moviegoers and controversial,
“sophisticated” film content was not nearly as one-dimensional as the moral watchdogs
of the era would have liked it to be. In this chapter, I will explore the intricacies of that
relationship by focusing on the classical Hollywood genre that managed to be labeled as
both predominately “feminine” and provocatively “sophisticated” at the same time: the
romantic comedy.
With the institutionalization of the Production Code in Hollywood in
1934… the sultry, libidinous presence of Mae West, Jean Harlow, and
Marlene Dietrich went underground. The platinum blonde seductress
languishing in satin in the bedroom of the 1920s and early 30s was
replaced by the working woman, or independent heiress whose common
sense or need to break free from her dominating father or crazy family
leads her to flee home. With restrictions placed on the explicit expression
of desire, desire reinscribed its presence in the 1930s comedy through
allusion or sublimation. If sex was to become aggression, then the sexual
partners would become physical and verbal combatants; and if sex was to
be couched in metaphor and humor, then it required a partnership where

10
Variety, 16 June 1931, qtd. in Jacobs, Decline of Sentiment, 22..
11
Jacobs, Decline of Sentiment, 23.
68
the joke could be shared. What the presence of the Production Code
encouraged, therefore, was that women become active players in their
portrayals, that their words and actions be as vibrant and playful as their
male partners.
12

Viewed from this perspective, the conservatism that Joseph Breen is generally believed to
have imposed upon “post-Code” Hollywood begins to lose some of its hegemonic luster.
In his efforts to clean up cinematic representations of sexuality—and, in particular, of
female sexuality—Breen inadvertently helped to create a new cinematic genre that would
herald in a new brand of cinematic feminism.
This is not, of course, the only time that my project has or will turn its sights on
the cinematic tradition of romantic comedy; Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve is
considered to be one of the most biting examples of the form, and Frank Capra’s It
Happened One Night is considered to be one of its founding fathers. But the romantic
comedy director to whom I will be turning my attention in this chapter is one whose work
(even when it strays outside of the romantic comedy genre, but particularly when it stays
within it) is regularly, almost compulsively, referred to as both “sophisticated” and
“feminine”: George Cukor. Indeed, it is difficult to find a piece of scholarly or
biographical work written on Cukor that does not refer to his reputation as a “woman’s
director” in at least some way. This reputation stemmed primarily from his ability to
elicit “undeniably superior performances” from the leading ladies of his films.
13

12
Kay Young, “Hollywood, 1934: ‘Inventing’ Romantic Comedy,” in Look Who’s Laughing: Studies in
Gender and Comedy (London: Routledge, 1994), 259.
Cukor
himself took offense at the term, not because he was ashamed of his close association
with his female stars, but because, as he dryly liked to put it, “There were men in those
13
Gene D. Phillips, George Cukor (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 95.
69
movies along with the ladies.”
14
To be sure, three of those men—James Stewart, Ronald
Coleman, and Rex Harrison—did go on to win Academy Awards for the roles that Cukor
helped them to portray. Still, it is the incomparable list of female performances that he
captured on film (Greta Garbo in Camille, Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind,
15
A less noted contributing factor to the reputedly “feminine” inflection of Cukor’s
films was the frequency with which he collaborated with female writers. To get a sense
of just how frequent such collaborations were, we need only glance over a list of the
“lady scribes” with whom Cukor worked over the course of his career, either by using
their plays or novels as source material or by having them write his films’ actual
screenplays: in chronological order, the list includes Doris Anderson, Louise Long, Edna
Ferber, Gertrude Purcell, Zoe Akins, Adela Rogers St. Johns, Jane Murfin, Clemence
Dane, Lucia Bronder, Frances Marion, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Mason, Wanda
Tuchock, Lenore Coffee, Gladys Unger, Margaret Mitchell, Clare Booth Luce, Anita
Loos, Rachel Crothers, Salka Viertel, Valerie Wyngate, I.A.R. Wylie, Marguerite
Roberts, Ruth Gordon, Isobel Lennart, Dorothy Parker, Sonya Levien, Vera Caspary,
Bella Spewack, and Jay Presson Allen. And the influence of women upon his scripts
does not end there, as he often sought the unofficial creative advice of his close female

Katharine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, Judy Holliday
in Born Yesterday, Judy Garland in A Star is Born, Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady, to
name a few) that continues to stand as Cukor’s principal directorial claim to fame.

14
Phillips, George Cukor, 95.
15
Although Cukor was fired from working on Gone with the Wind only two weeks into production, he
continued to give private acting coaching to Vivien Leigh (and Olivia DeHaviland) on weekends
throughout the shooting of the film, and both actresses credited him with the power of their performances.
70
friends. According to his childhood friend Stella Bloch, for example, “When George got
a script, he used to send it to me and ask me what I thought about it. He’d say, ‘I have a
script I’m supposed to direct and I’d like your opinion on it—whether any of the scenes
are demeaning to women.’”
16
Since Cukor is the only director studied in this project who
did not participate in any direct way with the writing of his scripts—“Now I, having
started in the theatre, am for better or worse an interpretative director, and the text always
determines the way I shoot a picture,” he freely admitted
17
Referring to Cukor as a “sophisticated” filmmaker, meanwhile, is only slightly
less of a critical commonplace than referring to him as a woman’s director. Gene
Phillips, for example, has praised “Cukor’s flair for imparting a brisk pace and a light
touch to sophisticated comedy,” Emanuel Levy has argued that “Cukor’s best films …
boast elegance, sophistication, intelligence, and distinctive style,” Douglas Edwards and
David Goodstein have described Cukor as the “legendary director of … dozens of titles
that set new standards of sophistication, wit and cinematic polish,” and actress Claire
Bloom has explained that “The difference between George and other directors was that
—it is important to keep these
women’s voices in mind when considering the general tone and impact of his oeuvre.
Indeed, in the absence of any female directors of romantic comedy during the classical
Hollywood era, the contribution of female writers to the genre needs to be properly
acknowledged, and studying the “feminine” works of George Cukor is one of the easiest
ways to perform that act of acknowledgment.

16
Qtd. in Patrick McGilligan, George Cukor: A Double Life (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 89.
17
John Gillett and David Robinson, “Conversation with George Cukor,” Autumn 1964, in Long, George
Cukor: Interviews, 11-12.
71
he was an extremely sophisticated European gentleman, with irony, wit, and delicacy.”
18

(Cukor would surely have derived the most pleasure from hearing this last remark; as the
son of “just barely middle class” Hungarian-Jewish immigrant New Yorkers, he always
went out of his way to come across as more “gentlemanly” and “European” than he really
was.) Certainly part of the basis for this labeling stems from the five-year stint that
Cukor spent directing successful plays on Broadway before being summoned to
Hollywood in 1929; in his own words, “When I came to Hollywood from New York
theater, everyone immediately typed me as a New York sophisticate.”
19
In Joseph Litvak’s compelling analysis of the cultural treatment of sophistication
entitled Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel, he argues that, “while
sophistication cannot be reduced simply to homosexuality, …gay people—especially gay
men—have traditionally functioned as objects of such distinguished epistemological and
rhetorical aggressions as urbanity and knowingness [and], in the Western imaginaire, gay
people also function as subjects of sophistication.”
But there is
another aspect of Cukor’s life that may have contributed to his “sophisticated” reputation
in a more surreptitious manner: his relatively uncloseted homosexuality.
20

18
Phillips, George Cukor, 74; Emanuel Levy, George Cukor: Master of Elegance (New York: William
Morrow and Company, 1994), 1; Edwards and Goodstein, “A Conversation with George Cukor,” 174;
qtd. in Levy, George Cukor, 269.
To support this claim, Litvak
helpfully reminds us of the etymological history of the term: “A glance at the dictionary
is all it takes to recall that sophistication in fact means ‘perversion.’ For though
sophistication might nowadays be defined most readily as ‘worldliness,’ as the opposite
19
Qtd. in Phillips, George Cukor, 95.
20
Joseph Litvak, Strange Gourmets: Sophistication, Theory, and the Novel (Durham: Duke University
Press, 1997), 4.
72
of ‘naïveté,’ its older meaning, as well as its normative meaning, deriving from the
rhetorical aberration known as sophistry, is ‘corruption’ or ‘adulteration,’ and its opposite
would be something like naturalness, which, if etymologically related to naïveté, enjoys
a considerably better press.”
21
In the intensely homophobic world of Hollywood’s studio
system, then, the fact that Cukor was so relentlessly labeled as a “sophisticated”
filmmaker might not have been quite as complimentary as our current use of the word
would seem to imply. Although Litvak does not turn his critical gaze upon the medium
of film anywhere in Strange Gourmets, the book’s overriding argument that “the class
politics of sophistication are inseparable from its sexual politics”
22
It might be a bit surprising to learn that one of the primary novelists that Litvak
uses to prove his point about the “perverted,” “homosexual” inflection of the term
sophistication is Jane Austen. But as compulsorily heterosexual as her works are
generally perceived to be, Litvak opens his argument with an extended discussion of
Austen’s “sophisticated” technique: “If the history of modern sophistication in some
sense begins with the Victorian novel,” he insists, “then Jane Austen is the first
‘Victorian’ novelist.”
is as relevant to my
discussion of classical Hollywood’s most “sophisticated,” most openly gay director as it
is to Litvak’s discussion of certain nineteenth century novelists and twentieth century
theorists.
23

21
Litvak, Strange Gourmets, 3-4.
In this chapter, I agree with this proto-Victorian positioning of
Austen on the basis of her narrative sophistication, but I will also demonstrate the extent
22
Ibid, 3.
23
Ibid, 14.
73
to which Austen can be claimed as a Victorian novelist from a censorship perspective.
For, as more and more historians of English morality are beginning to acknowledge, “the
culture of Victorianism was set deeply within the English psyche before Victoria was
crowned in 1837; in fact, most of the praise and the censure (the latter much more
common) that critics have heaped on the Victorian years applies in much the same way to
the preceding generation.”
24
In some ways, the bloody revolt being waged on the other side of the Channel
released a spirit of radicalism, libertinism, and rebellion in English writing, as can be
seen in such varied texts as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791), Mary Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication on the Rights of Women (1792), and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796).
But there was, at the same time, a fierce and hard-fought backlash against such
radicalism. In the words of Anthony Mandel,
The true impetus for the adoption of “Victorian values” as
we now tend to define them, such historians argue, had its roots in the complicated moral
aftermath of the French Revolution.
The close of the eighteenth century saw the convergence of two
conservative reactions which, allied together, curtailed the expansion of
the fiction market. There was the general political backlash led by the
Anti-Jacobins against any voice of protest. There was also a reaction
against the novel genre itself, which aligned itself against salacious and
morally disturbing titles. As a consequence of both impulses, the 1800s
saw the depolemicization (if not the depoliticization) of fiction, leading to
its reconstruction as a “proper” vehicle for middle-class expression.
25

24
Herbert Schlossberg, The Silent Revolution and the Making of Victorian England (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 2000), 1. For similar pre-Victorian histories, see also Ford K. Brown, Fathers of the
Victorians: The Age of Wilberforce (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1961) and Ben Wilson, The
Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain, 1789-1837 (London: Penguin Press, 2007).
25
Anthony Mandal, Jane Austen and the Popular Novel; The Determined Author (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 38-9.
74
Although there were several different conservative factions that fought for literary reform
during this time period, the loudest and most visible one was that of the Evangelicals.
The Evangelical reform movement had originated prior to the French Revolution; in
1787, for example, the dynamic Evangelical politician William Wilberforce had
succeeded in eliciting from King George III a “Proclamation for the Encouragement of
Piety and Virtue, and for the Preventing and Punishing of Vice, Profaneness and
Immorality,” and the Proclamation Society (later renamed the Society for the Suppression
of Vice) was born. Yet, as Edward Bristow has pointed out, “little of significance was
accomplished until after 1789, when Britain’s first pack of smuthounds were able to take
advantage of a repressive climate in which invitations to sexual indiscipline were equated
with invitations to political rebellion.”
26
It is my contention that the Evangelical moral reform movement of the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had a great deal in common with the Production
Code Administration of the 1930s to the 1960s, starting with the tenacious, self-righteous
spirits of their best known leaders—both Wilberforce and Breen considered it to be their
personal, God-given missions to “save” their respective cultures’ predominating popular
art forms from the corrupting forces of obscenity, licentiousness, and profligacy.
(Wilberforce famously proclaimed that “God almighty has set before me two great
objects, the suppression of the slave trade and the reformation of manners,” while Breen

26
Edward J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain since 1700 (Dublin: Gill and
Macmillan Ltd, 1977), 32. As Bristow also points out, however, this was not the first moral reform
movement to be organized on a grassroots level in England; an earlier wave had already occurred about a
century before, when various different Societies for the Reformation of Manners sprouted up across the
empire in an effort to fill the void being left by the decline of the medieval, morality-monitoring church
tribunals known as the “bawdy courts.”
75
is described in a recent biography as having felt “a sacred duty to protect the spiritual
well-being of the innocent souls who fluttered too close to the unholy attractions of the
motion picture screen.”
27
) Like the PCA, the Evangelical reformers enjoyed an extra-
legal but distinctly powerful “say” in terms of what was considered to be morally
acceptable and what was not. Like the PCA, the Evangelical reformers felt particularly
threatened by the sophisticated “other” that lay to the East: English conservatives feared
French cosmopolitanism in much the same way that Hollywood conservatives feared
Broadway urbanity and wit.
28
Like the PCA, the Evangelical reformers were even more
concerned about “the open female debauchery of the age”

than they were about male
forms of lewdness. And, like the PCA, they believed one major cause of that debauchery
to be the excessive female interest in the latest popular art form: in Hannah More’s
Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education (1799), she particularly complains
that “the corruption occasioned by these [novels] has spread so wide, and descended so
low, that among milliners, mantua-makers, and other trades where numbers work
together, the labour of one girl is frequently sacrificed that she may be spared to read
those mischievous books to others.”
29

27
Qtd. in John Wolffe, The Expansion of Evangelicalism: The Age of Wilberforce, More, Chalmers and
Finney (Nottingham: Inter-Varsity Press, 2006), 152; Thomas Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I.
Breen and the Production Code Administration (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 9.
Though not an Evangelical himself, English
physician Thomas Bowdler performed the age’s most famous act of moral censorship
28
A good example of an English conservative’s use of the term “sophistication” to describe this threatening
difference can be found in a passage written by the quintessential English conservative, Edmund Burke; in
contrasting his country’s purer, nobler ways with the ways of the profligate French, he boasts, “We
preserve the whole of our feelings still native and entire, unsophisticated by pedantry and infidelity. We
have real hearts of flesh and blood beating in our bosoms.” Qtd. in Wilson, The Making of Victorian
Values, 11.
29
Qtd. in Lisa Wood, Modes of Discipline: Women, Conservatism, and the Novel after the French
Revolution (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2003), 13.
76
when, in 1818, he edited out large portions of Shakespearean dialogue in the name of
female protection: “It is certainly my wish, and it has been my study,” he would explain
in his preface to the second edition of The Family Shakespeare, “to exclude from this
publication whatever is unfit to be read aloud by a gentleman to a company of ladies.”
30
It was during this post-revolutionary, Bowdlerizing era that Jane Austen wrote
and published all of her works, at a time when the novel was trying desperately to prove
itself as a reputable, innocuous art form. The question becomes, then, to what extent did
this historical context determine or influence the way that Austen composed her stories?
Or, for the purposes of this project: in the absence of any legally or administratively
enforced “code” of censorship, to what extent did Austen effectively censor herself?

Decades before Queen Victoria first gained England’s throne, then, the effort to
“Victorianize” literature had already ostentatiously begun.
The answers to these questions are difficult to come by, in part because of the
elaborate censoring of Austen’s first-hand accounts of her own thoughts and feelings that
was performed by her sister Cassandra, whose goal it was to preserve Austen’s image as
a respectable, well-bred sister and aunt; indeed, according to Deirdre Le Faye’s best
estimate, “Jane Austen probably wrote about 3,000 letters during her lifetime, of which
only 160 are known and published.”
31

30
Qtd. in Donald Thomas, A Long Time Burning: The History of Literary Censorship in England (New
York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1969), 186. The first edition of The Family Shakespeare was
published in 1807, though that edition is now credited to Bowdler’s sister Harriet. The second, more
widely read edition from 1818 contains Bowdler’s own excisions.
What we can tell from the private papers that
Cassandra did not reduce to ashes is that Austen was deeply, even obsessively, interested
31
Deirdre Le Faye, “Letters,” in Jane Austen in Context, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 33.
77
in how her novels were being received. This is perhaps most evident in her carefully
transcribed compilations of various friends’ and family members’ “Opinions” of some of
her works—of Emma, for example, she scrupulously records that “Captain Austen.—
liked it extremely, observing that though there might be more Wit in P & P—& an higher
Morality in MP—yet altogether, on account of it’s peculiar air of Nature throughout, he
preferred it to either.… Mr Sherer—did not think it equal to either MP—(which he liked
the best of all) or P & P.—Displeased with my pictures of Clergymen.… Mr
Cockerelle—liked it so little, Fanny would not send me his opinion”; and the list goes on
and on.
32
The fact that Austen paid as much attention as she did to her readers’ praises
and censures would seem to imply that public opinion did in fact matter to her on at least
some level. Yet we have almost no direct evidence that she catered any of her
subsequent fictional efforts to the whims of her readers’ tastes. (One small exception can
be found in her removal of an off-color joke about a “natural daughter” from the second
edition of Sense and Sensibility, apparently in deference to objections that were raised
after the publication of the first.) On the other hand, we are aware of several remarks that
she made which seem directly to contradict the assumption that pleasing her audience
was high on her artistic agenda, the most famous being her proclamation that, in Emma,
she intended to create “a heroine whom no one but myself will much like.”
33
If we attempt to use Austen’s attitude toward “Evangelicalism” as a way of
understanding her feelings about moral censure, we again find ourselves confronted with

32
Qtd. in Jane Austen: The Critical Heritage, ed. B.C. Southam (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968),
55-6.
33
J. E. Austen-Leigh, A Memoir of Jane Austen (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), 157.
78
markedly mixed signals, ranging from her flat assertion of 1809, “I do not like the
Evangelicals,” to her 1814 concession that “I am by no means convinced that we ought
not all to be Evangelicals, & am at least persuaded that they who are so from Reason &
Feeling must be happiest & safest.”
34
Critics have long debated the degree to which
Austen can be classified as a social or religious conservative, and have often relied on
one or the other of these statements to help support their different points of view. What
does seem clear is that Austen found much to mock and criticize in the narrative
tendencies of the major Evangelical novelists of her day; of Hannah More’s Coelebs in
Search of a Wife, for example, she notes at one point that her “disinclination for it before
was affected, but now it is real” and derides it for the pretentiousness of the diphthong in
its title character’s name (“the only merit [the book] could have, was in the name of
Caleb, which has an honest, unpretending sound; but in Coelebs there is pedantry &
affectation.—Is it written only to Classical Scholars?”), while of Mary Brunton’s Self
Control she declares that her “opinion is confirmed of its’ being an excellently-meant,
elegantly-written Work, without anything of Nature or Probability in it” and sarcastically
plans to “redeem” her “credit” with one of her acquaintances who has disparaged her
work “by writing a close Imitation of ‘Self-control” as soon as I can;—I will improve
upon it;—my Heroine shall not merely by wafted down an American river in a boat by
herself, she shall cross the Atlantic in the same way, & never stop till she reaches
Gravesend.”
35

34
Austen to Cassandra Austen, 24 January 1809 and 18 November 1814, in Jane Austen’s Letters, ed.
Deirdre Le Faye (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 170; 280.
In trying to explain why Austen was so opposed to the “Evangelical” style
35
Austen to Cassandra Austen, 24 January 1809, 30 January 1809, 11 October 1813, and to Anna Lefroy,
24 November 1814, in Jane Austen’s Letters, 170; 172; 234; 283.
79
of writing, a close friend of Austen’s named Ann Barrett hit upon some helpful points for
us to consider:
[She] had on all the subjects of enduring religious feeling the deepest and
strongest convictions, but a contact with loud and noisy exponents of the
then popular religious phase made her reticent almost to a fault. She had
to suffer something in the way of reproach from those who believed she
might have used her genius to greater effect; but … I think I see her now
defending what she thought was the real province of a delineator of life
and manners, and declaring her belief that example and not “direct
preaching” was all that a novelist could afford properly to exhibit.
36

Where Austen differs radically from the literary emissaries of the Evangelical reform
movement, then, is in her aversion to being too noisy, too preachy, or too direct. In fact,
if we subscribe to Ann Barrett’s assessment of her motives, we are led to believe that
Austen’s disdain for the Evangelicals (who were, almost certainly, the “loud and noisy
proponents of the then popular religious phase” to whom Barrett was referring) was what
actively inspired her to banish religious and moralistic discourse from her novels.
Instead, Austen preferred to be more “sophisticated” in her treatment of moral issues—to
write with what Virginia Woolf would call an “infallible discretion.”
37
As a result of that discretion, trying to figure out where Austen stood on
censorship from a close reading of her fiction is an equally perplexing business. Overall,
Austen scholars seem to have gathered themselves into two distinct camps regarding the
matter. There are those who believe that Austen sided squarely with the moral censors of
her day and served as a steadfast literary proponent of the patriarchal status quo (see, for
example, Alistair Duckworth’s The Improvement of the Estate, in which he views “the

36
Qtd. in Deirdre Le Faye’s Jane Austen: A Family Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1989), 233.
37
Virginia Woolf, “Jane Austen,” in The Common Reader (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1925),
146.
80
typical pattern of Jane Austen’s plots, not as an expression of her submission to social
pressures or as a fictional response to her own biographical predicament, but as an
indication of her attitude to society and to the individual’s place in society”
38
), and those
who believe that Austen brazenly faced up against the censorious powers-that-be and
consciously infused her texts with controversial and subversive material (see Jillian
Heydt-Stevenson’s Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions, in which she insists that
“Austen’s comedies of the flesh may sometimes shock, but they shock because she
wanted them to, as she exposes a multitude of worlds, some of them unsavory indeed,
within the well-known worlds of courtship and marriage.”
39
To this ongoing debate—which, it should be noted, almost never uses the word
censorship to describe the cultural or literary injunctions at play—I hope to add a new
dimension by considering the role that “sophistication” plays in Austen’s literary
technique. Her technique is sophisticated, certainly, in the sense of its being elegant,
refined, intricate, cultivated, and all the other positive connotations of the term. But it is
also sophisticated in the way that Jason Joy wanted the movies produced under his
domain to be sophisticated, by simultaneously working on two different levels—one that
is legible and appropriate for all audiences, one that is for certain eyes only. In Austen’s
well-known remark that serves as the epigraph to this chapter, she draws a Joy-ian
distinction between those of her readers who are “dull Elves” (meaning: unsophisticated)
and those who possess “a great deal of Ingenuity” (meaning: sophistication) themselves,
)

38
Alistair M. Duckworth, The Improvement of the Estate: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels (Baltimore:
John Hopkins University Press, 1971), 10.
39
Jillian Heydt-Stevenson, Austen’s Unbecoming Conjunctions: Subversive Laughter, Embodied History
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 209.
81
and admits that her works are written specifically “for” the latter. According to the moral
censor’s preconceived notions of sophistication, the “dull Elves” to whom Austen is
referring should necessarily consist of her young, rural, and female readers, while her
intended “smart Elf” audience should, by contrast, consist of grown-ups, city-dwellers,
and men. There is, of course, something fundamentally wrong with the gender dynamics
of this picture. Not only are Austen’s novels widely perceived to be un-male, they are
also, as D. A. Miller has pointed out, widely perceived to be unmanly: “Like a handbag
or fragrance, the works of Jane Austen [are] deemed a ‘female thing’; and just as they
[are] considered to bespeak the most distinctive depths of womanly being, so they [are]
equally regarded as unreadable by those out of their natural element there.”
40
________________________________________________
Much,
then, as George Cukor’s reputation for sophistication is connected, in some unspoken
way, with his persistent labeling as a “woman’s director,” Austen’s sophisticated
narrative technique—what Miller calls her “Style”—is what marks her as a “woman’s
writer” par excellence. By reading the works of Cukor and Austen alongside each other,
we can better understand the covert relationship between sophistication and gender,
particularly as they collide, conflate, and commingle in the “sophisticated”/“female”
genre of romantic comedy.
We can see a common ground between Austen’s novels and classical
Hollywood romantic comedies in two seemingly contradictory ways. On one hand, as
Thomas Doherty has expressly argued, the romantic comedies in question were required

40
D. A. Miller, Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 2-3.
82
by the Code to employ an “Austenian” brand of verbal and sexual restraint: “The moral
universe of classical Hollywood cinema—the world of reticence, constraint, discretion,
untruths, and unspokens—comes from out of the past as another century where they do
things differently. Packed tight with coded repression, it plays like the cinematic version
of a Jane Austen novel.”
41
At the same time, however, the romantic comedies certainly
also mirror Austen’s sense of linguistic playfulness and insouciant wit—the kind of wit to
which Maria DiBattista is referring when she traces the lineage of the Hollywood
romantic comedy back through its theatrical roots: “For inspiration and ease in the use of
words,” she argues, “the comic heroines of the talkies looked to the talkative women of
stage comedy, from Shakespeare through the Restoration playwrights to Wilde, Shaw,
and Coward.”
42

41
Doherty, Hollywood’s Censor, 340.
While not all of Austen’s heroines fall into this playfully “talkative”
model of womanhood (least of all Elinor Dashwood and Fanny Price, for example),
Austen is perhaps best known—and best loved—for her creation of two of literature’s
reigning female wits, Elizabeth Bennet and Emma Woodhouse. In this chapter, I have
chosen to focus on Emma (1815) rather than Pride and Prejudice (1813) because of its
more nuanced treatment of the concepts of “sophistication” and “interpretation” that are
so central to my discussion of censorship. And I have chosen to pair Emma with the
Hollywood romantic comedy that is, to my mind, the most explicitly about those same
concepts: Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story. Sophistication not only shapes these texts
from with without, it shapes them from within: each tells the story of a young woman
who must learn, over the course of her narrative, how to harness the powers of discursive
42
Maria DiBattista, Fast Talking Dames (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 31.
83
sophistication in order to circumvent her culture’s rigid expectations of moral perfection,
just as Austen and Cukor use strategies of sophisticated narration to circumvent their
cultures’ rigid rules of moral censorship.
As I will demonstrate, the entire plot of The Philadelphia Story can be read as
an epistemological defense of sophistication—a defense that was as important to the arc
of Cukor’s career as it was to the arc of Katharine Hepburn’s. The pivotal role that the
text played in Hepburn’s professional life is already part of Hollywood folklore. It is
well known, for example, that the role of Tracy Lord was specifically written for
Hepburn by playwright Philip Barry, that she starred in the Broadway version to great
acclaim at a time when she was considered to be “box office poison” in Hollywood, that
she bought the rights to the play to ensure that she would be cast in the film version, and
that the success of the film single-handedly (and permanently) returned her to
Hollywood’s A-list. Critics who focus on this biographical backdrop for the text tend to
read it in strictly Hepburnian terms; Andrew Sarris, for example, has maintained that
“The play was about Katharine Hepburn herself, and what the American people thought
about Katharine Hepburn in 1939, and what Katharine Hepburn realized that she had to
do to keep her career going. The Philadelphia Story … is Katharine Hepburn getting her
comeuppance at long last, and accepting it like the good sport she was.”
43

43
Andrew Sarris, You Ain’t Heard Nothin’ Yet: The American Talking Film History and Memory, 1927-
1949 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 451.
But if Sarris is
right that the text is fundamentally about what it means to be “Katharine Hepburn,” it is
important for us to remember how much Cukor was involved in the fabrication and
dissemination of that meaning. As writer Dan Callahan has aptly noted,
84
In Hepburn, Cukor found a woman who exemplified everything he
believed in and everything he wanted to be. Thus, a butch but vulnerable
actress became the seminal artistic creation of a sensitive but thrillingly
earthy gay man. There is a 1940s photograph of the two of them with
matching open-mouthed smiles: they have become each other, for a
moment or more, and together they created the idea of Katharine Hepburn,
a grand and ennobling and essentially solitary idea. George Cukor is
Katharine Hepburn, and vice versa. They helped, long before it was
fashionable, to de-stabilise the sexes, and they provided an example to
lyrical loners everywhere.
44

Although Cukor and Hepburn’s collaborative “artistic creation” was, ultimately,
an indisputable and unparalleled success (Hepburn currently ranks as the American Film
Institute’s Greatest Female Star of all time, holds the record for most Best Actress Oscar
wins, etc.), that success was in serious jeopardy at the time of The Philadelphia Story’s
conception. But why? What was so “poisonous” about the idea of Katharine Hepburn to
audiences of the late thirties? According to film scholar Kathrina Glitre, the key to
understanding the “box office poison” list of 1938 on which Hepburn was so famously
and pejoratively placed is to bear in mind the identity of the list’s author: Harry Brandt,
the president of the Independent Theater Owners of America. Brandt’s goal in taking out
a full-page ad in the trade press declaring the toxic status of stars like Hepburn, Greta
Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, and Fred Astaire was to protest the studio
practice of “block booking”—a practice wherein independent exhibitors were forced to
pay for blocks of several different films in order to rent the one film that they actually
wanted to play. Brandt’s list was, therefore, meant to discourage the studios from casting
the actors and actresses who were considered to be “unappealing” by the ITOA’s primary
clientele. Unappealing on what grounds? In Glitre’s opinion, “it is hardly surprising

44
Dan Callahan, “George Cukor,” Senses of Cinema 33 (October-December 2004).
85
that the androgynous, exotic and sophisticated allure of these particular stars did not go
down well in rural areas, where most of the independent exhibitors were located.”
45
For the year that Hepburn was labeled as poison was also the year that Cukor
worked arduously on the preproduction of the most eagerly anticipated, most highly
publicized movie of all time, Gone with the Wind, only to be humiliatingly replaced by
director Victor Fleming two weeks into the shoot. The reasons for Cukor’s firing have
been much debated, though there is some degree of consensus that they at least partially
stemmed from the strained relationship between Cukor and his male lead, Clark Gable.
The more commonly told rendition of the story maintains that Cukor was replaced by the
“manlier” Fleming because Gable feared that Cukor was focusing too much on the
leading ladies’ performances at the cost of his own. In an oft-quoted interview,
contributing GWTW screenwriter Ben Hecht described this version of the rationale

Hepburn’s sophistication can, then, be seen as one of the major contributing factors that
led to her temporary professional downfall. Significantly, however, Hepburn did not
choose as her comeback vehicle a work that demonized the concept of sophistication, or
that cast her in a more box-office-friendly, unsophisticated role. She chose, instead, to
play the most “sophisticated” character in a most “sophisticated” romantic comedy by
Broadway’s most “sophisticated” playwright. And when it came time to bring all of this
unapologetic sophistication to the big screen, she specifically chose to be directed by her
good friend Cukor, who was also going through a low point of his career, and on
similarly “sophisticated” grounds.

45
Kathrina Glitre, Hollywood Romantic Comedy: States of the Union, 1934-65 (London: Manchester
University Press, 2006), 114; emphasis mine.
86
behind Cukor’s firing in particularly dismissive terms: “[Cukor] didn’t know anything,
except one thing. He didn’t know anything about stories, he didn’t know anything about
directing, sets, technique. He had a flair for women acting. He knew how a woman
should sit down, dress, smile. He was able to make women seem a little brighter and
more sophisticated than they were, and that was about the only talent he had.”
46
The director was on the set… preparing a shot after a series of awkward
moments with Gable. Selznick was there too, as always. Suddenly, Gable
muttered audibly, “I can’t do this… I can’t do this scene…”
But
biographer Patrick McGilligan claims that Gable’s strong dislike of Cukor was less about
his disdain for Cukor’s “effeminately sophisticated” directing style than it was about his
disapproval of Cukor’s personal life. According to McGilligan, Gable voiced this
homophobia in no uncertain terms, at what would prove to be the breaking point of
Cukor’s directorial reign:
Everyone was dumbfounded. Because whatever else he was,
Gable was an absolute professional. Somebody asked, “What’s the matter
with you today?” And suddenly, Gable exploded. “I can’t go on with this
picture! I won’t be directed by a fairy! I have to work with a real man!”
The atmosphere was deeper than silence. Footsteps echoed on the
soundstage. Cukor had walked off. He was beaten. This was a story
Cukor told, on rare occasions behind closed doors, against himself.
The next day, Gable simply did not show up for work.
47

Whether this version—by McGilligan’s account, Cukor’s version—is wholly accurate or
not, Cukor does at least seem to have felt that his sexual orientation and perceived
femininity were taking a toll on his career in 1939. Again, though, Cukor’s response to
being negatively typed as a “sophisticated” woman’s director was not to turn away from
either female-centered material (his very next film would be the all-female The Women)

46
Qtd. in McGilligan, George Cukor, 116.
47
McGilligan, George Cukor, 150.
87
or from sophisticated Broadway fare (his next six films would be adaptations of former
Broadway plays.) Above all, Cukor’s disheartening experience working on Gone with
the Wind—which, he felt, its producer David O. Selznick was turning into “an
overblown, almost purple melodrama, lacking a speck of truth”
48
Although Austen never completely strayed from the comfort zone of that genre
herself, the closest that she came to doing so was certainly in the novel that directly
preceded her composition of Emma, Mansfield Park (1814). Mansfield Park is generally
regarded to be Austen’s most conservative, most “Evangelical” work; the one in which,
“most clearly, the ‘official’ censor intervenes on behalf of society to suppress insurgent
individualism.”
—made him fervently
want to return to the genre that he always considered to be his artistic safe haven, the
genre of romantic comedy.
49
And while that conservatism does appear, in some ways, to have “paid
off” for Austen—the first edition of Mansfield Park generated a profit of £320, which
was more than she made as a whole on the other three novels that were published during
her lifetime
50

48
Ibid, 145.
—Austen also suffered some serious disappointments when it came to the
reception of Mansfield Park, most notably in the utter lack of attention that was paid to it
by the literary reviewers of the time: not a single critical review was written upon its
initial release. Austen did not comment upon this fact directly in any of her surviving
letters, but she did demonstrate the extent to which her ego could be wounded by such an
oversight in a letter that she wrote to her publisher John Murray in 1816 after he sent her
49
See, for example, Mandal’s Jane Austen and the Popular Novel, in which he examines “the degree to
which Mansfield Park participates in a new concern with moral and domestic issues, one spearheaded by
fiction with a decidedly Evangelical cast,” 91; Duckworth, Improvement of the Estate, 36.
50
Mandal, Jane Austen and the Popular Novel, 102.
88
Sir Walter Scott’s review of her body of works which, again, failed to make any mention
of Mansfield Park: “I return you the Quarterly Review with many Thanks. The
Authoress of Emma has no reason I think to complain of her treatment in it, except in the
total omission of Mansfield Park.—I cannot but be sorry that so clever a Man as the
Reviewer of Emma, should consider it as unworthy of being noticed.”
51
The “reviews”
of her friends and family that she so meticulously kept track of were, meanwhile, only a
mixed bag at best. While a few of her friends professed to like Mansfield Park better
than any of her works to date, the vast majority of them could not help but admit that they
did not find in it quite the “Spirit,” “brilliance,” or “Wit” of Pride and Prejudice. Those
who did grant it praise almost always focused upon “the pure morality with which it
abounds,” or, more specifically, upon “the Manner in which the Clergy are treated.” But
even some of those glimmers of praise were qualified in the end; as one acquaintance
candidly explained, “I think it excellent—& of its good sense & moral Tendency there
can be no doubt… but as you beg me to be perfectly honest, I must confess I prefer
P&P.”
52
One gets the sense, from Austen’s correspondence, that she preferred “P&P”
herself—she even refers to it as “my own darling Child” in one of her most giddily
excited letters to her sister Cassandra. Later in the same letter, too, she reveals her
partiality toward the novel’s heroine, Elizabeth Bennet: “I must confess I think her as
delightful a creature as ever appeared in print, and how I shall be able to tolerate those

51
Austen to John Murray, 1 April 1816, in Jane Austen’s Letters, 313.
52
Qtd. in Southam, Critical Heritage, 48-50.
89
who do not like her at least I do not know.”
53
Why, then, did Austen create a heroine so
very different from Elizabeth in her next novel, Mansfield Park? (Mansfield Park is,
after all, the one novel in which Austen actually uses the term “sophisticated” to describe
her female protagonist, albeit in its negative form: when Henry Crawford is beginning to
feel attracted to Fanny Price, he thinks to himself that “It would be something to be loved
by such a girl, to excite the first ardours of her young, unsophisticated mind!”
54
) One
hypothesis is that Austen enjoyed the artistic challenge of variation—to be sure, just after
her comment about Elizabeth’s “delightfulness,” she notes that “Now I will try to write of
something else;—it shall be a complete change of subject—Ordination.”
55
The work is rather too light & bright & sparkling;—it wants shade;—it
wants to be stretched out here & there with a long Chapter—of sense if it
could be had, if not of solemn specious nonsense—about something
unconnected with the story; an Essay on Writing, a critique on Walter
Scott, or the history of Buonaparte—or anything that would form a
contrast & bring the reader with increased delight to the playfulness &
Epigrammatism of the general stile.
In order to
understand why Austen would consider such a change to be creatively beneficial, we may
look to one of her most famous comments about her own literary work (in this case,
Pride and Prejudice), which can be found in another letter that she wrote to Cassandra
just short of a week later:
56

It is possible, I would argue, to read Austen’s entire foray into the pious,
“Evangelical” world of Mansfield Park as an exercise in contrast, with the goal of
making her return to the sophisticated, irreverent epigrammatism of Emma all the more

53
Austen to Cassandra Austen, 29 January 1813, in Jane Austen’s Letters, 201.
54
Jane Austen, Mansfield Park (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 245.
55
Austen to Cassandra Austen, 29 January 1813, in Jane Austen’s Letters, 202.
56
Austen to Cassandra Austen, 4 February 1813, in Jane Austen’s Letters, 203.
90
“delightful” to her readers in the end. For although some critics have been able to read in
Emma a continuation of the conservative impulse that Austen began to explore in
Mansfield Park, many others bristle against such a reading, and vehemently argue for
Emma’s place at the table of radical and feminist ideas. John Dussinger, for example, has
written that “Emma is probably the most Gallic novel in English, imbued with the acuity
of La Rochefoucauld, Diderot, and Laclos [and] with the radical egoism of desire,”
57

while Claudia Johnson has asserted that, “In its willingness to explore positive versions
of female power, Emma itself is an experimental production of authorial independence
unlike any of Austen’s other novels.”
58
Like Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story,
Emma Woodhouse is positioned at the center of her fictional world and granted a sense
of social and economic autonomy from the start: both Tracy and Emma are, to use
Austen’s opening words, “handsome, clever, and rich,” and both are very much
accustomed to having their own way.
59
But do Emma and Tracy really possess as much power as their sovereign
positions within their respective stories would seem to suggest? Many critics believe not,
pointing to the “put her in her place” narrative structure that is ostensibly followed by
each text. A typical reading of Emma, for example, finds that “by the conclusion of her
story, Emma is brought low, and marriage saves her,”

60

57
John Dussinger, In the Pride of the Moment: Encounters in Jane Austen’s World (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1990), 50-51.
while a typical reading of The
58
Claudia Johnson, Jane Austen: Women, Politics, and the Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1988), 126.
59
Jane Austen, Emma (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993), 1. Further references will be given
parenthetically in the text by page number.
60
Johnson, Jane Austen, 140. Johnson is describing in this sentence the common response to Emma that
she intends to debunk.
91
Philadelphia Story points out that, in the end, “Tracy Lord becomes inebriated, is carried
semiconscious from the pool, apologizes repeatedly, cries because of her alienating
‘magnificence,’ [and] happily parrots lines spoken for her by her ex- and soon-to-be
husband, C. K. Dexter (Cary Grant).”
61
According to such readings, the heroines’
unfettered power is treated as a “problem” that must be “fixed” by narrative’s end, in a
misogynist version of compensating moral values. Adding to this impression of sexist
conventionality is the fact that, in each case, it is the male romantic partner who is
assigned the pedagogical task of fixing the heroine, thereby making his role fall
somewhere between lover and moral censor. “Indeed,” as Claudia Johnson has noted,
“Mr. Knightley does look like the benevolent, all-seeing monitor crucial to the
conservative fiction of Austen’s day. Hovering like a chaperon around the edges of every
major scene—the portrait party at Hartfield, the dinner at the Coles, the word game at the
Abbey, the outing at Box Hill—he is always on the lookout for wrongdoing and
nonsense.”
62
Dexter also does a great deal of hovering around the outskirts of the
narrative action in his story, though he chooses to adopt a decidedly less strict
chaperoning style than that of Mr. Knightley; in the words of Stanley Cavell, his “is a
power not to interfere in [events] but rather to let them happen.”
63

61
Diane Carson, “To Be Seen but Not Heard: The Awful Truth,” in Multiple Voices in Feminist Film
Criticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 213-16.
Still, Dexter is as
ready to lecture Tracy as Mr. Knightley is to lecture Emma, and from a similarly
fraternal, if not quite paternal, standpoint—just as we are repeatedly reminded of Emma’s
62
Johnson, Jane Austen, 140.
63
Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness,139.
92
and Knightley’s sibling-in-law status, so too are we reminded on several different
occasions that Tracy and Dexter “grew up together.”
But unlike Emma, who finds her only moral lecturer in Knightley—“Mr.
Knightley was, in fact, one of the few people who could see faults in Emma Woodhouse,
and the only one who ever told her of them” (5)—Tracy is subjected to the lectures of
virtually every man around her. While this pedagogical format may appear to fulfill the
gendered expectations of moral censorship, the ironic twist of The Philadelphia Story is
that almost all of the men are lecturing the woman to be less prudish, less judgmental,
less censorious. The bluntest such lecture comes from Tracy’s father, who in the course
of a few short minutes manages to call her an unattractive, unloving daughter, a heartless
prig, a jealous woman, and a perennial spinster who “might just as well be made of
bronze.” Only slightly less severe, meanwhile, are the speeches made by the film’s two
competing romantic heroes, Dexter and Mike “Macaulay” Connor (James Stewart); the
former condemns Tracy for being “generous to a fault… except to other people’s faults”
and warns her that she’ll “never be a first class human being or a first class woman until
you’ve learned to have some regard for human frailty,” while the latter rebukes her for
possessing all the self-righteous “arrogance of your class.” According to the perverse
moral logic of the film, Tracy must learn to shed her “exceptionally high standards,” her
“prejudice against weakness,” and her confident discrimination between right and wrong
in order to qualify as a “good” person by the story’s end.
Importantly, however, this expectation of moral laxity is a two-way street;
Tracy is allowed and, even, encouraged to indulge in “sophisticated” transgressions as
93
much as the male characters ask her to overlook their own. Most obviously, Dexter’s
renewed romantic interest in Tracy is directly contingent upon her learning to let her
“own foot slip a little.” Hence the genuine delight that he appears to feel when he sees
Tracy and Mike stumbling back from their drunken, late-night dip in the pool—no
bitterness, no jealousy, no moral condemnation. Quite the opposite, in fact: Tracy
effectively wins back Dexter’s love and respect by getting drunk, getting naked, and
getting physically intimate with another man. Mike’s attraction to Tracy is less blatantly
tied to his sense of her immorality, but it does begin when he sees her reading his book of
short stories in the library, an act which he jokingly refers to as being a moral danger in
and of itself: “Are you sure you’re doing the right thing? You know what happens to
girls like you when they read books like mine—they begin to think. That’s bad.” At the
peak of their romantic encounter, too, Mike specifically describes his love for Tracy in
terms of her fallibility rather than her perfection. “I don’t seem to you made of bronze?”
she asks. “No,” he croons in response, “You’re made out of flesh and blood. That’s the
blank, unholy surprise of it!” Tracy’s appeal, then, for both Mike and Dexter, is her
surprising capacity for “badness” underneath her pristine shell of moral purity. And, in
the end, Tracy comes to realize that she is no more attracted to moral perfection than
either of the film’s male protagonists is, for as much as she tries to convince herself that
the man she desires is her fiancé George (John Howard)—with his “very high morals;
very broad shoulders”—she ultimately rejects him on the grounds of his being “too good”
for her, “a hundred times too good.”
94
George is, in fact, the only character who looks at life from a more predictably
“moral” standpoint, and is repeatedly ridiculed by the other characters for doing so.
When, for example, he discovers Tracy in a heated tête-à-tête with her ex-husband and
stiffly remarks, “I suppose I should object to this twosome,” Dexter drolly brushes his
objection aside by explaining that “That would be most objectionable.” Or, when Tracy
reads aloud the letter that George has written after finding her draped over Mike’s arms
on the eve of their wedding (“My dear Tracy, Your conduct last night was so shocking to
my ideals of womanhood that my attitude toward you and the prospect of a happy and
useful life together has been changed materially…”), Dexter, Mike, and Liz must all
force themselves to stifle derisive smiles at the sound of its stodgy and morally inflexible
tone. Throughout the film, George epitomizes the prurient moral censor who cares more
about image than substance, and who sees more dirt and debauchery in the world than
even exists. When, in his final moments on screen, he tells Tracy that “it didn’t take
much imagination” for him to interpret her drunken swim with Mike in a sexual manner,
she cuttingly observes, “Not much, perhaps, but just of a certain kind.”
In an exchange that I consider to be central to the thematic structure of the film,
George’s sense of morality is specifically contrasted with that of the film’s other, more
likable characters in terms of its lack of “sophistication.” After observing Tracy and
Mike in their post-swim, ostensibly post-coital state, Dexter and George discuss what the
ramifications of the untoward scene should be:
Dexter: You won’t be too hard on her, will you?

George: I’ll make up my own mind what I’ll be!

95
Dexter: We’re all only human, you know.

George: You… all of you… with your sophisticated ideas!

Dexter: (smiling wryly) Ain’t it awful?

George means here to be critiquing the profligate ways of the upper class—the upper
class has immoral, “sophisticated” ideas whereas he, proudly, does not—but his critique
is undermined by the fact that the particular immoral idea he is bristling against is
Dexter’s innocuous, democratizing remark about everyone being “only human” after all.
In this sequence and in the film as a whole, George’s unsophisticated censoriousness is
portrayed as the unappealing antithesis to Dexter’s sophisticated humanity. To object to
“sophisticated ideas” is, within the slanted moral universe of The Philadelphia Story,
deemed to be “most objectionable” indeed.
By contrast, Austen’s moral universe appears to be much more conventional in
nature, as Emma’s moral “education” is typically read in terms of her learning to be less
egotistical, less snobbish, less oblivious to the emotional truths of the people around her.
But I contend that it is also possible to read Emma as a bildungsroman of sophistication.
As much as Emma may view herself as the epitome of the cultured sophisticate at the
outset of the novel—“handsome, clever, rich”—we are repeatedly shown otherwise. The
pre-educated Emma is, in fact, both bad at speaking in a successfully “sophisticated”
dialect and at being an astutely “sophisticated” listener. This can be seen as early as the
first time she engages in (supposedly sophisticated) banter with Mr. Knightley, in
response to his comment that “poor Miss Taylor” must necessarily be happier in her
newly married state than she had been in her position as Emma’s governess because, as
96
he puts it, “it must be better to have only one to please, than two” (41). “Especially,”
Emma responds “playfully,” “when one of those two is such a fanciful, troublesome
creature! That is what you have in your head, I know – and what you would certainly say
if my father were not by.” In this “playful” remark, Emma thinks she is demonstrating
her prowess both at unearthing the hidden meaning of Mr. Knightley’s words and at
framing her own barb in such a way that her father will not quite be able to follow it, so
that he will not be hurt or offended by it. But her “sophisticated” comment backfires on
both fronts. Mr. Woodhouse is even more offended by it than he would have been if he
had understood its true import (“I believe it is very true, my dear,” he says with a sigh. “I
am afraid I am sometimes very fanciful and troublesome”), while Mr. Knightley insists
that she has read more insult into his comment than was there (“I meant no reflection on
any body. Miss Taylor has been used to have two persons to please; she will now have
but one. The chances are that she must be a gainer.”)
This one small example of unsuccessful discursive sophistication on Emma’s
part is, of course, highly representative of the kinds of misinterpretations and
miscommunications—with Mr. Elton, with Frank Churchill, with Harriet Smith, among
others—that will constitute the bulk of the diegetic tension throughout the narrative. The
tension culminates at the pivotal group outing to Box Hill, where Emma commits her
most egregious “crime” of the novel, a crime that arises from yet another failed attempt at
sophisticated conversation—though this time her attempt fails in a very different way.
Perhaps out of frustration with her tendency to err on the side of under-communication
(meaning that her intended subtext is misunderstood or ignored by those to whom she is
97
directing it), Emma errs at Box Hill on the side of over-communication, by leveling a
“subtextual” insult at the benign and pitiable Miss Bates that is really not subtextual at
all. In response to Miss Bates’s self-effacing claim that she will “be sure to say three dull
things as soon as ever I open my mouth,” Emma replies, “Ah! ma’am, but there may be a
difficulty. Pardon me—but you will be limited as to number—only three at once” (239).
In the wake of this exchange, Mr. Knightley reproaches Emma more heatedly than he
does anywhere else in the novel—for being so “insolent,” so “unfeeling,” and so ethically
“wrong.” But if we look carefully at the way Mr. Knightley’s lecture is framed—at what
exactly he is saying Emma has done “wrong”—we find that Austen’s system of ethics is
not quite as simple as it might at first seem to be, either. For Emma’s real crime is not
that she has been witty at someone else’s expense, but that her wit has not been
sophisticated enough to escape the comprehension of even her least perspicacious of
listeners (in this case, Miss Bates, who has, as Knightley assures her, “felt your full
meaning” [241]). In other words, the problem is not that Emma has been cruel, but that
she has been obvious.
Mr. Knightley has, it should be noted, earned the right to lecture Emma about
the importance of sophisticated discourse, being one of Austen’s best employers of it
himself. Consider, for example, the scene in which he is stopped on the street by Miss
Bates, who calls to him from her mother’s bedroom window while Emma, Harriet Smith,
Jane Fairfax, Frank Churchill, and Mrs. Weston are gathered in the “little sitting-room”
adjacent. After Miss Bates has finished gushing about Emma and Frank’s “delightful”
98
dancing at the party the night before, Knightley gives a typically, because subtly,
humorous response:
“Oh! very delightful indeed; I can say nothing less, for I suppose Miss
Woodhouse and Mr. Frank Churchill are hearing every thing that passes.
And (raising his voice still more) I do not see why Miss Fairfax should not
be mentioned too. I think Miss Fairfax dances very well; and Mrs.
Weston is the very best country-dance player, without exception, in
England. Now, if your friends have any gratitude, they will say something
pretty loud about you and me in return; but I cannot stay to hear it.” (157)

In this passage, Mr. Knightley is finding humor in the unwieldy nature of certain forms of
discourse (gossip, eavesdropping, etc.) that are so deeply woven into the fabric of village
life. But he is also, significantly, finding humor in the foolishness of Miss Bates for not
realizing that her “pretty loud” compliments can and must be audible to all of her guests
in the other room. He is, in other words, just as willing to mock the “poor,” “degraded”
Miss Bates as Emma later will be at Box Hill, with the important distinction that he
knows how to calibrate his insult correctly, in such a way that his sophisticated listeners
(Emma, Mrs. Weston, Jane Fairfax, etc.) can be in on the joke while his more naïve
listener (again, Miss Bates) cannot. Knightley as a moral censor is, then, less Joseph
Breen, more Jason Joy; what he really wants is for Emma to speak in that Joy-ian
language “from which conclusions might be drawn by the sophisticated mind, but which
would mean nothing to the unsophisticated and inexperienced.” And if, as so many
critics maintain, Knightley serves as the “normative and exemplary figure” of the novel,
64

64
Duckworth, Improvement of the Estate, 148.

then his stance on sophistication would seem to be Austen’s stance on sophistication,
even if she never uses that particular term to discuss the conversational politics at play.
99
Interestingly, meanwhile, if we look at the negotiations between Joseph Breen
and George Cukor regarding the content of The Philadelphia Story, we find that Breen
himself was more “Joy-ian” in his censorship approach than tends to be imagined. In his
first “recommendation” letter to MGM that discusses the film, Breen opens with a
predictably conservative list of four specific items which he deems to be absolutely “not
acceptable, and which must be corrected in the finished picture.” They are: 1) “It will be
not be acceptable to suggest that Tracy and Mike go swimming in the nude,” 2) “It will
have to be definitely established that there has been no actual adultery between Seth Lord
and the dancer,” 3) “Some of the dialogue is not acceptable, either from the standpoint of
sex suggestiveness, or because of containing a condonation of illicit sex,” and 4) “There
is too much display of liquor and drinking, in certain scenes.”
65

65
Breen to L. B. Mayer, 18 June 1940, The Philadelphia Story Production Code Administration file,
Margaret Herrick Library.
But as forcefully
dogmatic as his initial demands may have been, something clearly altered his attitude
towards these four elements between his perusal of the screenplay and his signing off on
the final cut of the film. The fact that Tracy and Mike so obviously have gone swimming
in the nude, that Tracy’s father so clearly has had an affair with the dancer, that so much
of the dialogue does either contain sexual innuendo or a condonation of illicit sex, and
that so many characters do drink to excess throughout the film raises serious questions
about the strength and viability of “post-Code” film censorship. If, in 1934, the
Production Code really became as powerful as so many film historians have claimed,
then how could The Philadelphia Story have managed in 1940 to evade each and every
one of Breen’s preliminary prohibitions with such seemingly carefree aplomb?
100
The answer to this question can, in my opinion, be found in the film’s
“sophisticated” mystique. For as much as Breen may have objected to The Philadelphia
Story’s risqué content in theory, the glamorously highbrow atmosphere of the final
product seems to have drastically modified his sense of what was “acceptable” for the
film to show and suggest after all. Breen can forgive the film for its excessive “display of
liquor and drinking” because of the sophisticated, black-tie attire of the characters doing
the drinking and the sophisticated bubbles of the champagne being drunk. He can forgive
Seth Lord for his implied philanderings because of the sophisticated, “high society”
status of the fictitious family to which he belongs. He can forgive Tracy Lord and C. K.
Dexter Haven (or, perhaps more accurately, Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant) for the
“sex suggestiveness” of their banter because of the sophisticated tone in which the lines
are spoken. When, for instance, Tracy answers her mother’s rhetorical question “Is there
no such thing as privacy anymore?” with the salty reply, “Only in bed, mother, and not
always there,” it is Hepburn’s upscale Bryn Mawr accent that moves the remark from the
category of “dirty joke” to the category of “witty repartee.” Ironically, then, the very
attribute of sophistication that had condemned Katharine Hepburn to the “box office
poison” list of 1938 is what allowed her comeback vehicle to be as provocative and
explicit and, ultimately, as successful as it turned out to be. By the end of the film’s first
three weeks in circulation, it had broken the all-time box office record that had previously
been held by Walt Disney’s Snow White.
66

66
Levy, George Cukor, 137.

101
Hence even in the infamously straight-laced “post-Code” years, it must be
conceded that there were exceptions to Breen’s rigidly enforced rules—that there were,
so to speak, chinks in Breen’s censorial armor. Lea Jacobs, who is generally one of the
stronger proponents of distinguishing between pre-1934 and post-1934 censorship, has
made precisely this concession: “It should be noted that ambiguity in the treatment of
detail did not always work in the interests of censorship. The screwball comedies of the
late thirties and early forties proved to be a constant source of irritation and complaint for
the MPPDA precisely because they were so adept at exploiting the sorts of denial
mechanisms typically favored by the Production Code Administration”—especially, she
points out, “insofar as the plots revolved around misinterpretations, around the difficulty
of knowing the truth about the heroine’s putatively guilty past.”
67
The Philadelphia Story
certainly follows this pattern, with its plot revolving around the misinterpretation of
Tracy’s putatively guilty late-night swim. But it also does more than just follow the
pattern; it explicitly comments upon the hypocritical censoriousness of the pattern by
condemning George for even thinking about calling off his marriage to Tracy on the basis
of her ostensible sexual guilt. Whereas the plot of a more typical screwball comedy (The
Awful Truth, for instance, or My Favorite Wife) merely requires the man to realize that he
has been mistaken about his wife’s apparent infidelity and to forgive her accordingly, The
Philadelphia Story requires its hero to love and respect its heroine whether the more
illicit interpretation of her behavior proves to be true or false.
68

67
Jacobs, Wages of Sin, 113.
In other words, Dexter
68
In The Awful Truth, in fact, the sexist double standard goes even further: Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne)
must be cleared of the charge of infidelity by the story’s end, but must also agree to overlook the blatant
infidelity of her husband (Cary Grant) that marks the beginning of the film.
102
does not win Tracy’s hand because he is the only man sophisticated enough to interpret
the extent of her sexual deviance correctly, but because he is the only man sophisticated
enough not to care whether she has been “deviant” or not.
As many critics have previously noted, the plot of Emma is also deeply interested
in questions of interpretation and misinterpretation. What are the potential pleasures and
dangers of reading between the lines? To what extent are interpretations influenced by
emotions such as pride, anger, jealousy, and love? How do games of interpretation
reflect the moral and intellectual faculties of the players involved? Although Austen
addresses these questions in each of her novels, Emma is unique in its physicalization of
the game play: in it, the grown-up characters put together books of riddles, fashion
words out of alphabet blocks, and come up with verbal conundrums just to pass the time
of day. The characters believe, of course, that they are being clever and cunning by
engaging in all of this linguistic sophistry, and are transmitting socially forbidden
messages with anonymity and impunity. But they could not, for the most part, be more
wrong. Hidden meanings misfire, are misconstrued, and are intercepted at almost every
turn. While this could be read as Austen’s way of critiquing the entire enterprise of
indirect discourse, her own persistent use of indirection at the authorial level would seem
to undermine such a reading.
For, as critics like John Dussinger have observed, “the narrative text [of Emma]
insinuates itself like a crossword puzzle, providing just enough information to stir the
reader’s interest in filling in the empty spaces.”
69

69
Dussinger, In the Pride of the Moment, 45.
An often-cited example of this kind of
103
narrative interpretability can be found in Mr. Woodhouse’s partial recollection of David
Garrick’s dirty riddle, “Kitty, a fair, but frozen maid,” which was originally printed in the
scandalous 1771 publication The New Foundling Hospital for Wit (and not, as the text of
Emma claims, in the conservative and morally instructive Elegant Extracts.) It has been
much debated “[p]recisely what kind of game Jane Austen is playing with Mr.
Woodhouse and her readers” by putting a riddle about syphilis and prostitution into such
a feeble, seemingly sexless character’s mouth.
70
But however the riddle of Mr.
Woodhouse’s riddle may be solved, what does seem clear is that Austen the novelist was
actively engaging in the same kind of teasingly ambiguous word play as Emma the
matchmaker, Mr. Elton the suitor, or Frank Churchill the secret fiancé—so that, in
Dussinger’s words, “the charades in Emma function reflexively as a play-within-a-play,
imitating in miniature the whole enterprise of constituting the text of the novel.”
71
Emma is not, of course, the only Austen novel about which this observation could
be made; a much more literal example of a “play-within-a-play” can be found in
Mansfield Park, when the Bertrams and their friends decide to put on their own amateur

70
Alice Chandler, “A Pair of Fine Eyes: Jane Austen’s Treatment of Sex,” Studies in the Novel 7.1 (1975):
92. The riddle, whose first stanza tells us that “Kitty, a fair, but frozen maid,/ Kindled a flame I still
deplore;/ The hood-wink’d boy I call’d in aid,/ Much of his near approach afraid,/ So fatal to my suit
before,” has been analyzed in greatest detail by Jillian Heydt-Stevenson in Unbecoming Conjunctions.
According to Heydt-Stevenson, “the riddle addresses the plight of a man (the narrator) who has been
infected with venereal disease (“a flame I still deplore”) and who “prays” to Cupid, “the hood-wink’d boy,”
for a cure. The riddle’s solution is that the youth who raises and quenches such flames is a chimney sweep,
and the prize for guessing—the kiss—is slang for sexual intercourse” (161). Heydt-Stevenson takes the
sexual innuendo of the riddle as proof of Austen’s “bawdy,” “raunchy,” “dirty” mind. But discovering that
Austen could be playful with sexual material does not, in my opinion, suddenly turn her works into
examples of thinly-veiled pornography. If we consider the character of Mary Crawford in Mansfield Park,
who is also responsible for making some of the cruder jokes in Austen’s oeuvre, we realize that the novel
ultimately condemns her for her crudity. Austen cannot, ultimately, endorse Mary Crawford’s lack of
subtlety; humor, in her fiction, must be funny more than once.
71
Dussinger, In the Pride of the Moment, 45.
104
stage production of Lovers’ Vows. The play, which is Elizabeth Inchbald’s adaptation of
August von Kotzebue’s Natural Son, deals quite explicitly with the subjects of
extramarital fornication and illegitimacy, and raised its share of controversy when it was
first brought to the English stage in 1798. Within the context of Mansfield Park, the
performance of the play is controversial on several different levels: because Sir Thomas
would so clearly disapprove of his children’s theatrical experimentation, because of the
specific content of the play itself, and because the play is so clearly being used as an
outlet to express the actors’ true and forbidden emotions. As Lionel Trilling has put it,
“The impropriety lies in the fact that they [Maria and Henry, Mary and Edmund] are not
acting, but are finding an indirect means to gratify desires which are illicit, and should
have been contained.”
72
For it must be remembered that, as prim and proper as Austen’s work is so often
presumed to be, each of her first three published novels contains one episode of sexual
scandal that fundamentally alters the course of the narrative—John Willoughby’s
seduction of Colonel Brandon’s ward Eliza in Sense and Sensibility, Mr. Wickham’s
unwedded elopement with Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, and Maria’s fall from
grace in Mansfield Park. Part of the reason that Austen’s reputation for respectability has
not been sullied by her inclusion of these episodes is that she makes sure her protagonists
As we continue to read the novel, moreover, we learn of one
additional motive for Austen’s inclusion of Inchbald’s play: it serves to foreshadow the
most controversial episode of Austen’s own story, Maria Bertram’s adulterous and
irretrievably ruinous affair with Henry Crawford.

72
Qtd. in Elaine Jordan, “Pulpit, Stage, and Novel: ‘Mansfield Park’ and Mrs. Inchbald’s ‘Lovers’ Vows,’”
NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 20.2 (Winter 1987): 139.
105
loudly and preemptively vocalize the moral censor’s disapproving point of view—just as
Dexter slugs Mike in the jaw in order to prevent the morally outraged George from doing
the same, Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, and Fanny Price all beat Austen’s
anticipated objectors to the morally indignant punch. But there is one important
difference between the moral indignation of Austen’s heroines and that of the implied
moral censor. Where the moral censor, like nineteenth-century British society itself, was
much more apt to place the blame of an indecent affair squarely upon the shoulders of the
woman involved, Austen’s heroines are more judgmental of the male participants:
Elinor, for example, feels pity for Eliza but outright contempt for Willougby, while
Elizabeth considers Lydia to be foolish but Wickham to be really cruel. Even Fanny,
who has the most conservatively censorious reaction to the news of scandal, is at least
equally appalled by the conduct of Maria and Henry. Fanny does not, in other words,
have the sexist response to adultery that the narrator of Mansfield Park specifically
bemoans: “That punishment, the public punishment of disgrace, should in a just measure
attend his share of the offence, is, we know, not one of the barriers which society gives to
virtue. In this world, the penalty is less equal than could be wished.”
73
In Emma, Austen chooses to deviate from the formula established in her prior
three novels, inasmuch as the one scandalous relationship that Emma believes to exist
(that between Jane Fairfax and her best friend’s husband, Mr. Dixon) turns out to be a
figment of her imagination. But the false scandal in Emma is, in a way, more audacious
than the real scandals in Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, and Mansfield Park,

73
Austen, Mansfield Park, 452-3.
106
precisely because Emma does not react to the thought of it with shock or disgust—it is,
after all, a fiction that she has created in order to fulfill the latent desires of her own
psyche. Emma may not express those desires as transparently as the Bertrams do in their
drawing room production of Lovers’ Vows, but she does write and direct a series of
theatrical fictions of her own. As Marilyn Butler has pointed out, the “masterstroke” of
these fictions, from a censorship perspective, is that Emma does not cast herself as the
romantic heroine of them: “Social taboos would have prevented any young woman from
taking so commanding a role in pursuing a man for herself. But Emma is unhampered by
propriety when she takes the initiative in choosing a husband for Harriet.”
74
By marking
the text’s most sexual material as the “fanciful” product of Emma’s “imaginist” mind,
Austen effectively holds that material out of the censor’s reach—in much the same way
that Joseph Breen cannot object to Tracy’s ostensible affair with Mike after it is
diegetically declared be fictitious, Austen’s moral censors are stripped of their power by
the very “vicariousness” of Emma’s “promiscuity,”
75
Emma’s active imagination also challenges the assumptions of moral censorship
in another pivotal way: as clearly as the text defines her to be an elegant, well-bred lady,
it also repeatedly shows her indulging in the “unladylike” habit of reading sexual motives
into ostensibly innocent behaviors (Mr. Elton’s interest in Harriet’s portrait, Jane
Fairfax’s refusal to visit her friend Miss Campbell after she has married Mr. Dixon, Frank
to borrow D. A. Miller’s
terminology.

74
Marilyn Butler, Jane Austen and the War of Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 252.
75
D.A. Miller, Narrative and its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1981), 10.
107
Churchill’s rescue of Harriet from a band of gypsies, etc..) If Emma is an “imaginist,”
she is a markedly prurient one, contrary to the expectations—or, at least, the wishes—of
the moral censor. Of course, Emma is ultimately proven to be wrong in the majority of
her prurient suspicions. But she is almost never wrong about the existence of underlying
sexual motives behind the actions of the other characters, just about the identities of the
sexual partners involved. She is right, for example, that Jane Fairfax has received her
pianoforté as a romantic gift from a forbidden lover, and that Mr. Elton’s desire to watch
Harriet’s portrait being drawn and to contribute a charade about “courtship” to Harriet’s
compilation of riddles are both signs of a passionate flirtation on his part. The fact that
she mistakes Mr. Dixon for Frank Churchill and Harriet for herself does not mean that
she is mistaken in her overall perception of the world as an excessively sexual place.
In The Philadelphia Story, Tracy demonstrates some of Emma’s prurient
imaginative tendencies; she automatically assumes, for instance, that the relationship
between her father and the Broadway dancer Tina Mara is a sexual one, even though he,
unconvincingly, insists that it is not. But the character in the film who possesses the most
prurient mind is not Tracy or even the priggishly censorious George; it is Tracy’s
precocious, thirteen-year-old sister Dinah (Virginia Weidler). Although Dinah is both
young and female—two characteristics which should, according to the precepts of moral
censorship, mark her as an innocent, “unsophisticated” reader—she is persistently shown
to derive great, energetic pleasure from picking up as much grown-up “innundo” (sic) as
she possibly can, be it about her father (“I’ll bet it’s on account of father and that dancer
in New York!”), her sister (“Did [Dexter] really sock her? Did he really?”), or about the
108
tawdry world at large, as covered by the fictitious scandal sheet Spy Magazine (“I love it.
It’s got pictures of everything!”) In spite of all her family’s attempts to shield Dinah
from the sordid details of adult life—“I can tell there’s something in the air, because I’m
being taken away,” she observes at one point—they cannot take away her fervent desire
to know those details. The prepubescent Dinah, then, epitomizes precisely the kind of
“woman” to whom the aforementioned Variety article of 1931 was referring in its
dramatic opening claim that “Women love dirt. Nothing shocks ’em.”
But Dinah also epitomizes the kind of feminine/feminist reading of events that
Elinor Dashwood, Elizabeth Bennet, and Fanny Price point to in their respective stories.
When Dinah observes through her window the sight of Mike carrying Tracy from the
pool to her bedroom, she jumps to the same illicit conclusion that George does, but reacts
to that conclusion in a very different way. Instead of reproving Tracy for failing to live
up to the “ideals of womanhood,” Dinah directs all of her indignation at Mike instead for
exposing her beloved sister to the ignominy of a public disgrace—when she first sees him
the following morning, she stonily sneers “How do you do?” and does not stop scowling
at him until she departs the scene. What Dinah’s response demonstrates is that women
(even the young, impressionable women whose “innocence” the moral censor believes it
is his sacred duty to protect) are not afraid of sexuality or of scandal; they are afraid of
the social suppression that tends to occur in the wake of sexual scandal. As soon as
Dinah sees that Tracy will be marrying Dexter instead of George, all of her concerns
about Mike and Tracy’s late-night swim fly out the window, even though she has not yet
learned—as the other characters and the audience have—about the “perfect innocence” of
109
that swim. Watching Tracy stand in front of a minister next to the morally imperfect but
also morally tolerant man that she has been rooting for all along, Dinah is able to read,
with a sharply “sophisticated” eye, that her sister will be safe from censure, and will
enjoy the kind of happy ending that has nothing to do with “moral improvement” or
“compensating moral values.”
The marriage between Emma and Mr. Knightley may, meanwhile, appear to fit
more neatly into the code of conduct prescribed by moral censorship: Emma is rewarded
with the love of a good man only when she has learned how to be more humble,
respectful, and “good” herself. But, again, this seeming conventionality is undermined if
we look at the specific dynamics of their relationship. One particularly revealing
comment comes near the end of the novel, when Emma and Mr. Knightley are discussing
whether or not his lifelong habit of lecturing her has, in fact, changed her for the better.
She insists that it has, but he is not so sure:
“My interference was quite as likely to do harm as good. It was very
natural for you to say, what right has he to lecture me?—and I am afraid
very natural for you to feel that it was done in a disagreeable manner. I do
not believe I did you any good. The good was all to myself, by making
you an object of the tenderest affection to me. I could not think about you
so much without doating on you, faults and all; and by dint of fancying so
many errors, have been in love with you ever since you were thirteen at
least.” (298)

The implications of this statement are radical indeed. Mr. Knightley is admitting not just
that moral instruction can be and often is a self-defeating enterprise, but that his (near-
pedophiliac) romantic interest in Emma was inspired, increased, and inflamed by the
moral flaws in her budding character. As Joseph Litvak has argued of this same moment,
Mr. Knightley’s confession turns our entire notion of his function in the novel on its
110
head: “If the narrative has traditionally been conceived as a linear development whereby
Emma, changing under Knightley’s influence, moves gradually toward a welcoming
recognition of that influence, now the Pygmalion myth gets a new twist: Knightley is
interested less in perfecting the ‘object of [his] tenderest affection’ than in ‘fancying’—at
once imagining and liking—her charming imperfections.”
76
Just as Austen ends her novel with a promise of “the perfect happiness of the
union” between Emma and Mr. Knightley (313), so too does Cukor conclude his story
with a visual representation of promised marital bliss: a glamorized still photograph of
Tracy and Dexter as they are about to kiss their way back into the married state. And yet,
by the time we reach these two seemingly traditional endings of the romantic comedy
form, we have come to realize that “perfect happiness,” for Emma and Knightley and
Tracy and Dexter, is not found in the censor’s traditional vision of moral perfection. It is
What makes Knightley so
different from the typical romantic hero of Austen’s day is, then, his lack of interest in a
more typical (because more docile) romantic heroine: he considers Jane Fairfax to be too
“reserved,” Harriet Smith to be “too young and too simple,” and Emma’s sister Isabella
to be “differing only [from Emma] in those striking inferiorities, which always brought
the other brilliancy before him” (185, 38, 279). Emma is strong-willed, self-confident,
and hot-tempered, and Mr. Knightley would not want her any other way. The goal of the
narrative, then, is not to rob Emma of her most dominant attributes, as some critics have
claimed, but rather to make sure that she winds up with the one character who can and
will appreciate them properly.

76
Joseph Litvak, “Reading Characters: Self, Society, and the Text in Emma,” PMLA 100.5 (October 1985):
772.
111
found, instead, in the never-ending circuit of moral slips and fumbles that necessarily
belong to any life worth living—and in the kind of love that is “sophisticated” enough to
travel that circuit without judgment and without fear.
112
CHAPTER 3

Beyond Censorship:
Charles Dickens and Frank Capra

Nothing is purer than Christmas. Flakes of pure white snow softly fall upon the
Christmas ground. Carolers sing out pure notes of fond, familiar Christmas songs.
Children clap with pure delight as their parents hand them wrapped-up toys and lay out
succulent Christmas feasts of goose and punch and pudding. But it is more than that:
the Christmas season also brings about a near-mystical social transformation. Greed is
replaced by generosity. Cynicism is replaced by sympathy. Corruption is replaced by
moral purity. We know this is true because we have seen and read about it, year in and
year out, ever since we were children ourselves. We have read about a crotchety old
miser transformed overnight into the most munificent of givers, and about a tiny, crippled
child whose life is saved by the Christmas miracle of charity. We have seen a man who
is on the brink of suicide realize that the unglamorous, small-town life he leads is in fact a
wonderful life, and watched his friends and neighbors amiably empty their pockets to
rescue him from financial ruin. We have heard that every time a bell rings, an angel will
get his wings, and that God will bless us, Every One. We have seen and heard and
learned all this, of course, from two of our culture’s most revered and most perennial of
classics, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol and Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life.
Christmas simply would not be “Christmas” without them.
But what can such sacred texts possibly have to do with the issue at hand, the
issue of moral censorship? Who, in other words, would ever want to censor Christmas?
113
Interestingly, the holiday of Christmas has played a highly influential role in the
histories of both English literary and Hollywood film censorship. As Frank Fowell and
Frank Palmer describe in their detailed study of Censorship in England, the office of
English Dramatic Censor originated in the figure of the Lord of Misrule who, in medieval
times, was put in charge of selecting entertainment for the Royal Court to be performed
in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Over time, the “ephemeral and irresponsible
powers” that belonged to the Lord of Misrule became more structured and official in
nature, and the post was provided with a less anarchic-sounding name: Master of Revels.
It was in this incarnation that the post began to take on a more directly censorious role;
according to Fowell and Palmer, “The Master of Revels was held responsible for the
inoffensiveness and general success of court entertainments, and for his own credit’s sake
it was necessary for him to discriminate between good and bad plays.”
1

1
Frank Fowell and Frank Palmer, Censorship in England (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 12. For
another helpful history of early English censorship, see also Richard Dutton, Mastering the Revels: The
Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991).
Eventually, too,
the Master of Revels was put in charge of “licencing” the printed versions of the plays in
question, thereby making him a direct ancestor of the modern literary censor. In his
essay on “Licence and Licencing,” Tony Tanner has remarked upon the inherently
paradoxical nature of this censorship ancestry: “Titles like Lord of Misrule and Master of
Revels suggest a responsibility which looks two ways. The ‘Master’ must make sure that
the ‘Revels’ take place, thus he has (originally) to organize them and help them into
expressive form; at the same time he must ‘master’ them, control and delimit the form
114
they take.”
2
In the world of film, meanwhile, there is a clear and much-analyzed link between
the implementation of Hollywood’s Production Code and the pressures of Christian (and,
in particular, Catholic) morality groups. In fact, the issue of film censorship first gained
national attention in the United States when, in 1908, a coalition of New York ministers
pressured Mayor George B. McClennan into closing down all New York movie theaters
on Christmas Day in order to make the statement to the film industry that, “Unless they
took some action to clean up their image [and] address the concern of critics that movies
were corrupting children and adults, they could expect continued attacks by moral
guardians.”
Plays produced specifically for medieval Christmas festivities were, then,
the first English narratives on record to be influenced by the simultaneously productive
and repressive powers of moral censorship.
3

2
Tony Tanner, “Licence and Licencing: To the Presse or to the Spunge,” Journal of the History of Ideas,
38.1 (January-March 1977): 4.
As a result, early discussions of self-censorship within the budding
American film community often used the metaphor of the dreaded “Christmas boycott” to
describe the potential danger looming at the end of the censorship road. Ironically,
Christmas also played a role in the ground-breaking Supreme Court decision of 1952
which finally gave movies protection under the First Amendment and paved the way for
the dissolution of Hays Code censorship, as the decision was made in response to a legal
dispute over the banning of The Miracle, Roberto Rossellini’s allegedly “sacrilegious”
film about a peasant woman who is seduced and impregnated by a vagrant stranger but
3
Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 13.
115
convinces herself that she is experiencing a modern-day version of Mary’s immaculate
conception.
The two Christmas stories that I will be examining in the course of this chapter do
not have such a direct connection to the legal history of artistic censorship. In fact, as we
shall see, their authors were two of the most popular, least “objectionable” artists of their
respective eras. The stories themselves, meanwhile, have become so much a part of our
cultural consciousness that they have, to borrow Paul Davis’s terminology, reached the
seemingly untouchable status of “culture-texts.”
4
________________________________________________
Although there is certainly much in the
writing and filming of A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life that warrants the
critical and popular acclaim they have achieved, it seems clear that the reason they, out of
all of Dickens’s and Capra’s works, have reached such a lofty status lies in their
inescapable association with the monolithically “pure” holiday of Christmas. Yet it is
precisely because of this association that I have chosen to examine the texts under the
thematic lens of censorship. My goal is to determine the role that censorship plays in the
production and reception of even the most mainstream, family-friendly, respectable of
texts—texts that appear to be beyond reproach, beyond censorship.
Charles Dickens’s relationship with censorship was undeniably shaped by his
desire to be popular, accepted, and widely read. As Joss Marsh has aptly put it, “Dickens
never ‘despaired’ of ‘pleasing,’ and was determined that no ‘prejudice’ should stand in

4
Paul Davis, The Lives and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 4.
116
the way of thoroughly respectable and remunerative success.”
5
Although this
“determination” on Dickens’s part could be construed as a form of pandering to his
audience (as well as to the moral censors of his time), it could also be seen as a reflection
of his lifelong efforts to increase the status of the literary profession in terms of its “social
respectability.” To a certain extent, of course, these efforts were selfishly motivated—as
the son of a debt-ridden navy payroll clerk, Dickens could not deny the fact that he
wanted his own role as highly successful professional writer to provide him with that
much-coveted treasure in the Victorian world, upward social mobility—but they were
also part of a larger philanthropic vision that Dickens had for the artistic community as a
whole. Indeed, at an elegant society soirée held in his honor towards the end of his life,
Dickens confessed that one of his greatest hopes was that he had left the “social position
[of art] in England something better than I found it.”
6
But this is not to say that Dickens’s desire for social acceptability was the only
motivating force that informed his art. He was also, as Fred Kaplan has pointed out,
deeply infuriated by what he saw as a “British hypocrisy on moral and sexual matters, the
narrow-minded closing down of avenues of experience and life.”
If art was ever going to be seen as
truly “dignified,” in Dickens’s mind, it simply could not afford to be regarded as immoral
or obscene.
7

5
Joss Marsh, Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998), 54.
To a writer who
considered psychological and social “truth” to be essential ingredients of any novel worth
reading, this kind of hypocrisy posed a very real threat indeed. While residing in Paris in
6
Qtd. in Fred Kaplan, Dickens: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 505.
7
Kaplan, Dickens, 355.
117
1855 and 1856, Dickens confessed to his friend John Forster some of the frustrations he
felt about the current state of English art and literature: “Don’t think it a part of my
despondency about public affairs,” he wrote, “when I say that mere form and
conventionalities usurp, in English art, as in English government and social relations, the
place of living force and truth.”
8
In a way, the most severe of Dickens’s attacks on the “horrid respectability” that
he considered to be plaguing his nation appeared in the form of several scathingly
derisive character depictions, ranging from Mr. Pecksniff in Martin Chuzzlewit (“Perhaps
there never was a more moral man than Mr. Pecksniff: especially in his conversation and
correspondence”
Even when describing the works of some of his closest
friends, his complaint remained intact: “There is a horrid respectability about most of the
best of them—a little, finite, systematic routine in them, strangely expressive to me of the
state of England herself.” Although Dickens refrained from voicing these particular
complaints too directly in his public speeches regarding the literary profession, he did
allow them to work their way into certain key moments and key elements of his literary
texts.
9
) to Mrs. General in Little Dorrit (“Mrs. General was not to be told of
anything shocking. Accidents, miseries, and offences, were never to be mentioned before
her. Passion was to sleep in the presence of Mrs. General, and blood was to change to
milk and water”
10

8
Qtd. in Edgar Johnson, Charles Dickens: His Tragedy and Triumph (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1952), 2:858-9.
) to the character whose very name came to symbolize the hypocrisies
of Victorian morality, Mr. Podsnap in Our Mutual Friend. “Podsnappery,” as Dickens
9
Charles Dickens, Martin Chuzzlewit (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Classics, 1994), 11-12.
10
Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit (London: Penguin Classics, 1998), 475.
118
originally conceived it, had as much to do with self-satisfied jingoism as with moral
prudery (one of Podsnap’s most prominent character traits is his tendency to dismiss all
foreign art and politics with the stiff observation, “Not English!”), but it is the latter
feature of it for which it is most remembered. In particular, literary scholars have
repeatedly used the Podsnappian concept of “the cheek of the young person” as a
metaphor for the repressive limitations imposed upon Victorian artists.
11
A certain institution in Mr. Podsnap’s mind which he called “the young
person” may be considered to have been embodied in Miss Podsnap, his
daughter. It was an inconvenient and exacting institution, as requiring
everything in the universe to be filed down and fitted to it. The question
about everything was, would it bring a blush into the cheek of the young
person? And the inconvenience of the young person was, that, according
to Mr. Podsnap, she seemed always liable to burst into blushes when there
was no need at all. There appeared to be no limit of demarcation between
the young person’s excessive innocence, and another person’s guiltiest
knowledge. Take Mr. Podsnap’s word for it, and the soberest tints of
drab, white, lilac, and grey, were all flaming red to this troublesome Bull
of a young person.
It is easy to
understand why—Dickens’s metaphor is not, as we may see, a particularly subtle one:
12

This passage can be used to demonstrate several things: that censorship creates the
censorable as much as it condemns it, that censorship equates both youth and femininity
with impressionable, corruptible innocence, that the moral censor reveals the guiltiness of
his own knowledge by dint of his very censoriousness. For it is, of course, Mr. (not
Miss) Podsnap who selfishly “files” the world down to “fit” his purposes; he, not she,
who reads the color “red” into the mildest of “grey” matters; he, not she, who functions
as the “troublesome Bull” of Victorian society.

11
See, for example, Ruth Bernard Yeazell, “Podsnappery, Sexuality, and the English Novel,” Critical
Inquiry 9.2 (December 1982), and Richard Stang’s chapter entitled “The Cheek of the Young Person” in
The Theory of the Novel in England, 1850-1870 (London: Routledge & Paul, 1959).
12
Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1997), 132.
119
Although Dickens waited until the penultimate novel of his career to introduce the
character who most overtly and unapologetically lampooned his culture’s prudishly
censorious mentality, his most blatant authorial attack on that mentality occurred nearly
three decades earlier, in his preface to the 1841 edition of Oliver Twist. In this preface,
Dickens speaks directly to those members of Oliver Twist’s original reading public who
were morally offended by its “coarse and shocking” depiction of thieves, murderers, and
prostitutes. As his speech progresses, his tone towards these hypothetical readers
becomes more and more petulant, ultimately reaching a pitch of unadulterated and
undisguised contempt:
… I will not, for these readers, abate one hole in the Dodger’s coat, or one
scrap of curl-paper in the girl’s dishevelled hair. I have no faith in the
delicacy which cannot bear to look upon them. I have no desire to make
proselytes among such people. I have no respect for their opinion, good or
bad; do not covet their approval; and do not write for their amusement. I
venture to say this without reserve; for I am not aware of any writer in our
language having a respect for himself, or held in any respect by his
posterity, who ever has descended to the taste of this fastidious class.
13

The Dickens of this passage is as full of bravado as any Victorian narrator (including the
Thackerayan narrator to whom I directed my attention in my first chapter), though if
Dickens had actually followed through with his proclaimed indifference to his readers’
“fastidious” sensibilities, Oliver Twist would probably have felt a bit more like
Thackeray’s raunchier take on the Newgate novel, Catherine: A Story.
The difference is that, in the midst of all the boldness that Dickens displays in
refusing to excise so much as a single descriptive detail in the name of narrative
“delicacy,” he freely and unapologetically admits to censoring his characters on a

13
Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), lv.
120
conversational level. He will, he tells us, show us “the very dregs of life,” but only “so
long as their speech [does] not offend the ear.”
14
His reason for adopting this paradoxical
attitude towards censorship, he claims, has as much to do with his own personal sense of
moral decency as it has to do with his hypothetically offended readers’: “No less
consulting my own taste, than the manners of the age, I endeavored, while I painted in all
its fallen and degraded aspect, to banish from the lips of the lowest character I
introduced, any expression that could by possibility offend; and rather to lead to the
unavoidable inference that its existence was of the most debased and vicious kind.”
15

The paradox of Dickens’s censoring tendencies has been duly noted by several critics;
Tony Tanner, for example, has raised the question of “just why Dickens felt so ready,
indeed eager, to describe dirty clothes while absolutely refusing to transcribe ‘dirty’
words.”
16
So Dickens first eliminates the dirty words from his text, then justifies the dirty
clothes (and the dirty characters who inhabit those clothes) by invoking a strategy of
excessive purity. Dickens does not, of course, put it quite this way; instead, he tells us
that he “wished to shew, in little Oliver, the principle of Good surviving through every
The answer to this question lies, I would argue, in Dickens’s keen awareness
that the usage of certain red-flagged words was one of the easiest ways to have a text
banned or boycotted in Victorian England (and, a century later, in classical Hollywood.)
The censorship of profane words is a quick, straightforward, precise science; the
censorship of artistic imagery and thematic content is, decidedly, not.

14
Dickens, Oliver Twist, liii.
15
Ibid, lvi.
16
Tanner, “Licence and Licencing,” 14.
121
adverse circumstance, and triumphing at last” and assures us that “a lesson of the purest
good may … be drawn from the vilest evil.”
17
________________________________________________
But, as many critics have pointed out,
throughout the novel it feels much more as if we are following Oliver’s story so that we
can be exposed to the seedy but exciting underworld of Fagin, Sikes, and the Artful
Dodger than as if we are being exposed to their crimes and debaucheries so that we can
appreciate Oliver’s moral sanctity all the more. Even the preface supports this view; in
it, Dickens spends far more time discussing why he felt artistically compelled to go into
all of the dirty details about his lowlife characters, particularly Nancy, than he does
discussing why his depiction of sweet, innocent little Oliver might be important or
interesting. As much as he defends the authenticity of his depiction of Nancy’s miserable
depravity, Dickens does not make the same claim about Oliver’s wide-eyed innocence.
And, indeed, many readers have complained about Oliver being unconvincing as a
character; about his moral purity being laid on rather too thick; about that purity feeling
exaggerated, excessive, and overblown. In the end, the novel (like so many other of
Dickens’s works) seems less to defend the existence of unadulterated goodness in the
modern world than to call that goodness into serious question.
Frank Capra’s most celebrated films—which borrow so much from Dickens in
terms of style, theme, and tone
18

17
Dickens, Oliver Twist, liii.
—are similarly accused of being implausibly innocent
18
These similarities were no coincidence: according to Capra’s screenwriter on Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington, Sidney Buchman, “Capra’s great passion was Dickens. As soon as he had some money, he
bought some of the rarest and most extraordinary editions of Dickens’s work, and he was very proud of his
collection.” Qtd. in Joseph McBride, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1992), 414.
122
and excessively pure. The same cannot be said, however, of Capra’s lesser-known
“pre-Code” films; in these earlier works, Capra repeatedly and unapologetically pushes
the boundaries of moral and social acceptability. Witness, for example, the content of his
three pre-Code Barbara Stanwyck vehicles: 1930’s Ladies of Leisure, in which Stanwyck
plays a strong-willed hooker who comes across as far more likeable and sympathetic than
her hypocritically “respectable” costars; 1932’s Forbidden, in which she plays a librarian
who has an affair and an illegitimate child with a well-respected politician; and 1933’s
The Bitter Tea of General Yen, in which she plays an American missionary who falls in
love with a suicidal Chinese warlord. But in the years that followed Joseph Breen’s
ascension to the PCA throne, “moral purity” quickly began to play a more prominent role
in Capra’s work, as more and more of his films’ plots began to revolve around the
struggle between his protagonists’ wholesome idealism and the greed and corruption of
the powers that be. Although these later films are often praised for being Capra’s most
overtly and daringly political work, they are also the films that elicit the most derision for
being overly sentimental and cloyingly melodramatic—for being, as so many critics have
quipped, “Capracorn.”
In his autobiography, Capra attributes the shift in his films’ tone and theme that
occurred right around 1934 not to the sudden tightening of the Production Code, but
rather to an anonymous visitor who came to see him while he (just like Preston Sturges
before him) lay fighting for his life after an acute bout of appendicitis.
19

19
Capra dates this illness to 1935, just after he swept the Academy Awards, but McBride proves that it
really occurred in 1934.
According to
Capra’s rendition of the story, this mysterious “little man” calmly but forcefully accused
123
him of being a “coward,” even an “offense to God,” because of his failure to use his
directorial power to convey morally responsible messages to his vast movie-going
audience.
20
The little man even went so far as to compare Capra’s influence to the
influence of Adolph Hitler: “That evil man is desperately trying to poison the world with
hate. How many can he talk to? Fifteen million—twenty million? And for how long—
twenty minutes? You, sir, you can talk to hundreds of millions, for two hours—and in
the dark.”
21
That, according to Capra, was all the epiphany he needed; from that day
forward, “my films had to say something. From then on my scripts would take from six
months to a year to write and rewrite; to carefully—and subtly—integrate ideals and
entertainment into a meaningful tale.”
22
As neat and dramatic as this anecdote may be, its authenticity has often been
questioned. Capra biographer Joseph McBride, in particular, has adamantly determined
“[m]ost, if not all, of this fantastic story [to be] an invention.”

23
McBride comes up with
several potential motives that Capra may have had for creating the fiction of the little
man, none of which are particularly flattering to Capra (for instance: “the ‘little man’
incident provided Capra’s readers with an explanation for his transformation into a
socially conscious director without giving any credit for it to [his most frequent
collaborator, screenwriter Robert] Riskin.”
24

20
Frank Capra, The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography. (New York: Macmillan Company, 1971).
176.
) I would like to add to McBride’s string of
21
Capra, Name Above the Title, 176. What Capra’s anecdote does not acknowledge is the sexual power
that filmmakers are able to wield over their audiences as a result of the “two hours” that those audiences are
held captive in the bedroom-like “dark.”
22
Ibid, 185.
23
McBride, Frank Capra, 318.
24
Ibid, 322.
124
conjectures the possibility that Capra’s fierce sense of creative independence made him
want to deny any influence that the tightening of the Production Code might have had
upon his work. For even though Capra was not a “writer/director” in the same sense that
Preston Sturges was, he certainly considered himself to be the one in “control” of his own
artistic vision; in his autobiography, he describes how, as a young filmmaker, “the
simple notion of ‘one man, one film’…became for me a fixation, an article of faith. In
my subsequent forty years of film directing, I never forgot it, nor compromised with it—
except once. I walked away from the shows I could not control completely from
conception to delivery.”
25
Like Dickens, then, Capra prided himself on being an “uncompromising” artist;
but, also like Dickens, Capra made sure that his popular appeal and economic success
were not too “compromised” by the proclivities of his artistic vision, either. As a
Sicilian-born peasant who immigrated to America when he was six and maneuvered his
way up the social and financial ladder by sheer force of will and hard work, Capra valued
“success” with a passion that bordered on obsession. As he says in the first lines of the
preface to his autobiography, “I hated being poor. Hated being a peasant. Hated being a
scrounging newskid trapped in the sleazy Sicilian ghetto of Los Angeles. My family
couldn’t read or write. I wanted out.”

26

25
Capra, Name Above the Title, 34.
And out he got: by the 1930’s, Capra was one
of the best paid, most popular, most reliable makers of Hollywood smash hits.
Paradoxically, then, Capra’s burning desire for creative autonomy (“I take a very dim
Ib
Ibid, xi.
125
view of authority of any kind; I don’t like anybody telling me what to do”
27
) was
consistently tempered by his overall willingness to follow the dictates of social decorum
(“In short: ‘The audience is always right’ is a safe bet.”
28
Relatively little has been written on Capra’s dealings with the Production Code,
and for good reason: the most “trouble” Capra ever got into for one of his works
occurred when the U.S. Congress was treated to an early screening of Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington (1939) and shortly thereafter threatened to pass an Anti-Block Booking Bill
(which would have caused a great deal of financial hardship for the Studio System) if
Capra chose to release the film in an unaltered state. Ironically, the PCA was one of Mr.
Smith’s most adamant supporters in the wake of the controversy; in a letter to Will Hays,
Joseph Breen adamantly defended the film on the grounds that it “splendidly emphasized
the rich and glorious heritage which is ours and which comes when you have a
government of the people, by the people, and for the people.”
) Not surprisingly, both of these
conflicting drives played an important role in the development of Capra’s complex
relationship with moral censorship.
29

27
“Frank Capra: ‘One Man—One Film,’” in Frank Capra: The Man and His Films, eds. Richard Glatzer
and John Raeburn (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press), 21.
This view of the film is,
however, a far cry from Breen’s initial opinion of the novel The Gentleman from
Montana on which the screenplay was based. After MGM first submitted the novel to
Breen for his Code consideration in 1938, he “most earnestly” urged the studio to “take
serious counsel before embarking on the production of any motion picture based on this
story,” largely because of its “generally unflattering portrayal of our system of
28
Capra, Name Above the Title, 201.
29
Breen to Will Hays, 31 January 1939, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington Production Code Administration
file, Margaret Herrick Library.
126
Government, which might well lead to such a picture being considered, both here, and
more particularly abroad, as a covert attack on the Democratic form of government.”
30

The difference between Breen’s two very contradictory takes on the film was almost
certainly a result of Capra’s dexterously “delicate” handling of the material. Breen had,
in fact, been impressed by Capra’s artistic delicacy ever since he first took office at the
PCA in 1934: in response to an early draft of It Happened One Night, Breen remarked
that, “While a few of the situations will need careful handling, we feel sure that under
Mr. Capra’s direction, they will be treated in such a way in the finished picture as to be
not only satisfying under the Code, but free from danger of censorship.”
31
The few
critics who have discussed the Code’s uncharacteristically lenient treatment of Capra’s
work have hypothesized that the popular and critical success of his early films were so
impressive to the PCA that it consciously chose to treat his later work “with particular
favor,” as Richard Maltby has put it.
32
But it is also important to note that the trust that Breen placed in Capra’s sense of
delicacy was, to a large extent, justified. The self-proclaimed goal of the PCA was, after
all, to object solely to that which the American public would find “objectionable;” so the
fact that Capra reliably and unabashedly catered to the dictates of public opinion must
surely have gone a long way in quelling the PCA’s fears. Indeed, as a Los Angeles Times
writer concluded after an interview with Capra in June of 1934, “One of the prime Capra

30
Breen to L. B. Mayer, 19 January 1938, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington PCA file.
31
Breen to Harry Cohn, 12 November 1933, It Happened One Night Production Code Administration file,
Margaret Herrick Library.
32
Richard Maltby, “It Happened One Night: The Recreation of the Patriarch,” in Frank Capra: Authorship
and the Studio System, ed. Robert Sklar and Vito Zagarrio (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998),
134.
127
tenets is to keep a film clean; smut, he insists, is the way of the lazy writer, the slothful
director, the misguided producer.”
33
This is not to say, however, that Capra was exactly
on the “side” of censorship. Within the same L.A. Times interview, he also makes it clear
that he “holds no brief for censorship, believing that the industry at large should not be
made to suffer for the sins of the few.”
34
In one camera set-up we watch the blanket-screen with the man as it is
rippled and intermittently dented by the soft movements of what we
imagine as the woman changing into pajamas in cramped quarters. The
thing that was to “make everything all right” by veiling something from
sight turns out to inspire as significant an erotic reaction as the unveiled
event would have done… The barrier works, in short, as sexual censorship
typically works, whether imposed from outside or from inside. It works—
blocking a literal view of the figure, but receiving physical impressions
from it, and activating or imagination of that real figure as watch in the
dark—as a movie screen works.
In fact, it was only a few months after that
interview that Capra shot the famous “walls of Jericho” scene in It Happened One
Night—a scene that has been read as a shrewd metaphor for the self-defeating nature of
censorship by, for example, Stanley Cavell:
35

Like many other film scholars who have examined this scene, Cavell considers it to be an
intentional indictment of Code censorship on Capra’s part: “I cannot doubt that the most
celebrated Hollywood film of 1934 knows that it is, among other things, parodying the
most notorious event of the Hollywood film’s political environment in 1934, the
acceptance of the motion picture Production Code.”
36

33
Philip K. Scheuer, “Public Doesn’t Want to Think, Says Capra,” in Frank Capra: Interviews, ed. Leland
Poague (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004), 14.

34
Ibid, 14.
35
Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1981), 82.
36
Ibid, 82-3.
128
If we return, then, to the issue of the shift in Capra’s tone that took place around
the time of It Happened One Night, there does seem to be some indirect evidence that
Capra was responding to the intensification of Code enforcement that was occurring at
roughly the same historical moment. One of the most striking differences between
Capra’s pre-Code and post-Code work is the altered persona of his male protagonist;
whereas most of the “heroes” in Capra’s early films are either dishonest (Forbidden),
manipulative (Platinum Blonde), or even outright violent (The Bitter Tea of General
Yen), the heroes of his mature works tend to be sweet, simple, and wholesome to a fault.
The most obvious examples of this kind of hero can be found in Capra’s enormously
successful “Mister” films, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and Mr. Smith Goes to
Washington; in each of these works, the excessive innocence of the male protagonist
serves as a central narrative concern. Both Longfellow Deeds and Jefferson Smith are
small town heroes who are thrust overnight into the lair of urban corruption, where they
are mercilessly mocked for their extreme artlessness and naïveté. But as the films
progress, the authenticity of Deeds’ and Smith’s artlessness is called into serious question
by a world that simply cannot comprehend how anyone could be that “good”—Deeds is
put on trial for insanity simply because he wants to give away his twenty million dollar
inheritance “to people who need it,” while Smith is accused of wanting to pass his
National Boys Camp bill for his own personal profit rather than for the sake of the “boys
of America” he claims to hold so dear. Although Capra’s “Mister” films do officially
allow their wholesome protagonists to thrive and triumph in the end, that triumph is only
129
achieved when the heroes learn to shake off some of their small town innocence and play
by the big city’s (or the big Senate’s) slicker, more cynical rules.
As a result, there are two potential ways to read the role that innocence plays in
the moral landscapes of these films. On one hand, both films paint innocence as a
valorous, appealing, heroic trait; on the other hand, they both expose the rarity of that
trait within the modern world, and portray it is as something that must ultimately be
outgrown and overcome. In the case of Mr. Smith, the offended U.S. Congress obviously
chose to read the film in the latter light, while the contented PCA chose to read it in the
former. In the letter from Breen to Hays defending the film, in fact, Breen is so satisfied
with what he perceives to be the film’s “morally pure” message that he predicts it “will
do a great deal of good for all those who see it and, in my judgment, it is particularly
fortunate that this kind of story is to be made at this time.”
37
In Breen’s eyes, then, the
excessiveness of the male protagonist’s innocent idealism effectively overshadows and
excuses what he had once determined to be the story’s problematically “unflattering
portrayal of our system of government.” And Breen was certainly not alone in his
attitude towards the film: many of its contemporary reviewers made some sort of
reference to the “redemptive light” that “Jimmy Stewart’s boyishly sincere performance”
was able to cast in the midst of Capra’s otherwise scathing “one-man campaign against
crooked politics.”
38
________________________________________________

37
Breen to Will Hays, 31 January 1939, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington PCA file.
38
Unsigned reviews in Motion Picture Daily, 14 October 1939 and Variety, 11 October 1939, Mr. Smith
Goes to Washington PCA file.
130
Seven years and a world war would pass before Capra would have the opportunity
to collaborate with his “boyishly sincere” Mr. Smith star again, on a film that they would
both consider to be the pinnacle of their Hollywood careers, It’s a Wonderful Life. Out of
all of Capra’s films, Wonderful Life is, of course, the one that is most frequently and most
facilely compared to a specific work of Dickens’s. To cite a small sampling: James
Agee refers to it as “one of the most efficient sentimental pieces since A Christmas
Carol”
39
; Paul Davis hails it as “the apotheosis of the American Carol”
40
; and David
Mamet condemns it as a “warped,” “populist” version of the “old-world vision [of]
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.”
41
Less well known, perhaps, is the fact that both A Christmas Carol (1843) and It’s
a Wonderful Life (1946) were conceived at particularly uneasy moments of their authors’
careers. Dickens was in the middle of serializing his least financially successful work,
The reasons for such comparisons are fairly
obvious: both texts’ plots revolve around the education and, ultimately, the moral
redemption of their erring protagonists. Both contain the unwanted intrusions of
supernatural spirits. Both rely on the machinery of retrospection (Scrooge looks back
over the course of his own life, Clarence looks back over the course of George Bailey’s)
followed by the machinery of counterfactuals (Scrooge gets to see what life will be like if
he does not change his miserly ways, George gets to see what life would be like if he had
never been born.) And, most obviously of all, both are proudly and ostentatiously set
during the Christmas holiday season.

39
James Agee, qtd. in Capra, Name Above the Title, 382.
40
Paul Davis, Life and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge, 164.
41
David Mamet, “Crisis in Happyland,” Sight and Sound 12.1 (January 2002): 22.
131
Martin Chuzzlewit, which was doing so poorly that it suddenly became “the rage,”
according to a review in The Critic, “to decry Dickens, by pronouncing his Chuzzlewit a
failure, and his writings vulgar, and whispering ‘Boz is going down.’”
42
One reason that
Dickens was having more trouble than usual in winning over his reading public was,
perhaps, that his new novel lacked a sufficiently sympathetic, innocent protagonist; The
New Republic, for one, felt that the novel suffered from its author’s “mistake of
supposing that a tale can be perfectly successful without the impersonation of a single
character worthy of, or capable of exciting, the reader’s sympathy. In Martin Chuzzlewit
we are introduced to a world of knaves and fools, destitute of any one quality that could
command respect.”
43
Dickens was not quite so indifferent to the public’s moral criticism
of his work as he professed himself to be in his Oliver Twist preface—he referred in his
letters to his “Chuzzlewit agonies,”
44
Capra, meanwhile, was newly returned from his four-year tour of duty in World
War II, and was extremely nervous that he would not be able to regain the directorial
glory of his pre-war years: “There’s no denying that butterflies began putting on their
own private air show in my stomach,” he confesses in his autobiography. “How would a
Ruth, Gehrig, or DiMaggio feel if he hadn’t swung a bat for four years and was suddenly
and was both mortified and enraged when his
publishers threatened to reduce his monthly payment by fifty pounds as a result of the
book’s disappointingly sluggish sales.

42
Unsigned review in The Critic, January 1844, in Charles Dickens: The Critical Heritage, ed. Philip
Collins (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 183.
43
Unsigned review in The Westminster, December 1843, in Collins, Critical Heritage, 183.
44
John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens (New York: Dutton, 1927), 1:287.
132
asked to hit a home run in Yankee Stadium?”
45
Capra’s sense of trepidation was,
moreover, compounded by the fact that his first post-war film would inaugurate the
independent production company that he had recently formed with William Wyler,
George Stevens, and Samuel Briskin, causing him to feel that “I was not only carrying
the load of making Wonderful Life a successful picture. I had to make a success out of
Liberty Films. We were the bellwether of the post-war independents.”
46
At the same time, however, we must bear in mind that the years of 1843 and 1946
were periods of intense social reflection for Dickens and Capra, respectively. The plight
of the poor weighed very heavily on Dickens’s mind in 1843, thanks largely to two
parliamentary reports issued by the Child Employment Commission which publicly
exposed the appalling conditions of child labor in England.
For both
Dickens and Capra, then, there was an enormous pressure to come up with stories that
would appeal to a wide audience and reconfirm their status as major “box office” draws.
47
In response to these
reports, Dickens told friends that he planned to write “a very cheap pamphlet, called ‘An
appeal to the People of England, on behalf of the Poor Man’s Child.’”
48

45
Capra, Name above the Title, 374.
Although this
pamphlet never materialized, Dickens defended his decision not to write it by assuring his
social reformer friends that “when you… see what I do, and where, and how, you will
certainly feel that a Sledge hammer has come down with twenty times the force—twenty
46
Capra, Name Above the Title, 378.
47
The first report of the Children’s Employment Commission, issued in 1842, revealed the shocking
conditions of child labor in England’s coal mines, while the second report (February 1843) examined the
even worse conditions of other industries, including the needle sweatshops of London.
48
Dickens, Letters, 3:459.
133
thousand times the force—I could exert by following out my first idea.”
49
In 1946, Capra was emotionally preoccupied with what he perceived to be “the
cataclysmic aftermaths of war—hunger, disease, despair—[that] would breed gnawing
doubts in man: Why? Why? Why did my wife and children have to be blown to bits?
Where is God now?”
Several
months after making this assurance, just after giving a rousing speech at the Manchester
Athenaeum about the need for educational reform for the poor, Dickens finally conceived
of a very different way to “hammer” home his political message: by dressing it up and
serving it as a crowd-pleasing Christmas treat.
50
But, like Dickens, Capra came to realize that the best way to
address the world’s “gnawing doubts” would be in an indirect fashion; when
contemplating what the subject matter of his first post-war film should be, he says that he
specifically “knew one thing—it would not be about war.”
51

49
Ibid, 3:461.
Instead, Capra chose to
adapt a short story by Philip Van Doren Stern—a story so short, in fact, that it had
originally been circulated as Stern’s 1943 Christmas card to his friends and family. The
story is certainly not about war, but it is important to note that it is not too much about
Christmas, either. The opening lines of the story are indicative of the peripheral role that
the yuletide setting plays in both Van Doren Stern’s “Christmas” card and Capra’s filmic
adaptation of it: “The little town straggling up the hill was bright with colored Christmas
50
Capra, Name Above the Title, 375.
51
Ibid, 374-5. Even though the plot of Wonderful Life touches on the fact of World War II only briefly—
George Bailey’s brother and best friends all get to serve in the war while he is forced to fight the “battle of
the homefront” due to his one deaf ear—Charles Wolfe has argued that Jimmy Stewart’s well-publicized
status as a war veteran necessarily connected George Bailey’s story to the trauma of postwar life:
“George’s nightmare vision of dissociation, of the rupture of the family and of small-town values, can be
read as operating within the spirit of postwar noir, where the representation of veteran anguish is frequently
not literal.” Wolfe, “The Return of Jimmy Stewart: The Publicity Photograph as Text,” Wide Angle 6.4
(1985): 51.
134
lights. But George Pratt did not see them. He was leaning over the railing of the iron
bridge, staring down moodily at the black water.”
52
Despite the fact that both texts have garnered a certain amount of criticism for
their secular natures—criticism along the lines of Margaret Oliphant’s gripe that the
Carol promoted only “the immense spiritual power of the Christmas turkey”
Ironically, then, the modern world’s
two most celebrated Christmas narratives are a ghost story and a suicide story that do not
deal, in any direct way, with the biblical birth of Christ.
53
—the
reality is that the forces of moral censorship worked to minimize the texts’ religiosity
rather than to augment it. Indeed, with the exception of the opening set of prayers that
serve as the expository foundation of the film, Joseph Breen’s string of
“recommendation” letters ask Capra to cut out almost all of Wonderful Life’s most direct
references to God and Jesus (in phrases such as “I wish to God,” “Thank God,” “A, Dio
Mio,” and a comment made by Uncle Billy to George about “the place your father used
to try to run like he thought Jesus would run it”) for fear that they were not being used
“reverently” enough.
54
Following a similar logic, the London Censorship Board even
attempted to make Capra remove all references to “heaven,” “wings,” and “angels”
before the film was released in England.
55

52
Philip Van Doren Stern, “The Greatest Gift,” qtd. in Jeanine Basinger, The It’s a Wonderful Life Book
(New York: Knopf, 1986), 95.
But, after pleading with the censors “not to
ruin our first independent production” and assuring them that “all United States censor
boards have hailed picture as just type of clean wholesome entertainment they all cry
53
Margaret Oliphant, “Charles Dickens,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, June 1871, in Collins,
Critical Heritage, 689.
54
Breen to William Gordon, 6 March, 29 March, and 28 May 1946, It’s a Wonderful Life Production Code
Administration file, Margaret Herrick Library.
55
Ted O’Shea to Samuel Briskin, cable, 18 March 1947, It’s a Wonderful Life PCA file.
135
for,”
56
Even before these official objections were raised, however, Capra’s desire to
obtain his audience’s moral stamp of approval had a strong impact on the way he chose to
present the film’s religious content. As he explained to a reporter later on:
Capra was able to get most of his “wings” and “angels” through to the British
public after all.
For a long time we were worried about how to show heaven.… I knew we
wouldn’t please everybody, and I knew we’d probably get some laughs
with the thing that we naturally didn’t want. So rather than getting laughs
that we didn’t want, I used laughs we did want.… This was, in a way, a
way out of a difficulty. But a conscious way. When a thing gets tough,
try to make it funny and it’ll go over. It’s like Mae West with her sex. If
you make it funny, you can get away with murder. So heaven was
humorous this way and it didn’t offend anybody.
57

As little as Wonderful Life’s divine moments may seem to have in common with the
saucy, bawdy humor of Mae West, Capra does manage to portray heaven in a relatively
unholy, unspiritual way without raising objections from even his most devoutly religious
viewers. Capra’s angels do not talk about the Pearly Gates. Or eternal salvation. Or
Jesus or Mary or God, for that matter. Instead, they focus on what the audience is
focusing on: sitting back and watching a good movie. (“Sit down,” Joseph instructs
Clarence, “If you’re going to help a man, you want to know something about him, don’t
you?”) Interestingly, Joseph Breen appears to have had no problem with Capra’s secular
approach to representing the afterlife; the scenes in heaven are not so much as mentioned
in any of the five “recommendation” letters that Breen wrote in response to early drafts of
the film. Apparently, the Catholic-based Production Code considered it to be more

56
Capra to Ted O’Shea, cable, 19 March 1947, It’s a Wonderful Life PCA file.
57
Qtd. in Stephen Cox, It’s a Wonderful Life: A Memory Book (Nashville: Cumberland House Publishing),
49.
136
acceptable for a film to avoid religious discourse altogether than to contain discourse that
might be considered blasphemous by any of the members of its audience.
Although we do not have quite such formal evidence of censorship’s influence on
the secularization of the Carol, we do know that Dickens made several last minute textual
changes at the galleys which seem to have been based on his fear of offending his
audience’s sense of religious decorum (i.e., the Ghost of Christmas Present’s reason for
sprinkling his spirit-lifting incense upon the dinner of poor men “the most” is changed
from “Because my eldest brother took them especially under his protection” to “Because
it needs it most.”
58
) In addition to excising some of his most direct references to
religious subject matter, Dickens also relied on the “heavenly” strategy outlined by
Capra: he sprinkled his account of spirits and spiritual salvation with a hearty dose of
genial Dickensian humor. (This can be seen as early as the second paragraph of the text,
when Dickens abruptly turns his discussion of Marley’s death into a comic discussion of
the ineptness of the simile “as dead as a doornail.”
59

58
Michael Patrick Hearn, The Annotated Christmas Carol (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2004),
91-2. It is also important to realize how much more emphatic the Victorian stage censors were about the
use of any religious language; in most early stage versions of the Carol, Tiny Tim’s famous line had to be
changed to “Heaven Bless us, every one!”
) This strategy did not work on
everyone, of course. In response, for example, to the Carol’s light-hearted assertion that
“it is good to be children sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its mighty
Founder was a child himself” (89), a reviewer in the Christian Remembrancer criticized
“the extreme irreverence of this way of speaking” and advised Dickens “that his
59
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Writings (London: Penguin Books, 2000), 33.
Further references will be given parenthetically in the text by page number.
137
expunging, or altering, the sentence in the next edition, will give general satisfaction.”
60

Such complaints notwithstanding, the vast majority of Dickens’s readers were more than
satisfied with his “way of speaking” in the Carol, as irreverent and/or irreligious as it
may have been. In fact, as critics like Paul Davis have pointed out, Dickens’s Christmas
stories seem to have been specifically catered towards the secularized sensibilities of his
Victorian London reading public: “Writing for these new urban readers,” Davis asserts,
“Dickens sought to express spiritual truth in the humanized language of the self-mirroring
secular city.”
61
But what, we might ask, is the secular message that is being promulgated in these
texts in place of a religious one—and what role does censorship play in that message’s
creation and repression? As Mrs. Oliphant’s quip about Dickens’s undue emphasis on
“the Christmas turkey” implies, the most obvious thematic statements being made by the
texts are socio-economic in nature; and yet, the exact nature of those statements is
anything but obvious. Both works spend a great deal of narrative energy pointing out and
bemoaning the economic injustices of the modern world’s capitalist system, and cast as
their villains characters who personify the cutthroat potential of that system (the
unreformed Scrooge, the never reformed Potter.) At the same time, however, some
In a way, then, the secular nature of Dickens’s and Capra’s seminal
“Christmas” texts can be understood less as a form of rebellion against the conservatively
religious ethos of Victorian and Hays Code–era systems of censorship than as a
paradoxical result of that ethos: ultimately, the moral censor’s fear of “blasphemy” both
promoted and provoked the secularization of Dickens’s and Capra’s narrative art.

60
Unsigned review, The Christian Remembrancer, January 1844, in Collins, Critical Heritage, 119.
61
Davis, Life and Times of Ebenezer Scrooge, 61.
138
recent critics have begun to argue that the texts actually work to reinforce an “essentially
conservative” capitalist ideology. J. Hillis Miller, for instance, has commented upon the
fact that at the end of the Carol, “Scrooge is not supposed to give up his business, nor is
he to cease to go daily on ’Change, nor is the capitalist system of getting, spending,
production and exchange supposed to be altered in any basic way,”
62
while David Mamet
has criticized Wonderful Life for being a “self-deluded” proponent of “un-selfinterested
capitalism, [which] is of necessity an oxymoron.”
63
Because Dickens’s and Capra’s
resolutely mainstream texts participate so conspicuously in the commodity culture of
literary and cinematic production, such critics argue, their authors cannot help but have a
personal investment in making the economic system at the heart of that culture “look
good.” And what better way to cast a positive light upon the buying and selling of goods
than by broaching the subject of Christmas—that “phantasmatic” season during which, to
borrow Audrey Jaffe’s phrase, “laissez-faire economics is happily wedded to natural
benevolence.”
64
That “wedding” is carried out by the stories of spiritual transformation that these
scripts tell—but they do not tell them easily, or outside the forces of the marketplace of
ideas. Christmas is, after all, the most “manufactured” of spiritual holidays, both in terms
of its endlessly regenerated representation in popular culture and in terms of its
pronounced connection to raw commercialism. The Christmas fantasy that plays out in
the lives of Ebenezer Scrooge and George Bailey is also, therefore, an “ideological

62
J. Hillis Miller, “The Genres of A Christmas Carol,” The Dickensian 89.3 (Winter 1993): 204.
63
Mamet, “Crisis in Happyland,” 22.
64
Audrey Jaffe, “Spectacular Sympathy: Visuality and Ideology in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol,” PMLA
109.2 (March 1994): 255.
139
project,” as Jaffe has called it: “A capitalist sensibility is perhaps most evident,” Jaffe
argues, “in the story’s external and internal refusals of temporality: in the identification
with a time of year that ensures its annual return and in its offer to Scrooge, to its readers
or viewers, and, theoretically, to the poor themselves of an endlessly repeatable cycle of
failure and recovery.”
65
This dynamic of dressing capitalism in the red and white robes of Father
Christmas intriguingly reflects the role of the censor in shaping novels and films—like
the Lord of Misrule, both inviting and restraining merriment. Just as Dickens and Capra
clearly had a personal and professional stake in the success of capitalism, so too did the
system of moral censorship under which they were forced to operate—the censorship of
the marketplace. This can, as usual, be seen most explicitly in the case of the Production
Code; as I outlined in my introduction, Hollywood’s decision to adopt the 1930
Production Code only a few months after the stock market crash of 1929 was
unmistakably influenced by the economic ramifications of that crash. If Hollywood
wanted to keep as much of its box office revenue as possible in the face of the depression,
the thinking went, it had better start trying to offend as few of its potential viewers as
possible. Because the very genesis of the Code was so market-driven in nature, it is no
surprise that classical Hollywood filmmakers consistently found themselves being
Jaffe’s words could, of course, apply just as easily to Capra’s
seasonal tale of financial ruin followed by redemption; in both A Christmas Carol and
It’s a Wonderful Life, the holiday of Christmas is used to demonstrate (and, in the minds
of most Marxists, to grossly exaggerate) the warmer and friendlier side of capitalism.

65
Jaffe, “Spectacular Sympathy,” 255, 262-3.
140
“encouraged” by Code administrators to create works that would defend and uphold the
capitalist status quo.
This type of encouragement gained new momentum when the infamous House on
Un-American Activities Committee began to question Hollywood’s relationship to
communism in the years following World War II. Throughout this postwar/Cold War
era, the PCA attempted to suppress any messages that they thought the HUAC would
consider to be communist or anti-capitalist in nature, suddenly subjecting filmmakers to
even stricter censorship policies than the Production Code had originally established. As
many film critics have noted, one of the primary ways that the PCA believed it could
control the “messages” of Hollywood films was by forcing filmmakers to conclude their
narratives on ideologically conservative notes.
66
The respective endings of A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life certainly
appear to satisfy the censor’s demand for compensating moral values, particularly when it
comes to their depiction of capitalism in a morally complimentary light. Both endings
This pressure came under the heading
of the “rule of compensating moral values”—a rule which never officially appeared in the
Production Code, but which was cited time and time again by Code administrators in
their “recommendation” letters to filmmakers over the years. According to this rule,
filmmakers were permitted to portray morally objectionable behavior if, and only if, that
behavior was criticized, vilified, and punished in the end. Depravity must be defeated;
goodness (and capitalism) must prevail.

66
See, for example, Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997) and Gregory Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics,
and the Movies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
141
hinge, of course, on the psychological transformation and moral salvation of their stories’
misguided protagonists. But if we look closely at what each protagonist is called upon to
do in his text’s final moments—at how he is called upon to change—we can see the
ideological imprint of the moral censor: in order to become better men, both protagonists
must learn to become better capitalists. Scrooge’s redemption manifests itself in his new-
found appreciation for the “spending” side of the economic equation (exemplified,
famously, by his purchase of “not the little prize Turkey: the big one” (112)—the more
money Scrooge spends, the better and purer we know he has become), while George’s
salvation comes when he learns to participate in the “profit” side of the equation (after a
lifetime of “not making a dime” out of his family’s successful Building and Loan, George
must ultimately give in and allow his customers to pay him a proper monetary
compensation for his efforts.) In the end, then, the Christmas “miracles” depicted in A
Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life are not religious, but economic in nature: in
the former, the miracle is that Scrooge finally gives his clerk a raise. In the latter, the
miracle (as Mary Bailey even explicitly calls it—“I hear them now, George, it’s a
miracle! It’s a miracle!”) is that George’s friends pile into his living room and hand him
a basketful of cash.
And yet, as much as the happy endings of the texts may appear to serve as
ringing, Christmas-card endorsements of capitalist consumerism, it is important to note
that they are not the only “endings” that Dickens and Capra provide for us. Because the
texts employ the machinery of the counterfactual conditional, each of them is given the
opportunity to depict two alternative endings, only one of which need paint capitalism in
142
a glowingly optimistic light. The alternate ending of It’s a Wonderful Life can, of course,
be found in the dark and seedy “Pottersville” dream sequence that shows George what
life would have been like if he had never been born. Although the dialogue used in the
sequence never addresses the issue of capitalism or consumerism in a direct manner (the
most it even refers to banking is when George is informed that his family’s Building and
Loan “went out of business years ago”), the message of the sequence is as glaringly
obvious as the flashing neon signs of the night clubs, liquor stores, pool halls, and pawn
shops that line Pottersville’s Main Street. If Potter’s brand of no-holds-barred, purely
profit-based economics is allowed to triumph over George’s more community-based
brand, then the moral fabric of Bedford Falls society will utterly and irrevocably
disintegrate. This is, in fact, precisely the if-then scenario that George has been warning
his friends and neighbors about throughout the film: “This town needs this measly one-
horse institution if only to have some place where people can come without crawling to
Potter”; “If Potter gets hold of this Building and Loan there’ll never be another decent
house built in this town.” But it is only in the Pottersville dream sequence that we are
able to follow George’s premonitions to their darkest and most disturbing economic
conclusions.
Everything in Potterville is, crudely, for sale. Nick the bartender (now turned bar-
owner) sells hard-core inebriation: “We serve hard drinks in here for men who want to
get drunk fast.” George’s mother (now the “coldly suspicious” proprietor of Ma Bailey’s
Boarding House) sells her home. Violet Bick (now an out-and-out prostitute) sells her
body. Those who do not or cannot participate in the sales game, moreover, are brutally
143
punished for it: Uncle Billy, the epitome of the inept businessman, has “been in the
insane asylum ever since he lost his business,” while Mary, who refuses to marry for
money (as is seen in her rejection of the uber-wealthy Sam Wainwright), has become a
meek and pitiable “old maid.” As George stumbles through this nightmarish revision of
the life he once knew, Capra emphasizes the disparity between the world of Bedford Falls
and the world of Pottersville by abruptly switching into an entirely new cinematic
genre—as Robin Wood has put it, “the iconography of small-town comedy is exchanged,
unmistakably, for that of film noir, with police sirens, shooting in the streets, darkness,
vicious dives, alcoholism, burlesque shows, strip clubs, and the glitter and shadows of
noir lighting.”
67
The Carol’s alternate ending, meanwhile, occurs in its bleakly futuristic fourth
stave, as Scrooge is guided through the terrifying landscape of what his “end” will be if
he does not change his miserly ways. Although the section of this stave that is most
remembered—and most often dramatized in film and television versions of the tale—is
the section that shows the Cratchits mourning the death of Tiny Tim, there are several
lesser known, less reenacted episodes that lead up it, each of which paints a rather grim
portrait of the inner workings of capitalism. Scrooge starts his Christmas Yet To Come
journey off by finding himself “on ’Change, amongst the merchants; who hurried up and
Under the glare of this new lighting, Potter’s fairly standard capitalist
ambitions—to make more and more money, to own more and more property, to achieve
greater and greater socio-economic success—are suddenly made to look monstrous, lurid,
and morally unsound.

67
Robin Wood, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, eds. Leo
Braudy and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 668.
144
down, and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in groups, and looked at
their watches, and trifled thoughtfully with their great gold seals; and so forth” (96).
These business merchants are depicted, for the most part, as unappealing ogres: one is “a
great fat man with a monstrous chin,” another is “a red-faced gentleman with a pendulous
excrescence on the end of his nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock” (96). But
they are also, more importantly, portrayed as heartless, callous individuals who can yawn
and laugh about a man’s death, and focus more on the economics of the situation than on
anything else: “What has he done with his money?” asks one. “It’s likely to be a very
cheap funeral,” remarks another. “I don’t mind going if a lunch is provided,” chuckles a
third (96-97).
As grotesque as the businessmen’s financial discussion of Scrooge’s death may
be, however, their grotesqueness is one-upped by the scene that follows. In it, Scrooge
watches his servants pawn the possessions of his that they have managed to steal away
from his death chamber (and, indeed, from his dead body—the charwoman has gone so
far as to rob him of the clothes that he had been dressed in for his burial.) Scrooge
regards the actions of these servants as examples of profiteering taken to a diabolic
extreme. “He viewed them,” we are told, “with a detestation and disgust, which could
hardly have been greater, though they had been obscene demons, marketing the corpse
itself” (102). To soothe his sense of moral revulsion, Scrooge asks the Ghost of
Christmas Yet to Come to take him to see “any person in the town, who feels emotion
caused by this man’s death” (103). In response to this request, the Ghost brings Scrooge
to the home of a kind young couple and their children, who have nothing “monstrous” or
145
“demonic” about them. But even in this house of warmth and goodness, the pressures
imposed by Victorian England’s economic system cause the family to have a reaction to
death that is not too much less callous than the business merchants’, or less profit-driven
than the servants’; because it means a timely delay in the repayment of their debt, the
family morbidly delights in the news of their creditor’s passing. “Soften it as they would,
their hearts were lighter. The children’s faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what
they so little understood, were brighter; and it was a happier house for this man’s death!
The only emotion that the Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of
pleasure” (106).
In both the Pottersville section of It’s a Wonderful Life and the futuristic fourth
section of A Christmas Carol, then, we are shown the darker, seedier, uglier results of
capitalism. Interestingly, however, neither section aroused much disapproval from the
moral censors of its time. Indeed, when looking through the pages and pages of
objections that Joseph Breen raised in response to the various drafts of Wonderful Life
that were submitted to his office, one is struck by the near-total absence of complaints
directed towards the content of the Pottersville sequence. (Breen’s very first letter warns
that any “indication of Violet as a street walker is unacceptable,”
68

68
Breen to William Gordon, 6 March 1946, It’s a Wonderful Life PCA file.
but the objection is
never mentioned again, in spite of the fact that Capra did nothing to alter Violet’s
Pottersville dialogue or characterization between the screenplay’s first draft and the
film’s final cut.) Similarly, one would be hard-pressed to find so much as a sentence
written by one of Dickens’s contemporaries that finds fault with the socio-political
146
implications of his Christmas Yet To Come. All in all, both Dickens and Capra seem to
have been extremely successful in achieving the goal of inoffensiveness that Dickens
specifically describes in his pithy preface to the Carol: “I have endeavored in this
Ghostly little book,” he writes, “to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my
readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me.
May it haunt their house pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it” (29).
The reason, I would argue, that the social criticism of the Carol and Wonderful
Life so successfully avoids putting readers, viewers, and censors “out of humour” with
the texts lies largely in the counterfactual positioning of that criticism. According to the
official plotline of each narrative, it is, after all, the unrelenting bleakness of the alternate
universe that is the fiction, the fabrication, the hallucination, while the reassuring
optimism of the happy ending is the diegetic “reality.” Understanding the importance of
this fiction/reality distinction from a censorship perspective, both Dickens and Capra take
great pains within their texts to prove to us that their final moments are, in fact, real.
George has to make sure that he has “really” woken up from his Pottersville nightmare by
verifying the empirical evidence of his bloodied lip, his smashed-up car, Zuzu’s petals in
his pockets, and the corporality of his non-librarian wife (“Mary! Let me touch you! Are
you real?”). Scrooge, meanwhile, has to keep insisting to the people he encounters that
he, in his reformed state, is real—when he asks the Cockney boy beneath his window to
go buy the prize turkey for him, the boy exclaims in disbelief, “Walk-ER!” (113); when
he makes a shockingly large donation to the poor, the “portly gentleman” to whom he
makes it breathlessly replies, “My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious?” (114); and when
147
he gives Bob Cratchit the raise that he has deserved for so long, the bewildered Cratchit
responds by trembling and considering “knocking Scrooge down with [a ruler]; holding
him; and calling to the people in the court for help and a strait-waistcoat” (116).
Moreover, in the case of A Christmas Carol, the omniscient narration works to reinforce
our sense of what is real and what is not, for even though the Ghost of Christmas Yet To
Come refuses to tell Scrooge whether or not his reformed actions will be able to alter the
tragic future events that he has witnessed, Dickens’s narrator does specifically tell us that
“Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim,
who did NOT die, he was a second father” (116). In this one, capitalized phrase, the
question of diegetic reality is flatly answered for us—if Tiny Tim does NOT die, then we
know once and for all that Stave Four is merely a dream sequence, and that goodness and
innocence do, “really,” prevail.
Yet in spite of all of this textual insistence that we can and should believe in the
stories’ happy endings, many readers and viewers over the years have had a hard time
doing so. Some of these disbelievers have chosen mentally to rewrite the ending of the
particular text in question in a more plausible fashion; see, for example, Edmund
Wilson’s famous New Yorker article from 1939, in which he tries to imagine “what
Scrooge would actually be like, if we were able to follow him beyond the frame of the
story” and comes to the conclusion that “he would relapse, when the merriment was
over—if not while it was still going on—into moroseness, vindictiveness, suspicion. He
would, that is to say, reveal himself as a victim of a manic-depressive cycle, and a very
148
uncomfortable person.”
69
Others, meanwhile, have chosen simply to disregard the
ending, or to push the ending back to what they would consider to be a more believable
point in the story; see William S. Pechter’s essay from 1962, in which he insists that “for
those who can accept the realities of George Bailey’s situation—the continual frustration
of his ambitions, his envy of those who have done what he has only wanted to do, the
collapse of his business, a sense of utter isolation, final despair—and do not believe in
angels, …the film ends, in effect, with the hero’s suicide.”
70
But it is not only the presence of supernatural angels and ghosts in the texts that
prevents these readers and viewers from trusting fully in the happy endings that are
provided for them. There is, I would argue, one other major element of those endings
that distinctly stands in plausibility’s way: the element of excess. Scrooge, for instance,
does not simply transform into a kinder, less miserly old man—he transforms into “as
good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any
other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world” (116). He does not simply
buy the Cratchits a turkey—he buys them a turkey so improbably large that “[h]e never
could have stood upon his legs, that bird. He would have snapped ‘em off short in a
minute, like sticks of sealing wax” (113). He does not simply make a charitable donation
to the poor—he makes a donation so overwhelmingly “munificent” that it takes the
charity worker’s breath away (114). And Scrooge is not the only one who can be accused
of excessiveness in the Carol’s fifth stave; Dickens, too, employs many linguistic
techniques that serve to inflate the narrative’s sense of urgency and intensity—such as,

69
Edmund Wilson, The Wound and the Bow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 53.
70
George Pechter, “American Madness,” in Glatzer and Raeburn, Frank Capra, 181-2.
149
for example, his extensive use of superlatives, exclamation points, and repeated words or
repeated rhythms. (To give just a few illustrations: “He was checked in his transports by
the churches ringing out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang, hammer, ding,
dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding, hammer, clang, clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!” (112). Or:
“The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with which he paid for the Turkey,
and the chuckle with which he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he
recompensed the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle with which he sat down
breathless in his chair again, and chuckled till he cried” (113). Or: “Let him in! It’s a
mercy he didn’t shake his arm off. He was at home in five minutes. Nothing could be
heartier. His niece looked just the same. So did Topper when he came. So did the
plump sister, when she came. So did everyone when they came. Wonderful party,
wonderful games, wonderful unanimity, wonder-ful happiness!” (115). The desperation
of Scrooge’s conversion—the sense that he must continually come up with new and more
emphatic ways to demonstrate the change in his spirit, that he cannot express that change
nearly enough—is mirrored in the excessive desperation of Dickens’s prose.
A similar type of excess marks the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, particularly when
it comes to the over-the-top emotion of its male protagonist; indeed, George Bailey’s
“light as a feather, happy as an angel, merry as a school-boy, giddy as a drunken man”
actions and demeanor in the film’s final sequence constitute the most direct link between
his character and the character of Ebenezer Scrooge (111). On a narrative level,
meanwhile, Capra mimics many of Dickens’s excessive linguistic maneuvers, from his
abundant use of exclamation (more than half of the screenplay’s “happy ending” lines are
150
punctuated with exclamation points) to his saccharine use of one particularly memorable
superlative (“To my big brother, George – the richest man in town!”) to his frequent use
of repeated sentences (i.e., “My mouth’s bleeding, Bert! My mouth’s bleeding!”) and
repeated rhythms (i.e., George’s friends and neighbors each making their little
explanatory speech of gratitude as they give him their money.) But Capra’s cinematic
excess does not stop there: the last few minutes of his film also bombard us with an
excessive amount of snow falling to the ground, an excessive number of Christmas lights
lining Bedford Falls’ Main Street, an excessive amount of holiday decorations adorning
the Bailey’s living room, an excessive number of friendly neighbors piling into that living
room, an excessive amount of cash accumulating on the living room table, an excessive
number of voices crooning one yuletide song after another, an excessive amount of
cheering and laughing and crying and hugging—an excessive amount, in other words, of
heart-warming, wholesome Christmas.
For in spite of Capra’s repeat casting of the “boyishly sincere” Jimmy Stewart in
the film’s leading role, it is not Wonderful Life’s male protagonist who embodies the trait
of excessive innocence, as was the case in the earlier “Mister” films—it is, instead, the
setting of proverbially pure Christmas itself. Interestingly, only a small percentage of the
story actually takes place during the Christmas season, since Capra does not limit his
detailing of George’s personal history to moments from his “Christmases past” in the
same way that Dickens does. And yet, thanks largely to the excessive vigor with which
Capra portrays George’s miraculously Merry Christmas in the film’s final moments, It’s
a Wonderful Life has come to be identified not only as a Christmas movie, but as an
151
intrinsic part of the modern world’s Christmas tradition. Yet I would also argue that the
excessive Christmassiness of the closing sequence serves another specific narrative
purpose: it gives Capra’s story an overall impression of joyfulness, hopefulness, and
family-friendly inoffensiveness, while drawing the moral censor’s attention away from
the darker, bitterer sentiments that lie at the heart of the film—or, to put it more precisely,
in the heart of the film’s protagonist.
For, again, as much as the character of George Bailey may physically look like
the character of Jefferson Smith, it is important to acknowledge how little the two
actually have in common. Where Jefferson Smith cherishes the small town life he lives
before being whisked off to Washington, George Bailey detests all of Bedford Falls’
homey conventionalities and yearns desperately to escape them; where Jefferson Smith
blushes and stammers every time a pretty girl talks to him, George Bailey vehemently
resists giving in to the matrimonial advances of his town’s resident “pretty girl,” Mary
Hatch; where Jefferson Smith fights with every honorable fiber of his being to clear his
name after being wrongly accused of large-scale political corruption, George Bailey
cravenly plans to commit suicide after being wrongly accused of misappropriating
$8,000. But the biggest difference between George Bailey and Jefferson Smith (and
Longfellow Deeds, and John Doe, and most of Capra’s other pre-war heroes) can be
found in the way that they “triumph” in the end. Where the typical Capra protagonist
triumphs by defeating vice and exposing villainy, George Bailey never even realizes that
Mr. Potter is the one who has gotten hold of his $8,000, and therefore never achieves the
satisfaction (for himself or the audience) of making the antagonist pay for his sins. As it
152
turns out, snapping George out of his suicidal funk has relatively little to do with the
missing money at all, and much more to do with convincing him that his small town,
domesticated existence is not as claustrophobically dismal as he has been making it out to
be.
The scene that best depicts George’s sense of claustrophobia is, significantly, the
one other scene of the film that is as steeped in the trappings of Christmas as is its happy
ending. The scene takes place just after George and Uncle Billy have unsuccessfully
scoured the town looking for their missing $8,000—at a point when George is, as he later
puts it, “at the end of his rope.” Upon arriving home, George is confronted with a
barrage of what should be the comforts and joys of the holiday season: a Christmas tree
so tall that Mary must stand on a chair to trim it, a “Merry Christmas” banner running
across the entire living room ceiling, a table piled high with wrapping paper, bows, and
half-wrapped presents, a fire burning brightly in the fireplace, a son enthusiastically
working on his own Christmas play, a daughter diligently practicing “Hark, the Herald
Angels Sing” on the piano. Yet instead of finding solace in his family’s excessive
hominess and holiday spirit, George finds them rather to be overwhelming (“You call this
a happy family? Why did we have to have all these kids?”), overbearing (“Janie, haven’t
you learned that silly tune yet? You’ve played it over and over again. Now stop it! Stop
it!”), and, ultimately, profoundly alienating (“George, why must you torture the children?
Why don’t you...”). Although Mary does not finish her accusatory reprimand, George is
so stung by her tone, and the disappointed looks on his children’s faces, that he begins to
think quite seriously about committing suicide. As much, then, as Wonderful Life may
153
leave us with the impression that it has depicted Christmas as a warm and winsome
symbol of conventional domestic bliss—fitting neatly into the nostalgic tradition of such
holiday films as Ernst Lubitsch’s The Shop Around the Corner (1940), Mark Sandrich’s
Holiday Inn (1942), and Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)—the truth is
that it gives us one of classical Hollywood’s starkest portrayals of the desolate feeling a
man may get when the spirit of Christmas has left him out in the cold. And this portrayal
was no accident on Capra’s part, as he makes clear in an interview from the early 1980s.
When explaining why two of his most emotionally powerful works, Meet John Doe and
Wonderful Life, just so happen to pair the setting of Christmas with the theme of suicide,
Capra points out that “Christmas makes people vulnerable, brings out deep feelings. No
one is neutral. People either feel more joyous or sadder. It’s a time when some people
feel lonelier, more abandoned. There are many suicides that time of year.”
71
Capra is, here, echoing a sentiment that is briefly but emphatically expressed
within the text of the Carol; as one of the “portly gentlemen” who is soliciting Christmas
donations for the poor explains to Scrooge, “We choose this time because it is a time, of
all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices” (39). Even though
Dickens, like Capra, makes sure that the most memorable moments of his Christmas
story serve to illustrate how “abundantly joyful” the holiday can be (think, for example,
of the Fezziwigs’ jubilant Christmas Eve ball or the Cratchits’ jovial Christmas day
dinner), he finds many other ways of conveying a less sanguine view of the season as
well. One of the most interesting ways he does this is through his creation of a distinctly

71
“Capra: The Voice Behind the Name Above the Title,” in Poague, Frank Capra: Interviews, 198.
154
unwholesome, un-joyful, un-Christmassy protagonist—if George Bailey is no Jefferson
Smith, Ebenezer Scrooge is certainly no Oliver Twist. By casting such a character as his
story’s (ultimately sympathetic) hero, Dickens is able to include in his text a great deal of
anti-Christmas sentiment with utter impunity; indeed, who but Dickens could pen lines
such as “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled
with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart,” and still be
regarded as the literary incarnation of good Father Christmas himself?
72
Of course, the reason that Scrooge’s ornery, atheistic sentiments are excused is
that they are so emphatically recanted after his conversion has taken place. But if we
consider the root cause of Scrooge’s initial yuletide animosity, we find a very different
way in which Dickens chips away at the Merry Christmas myth. When the Spirit of
Christmas Past takes Scrooge to the first stop on his trip down memory lane, we are
immediately confronted with a scene of excessive Christmas gaiety: “Some shaggy
ponies now were seen trotting towards them with boys upon their backs, who called to
other boys in country gigs and carts, driven by farmers. All these boys were in great
spirits, and shouted to each other, until the broad fields were so full of merry music, that
the crisp air laughed to hear it” (57). But then, standing in stark contrast to these “jocund
travellers,” we are shown one other figure: “‘The school is not quite deserted,’ said the
Ghost. ‘A solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still.’ Scrooge said he
knew it. And he sobbed.” In this moment, Dickens simply but devastatingly portrays

72
This view is most famously expressed in a story told about a little costermonger’s girl who, on the day of
Dickens’s death, allegedly exclaimed, “Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?” Qtd. in
Theodore Watts-Dunton, The Coming of Love (London: John Lane, 1899), 191.
155
one type of “Want” that can be “keenly felt” during the holiday season—not the type
meant by the Carol’s portly gentlemen, perhaps, but a very tender type nonetheless.
This is not to say, however, that Dickens disregards the type of Want that is meant
by his portly gentlemen; as we have already seen, his text is extremely interested in
depicting and decrying the economic injustices felt by London’s poor. The way that
Dickens manages to impart this kind of social criticism while still maintaining the
Carol’s aura of benign holiday cheer is by stressing the fact that the Merry Christmases
portrayed within it are merry in spite of his characters’ wretched financial situations.
This is most obviously true in the case of the Cratchits, but the Ghost of Christmas
Present shows us many other cheery-in-spite-of-everything Christmas celebrations as
well—celebrations of lowly miners, lighthouse attendants, sailors, all of whom are able to
enjoy the warmth of Christmas even in the midst of their “bleak,” “desolate,” “dreadful”
surroundings. How do they do it? Dickens specifically tells us: it is a feat of Christmas
magic, in the form of laced incense sprinkled by the Ghost upon poor men’s Christmas
dinners. “The Spirit stood beside sick beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands, and
they were close at home; by struggling men, and they were patient in their greater hope;
by poverty, and it was rich” (91). The problem with this kind of Christmas miracle is, of
course, that it is so short-lived; the Ghost can only work his wonders but one day a year.
By turning hope and patience and wealth and good cheer into gifts that are artificially and
temporarily bestowed, Dickens reveals Christmas to be a bright and shiny façade that
merely cloaks the social, moral, and economic failures of his society. At the end of the
third stave, in fact, Dickens goes so far as to literalize this rather cynical view of
156
Christmas: hidden beneath the skirts of the “genial,” “unconstrained,” “joyful” Ghost of
Christmas Present, we discover “a boy and girl” who are “wretched, abject, frightful,
hideous, miserable” (not to mention “yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish” [92]).
They are the human incarnations of Ignorance and Want, and even though we are
specifically told that they belong to Man, we can see that they “cling,” steadfastly, to
Christmas.
The image of these horrifying creatures skulking behind the curtain of the Spirit’s
rich and plenteous robes stands as an excellent metaphor for the thematic double standard
being practiced in A Christmas Carol and It’s a Wonderful Life: in both texts, we are left
with enough diegetic wiggle room to interpret the morals of the stories as we see fit. But
it is important to acknowledge that this double standard is, almost surely, a result of
moral censorship. By requiring texts to adhere to certain well-known structural rules
(e.g., the rule of compensating moral values), censorship effectively creates a space for
multiple and contradictory interpretations. Artists like Dickens and Capra who are aware
of this space can, then, use it to infuse their texts with ordinarily censorable sentiments
(skepticism towards capitalist ideology, bitterness towards the confinement of domestic
life, antipathy towards Christmas, etc.) without inciting too much shock or controversy.
In the end, Dickens and Capra’s texts’ inescapable association with the Christmas season
may be the greatest trick that the authors perpetrate on their moral censors. While the
censors can derive from that association a reassuring sense of the texts’ jollity and
wholesomeness—nothing, we must remember, is purer than Christmas—Dickens and
Capra clearly view their texts’ Christmas settings in a darker, more complicated light.
157
Christmas, for them, is not merely a time of excessive snow and excessive caroling and
excessive geese and punch and puddings; it is a time for excessive feeling, whether that
feeling is of pleasure or of pain.
158
CHAPTER 4
The Thrill of the Fight:
Charlotte Brontë and Elia Kazan

“It is easy to show that the value the mind sets on erotic needs instantly
sinks as soon as satisfaction becomes readily obtainable. Some
obstacle is necessary to swell the tide of the libido to its height; and at
all periods of history, wherever natural barriers in the way of
satisfaction have not sufficed, mankind has erected conventional ones
in order to be able to enjoy love.”

—Sigmund Freud, Contributions to the Psychology of Love

Perhaps more than any other Victorian novelists or Classic Hollywood directors,
Charlotte Brontë and Elia Kazan considered themselves to be artists of “passion,” and
belittled the creative contributions of those novelists and filmmakers whose work they
dismissed as “dispassionate.” Brontë, for example, famously complained of Jane Austen
that “the Passions are perfectly unknown to her… what throbs fast and full, though
hidden, what blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target
of Death—this Miss Austen ignores”
1
, while Kazan brusquely wrote off Alfred
Hitchcock as a “smug” and “artificial” filmmaker who was merely a “master of stunts
and tricks.”
2

1
Brontë to W.S. Williams, 12 April 1850, in Selected Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Margaret Smith
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 161-2.
By contrast, Brontë spoke frequently in her letters about the importance that
she placed on raw emotional “Truth” in her own writing, and Kazan peppered his
autobiography with allusions to his own creative intensity, integrity, and fervor. These
were, of course, no empty boasts on Brontë or Kazan’s parts: both artists have been
repeatedly hailed for their “ardent” and “uncompromising” portrayals of the complex
drama of human desire. But as ostentatiously impassioned as the majority of their works
2
Qtd. in Kazan on Kazan, ed. Jeff Young, (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), 36.
159
may be, the specific plots of those works also persistently revolve around the seemingly
antithetical impulse of repression; “uncompromising ardor,” in Brontë and Kazan, is
almost always coupled with sexual and emotional compromise and restraint. It is the aim
of this chapter to demonstrate why.
3
John Kucich has previously explored this subject in his chapter on Brontë in
Repression in Victorian Fiction. For Kucich, there is little difference between the ways
Brontë’s characters express and repress their libidinal desires; he cites, for example,
Rochester’s perverse “wooing” of Jane Eyre in which he pretends that he is not attracted
to her at all and would rather marry Blanche Ingram, followed by Jane’s equally perverse
“confession” of her love for Rochester which “takes the form of a threat to leave him.”

4

3
I have used the passage from Freud as an epigraph to this chapter as a way of summarizing a certain way
of thinking about sexual desire, but Freud is, of course, neither the first or last important writer to have
made some version of this point. (See, for example, Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, the entire plot of
which can be read as a prolonged meditation on the sexual allure of the forbidden fruit.)

By recasting repression as an “intensifying” and “destabilizing” force within Brontë’s
works, Kucich attempts to free her from the stigma of being thought to have succumbed
to the “tragic,” “unhealthy” emotional injunctions of self-denial and self-restraint. Much
as this line of thinking has in common with my own de-stigmatizing work throughout this
project, Kucich establishes at the outset of his argument that his “repression” is not
Freud’s “repression,” the repression that “censors, displaces, and condenses dangerous
material, driving it from the conscious to the unconscious, and producing the distortions
of neurosis”; instead, Kucich’s focus is on “the nineteenth-century cultural decision to
4
John Kucich, “Passionate Reserve and Reserved Passion in the Works of Charlotte Brontë,” ELH 52.4
(Winter 1985): 919.
160
value silenced or negated feeling over affirmed feeling.”
5
I am also, therefore, more interested than Kucich in the ways that censorship and
repression play out, for Brontë, on a more biographical level—the ways that the
“dialectic of repression and expression” in her works reflects the battle with the moral
censor that she waged throughout her life.
Where Kucich eschews a
psychological reading of repression in Brontë’s novels in favor of a more socio-
ideological one, I want to conflate the two approaches. In my view, the private act of
“censoring” and “distorting” one’s sexual urges is both a product of and a helpful
metaphor for the larger “cultural decision” to censor and modify works of art.
6
This battle has, to a large extent, been either
discounted or disregarded by literary scholars in the past: “Though she had her
skirmishes with prudes,” wrote one such scholar, “Brontë was not able in her time to
make the direct challenge to the public standards for publishing on sexual subjects that
her successors, with such battle and such wounds, were able to.”
7
Elia Kazan, on the other hand, did engage in a series of very vocal, very well-
known bouts with the moral censor over the course of his cinematic career. Some of the
elements of Kazan’s films that the PCA found most “objectionable” were the interracial
Brontë’s “skirmishes”
may not have been quite so visibly or publicly bloody as those of “successors” such as
Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and James Joyce, but they were, as we shall see, just as
central to her work.

5
John Kucich, Repression in Victorian Fiction: Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 2-3.
6
Joseph Boone, Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping of Modernism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1998), 27. Although the focus of this book is on modernist texts, Boone considers Villette
to “manifest an almost gleefully perverse narrative erotics that anticipates the attempts of its modern and
modernist successors to convey in fictional form those elusive psychosexual and libidinal currents,” 33.
7
John Maynard, Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 4.
161
romance in Pinky, the rape in A Streetcar Named Desire, the depiction of the inside of a
brothel in East of Eden, and the erotic impulses of high school students in Splendor in the
Grass. But it was the condemnation of his “Southern gothic sexual farce” Baby Doll by
the Catholic Legion of Decency in 1956—and the relative success of the film in spite of
that condemnation—that played the most visible role in the process of censorship erosion
that gradually took place over the course of the 1950s and 60s.
8
According to Vincent
Brook, Warner Brothers’ decision to release the film in the midst of the Legion’s fierce
opposition to it “signaled a radical shift in Hollywood’s relations with the Catholic
Church. The fact that Cardinal Spellman’s condemnation of Baby Doll not only failed to
kill the film at the box office but may even have helped it turn a slight profit showed that
while defiance of the Church was no guarantee for success, neither did it necessarily spell
financial ruin nor public relations disaster.”
9
Although Kazan does complain in his
autobiography about the injurious blackballing of his film (“People were reading that the
film was breaking box office records. This was not true; the cardinal’s attack hurt us”),
he also acknowledges that those blackballing efforts were, to a large extent, what gave
the film its forbidden allure: “It took Cardinal Spellman to make [Baby Doll] famous.”
10

8
Baby Doll is often held up alongside films like Roberto Rossellini’s The Miracle (1950) and Otto
Preminger’s The Moon is Blue (1953) to represent the beginning of the legal and commercial downfall of
Hays Code censorship that culminated with the introduction of the MPAA’s Code-replacing rating system
in 1968.

As much, then, as Kazan may have declared himself to be “the victim of a hostile
9
Vincent Brook, “Courting Controversy: The Making and Selling of Baby Doll and the Demise of the
Production Code,” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 18.4 (2001): 357-8.
10
Elia Kazan, Elia Kazan: A Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), 563.
162
conspiracy” when it came to his dealings with censorship,
11
Indeed, as Kazan’s candid descriptions of his own directorial efforts make clear,
he took great pleasure in manipulating various forms of emotional “conflict” for the
benefit of his “art.” In discussing the antipathy between James Dean and Raymond
Massey while shooting East of Eden, for example, Kazan admits that “This was an
antagonism I didn’t try to heal; I aggravated it… The screen was alive with precisely
what I wanted; they detested each other.”
the degree of his true
victimization remains questionable.
12
But Kazan did not reserve this sadistic push
towards conflict for his actors alone; he always maintained an ample supply of conflict
within his own life as well. “I really enjoy being in battle,” he would often boast; “I love
fighting out of a hole. It’s exhilarating to me. And I like to get people angry because
they should be angry.”
13
To understand better the interplay of repression, conflict, and pleasure in the
works of Brontë and Kazan, I will concentrate on texts from very different points in the
arcs of their respective careers: Brontë’s Villette (1853), which was the final novel that
she completed before dying abruptly at the age of thirty-eight, and Kazan’s A Streetcar
Although this kind of comment on Kazan’s part is usually read
in terms of the most infamous “fight” of his life—the controversy surrounding his
decision to “name names” during the McCarthy blacklisting trials of the 1950s—I think it
can be applied just as easily to the battle that he enjoyed waging with the moral censor
throughout his cinematic career.

11
Kazan, A Life, 436.
12
Ibid, 535-6.
13
Qtd. in Young, Kazan on Kazan, 91.
163
Named Desire (1951), which is generally considered to be the first film to demonstrate
his directorial powers in full.
14
________________________________________________
My decision to focus on Streetcar—a text that is more
strongly associated with its writer, Tennessee Williams, than with its director—will
necessarily raise questions of authorship that I have, for the most part, been able to
bypass in my other chapters. I could have looked at one of the films that Kazan did write
entirely himself (America, America; The Arrangement), or at one that is taken to be more
representative of his own life struggles (On the Waterfront). But I chose to look at
Streetcar instead for two reasons: because it was the first film over which Kazan had to
fight vigorously with the moral censor, in ways that have been much (though, to my
mind, somewhat faultily) analyzed, and because so many of the repressive psychological
elements of Streetcar seem to me to be closely connected to the psychology of moral
censorship. By examining Streetcar alongside Villette—simultaneously Brontë’s most
repressed and most erotic novel—I hope to reveal the hidden, forbidden pleasures that
can be aroused by the imposition of private obstacles and public prohibitions.
Villette is widely perceived to be Brontë’s most autobiographical book, based
upon her experiences at a girls’ pensionnat in Brussels where she studied and taught
between 1842 and 1844. But the “authenticity” with which her writing is so often
credited (as in Leslie Stephen’s flat assertion that Brontë “has simply given fictitious
names and dates, with a more or less imaginary thread of narrative, to her own experience

14
Though Kazan had, by 1951, already made an indelible directorial mark upon the American theater
scene, his earlier films—A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Sea of Grass, Boomerang, Panic in the Streets, Pinky,
even A Gentleman’s Agreement, for which he won the best director Oscar in 1948—have not attained the
same iconic status as many of his later films.
164
at school, as a governess, at home and in Brussels”) can also be seen as a thinly veiled
artistic critique, a questioning of her ability to write anything outside of her “small” realm
of personal knowledge.
15
You will see that “Villette” touches on no matter of public interest. I
cannot write books handling the topics of the day—it is of no use trying.
Nor can I write a book for its moral—Nor can I take up a philanthropic
scheme though I honour Philanthropy—And voluntarily and sincerely veil
my face before such a mighty subject as that handled in Mrs. Beecher
Stowe’s work—“Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” To manage these great matters
rightly they must be long and practically studied—their bearings known
intimately and their evils felt genuinely—they must not be taken up as
business-matter and a trading speculation.
Brontë was not oblivious to the fact that her works were
narrower in scope than many of the other successful novels of her day, but chose to write
about more internal than external subjects nonetheless. In a letter that accompanied the
first two volumes of Villette that she sent to her publisher in October of 1852, she
explained the rationale behind this choice:
16

But even if Brontë did deliberately limit herself to writing what she “knew,” part of what
she knew by the time she was working on Villette—“intimately” and “genuinely”—was
the cultural pressure of censorship, particularly as that pressure was directed toward
female writers.
At the age of twenty, Brontë sent samples of her writing to poet laureate Robert
Southey and asked for his opinion of their merit. In response, Southey advised her to
give up her hopes of ever publishing her work, not because it was poorly written, but
because “Literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The
more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as an

15
Leslie Stephen, “Charlotte Brontë,” Cornhill Magazine 36 (December 1877): 723.
16
Brontë to George Smith, 30 October 1852, in Selected Letters, 208.
165
accomplishment and a recreation.”
17
Brontë was dismayed but not surprised by
Southey’s counsel, since, as she explained to him in a follow-up letter, she was
accustomed to hearing such talk: “Following my father’s advice who from my childhood
has counselled me just in the wise, and friendly tone of your letter; I have endeavored not
only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfil, but to feel deeply
interested in them—I don’t always succeed, for sometimes when I’m teaching and
sewing I’d far rather be reading or writing, but I try to deny myself.”
18
The creative utopia of the household in which Brontë was raised is by now a
fixture of Victorian folklore: cordoned off from the rest of the world in their father’s
small Yorkshire parsonage, siblings Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne devoted the
majority of their childhood and adolescent energies to the detailed chronicling of two
imaginary kingdoms, Gondal and Angria. These chronicles, referred to as the
“juvenilia,” are the Brontës’ most unapologetically passionate and salacious fictions,
precisely because they were written for private, rather than public, consumption. When
Brontë first attempted to get her work published, however, she consciously chose to rein
The fact that
Brontë was told in no uncertain terms to deny and repress her literary desires both by the
symbolic patriarch of English literature and by her own familial patriarch demonstrates
the intense social opposition that faced women writers of her day. At the same time, the
fact that Brontë—along with two of her sisters—ultimately refused to follow this
patriarchal advice demonstrates the ferocity of her, and their, artistic passion.

17
Southey to Charlotte Brontë, 12 March 1837, in Clement Shorter’s The Brontës: Life and Letters (New
York: 1908), 1: 128.
18
Brontë to Robert Southey, 16 March 1837, Selected Letters, 9.
166
in some of that passion, in an effort to make her writing more palatable to the world at
large; as she would later describe in a letter to George Henry Lewes, “I restrained
imagination, eschewed romance, repressed excitement: over-bright colouring too I
avoided, and sought to produce something which would be soft, grave and true.” The
result of such restraint and repression was The Professor, which was rejected by “six
publishers in succession,” each of whom told her the work was “deficient in ‘startling
incident’ and ‘thrilling excitement’” and therefore simply “would not sell.”
19
Ironically, though, Brontë’s fulfillment of the publishers’ (and the public’s)
wishes brought her precisely the kind of moral criticism that she had been trying to avoid
by taming her “romantic” and “imaginative” impulses in The Professor. As John
Maynard has put it, “Brontë found that her society rewarded and punished her relative
boldness at one and the same time. As [Jane Eyre] was making Currer Bell a household
name, critics were as quickly warning readers about the dangers of bringing this man’s
work into one’s home. When it appeared that this was no male but a female writer, the
fear grew in proportion to the relative danger.”
Dejected
but not defeated, Brontë immediately began work on her next novel, this time coming up
with the far more “startling” and “thrilling” Jane Eyre, which became an immediately
enormous popular success.
20

19
Brontë to G.H. Lewes, 6 November 1847, Selected Letters, 90.
Much as she may have claimed to have
a thick skin about this kind of negative publicity (“You do very rightly and kindly,” she
assured her publisher, “to tell me the objections made against ‘Jane Eyre’; they are more
20
Maynard, Charlotte Brontë and Sexuality, 145-6.
167
essential than the praises”
21
), the defensive tone taken in many of her subsequent letters
signals that she was in fact deeply hurt by the various attacks lodged against her novel on
moral grounds.
22
Three months after her “godless” and “pernicious” book’s initial
release, Brontë wrote to Lewes that she was determined to alter her writing style once
again: “I mean to observe your warning about being careful how I undertake new
works… If I ever do write another book, I think I will have nothing of what you call
‘melodrame.’”
23
When critics talk about the influence that moral censorship had upon the film
version of A Streetcar Named Desire, meanwhile, what they are usually discussing are
the four minutes that were excised from the final cut of the film, without Kazan’s
knowledge or consent, in order for it to avoid a C (“Condemned”) rating from the
Catholic Legion of Decency.
By the time Brontë got around to writing Villette, therefore, the course
of her artistic career had already been subtly but decisively influenced by the silent
specter of moral censorship.
24

21
Brontë to W.S. Williams, 31 December 1847, Selected Letters, 95.
I will briefly consider the impact of those excised
minutes at the end of this chapter, but the majority of my textual analysis will concentrate
on the footage that Kazan assembled prior to the intervention of the Legion—the
“director’s cut,” as it is now marketed on DVD. By restricting myself to a reading of this
restored version, I will be able to focus on the censorship changes that Kazan chose to
22
An example of this defensiveness on Brontë’s part can be found in a letter to W.S. Williams from
January 4, 1848 in which she insists that “It would take a great deal to crush me, because I know… that my
own intentions were correct; that I feel in my heart a deep reverence for Religion, that impiety is very
abhorrent to me.” Selected Letters, 96.
23
Brontë to G. H. Lewes, 12 January 1848, Selected Letters, 98.
24
For the most thorough consideration of the effects of the Legion’s post-production censorship, see
Leonard Leff’s “And Transfer to Cemetery: The Streetcars Named Desire,” Film Quarterly 55.3 (Spring
2002): 29-37.
168
make over the course of adapting and shooting the film, as opposed to the censorship
changes that were thrust upon him. In some critics’ eyes, even the changes that Kazan
allowed were so damaging to the integrity of Williams’s original play that the film must
be labeled an adaptive “failure”—see, for example, Ellen Dowling’s “The Derailment of
A Streetcar Named Desire,” in which she criticizes the film’s “blatant bowdlerization”
and “general whitewashing” of Williams’s controversial material, and calls for “a new
film version of Tennessee Williams’s masterpiece which would, indeed, be a faithful
adaptation of the stage play.”
25
This theatrical malleability is well illustrated by the fact that there are several
competing versions of Williams’s “original” play currently in print: the “acting edition”
that was prepared directly from the stage manager’s script for Dramatists Play Service,
the “reading edition” that Williams prepared for publication by New Directions (making
slight changes to the script each time a new edition was released), and other British
editions that take their own approach to transcribing the text. In all published versions,
however, Kazan’s handprint on the material can quite clearly be seen—in the form of
stage directions, set descriptions, and various bits of “business” that Kazan devised
While Dowling’s opposition to the principle of
censorship is, of course, understandable, her implied belief that there exists one “correct”
version of Williams’s story that Kazan’s film simply failed to tell is somewhat naïve.
The truth is that all plays—and particularly ones as complex and nuanced as Streetcar—
are vulnerable to “change” every time that they are restaged, reproduced, redesigned, or
recast.

25
Ellen Dowling, “The Derailment of A Streetcar Named Desire,” Literature/Film Quarterly 9.4 (1981):
240.
169
during the course of the initial Broadway run. Indeed, as Brenda Murphy explains in her
analysis of the dramatic partnership of Williams and Kazan, “A director who works with
a playwright on the first production of a play is a full collaborator in the work that is
eventually described in the published script.”
26
The more that Williams and Kazan
worked together, the more “collaborative” their work became, leading many critics of the
1950s to question “whether Williams was a ‘weak’ playwright who allowed his director
to ‘tamper’ with his plays, or whether Kazan was an overbearing director who violated
the writer’s artistic integrity, or both.”
27
Regardless of what the dynamics of Williams
and Kazan’s creative relationship within the confines of the theater may have been, the
movement of Streetcar from stage to screen necessarily granted Kazan a new form of
power over Williams’s artistic vision. As Kazan described it, “In movies, the camera
helps out—moves the idea along. Sometimes it can talk, as it closes in or backs up, helps
express emotion, what a character is thinking, or it can anticipate action.”
28

26
Brenda Murphy, Tennessee Williams and Elia Kazan, A Collaboration in the Theatre (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1.
What Kazan
decided to do with the additional power afforded him by the movie medium was to
“rebalance” the viewer’s sympathies. Indeed, according to Kim Hunter (the actress who
first played Stella on both stage and screen), the primary reason that Kazan agreed to do
the film was “because he felt that he had laid too much emphasis on the character of
Stanley in the play. Otherwise I don’t think he would have wanted to direct it because he
wasn’t one who wanted to repeat anything, ever… But he wanted to make the focus
27
Ibid, 3.
28
Interview with Lewis Gillenson, November 1951, in Elia Kazan: Interviews, ed. William Baer. (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 12.
170
more on Blanche.”
29
This assessment of Kazan’s motivations is also borne out by several
of the notes that he made in the margins of his final draft of the screenplay: “There is no
use in the world in doing Streetcar,” he reflected, “unless you really make work your idea
about ‘subjective photography,’ using the camera to penetrate Blanche and then showing
the SUBJECTIVIZED source of the emotion… So crawl into her with your camera. Be
free… This will make for a new kind of storytelling. You tell not the literal facts, as an
observer might see them. You bring directly to the screen BLANCHE’S WORLD!!!”
30
One way that Kazan planned to shift our focus away from Stanley and onto
Blanche was by starting the film off with her backstory; “by putting on screen everything
that Blanche describes in dialogue about Belle Reve and her last days there.”

31
To that
end, Kazan worked closely with script adaptor Oscar Saul to create a more visually
explicit, more “opened up” screenplay. But when he returned to the draft after a brief
vacation from it, he discovered that it was, to his mind, a complete “fizzle”: “The force
of the play had come precisely from its compression, from the fact that Blanche was
trapped in those two small rooms… Everything we’d done to ‘open up’ the play diluted
its power.”
32

29
Kim Hunter, “Streetcar on Film,” Disc 2: Special Features, A Streetcar Named Desire, special ed. DVD,
dir. Elia Kazan (Burbank, CA: Warner Home Video, 2001).
While Kazan is certainly right to locate a great deal of the play’s emotional
power in its claustrophobic “compression,” I would argue that the other main reason for
30
Elia Kazan, Kazan on Directing, (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 156-7. Whether or not Kazan
fully achieved his goal of taking the focus away from Stanley in the film version is, of course, debatable.
Even with the camera “crawling into” Blanche as effectively as it does, Marlon Brando’s performance is so
riveting and ground-breaking that it continues to overshadow Vivien Leigh’s performance in the annals of
classical Hollywood. But, as Karl Malden has remarked, this overshadowing was less emphatic in the film
version than in the original Broadway run, during which Brando would repeatedly stop the action and draw
all the attention to himself.
31
Kazan, A Life, 384.
32
Ibid, 384.
171
the failure of his revised script was that it stripped Williams’s story of its equally
powerful tendency towards narrative repression. Just as Blanche tries to keep the secret
of her sullied past hidden from Stella, Stanley, and Mitch as long as she possibly can, so
too does Williams repress that information on a narrative level until it violently bursts
forth. Importantly, then, Kazan’s initial impulse to show Blanche’s sexual past in vivid,
lurid detail—an impulse which would, no doubt, have encountered serious objections
from Code censors—was not a “better” choice simply because it was a “bolder” choice.
Repression is one of Streetcar’s central narrative concerns, but it is also one of its most
potent narrative techniques.
Villette is even more obviously a text of repressed narration. Far from being
candid or forthcoming, Lucy Snowe is one of the most perversely private first-person
narrators in all of English literature. She refuses to tell us anything, really, of her family
history (“It will be conjectured that I was of course glad to return to the bosom of my
kindred. Well! the amiable conjecture does no harm, and may therefore be safely left
uncontradicted.”
33

33
Charlotte Brontë, Villette (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 94. Further references will be given
parenthetically in the text by page number.
) She refuses to tell us what becomes of her at the end of the narrative
(“Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said”), and concludes instead by cursorily
letting us know the fates of her worst enemies (“Madame Beck prospered all the days of
her life; so did Père Silas; Madame Walraven fulfilled her ninetieth year before she
died. Farewell” [596]). Perhaps most eccentrically of all, she refuses, for six chapters, to
tell us that two of the text’s central characters—Graham Bretton and Dr. John—are in
172
fact the same person. In describing why she has chosen not to reveal her awareness of
this small identificatory detail to Graham/John himself, she explains that,
To say anything on the subject, to hint at my discovery, had not suited my
habits of thought, or assimilated with my system of feeling. On the
contrary, I had preferred to keep the matter to myself. I liked entering his
presence covered with a cloud he had not seen through, while he stood
before me under a ray of special illumination, which shone all partial over
his head, trembled about his feet, and cast light no farther. (248)

For Lucy, repression—which must surely rank at or near the top of her “system of
feeling”—serves as a narrative tool that allows her to gain a certain sense of subversive
control. Although this passage is officially discussing the pleasure that she takes in
gaining such control over Graham, the reader has been deprived of the same critical
information for the same period of time, and is therefore equally subordinated by Lucy’s
(and Brontë’s) willful act of narrative repression. In a variation on Thackeray’s “tail
below the water” metaphor from Vanity Fair that Brontë specifically praised in a letter to
one of her publishers,
34
In addition to the formal similarities between Villette and A Streetcar Named
Desire which lie in their mutual penchant for repressed narration, there are other
significant attributes that the two seemingly disparate texts have in common. Both are
Brontë is telling her readers here that she will not be telling us
everything; if Thackeray can submerge some of his meaning under the water, she can
“cover” some of hers with a “cloud.”

34
“I have already told you,” she wrote to W.S. Williams on August 14, 1848, “that I regard Mr. Thackeray
as the first of Modern Masters, and as the legitimate High Priest of Truth; I study him accordingly with
reverence: he—I see—keeps the mermaid’s tail below water, and only hints at the dead men’s bones and
noxious slime amidst which it wriggles; but—his hint is more vivid than other men’s elaborate
explanations, and never is his satire whetted to so keen an edge as when with quiet mocking irony he
modestly recommends to the approbation of the Public his own exemplary discretion and forebearance.”
Selected Letters, 116.
173
about women from comfortable, even affluent backgrounds who have tragically but
mysteriously lost everything—home, family, friends—and must try to negotiate their way
through the world on their own. To do so, both women become English teachers; one of
them unexpectedly thrives in the occupation, one of them flounders (though for more
personal than professional reasons) and must attempt to start her life over yet again.
They both move to big, unfamiliar cities where they take up residence in tight,
claustrophobic quarters. They are both treated as dangerous outsiders within their new
homes and are, ultimately, expelled from them. For Lucy, this expulsion feels much
more like a desirable release—Kate Millett has, famously, described Villette as “one long
meditation on a prison break”
35
In Villette, Lucy labors intensively to keep her passions in check, and stages
lengthy internal debates between “Feeling” and its archrival, “Reason.” After she has
once again encountered Graham and Mrs. Bretton and tasted the fruit of human kindness
for the first time in her adult life, for example, she calls on her sense of Reason to calm
her Feelings down: “Do not let me think of them too often, too much, too fondly,” she
implores, “let me be content with a temperate draught of this living stream: let me not
run athirst, and apply passionately to its welcome waters: let me not imagine in them a
—whereas the expulsion in Streetcar is quite literally an
act of incarceration, as Blanche is brutally shuttled off to the insane asylum. But the risk
of mental breakdown is as real for Lucy as it is for Blanche, and both texts are equally
concerned with the threatening and potentially self-destroying role that “passion” plays in
their heroines’ lives.

35
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Doubleday, 1969), 145.
174
sweeter taste than earth’s fountains know” (251). As masochistic as such an inner
monologue may sound, Lucy’s life experiences have given her good cause to fear her
own emotionalism—she has, after all, just recuperated from “a strange fever of the nerves
and blood” which, she believes, brings her to the brink of “Death” (231), and whose
origins lie entirely in the “despairing,” “hopeless” mental wanderings that besiege her
during her solitary stay at the pensionnat through its eight-week holiday vacation (228).
If she does not find a way to repress the ardent longings of her passionate heart, Lucy
reasons, they very well might kill her.
Although Reason never fully triumphs over Feeling within Lucy, it does convince
her to strike an external compromise:
These struggles with the natural character, the strong native bent of the
heart, may seem futile and fruitless, but in the end they do good. They
tend, however slightly, to give the actions, the conduct, that turn which
Reason approves, and which Feeling, perhaps, too often opposes: they
certainly make a difference in the general tenor of a life, and enable it to
be better regulated, more equable, quieter on the surface; and it is on the
surface only the common gaze will fall. As to what lies below, leave that
with God. (252)

What is important to Lucy, then, is not that she can eliminate her own passions but that
she can successfully hide them from the world at large, in an attempt to live a more
socially acceptable life. It is here that Lucy’s emotional “struggles with [her] natural
character” begin to feel distinctly metaphoric of Brontë’s artistic struggles with the moral
censor. For here, again, we are reminded of Thackeray’s differentiation between what
floats above the water and what lies below, as we hear Brontë endorsing a strategy of
subterfuge that will satisfy the “common gaze” of the Moral World. The metaphor
becomes even more apparent as Brontë changes the terms of combat from Reason versus
175
Feeling to Reason versus Imagination: “Reason might be right; yet no wonder we are
glad at times to defy her, to rush from under her rod and give a truant hour to Imagination
– her soft, bright foe, our sweet Help, our divine Hope” (308). Reason is no longer
simply fighting Lucy’s desire to feel; it is fighting her desire to imagine, to invent, and,
even, to write.
Before Lucy receives the letter from Graham Bretton that will set her sexually and
emotionally aflame, she begins to debate with Reason about whether or not she is
“allowed” to reply to it. “Do you meditate pleasure in replying?” scoffs Reason. “Ah,
fool! I warn you! Brief be your answer. Hope no delight of heart – no indulgence of
intellect: grant no expansion to feeling.” “But,” Lucy protests, “if I feel, may I never
express?” to which Reason callously insists, “Never!” (307). Prohibited from expressing
what is in her heart or in her mind, Lucy finds herself in much the same position that
Brontë was in after writing to Robert Southey for professional advice. Lucy’s response
to this prohibition is to split herself in two, by first writing a lengthy letter to Graham that
boldly and poetically “give[s] expression to a closely-clinging and deeply-honouring
attachment – an attachment that wanted to attract to itself and take into its own lot all that
was painful in the destiny of its object; that would, if it could, have absorbed and
conducted away all storms and lightnings from an existence viewed with a passion of
solicitude,” but then promptly tearing that letter up and replacing it with a “terse, curt
missive of a page” that she actually sends out (335). In this moment, sexual repression is
intrinsically equated with literary censorship, as Lucy represses her physical and
emotional attraction to Graham through the act of mercilessly censoring her own writing.
176
Like Lucy, Williams and Kazan’s Blanche works hard to keep the “strong native
bent of [her] heart” in check, because, as she describes to Mitch on one of their dates, “A
single girl, a girl alone in the world, has got to keep a firm hold on her emotions, or she’ll
be lost!” This statement is meant, on one hand, to refer to the social prejudice against
women who give in to their sexual desires and “lose” their chance of ever capturing a
good man. (To Stella, Blanche makes this point even more bluntly when she declares
that she hasn’t given Mitch anything beyond a goodnight kiss, since she “want[s] his
respect, and men don’t want anything they get too easily.”) But it is also meant to refer
more specifically to Blanche’s fear of her own emotions, and to the possibility that, if she
does not rein them in, they too will lead to her social destruction. Just as Lucy
consciously strives to present a false front of self-regulation and equanimity to the world
at large, Blanche tries desperately to maintain the image of a prim and proper (and
young) Southern belle in the face of a very different physical reality. Although Blanche
first defends her ruse in pragmatic terms, telling Stella that she “want[s] to deceive
[Mitch] just enough to make him want me,” she later defends her motivations more
poetically, in a speech that is often taken to describe Tennessee Williams’s own aesthetic
approach: “I don’t want realism, I want magic!... Yes, yes, magic! I try to give that to
people. I do misrepresent things, I don’t tell truths, I tell what ought to be true. And if
that is sinful, then let me be punished for it. Don’t turn the light on!” But it is not only
our playwright who practices Blanche’s brand of deception on an artistic level; we must
remember that our director, too, freely admitted in his script notes that he did not feel
bound to tell “the literal facts, as an observer might see them” (a.ka.: “realism”) but
177
would instead perform the “magic” trick of “crawl[ing] into [Blanche] with [his] camera”
in order to show “the SUBJECTIVIZED source of the emotion.”
There is, of course, one major difference between Blanche’s “cover-up” and
Lucy’s “cover-up,” which is that Blanche has so much more to conceal—not simply that
she feels more than she “should,” or that she is physically attracted to others, but that she
has already acted on those feelings and attractions, quite prolifically, in the past. “Yes,”
she finally confesses, “I have had many meetings with strangers. After the death of
Allan, meetings with strangers was all I seemed able to fill my empty heart with.”
During this earlier period of her life, Blanche uses casual sex in the same way that Lucy
uses her fertile Imagination: to fill a deep and painful emotional void. (By the end of the
film, it should be noted, Blanche does discover the “sweet Help” and “divine Hope” of
her own imaginative powers that Lucy has been extolling all along, and retreats into the
fantasy plot of receiving a telegram from a rich, well-intentioned suitor who wants to
whisk her away from her misery and keep her as his platonic companion on his
Caribbean yacht.) But as promiscuous as Blanche’s behavior may have been prior to her
arrival in New Orleans, we must remember that all we get to see within the confines of
the film are demonstrations of sexual repression and restraint: Blanche rebuffing Mitch’s
too-“familiar” advances, Blanche sending away the young collector for the Evening Star
after one brief kiss because she knows she has to “keep [her] hands off children,”
Blanche fighting off Stanley with the broken end of a bottle. The Blanche that we meet,
in other words, is living as chaste a life as that of Lucy Snowe, and is actively
suppressing all of her “natural” romantic impulses in a similar manner.
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The buried nature of Blanche and Lucy’s feelings stands in stark contrast to the
unapologetic expressions of love and passion voiced by their respective sister-figures,
Stella and Polly Home (or, at least, the childhood version of Polly that we meet at the
outset of the novel.) Polly and Stella shock Lucy and Blanche with their fearless
willingness to give into desire so completely, to declare their emotions so openly. After
hearing young Polly tell Graham point-blank that she loves him—that, “if [he] were to
die… [she] should ‘refuse to be comforted, and go down into the grave to [his]
mourning’”—Lucy watches in awe as the audacious child gathers Graham in her arms,
“drawing his long-tressed head towards her.” The action excites in Lucy “the feeling one
might experience on seeing an animal dangerous by nature, and but half-tamed by art, too
heedlessly fondled. Not that I feared Graham would hurt, or very roughly check her; but
I thought she ran risk of incurring such a careless, impatient repulse, as would be worse
almost to her than a blow” (87). Even though the relationship between Polly and Graham
is, at this stage, officially pre-sexual (she is a child of six in “love” with a young man of
sixteen), the fact that the two do marry at the end of the novel retroactively marks this
moment as the first physical manifestation of their courtship, with Polly quite brazenly
being the one doing the “courting.”
The relationship between Stella and Stanley, meanwhile, is most certainly sexual,
with Stella taking as active a role in the romantic interplay as Polly does. We need only
think, for example, of the famous scene where Stella slowly, lustfully descends the
staircase to return to Stanley’s arms after he has gotten drunk and beaten her. As I will
discuss later on, Stella’s descent was one of the most “offensive” elements of the film to
179
the Catholic Legion of Decency, which demanded that Warner Brothers significantly trim
it down before the film’s initial release. But in either its edited or restored form, the
scene exudes a sense of raw female desire that is more or less unheard of in classical
Hollywood cinema. Blanche is, of course, awestruck by Stella’s visceral—and publicly
visible—demonstration of her passion, and chastises her the following morning for giving
in so easily to her “desire—just brutal desire!” Much as Lucy mentally compares
Graham to a “dangerous animal,” Blanche tells Stella that Stanley “acts like an animal,
has an animal’s habits” and beseeches her sister not to “hang back with the brutes!” The
reason that Blanche and Lucy are so judgmental about Stella and Polly’s emotional
availability stems at least partially from a sense of jealousy. Lucy quite obviously envies
Polly’s ultimately successful pursuit of Graham, since he is the man with whom she first
falls in love as well, and it does not take much reading between the lines to hear the echo
of covetousness in Blanche’s vehement disapproval of Stanley the Beast.
But in spite of all the textual evidence that seems to label Lucy and Blanche as a
pair of frustrated, green-eyed, “old-maid school-teacherish”-type women who are driven
to the brink of insanity by the unhealthy suppression of their sexual urges, there is also an
important undercurrent in both texts that tells a much different story about their erotic
lives. For in addition to all the externally imposed barriers that stand in the way of Lucy
and Blanche’s sexual fulfillment—the social expectation that they will be good, “modest”
girls who never reveal their interest in sex unless and until they are safely confined in the
state of wedlock, Lucy’s “unappealing” plainness, Blanche’s “unappealing” age—there
180
are multiple ways in which the heroines can be seen to create further romantic obstacles
for themselves in order to heighten and enhance their own sensations of desire.
One obvious way that Lucy and Blanche do this is by falling for men who are
somehow unattainable or marked as forbidden to them. Lucy falls in love first with
Graham, or “Dr. John” as all the girls and women of the pensionnat swooningly call him.
Aside from the fact that he is the tallest, handsomest, most desirable man that enters the
small world of the Rue Fossette and is, therefore, hopelessly out of poor, plain Lucy’s
“league,” Graham comes with the additional hindrance of being ardently smitten with
someone else—the younger, prettier, more vivacious Ginevra Fanshawe—before Lucy
even has the opportunity to enter his adult life. We have already seen some of Lucy’s
attempts to “reason” her way out of her “feelings” for Graham, but what is also apparent
in her interior monologues is the perverse pleasure that she derives from her romantically
unsuccessful dealings with him. When he fails to acknowledge or understand her true
feelings, for example, she reflects that “There is a perverse mood of the mind which is
rather soothed than irritated by misconstruction; and in quarters where we can never be
rightly known, we take pleasure, I think, in being consummately ignored” (164). When
he falls into the habit of confiding to her his romantic thoughts about Ginevra, we are told
that, “In a strange and new sense, I grew most selfish, and quite powerless to deny myself
the delight of indulging his mood, and being pliant to his will” (267). And, when he
subsequently transfers his feelings from the undeserving Ginevra to her superior cousin,
Countess Paulina de Bassompierre (aka Polly Home), Lucy’s perverse enjoyment only
seems to be amplified, in spite of all her forlorn protestations to the contrary. She
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specifically chooses, after all, to spend countless hours in the presence of the nascent
lovebirds, vigilantly observing (and, later, meticulously recording) the minute details of
their “idyllic” romance. She refuses to accept a position as Polly’s paid companion, but
that does not stop her from unofficially serving as personal confidante and trusted advisor
to both Polly and Graham throughout their courtship. During one such confidence
session, Graham inflicts a particularly vicious brand of pain upon Lucy by telling her that
“if [she] had been a boy instead of a girl – my mother’s god-son instead of her god-
daughter – we should have been good friends: our opinions would have melted into each
other” (401). But as much as it may pain Lucy to hear herself being relegated to the
realm of platonic fraternity, it is, for her, a “pain which thrilled my heart.” Indeed, had
another, even more forbidden love object not entered into Lucy’s line of vision to
supplant the unattainable Graham, one could quite easily imagine her drawing a lifetime
of masochistic pleasure from the well of unrequited love.
Lucy’s next love interest, M. Paul, is forbidden to her on several different levels.
He is, in the first place, a devout Catholic, she an unflinching Protestant, and for a time
their religious differences do manage to erect a significant philosophical barrier between
them. He is morally appalled by her “strange, self-reliant, invulnerable creed,” her
“terrible, proud, earnest Protestantism” (512); she is sickened by the legends of his
Catholic saints that are, to her mind, impious “nightmares of oppression, privation, and
agony” (184). Eventually, Lucy and M. Paul come to accept and forgive each other’s
spiritual “eccentricities,” but the obstacles between them do not end there. Lucy learns
(or thinks she learns) about two daunting rivals for M. Paul’s heart: his young, wealthy
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ward Justine Marie, and the memory of his beloved, deceased fiancée after whom his
ward was named. It turns out, of course, that a triumvirate of M. Paul’s closest
connections, Madame Beck, Père Silas, and Madame Walravens, has conspired to
squelch Lucy’s feelings for its financial provider by thrusting the threat of the two Justine
Maries before her. But Lucy’s sexual attraction to M. Paul—a man she had once
considered to be disagreeably “dark,” “little,” “pungent,” and “austere” (197)—is
enflamed, not extinguished by the image of this romantic competition (in much the same
way that M. Paul only begins to show a real interest in Lucy when he starts seeing her out
in public with Graham). “Was I, then,” Lucy thinks to herself, “to be frightened by
Justine Marie? Was the picture of this pale dead nun to rise, an eternal barrier?...
Madame Beck – Père Silas – you should not have suggested these questions. They were
at once the deepest puzzle, the strongest obstruction, and the keenest stimulus, I had ever
felt” (491). For both Lucy and M. Paul, then, “enticement” and “impediment” are two
deeply and inextricably interdependent forces.
36
This interdependency can be seen even more clearly in the ways that they stage
their social interactions with one another. From the time M. Paul first begins to pay any
attention to Lucy, his discourse is marked more by frustration, ferocity, and fuming than
by anything resembling flirtation or affection. He even, in the midst of their “courtship,”
makes a long, eloquent speech denying that there can ever be anything like a romance
between them: “Don’t suppose that I wish you to have a passion for me, Mademoiselle…

36
For a fuller consideration of the triangulation of desire, see René Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel:
Self and Other in Literary Structure (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), in which he argues
that “great” literature correctly and astutely portrays the “mimetic” character of human desire.
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– the thing, I assure you, is alien to my whole life and views. It died in the past – in the
present it lies buried – its grave is deep-dug, well-heaped, and many winters old” (433).
One of the rougher instances of his “unromantic” conduct towards her occurs late in the
novel, when he physically drags her, along with her chair and desk, into the middle of a
large interrogation room where he forces her to write an impromptu essay on “Human
Justice” in front of two of his colleagues to prove to them that she is capable of
intellectual thought. Although Lucy is at first so offended by these dictatorial
proceedings that she can “neither write nor speak,” she soon finds inspiration in her
outrage, and composes an inventively sardonic essay in which Human Justice is
personified as “a red, random beldame” who smokes and drinks and ignores the
melancholy pleas of the “suffering souls” around her (495). In this moment of expository
triumph, Lucy proves the point that she had earlier made about the paradoxical effect of
M. Paul’s malice: “Yet, when [he] sneered at me… his injustice stirred in me ambitious
wishes – it imparted a strong stimulus – it gave wings to aspiration” (440).
Lucy’s treatment of M. Paul, meanwhile, is willfully “perverse,” as she herself
repeatedly puts it—when the thing that she “most wishe[s] to do in the world” is talk to
him, she finds herself running away from him and hiding in one of the schoolrooms
(477); when she makes a lavish watchguard to present to him on his fête-day, she finds
herself holding it in her lap and pretending she has nothing for him, merely to see him
“vexed” (427). He calls her “vain,” “unpleasant” and “intractable,” she calls him “stern,”
“dogmatic” and “imperious.” Yet as little as this may sound like the language of love,
there is more passion in their petty bickering than in all of Lucy’s conversations with
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Graham put together. Take, for example, one of Lucy and M. Paul’s most heated
exchanges, in which anger and ardor are inextricably mixed: “You alluring little
coquette!” he hisses at her in French, “You seem sad, submissive, dreamy, but you aren’t
really: it is I that says this to you: Savage! with a blazing soul and light in your eyes!”,
to which Lucy just as vehemently hisses back, “Yes, I have a blazing soul, and the right
to have one!” (404) M. Paul is, in this moment and throughout the text, both Lucy’s
lover and her moral censor, admiring and judging her in the same breath.
“Censor” is, in fact, a term that is directly applied to M. Paul several times in the
novel—after he lectures Lucy about the “risqué” turn her wardrobe has lately taken
(denouncing in particular an offensive “scarlet” dress that is, in truth, a modest “pale
pink”), she mentally calls him “[t]his harsh little man – this pitiless censor” (421), and
after he cuts out some pages from a book he is giving to her, she explains to us that “he
generally pruned before lending his books, especially if they were novels, and sometimes
I was a little provoked at the severity of his censorship” (434-5). Some feminist critics
have taken M. Paul’s moral censoriousness to be Brontë’s subtle way of hinting to us that
he is not really the “romantic hero” that the structure of the text declares him to be. To
Kate Millett, M. Paul is a “jailer” and pedagogical “tyrant” from whom Lucy cannot wait
to “escape” at the novel’s end. As soon as she has “beguiled” him into setting her up in
her own school and giving her social and financial freedom, Millett rejoices, “she’s gone.
The keeper turned kind must be eluded anyway; Paul turned lover is drowned,” and
Lucy, at last, “is free.”
37

37
Millett, Sexual Politics, 146.
Along similar lines, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar see in
185
Brontë’s depiction of M. Paul’s suffocating pedantry an indictment of the patriarchal
convention of heteronormative romance: “As if to emphasize the false expectations
created by romantic enthrallment, Brontë has Lucy set the glamour of the ‘romantic’
courtship against her own growing friendship with M. Paul, who is emphatically an anti-
hero—small, dark, middle-aged, tyrannical, self-indulgent, sometimes cruel, even at
times a fool.”
38
But what if Brontë’s strange conflation of the roles of lover and censor in the
character of M. Paul points to something more complicated than a judgment against the
entire male sex? What if it points, instead, to the inadvertently stimulating, perversely
arousing effect of moral censorship itself? What if Lucy is inspired to use her
imagination to fill in the pages that M. Paul excises from her books, and what if the pages
she envisions are more tantalizing and liberating than those which have been cut? What
if Lucy never feels sexier than when M. Paul pruriently sees in her demure pink dress an
indecent scarlet gown? And what if Brontë the novelist never felt more emotionally or
artistically fired up than when her moral censors tried to tell her what and what not to
do—when Robert Southey advised her not to publish and to know her “womanly” place,
when the critics of Jane Eyre called her “godless” and “pernicious” and demanded that
she improve her “low moral tone,” when G. H. Lewes suggested that she rely less on
“melodrame” and write more like Jane Austen? Villette has been viewed as the story of a
woman learning how to write, how to voice the “heretic narrative” that she has within
her, how to rebel against the impulse of censorship. Patricia E. Johnson, for example, has

38
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the
Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 428.
186
argued that, predominantly due to her work in Villette, Brontë “will continue to be
signally important to female writers and readers: first, because she struggles with cultural
prohibition, but second, and more essentially, because she discovers her pleasure and
power in writing despite it.”
39
Blanche Dubois’ story, though vastly different in many respects, has this same
basic perversity at its core: like Lucy, Blanche is continually attracted to men she cannot
or should not have. Most blatantly prohibited are the string of male strangers—and, in
particular, young male strangers—with whom Blanche holds so many illicit “meetings”
at the Tarantula Arms in her pre-New Orleans life. We are given a glimpse of how such
meetings were orchestrated in the brief scene where she starts to seduce the collection
boy for the Evening Star. Nowhere in the film does Blanche appear more charged up or
turned on than during this triply forbidden encounter—forbidden because the boy is so
young, forbidden because Mitch is due to arrive any moment for their date and might
“catch her in the act,” forbidden because she is living in a narrow-minded world that
expects her to be chaste and virginal until she marries or dies. Interestingly, this was the
one scene that Kazan himself chose to cut down (meaning: censor) after it elicited
nervous, “bad” laughter from the test audiences who initially screened it. To spare the
character of Blanche from this humiliating reaction to her sexuality, Kazan edited the
But Villette is also, to my mind, the story of a woman who
thrives on her own heresy, and who experiences “pleasure and power” not only in spite of
her moral censors, but also, paradoxically, because of them.

39
Patricia E. Johnson, “Charlotte Brontë and Desire (to Write): Pleasure, Power, and Prohibition,” in
Anxious Power: Reading, Writing, and Ambivalence in Narrative by Women, ed. Carol J. Singley and
Susan Elizabeth Sweeney (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 184.
187
scene in a more dream-like way, using more shots of her looking at the boy and fewer
shots of the boy himself. Without changing any of the dialogue or negating the import of
the scene, Kazan managed to make the audience judge Blanche less severely for her
sexual “misconduct;” to show us the “SUBJECTIVIZED source of the emotion” that is
underlying her controversial compulsion to seduce someone so obviously forbidden to
her.
Of course, the man that Blanche spends much more time and energy trying to
seduce over the course of the film is Mitch. Although it might appear that Blanche sets
her sights on him precisely because he is not forbidden or unattainable—“Is he married?”
she checks with Stella before allowing herself to get too interested, “Is he a wolf?”—the
fact that he is not a “wolf,” that he is visibly “superior to the others” in terms of manners
but, also, in terms of morals, means that he is the suitor who is most likely to be shocked
and offended by the truth of her “sordid” past. He is, in other words, the one who is most
likely to reject her. And reject her he ultimately does: in the film’s most cruelly
moralistic line, Mitch tells Blanche that he no longer wants to marry her because she is
“not clean enough to bring in the house with Mother.” For all his seeming sweetness,
then, Mitch turns out to be a variation on the “harsh” and “pitiless” moral censor/ lover
that M. Paul embodies in Villette. Yet it is, I would argue, this very character trait of
Mitch’s—his upright, unforgiving censoriousness—that makes Blanche “want him,”
“want him very badly.”
But it is Blanche’s relationship to the other major male character of the film,
Stanley, that paints the most complex portrait of the nature of human desire. Critics have
188
had many different opinions over the years about what exactly is “going on” between
Blanche and Stanley, but the opinion that I would like to begin by considering is that of
the Production Code Administration. When Joseph Breen was first sent a script of the
salacious Broadway hit that was trying to make its way to Hollywood, he did not know
what to object to most. The four major issues that he had with the play were the
homosexuality of Blanche’s husband (what he called “the element of sex perversion”),
Stanley’s act of raping Blanche (and the fact that “this particularly revolting rape goes
unpunished”), Blanche’s sexuality (referred to, alternately, as her “nymphomania,” her
“promiscuity,” and her “prostitution”), and Stanley’s “unacceptable vulgarities.”
40

Importantly, however, the only one of these eliminations that was fully realized in the
film adaptation was the first: Blanche’s husband still commits suicide when she tells him
how disgusted she is by him, but in the film her disgust stems not from finding him in
bed with another man, but from a vaguer objection to his “sensitivity” and “weakness.”
(“Oh my god,” Vivien Leigh reportedly groaned when she first read the censored version
of her backstory, “You mean I have to say, ‘You disgust me because you’re a poet?’”
41

40
Breen to Luigi Luraschi, 27 June 1949, A Streetcar Named Desire Production Code Administration file,
Margaret Herrick Library.
)
Other, though, than this one rather ludicrous change—which did not, ultimately, do
particularly much good, since so many moviegoers of 1951 were familiar enough with
the major plot points of Streetcar to know full well why Allan “really” killed himself—
the majority of the revisions made to the script to satisfy Breen’s demands were minor in
nature and did not alter the crucial facts of the story. Blanche in the film still clearly has
41
Kim Hunter, “Streetcar and the Censor,” Disc 2, A Streetcar Named Desire DVD.
189
had sex with many strangers, Stanley in the film still clearly is vulgar, and the climax of
the film still lies in Stanley’s brutal act of raping Blanche.
What the interloping of the Hays Office did force Kazan to do was to present the
play’s most controversial elements in a more ambiguous, indirect manner, so that our
character perceptions are less reliant on lines of actual dialogue and more reliant on
camera angles, staging, tone of voice, and musical cues. Let us take, as our primary
example, the excision of one of the play’s best-known lines, muttered by Stanley just
before he carries Blanche off to his bed to rape her: “We’ve had this date with each other
from the beginning!” Even though the line, in its immediate context, is certainly meant
to come across as an abuser’s disturbing rationalization of an unforgivable crime (along
the lines of “Come on, you know you want it”), the fact that Blanche plainly does not
“want it” in that moment should not nullify the complexity of her feelings about Stanley
leading up to that point. Her feelings of repugnance are repeatedly verbalized throughout
the film, but her feelings of attraction, because the PCA considered them to be a further
demonstration of the “nymphomaniacal” tendencies that needed to be deemphasized, are
relegated to a sub-verbal realm: to the shots of her watching him when he doesn’t know
he is being watched, to the moan of the background music when they carry on a
seemingly innocent conversation, to the expression of her face, the tenor of her speech,
the import of her movements. In all of these subtle ways, Kazan allows us to see what he
perceived to be the central moral complexity of the drama: the fact that Blanche is, in
spite of everything, “drawn” to Stanley. In a 1971 interview, Kazan described this
element of the story in biographical terms: “I wanted to show exactly what Williams
190
meant, which is that he, as a homosexual, is attracted to the person he thinks is going to
destroy him—the attraction you have for someone who’s on the other side, supposedly
dead against you, but whose violence and force attract you.”
42
Similarly, in his notes to
the final draft of the Streetcar screenplay, he concludes that “There is no doubt [Blanche]
is drawn to what will kill her. She has a death wish. She is drawn to her ‘executioner.’
It is suicide.”
43
In these comments, Kazan is specifically referring to yet another pivotal line that
was expunged from the film (but whose content is also nonverbally transmitted to us),
Blanche’s declaration to Mitch that “The first time I laid eyes on [Stanley], I thought to
myself, that man is my executioner! That man will destroy me!” Part of what Blanche
means by this, I would argue, is that she can tell from the outset that Stanley will be the
“harshest” and most “pitiless” moral censor ever to cross her path. As much as he may
appear to be the very opposite of a censorious prig—crude, crass, unapologetically
sexual—Stanley has a fierce, primitive sense of “right” and “wrong,” and is, ultimately,
the one who makes the life-ruining decision to announce Blanche’s past indiscretions to
all his friends so that she is forced to pay for her “sins.” This first stage of Blanche’s
punishment is very much in line with the mandates of the Production Code, which would
clearly expect the wanton seductress of teenage boys to receive some kind of severe
moral retribution for her crimes. The problem, from a Code perspective, is that Stanley
then continues to mete out Blanche’s punishment in a way that is deeply immoral in its
own right—by raping her. This action fundamentally disturbs some of the Code’s most

42
Interview with Stuart Byron and Martin L. Rubin, 1971, in Baer, Elia Kazan: Interviews, 135.
43
Kazan, Kazan on Directing, 158.
191
basic tenets: that the “presentation of crimes” must never throw sympathy “with the
criminal as against those who punish him,” that the audience must always “feel sure that
evil is wrong and good is right.” If, as John Roderick has argued, “The sexually healthy
marriage that [Stanley] shares with Stella” is meant to “stand as the sacred arena defiled
by the profane intruder Blanche with her sexual perversity,”
44
It was a question whose answer Joseph Breen did not want to learn. Out of all the
play’s “objectionable” elements, Kazan had to fight hardest to convince Breen to allow
Stanley’s act of raping Blanche to remain in the film. There were numerous memos and
countless conversations in which the viability of “the rape scene” was heatedly discussed;
Code administrators wanted it to be cut entirely or, perhaps, made out to be a figment of
Blanche’s imagination, while Kazan kept insisting that the fact of the rape was crucial to
the emotional fabric of the film and threatened to walk out on the production if it was
eliminated. Ultimately, Kazan wound up “winning” the battle of the rape sequence by
promising to present it “by suggestion and with delicacy.” On film, we do not see
Stanley “start[ing] towards the bed” with Blanche in his arms as we do in the play, but we
do still see Stanley attacking Blanche physically, grabbing her by the arms and pushing
her into a mirror to the point where it smashes and she is left unconscious in his grasp,
after which we cut directly to a none-too-subtle shot of a hose spurting water onto the
dirty New Orleans pavement outside. Regardless of all the pent-up attraction that
Blanche may feel for Stanley throughout the film—the perverse attraction to her moral
then how is the audience
supposed to respond to the “defiled” becoming the “defiler”?

44
John M. Roderick, “From ‘Tarantula Arms’ to Della Robia Blue,” in Tennessee Williams: A Tribute, ed.
Jac Thorpe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1977), 118.
192
censor who, she knows, will be her executioner—the metaphoric, shattered-mirror
staging of the scene that Kazan had to devise in order to satisfy Breen’s demands works,
in fact, to emphasize the unadulterated tragedy and injustice of the fate that befalls her.
Blanche is not “just” defiled and injured; she is, irrevocably, broken.
In an essay linking Blanche’s story to that of her author, Nancy Tischler contends
that Tennessee Williams has Stanley rape Blanche because “Rape is an effective term for
what the Romantic believes the world does to him and his art. It robs the artist of his
dreams and then uses him for its own diversion.”
45

45
Nancy Tischler, “The Distorted Reality: Tennessee Williams’ Self-Portrait,” in Tennessee Williams: A
Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Stephen S. Stanton (New York: Prentice Hall, 1977), 168.
Although this morbid and somewhat
hystericized outlook on life and art was not, on the whole, Kazan’s way of thinking about
things, there is one section of his autobiography in which he does seem to consider “rape”
to be an appropriate description of what was happening to him artistically. It is the
section that discusses the post-production “moral improvements” to Streetcar that were
forced upon him by the Legion of Decency, amounting to four minutes of deleted
footage: the scene of Stella descending the staircase was significantly shortened, a shot
of Blanche sighing, moaning, and arching her body as she sits alone in the Kowalskis’
apartment was excised, and various “overly suggestive” lines were eliminated—i.e.,
“You know, if I didn’t know that you was my wife’s sister, I would get ideas about you,”
“It would’ve been nice to keep you, but I’ve got to be good and keep my hands off
children,” and “Well, maybe you wouldn’t be bad to interfere with.” Even though Kazan
ultimately came to believe that the cuts imposed by the Legion failed to make any real
193
difference (“You still get it, don’t you?” he would comment late in his life
46
), in 1951 the
cuts made him feel small, hurt, and powerless: “The plain fact was—and I had to
recognize it—the picture had been taken away from me, secretly, skillfully, without a
raised voice. I discovered I had no rights.”
47
But it is important to note that Kazan only
develops this victimized, wounded tone when he is talking about the “conspiratorial”
censorship practices of the Legion of Decency, not the practices of the PCA. Kazan’s
dealings with Breen, as antagonistic as they sometimes were, felt to him like a “fair
fight,” and were, therefore, a source of pleasure for him rather than strife. After he
finished editing the film (but before he found out about the Legion’s additional
excisions), Kazan wrote a very friendly note to Breen letting him know that he was
pleased with the final cut and “thanking” him for all his “cooperation and help on this
picture.”
48
At the end of Villette, the Catholic junta is as unsuccessful in its attempts to keep
Lucy and M. Paul apart as the Legion of Decency was in its attempts to “purify” Kazan
Breen may have been the artistic “enemy,” but he was an enemy that Kazan
could enjoy tussling with, just as Blanche enjoys tussling with Stanley until he, like the
Legion of Decency, becomes conspiratorially vindictive and “deliberately cruel.” Or, to
draw an inter-textual analogy, Kazan appears to have resented the silent, collaborative
scheming of the Catholic Legion in much the same way that Lucy resents the Catholic
“junta” of Madame Beck, Madame Walravens, and Père Silas for stealthily conniving to
keep her away from M. Paul.

46
Richard Schikel, “Streetcar and the Censor,” Disc 2, A Streetcar Named Desire DVD.
47
Kazan, A Life, 435.
48
Kazan to Joseph Breen, 18 May 1951, A Streetcar Named Desire PCA file.
194
and Williams’s Streetcar. But Lucy and M. Paul face a far more formidable opponent in
the form of their literary creator, who makes the brutal authorial choice to conclude the
story of their romance with a shipwreck. This brutality is tempered, of course, by the
notorious narrative elision that allows Brontë’s readers to envision a pleasanter ending
than the tragic one implied: “Here pause: pause at once. There is enough said. Trouble
no quiet, kind heart; leave sunny imaginations hope. Let it be theirs to conceive the
delight of joy born again fresh out of great terror, the rapture of rescue from peril, the
wondrous reprieve from dread, the fruition of return” (596). Significantly, however, we
know that Brontë did not originally plan to conclude her story with such evasiveness; the
ending was, instead, a compromise that she came up with in order to satisfy the demands
of her first and most influential “censor,” her father. As Elizabeth Gaskell describes in
The Life of Charlotte Brontë,
Mr. Brontë was anxious that her new tale should end well, as he disliked
novels which left a melancholy impression upon the mind; and he
requested her to make her hero and heroine (like the heroes and heroines
in fairy-tales) “marry and live very happily ever after.” But the idea of
M. Paul Emanuel’s death at sea was stamped on her imagination till it
assumed the distinct force of reality; and she could no more alter her
fictitious ending than if they had been facts which she was relating. All
she could do in compliance with her father’s wish was so to veil the fate in
oracular words, as to leave it to the character and discernment of her
readers to interpret her meaning.
49

In this, arguably the most direct act of censorship imposed on Brontë during her writing
career, we find one of the clearest illustrations of the paradoxical effects of the word
“no.” Because she is explicitly forbidden to write one sentence—“M. Paul died in a

49
Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 484.
195
shipwreck”—the substance of that sentence is forced to surface throughout the text in
subtler, darker, more insidious ways.
For we must remember that the entire story of Villette is told to us in retrospect,
from the distanced perspective of Lucy’s old age—“I speak of a time gone by,” she
confesses, “my hair, which till a late period withstood the frosts of time, lies now, at last
white, under a white cap, like snow beneath snow” (105). What this means is that the
Lucy who is narrating our story has been through all of it already, and that each of her
acts of narrative self-censorship is performed in the shadow of the nautical disaster that
we only learn about at the novel’s close. If we go back and re-read the book with this
disaster as our underlying subtext, we see that turbulent oceans and raging storms are
everywhere, as if Lucy can only view the world through the lens of the focal trauma of
her life. Some of these storms are presented to us as being physically “real” (the squall of
the night that Lucy visits the confessional before collapsing on the street; the downpour
that traps her in Madame Walravens’ house while Père Silas tells her the story of Justine
Marie), but the majority of them are, more powerfully, consigned to the figurative realm.
Indeed, at almost every textual moment when Lucy is discussing something too “painful”
for her to describe in detail, she relies on the forbidden metaphor of the sea storm to
suture the break in her narrative.
50

50
To name a few such figurative sea storms: The unidentified misfortunes of Lucy’s childhood are
described as a “heavy tempest” that demolishes the vessel on which she and her family are traveling, so that
“the ship was lost, the crew perished” (94). At the peak of Lucy’s nervous breakdown, she imagines a cup
of “suffering” being forced to her lips that is “drawn from no well, but filled up seething from a bottomless
and boundless sea” (231). When Lucy must wait in agonizing suspense for M. Paul to come say good-bye
to her before departing for the West Indies, she describes the hours as “pass[ing] like drift cloud – like the
rack scudding before the storm” (542).
Metaphor works in Villette the way the visual works
in A Streetcar Named Desire: as a means of speaking the unspeakable. And, just as
196
Kazan appears to have been creatively energized by the challenge of having to
communicate so many of his text’s most important ideas through his camera, Brontë
appears to have relished the indirection and ambiguity that her father’s injunction had, in
effect, required of her. When her publisher suggested that she fill in some of Villette’s
“morbid” narrative gaps, Brontë flatly refused to do so, explaining that “it would be too
much like drawing a picture and then writing underneath the name of the object intended
to be represented.”
51
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud uses the analogy of a writer facing
censorship to explain why the human psyche chooses to “distort” its most forbidden
desires into dreams that must be deciphered in order to be understood. Freud paints this
analogous picture in primarily constrictive terms: “The writer stands in fear of the
censorship”; “He finds himself compelled, in accordance with the sensibilities of the
censor, either to refrain altogether from certain forms of attack” or to “conceal his
objectionable statement in an apparently innocent disguise.” Ultimately, however, Freud
acknowledges that the censored writer, like the repressed sexual being, can paradoxically
benefit from the constrictions placed upon him: “The stricter the domination of the
censorship, the more thorough becomes the disguise, and, often enough, the more
ingenious the means employed to put the reader on the track of the actual meaning.”
For both Brontë and Kazan, censorship was an integral part of the
artistic process—more inspiring than limiting, more productive than destructive.
52

51
Brontë to W.S. Williams, 6 November 1852, Selected Letters, 211.

What Freud makes it possible for us to imagine, and what these two challenging works
52
Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (New York: Modern Library, 1978), 52.

197
make even clearer, is that “the actual meaning” is finally inseparable from the ingenuity
of the means of representation; repression and writing are, in the end, impossible to tell
apart.
198
Postscript:
Oscar Wilde and Mae West

If Jane Austen cannot technically be defined as a Victorian novelist, Oscar Wilde
technically can: he wrote one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in the final decade of
Queen Victoria’s reign. Yet Wilde is more often viewed as a turn-of-the-century (or fin-
de-siècle) writer, and is more often admired as a playwright than a novelist. Mae West,
on the other hand, is the only Hollywood artist explored in this project who served as
writer and actor rather than director. But due to her extreme, if short-lived, popularity,
West was able to obtain a degree of creative control on her films that effectively put her
above the director (some would even say above the studio heads; for a few years in the
early 1930s, Mae West movies were single-handedly keeping Paramount Pictures afloat,
and both she and the Paramount executives knew it.) I want to conclude my project with
a brief glance at these two slightly miscategorized artists because they simultaneously
demonstrate the delirious heights to which censorship evasion can go—consider their
word play, their double entendres, their insouciant, incalcitrant wit—and the tragic lows
that can result from the “success” of the moral censor. I want, in other words, to concede
that the libidinous, subversive pleasures afforded by censorship must always dangle
precariously close to suppression and destruction and pain.
As dissimilar as the shapes of their respective careers may be, Wilde and West
have both achieved a specific type of notoriety that is firmly rooted in their dealings with
the moral censor: in strikingly parallel language, recent critics have pointed out that
“Oscar Wilde is commonly considered to be the iconic victim of Victorian puritanism”
199
and that “Mae West is best remembered as Hollywood’s most colorful victim of
censorship.”
1
The biggest difference between these two claims is, of course, that Wilde’s
notoriety is less related to the censoring of his art and more related to the censure of his
life. But this does not mean that his art was untouched by moral censorship. His first
play, Vera; or, The Nihilists, was cancelled before rehearsals were even allowed to begin,
due entirely to unlucky timing: its plot revolved around an aborted assassination attempt
on a Russian Czar, which suddenly became forbidden subject matter in the wake of the
successful assassinations of Czar Alexander II and President James Garfield in 1881.
Though this early example of censorship was, as Richard Ellman has described it, “no
less infuriating because [it] was unofficial,”
2
Wilde’s one foray into prose fiction, meanwhile, was also influenced by
censorship, though in somewhat subtler ways. First published in Lippincott’s Monthly
Magazine in 1890, The Picture of Dorian Gray aroused a flurry of moral criticism that
the best-known case of Wilde’s work being
explicitly censored involved his 1892 dramatic retelling of the story of Salome.
Rehearsals had, this time, already gotten underway (with the legendary Sarah Bernhardt
slated to play the title role) when Wilde was informed that E. F. S. Pigott, the Lord
Chamberlain’s licensor of plays, would be banning the theatrical performance of Salome
on the grounds of that it was illegal to depict Biblical characters on stage—a ban which
would not be lifted in England for almost forty years.

1
Ari Adut, “A Theory of Scandal: Victorians, Homosexuality, and the Fall of Oscar Wilde,” American
Journal of Sociology 111.1 (July 2005): 214; Marybeth Hamilton, “Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It:
Censoring Mae West,” in Movie Censorship and American Culture, ed. Francis Couvares (Washington:
Smithsonian Institution Press), 187.
2
Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage Books, 1988), 153.
200
was as much about Wilde’s own persona as it was about the dangers of his “unmanly,
sickening, vicious” book.
3
One is struck by the profusion of such terms [in the reviews of Dorian
Gray] as “unclean,” “effeminate,” “studied insincerity,” “theatrical,”
“Wardour Street aestheticism,” “obtrusively cheap scholarship,”
“vulgarity,” “unnatural,” “false,” and “perverted”: an odd mixture of the
rumors of Wilde’s homosexuality and of more overt criticism of Wilde as
a social poseur and self-advertiser. Although the suggestion was couched
in terms applying to the text, the reviews seemed to say that Wilde did not
know his place, or—amounting to the same thing—that he did know his
place and it was not that of a middle-class gentleman.
As Regenia Gagnier summarizes:
4

In response to this barrage of insults, Wilde made a series of changes to his text before
publishing it in book form a year later. Gone, for example, were some of the lines with
the most overtly homoerotic overtones: “There was something in his nature that was
purely feminine in its tenderness,” “It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far
more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend,” “Dorian, your reputation
is infamous. I know you and Harry are great friends. I say nothing about that now, but
surely you need not have made his sister’s name a by-word,” etc.. Wilde’s exercise in
self-censorship was, to some extent, successful: the literary reviews were significantly
less condemnatory the second time around, and certain critics who had considered it to be
“too dangerous” to comment positively about the work after its initial magazine release
now came forward to express their admiration.
5

3
Unsigned review from the Athenaeum, qtd. in Stuart Mason, Oscar Wilde: Art and Morality (New York:
Haskell, 1971), 200.
Still, the major circulating libraries
refused to carry the “dirty” novel, and conservative moralists lamented the enormous
4
Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1986), 59.
5
Ellman, Oscar Wilde, 323. The most famous example of a critic who did this was Walter Pater.
201
level of popularity that it managed to achieve in spite of all their best efforts to see it (and
its “profligate” author) flounder.
It would take a series of legal trials, the first of which was instigated by Wilde
himself, to fulfill his moral adversaries’ ill wishes. In 1895, Wilde filed a libel suit
against the father of his long-time lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, for leaving a calling card
at Wilde’s social club that was addressed to “Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite” (sic). By
taking the matter of his sexuality to court, Wilde opened the door for legal proceedings
against himself, and after Douglas’s father was acquitted on all counts, Wilde was
immediately arrested for “gross indecency” and eventually found guilty of the charge.
His last words in the courtroom were, famously, “And I? May I say nothing, my lord?”,
which were drowned out by the crowd’s condemnatory cries of “Shame!”
6
Where Wilde’s personal demise is so often read as the tragic conclusion to the
history of Victorian hypocrisy, West’s cinematic demise is typically viewed as the
foreboding beginning of the “serious” Code censorship enforced by Joseph Breen.
West’s bouts with censorship did not begin in Hollywood, however. Like Wilde, West
was physically imprisoned for her defiance of moral standards, though in her case the jail
Wilde was
sentenced to two years of hard labor, after which he moved to the Continent where he
would spend the last three years of his life in relatively penniless exile. He died on
November 30, 1900, less than two months before the death of Queen Victoria—the death
which marked the official endpoint of the “Victorian” moral culture that had, in effect,
destroyed him.

6
Ellman, Oscar Wilde, 477-8.
202
time was served much earlier in her career, and was just scandalous enough to enhance,
rather than ruin, her reputation. West’s ten-day sentence came as a result of obscenity
charges that were leveled against her in April of 1927 for “corrupting the morals of
youth” with her prostitution-themed first Broadway hit, Sex, although West believed that
the city officials’ real objection was to her gay-themed second venture, The Drag, which
was going through a trial run in New Jersey at the time. Due to threats from the Society
for the Prevention of Vice that it would be loudly and vigorously boycotted, The Drag
never made it to the Broadway stage.
West’s early struggles against the constraints of theatrical censorship were a
precursor to the troubles that she would eventually experience in Hollywood. By 1934,
thanks to the unparalleled success of her brazenly bawdy first two starring vehicles, She
Done Him Wrong and I’m No Angel, the very name Mae West had become a catchphrase
for everything that was “wrong” with the motion picture industry. “There must,”
lamented one Presbyterian protest pamphlet, “be tens of thousands of high school girls all
over the United States reading, hearing, and seeing all they can of this particular star and
her wanton heroines, imitating them so far as they can.”
7

7
Qtd. in Marybeth Hamilton, When I’m Bad, I’m Better: Mae West, Sex, and American Entertainment
(New York: HarperCollins, 1995), 201.
Hence when Joseph Breen took
charge of the PCA, Mae West was one of the first “problems” that he intended to “fix.”
Initially, he tried to clean up her act by insisting that she eliminate all her trademark
double entendres and that the storylines of her films be exaggeratedly “moral” in nature.
(The plot of 1936’s Klondike Annie, for example, transforms West from a dance hall
singer to an Alaskan missionary by the story’s end.) But Breen soon realized that the
203
Mae West dilemma was harder to solve than he had originally anticipated; in a private
memo from 1936, he admitted that “Just so long as we have Mae West on our hands…
we are going to have trouble. Difficulty is inherent in a Mae West picture. Lines and
pieces of business, which in the script seem to be thoroughly innocuous, turn out when
shown on the screen to be questionable at best, when they are not definitely offensive.”
8

The only solution was to get West “off of” Hollywood’s “hands” altogether, which was
successfully accomplished within a few short years—by 1938, West’s popularity had
waned so dramatically that her movies began losing money, at which point Paramount
promptly (and, according to insiders, with a sigh of relief) dropped her. She made one
more hit film with Universal in 1940, My Little Chickadee, but after that her Hollywood
career was, for all intents and purposes, over. Even though, as Leonard Leff and Jerold
Simmons have noted, West’s rapid fall out of favor was not due to Breen’s efforts
alone—it was also due to the “throwback” style of her “burlesque blue humor,” which
dated quickly
9
What these brief outlines of Wilde and West’s negative interactions with the
moral censor must necessarily skim over, of course, are the happier moments of their
respective careers—the moments in which Wilde and West were able to balance their
penchants for moral controversy with just enough “politeness” to make their works
subversive and successful at the same time. Wilde’s artistic heyday took place during the
—it is difficult to deny that the films made after Breen unleashed his full
censorship wrath upon her are markedly less brash, less roguish, and less enjoyable.

8
Breen, interoffice memo, 10 February 1936, Klondike Annie Production Code Administration file,
Margaret Herrick Library.
9
Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the
Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 51.
204
first half of the 1890s, when his series of social comedies (Lady Windermere’s Fan, A
Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest)
brought him both great critical acclaim and enormous popular appeal, in spite of all the
morally suspect ideas that they contained within them. As Peter Raby has put it, “With
one eye on the dramatic genius of Ibsen, and the other on the commercial competition in
London’s West End, [Wilde] targeted his audience with adroit precision.”
10
While
West’s films may have had little of “Ibsen” about them, she too was a censorship
manipulator par excellence when at her pre-Code (meaning pre-Breen) prime. In an
essay that bears much in common with the overarching premise of this project, Marybeth
Hamilton specifically makes the claim that, in the best of West’s films, “censorship
actually enhanced her appeal. Not only West, but also her censors, sought to mediate sex
so as to appeal to the widest range of viewers. And it is hard not to argue that, though
West had done it well on Broadway, in Hollywood the Hays Office did it even better.”
11
Collectively, the works of Oscar Wilde and Mae West exemplify a wide array of
“mediation” strategies, including all of the major ones I have explored in my chapters:
the strategy of scandal, the strategy of sophistication, the strategy of excess, the strategy
of restraint. The fact that these two particular artists were struck down by the forces of
censorship at the very pinnacles of their strategizing careers should not make us disregard
what they were able to achieve before those respective downfalls. What it should instead
remind us is that the game of censorship circumvention is necessarily a dangerous game,
with very real and very personal stakes. Yet it was a game that many Victorian novelists

10
Peter Raby, Oscar Wilde (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 146.
11
Hamilton, “Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It,” 200.
205
and classical Hollywood filmmakers believed to be well worth playing, and, as I have
hoped to show throughout this project, a game that most of the best such artists ultimately
managed to “win.” Since Oscar Wilde and Mae West were not, in the end, quite so
fortunate, I would like (in my own version of “compensating moral values”) to give them
the final word in this discussion of censorship. I will conclude, therefore, with a list of
Wilde-isms and West-isms which, taken together, say almost everything that I have been
trying to say about the perverse relationship between censorship, morality, and art—
albeit with more wit, more bite, and considerably more style.

When I’m good, I’m very good. But when I’m bad, I’m better.
– Mae West

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or
badly written. That is all.
– Oscar Wilde

I like restraint, if it doesn’t go too far.
– Mae West

I can resist everything except temptation.
– Oscar Wilde

Those who are easily shocked should be shocked more often.
– Mae West

An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.
– Oscar Wilde

It’s not what I do, but the way I do it. It’s not what I say, but the way I say it.
– Mae West

206
If you pretend to be good, the world takes you seriously. If you pretend to be bad,
it doesn’t.
– Oscar Wilde

Every man that I meet wants to protect me. I can’t figure out from what.
– Mae West

Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the
symbols do so at their peril.
– Oscar Wilde

Virtue has its own reward, but no sale at the box office.
– Mae West

Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
– Oscar Wilde

If I asked for a cup of coffee, someone would search for the double meaning.
– Mae West

Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being
charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful
things are the cultivated. For these there is hope.
– Oscar Wilde

The censors wouldn’t even let me sit on a guy’s lap, and I’d been on more laps
than a napkin.
– Mae West

The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own
shame.
– Oscar Wilde

I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it.
– Mae West

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he
will tell you the truth.
– Oscar Wilde
207
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Asset Metadata

Creator Gilbert, Nora (author)

Core Title The joy of censorship: strategies of circumvention in novel and film

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publication Date 09/07/2012

Defense Date 08/24/2010

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

Tag censorship,Hollywood film,OAI-PMH Harvest,victorian novel

Place Name California (states), England (countries), Hollywood (city or populated place)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Schor, Hilary M. (committee chair), Braudy, Leo (committee member), Kincaid, James R. (committee member), Renov, Michael (committee member)

Creator Email joshg@me.com,ngilbert@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-m3423

Unique identifier UC1175502

Identifier etd-Gilbert-4004 (filename),usctheses-m40 (legacy collection record id),usctheses-c127-392691 (legacy record id),usctheses-m3423 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-Gilbert-4004.pdf

Dmrecord 392691

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Gilbert, Nora

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Repository Name Libraries, University of Southern California

Repository Location Los Angeles, California

Repository Email cisadmin@lib.usc.edu