The Woman's Film of the 1940s

Gender, Narrative, and History

Alison L. McKee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135053697
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Film e video

This book explores the relationship among gender, desire, and narrative in 1940s woman's films which negotiate the terrain between public history and private experience. The woman's film and other form of cinematic melodrama have often been understood as positioning themselves outside history, and this book challenges and modifies that understanding, contextualizing the films it considers against the backdrop of World War II. In addition, in paying tribute to and departing from earlier feminist formulations about gendered spectatorship in cinema, McKee argues that such models emphasized a masculine-centered gaze at the inadvertent expense of understanding other possible modes of identification and gender expression in classical narrative cinema. She proposes ways of understanding gender and narrative based in part on literary narrative theory and ultimately works toward a notion of an androgynous spectatorship and mode of interpretation in the 1940s woman's film.

1
Film Theory, Narrative, and the 1940s Woman’s Film

Feminist Film Theory and its Discontents

With the appearance of Laura Mulvey’s now-classic “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in 1975, British and American debate around the representation of women focused on the images of women produced under the classical Hollywood studio system. It also examined enunciative strategies of classical narrative film itself, which Mulvey and many writing after her conceived as structuring a limited number of oppressive, masculine positions available to movie spectators, regardless of the biological sex of those spectators. Mulvey invoked Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis with a twofold purpose. It provided a means of anatomizing a patriarchal discourse (i.e., psychoanalysis) that she felt provided an “exact rendering of [female] frustration experienced under the phallocentric order,” as well as a way of allowing patriarchy to be the cause of its own undoing, turning one of its own discourses against itself: “Psychoanalytic theory is thus appropriated here as a political weapon, demonstrating the way the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (Mulvey [1975] 1986, 199 and 198).¹ Mulvey’s formulations about the position of women and the masculinization of the spectator position in classical narrative film are sufficiently well known now not to require extensive elaboration here. Of specific relevance to my own concerns around gender and narrative in the woman’s film, however, is Mulvey’s take on the (im)possibility of finding an authentic representation of female subjectivity and desire in classical film, which, she asserts, always cracks under the pressure of the few existing attempts at such a representation. The roots of her discussion lie in the terrain surrounding the castration complex as Freud conceived it and as Lacan refined it, the ramifications of which she maps and analyzes in terms of their impact on patriarchal representations of feminine subjectivity and desire:

Woman’s desire is subjected to her image as bearer of the bleeding wound, she can exist only in relation to castration and cannot transcend it…. Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.

(Mulvey [1975] 1986, 199)

In “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,’” Mulvey responded to those critics who faulted her for failing to consider the ways in which female spectators might experience pleasure on their own terms in response to classical cinema, elaborating on her position that the only truly active point of view that classical cinema structures is a masculine one (Mulvey 1981). The only access that a female spectator has to pleasure and spectatorial identification within this system, as Mulvey saw it then, is in taking up one of several masculine positions that the film structures for her and, in the process, recollecting the lost masculine stage of her sexual identity.

Mary Ann Doane continued Mulvey’s investigation of subject positioning through an exploration of specifically cinematic enunciative strategies in terms of gender in her 1987 landmark study of the woman’s film, The Desire to Desire. Viewing it as “a privileged site for the analysis of the given terms of female spectatorship and the inscription of subjectivity” (3), Doane was concerned with analyzing the woman’s film primarily in terms of its presumed address to the female spectator and isolated the 1940s as a period in which World War II arguably caused the Hollywood film industry to anticipate a largely female audience and to generate woman’s films that she felt addressed the female spectator more directly and specifically than other categories of films and other woman’s films in other periods. At the heart of Doane’s thesis is the point that, while these films seem to permit their female protagonists an authentic point of view and permit their female spectators to take up and share in the feminine subjectivity that these films apparently evoke, neither assumption is in fact true. Instead of offering “access to a pure and authentic female subjectivity,” Doane argued, these films offer us merely “an image repertoire of poses—classical feminine poses and assumptions about the female appropriation of the gaze” (4).² Doane staked out her argument in the ground surrounding the gaze within and at cinema (“I hope to analyze what is, above all, a certain representation of female spectatorship, produced as both image and position as an effect of certain discourses specified as ‘belong’ to the woman” [8]), invoking both cinema and psychoanalysis as coincident forms of representation, and ultimately asserting that “each system specifies that the woman’s relation to desire is difficult if not impossible. Paradoxically, her only access is the desire to desire” (9).

Like Mulvey, Doane intended to use psychoanalysis as a tool to deconstruct a patriarchal system of representation—in this case, classical Hollywood cinema. Echoing and elaborating on some of Mulvey’s assertions in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Doane observes that

the “stories” psychoanalysis tells, its fictions of subjectivity, are fully compatible with those proffered by the cinema. In that case, we might privilege Freudian psychoanalysis because it makes the cultural construction of femininity more legible—not because it dictates a “truth” of femininity. Reading Freud is often as strangely compelling as watching a woman’s film—both entail the simultaneously pleasurable and unpleasurable effect of recognition/misrecognition of one’s own cultural positioning.

(1987, 20)

If reading Freud evokes, among other things, the “unpleasurable … mis-recognition” of patriarchy’s positioning of women within its cultures, however, then reading Lacan (i.e., rereading Freud in terms of a linguistically based psychoanalysis) reinvokes and reinscribes that misrecognition. Doane recapitulates the classic psychoanalytic trajectory (embodied in the Oedipal complex) traversed by the self in search of subjecthood. However, in doing so, she inadvertently points to the pitfalls for feminist theory that inhered in both Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theories as they were adopted (and adapted) by much of second-wave feminist film studies:

The logical consequence of the Lacanian alignment of the phallus with the symbolic order and the field of language is the exclusion of the woman, or at the very least, the assumption of her different or deficient relation to language and its assurance of subjectivity…. It is with the Oedipal complex, the intervention of a third term (the father) in the mother-child relation and the resulting series of displacements which reformulate the relation to the mother as a desire for a perpetually lost object, that the subject accedes to the active use of the signifier. Distance from the “origin” (the maternal) is the prerequisite to desire; and insofar as desire is defined as the excess of demand over a need aligned with the maternal figure, the woman is left behind.

(11–12)

Distance, for the woman, is impossible, according to this system, because she does not engage in the same processes of disavowal and fetishism in order to neutralize the threat of castration that men do. Assigned a position in which her difference from men signifies not so much difference as lack, woman is thus further conceived as suffering from proximity, overpresence, or excessive closeness to the body—her own body or its surrogates. That is, not only does the woman embody lack in relation to men and to their conceptualization of the female body, but also the relation toward their own bodies that Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis constructs for them is posited as one that deviates from the (masculine) norm and therefore strips them of the capacity to desire. Doane observes that “subjectivity in its psychoanalytic formulation is always a desiring subjectivity” (11); without the necessary distance from the body, which permits access to desire, then, woman, as she is conceived of in Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and in classical Hollywood cinema, has access only to the desire to desire.

As I see it, the difficulty in Doane’s approach (and in many feminist and other deployments of psychoanalytic theories regarding the Oedipal complex from this period) is that the relationship that these approaches generally construct between the explanatory model (psychoanalysis) and its object of study (individual films, genres, or their spectators) is overstated and often results in tautological conclusions. As Doane observes, “The ‘stories’ psychoanalysis tells, its fictions of subjectivity, are fully compatible with those proffered by the cinema…. [W]e might privilege Freudian psychoanalysis because it makes the cultural construction of femininity more legible” (20). However, as conceived by Mulvey and others, the application of psychoanalysis to cinema was first and foremost metaphoric, in which the former discourse glossed but did not actually determine the structures and conditions of meaning for the latter. It was never intended to be a prescriptive or exhaustive explanatory paradigm of meaning in narrative cinema, nor even of cinematic subjectivity. If an application of Freudian analysis makes patriarchy’s construction of femininity more legible, a rigid application of that model can also reinscribe that construction: it may shed light on the oppressive elements of the construction of femininity in cinema, but by virtue of its own limitations, it cannot account for other nonoppressive elements—other accounts of subjectivity and points of view—that lie beyond the reach of its explanatory powers.

Arguing from within a psychoanalytically informed framework, Doane’s fundamental argument about (the lack of) female subjectivity in classical Hollywood cinema generally and the 1940s woman’s film specifically is nevertheless persuasive, compelling, and carefully worked through. As Jackie Byars has pointed out, Doane’s work on female spectatorship and the woman’s film made (at least) two significant contributions: “She attempted to address, as psychoanalytic criticism had not generally done, the sexual specificity of the intended spectator, and she examined the influence of generic conventions on enunciative practices” (1991, 164–165). This is undeniably true. However, I am doubtful, as I have indicated, of the ability of strictly applied Freudian and Lacanian feminist film theory to identify and account for those impulses within classical cinema that are not contained by a totalizing norm presumed to be masculine, precisely because such approaches are not likely to recognize that alternatives exist within that system. Strict psychoanalytic theory has its own occlusions about both gender and sexuality that induce critical blindness. That is not to say that my own way of thinking about classical Hollywood cinema and the woman’s film specifically has not been significantly influenced by feminists, Doane among them, and narratologists writing within the tradition of Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory—it has, as will become abundantly clear later in this discussion and in subsequent chapters. It is to assert, however, that I prefer to focus less on the processes of objectification and victimization of women in classical cinema and more on the elements within those processes that sometimes offer viewers alternatives to what has long been considered an oppressive system of representation of women and of strictly conceptualized categories of gendered subjectivity. As Judith Mayne observed in a 1985 essay in Signs,

Given classical cinema’s obsession with sexual hierarchy, feminist film critics could choose the somewhat obvious task of amassing more and more evidence of women’s exclusion and victimization, or they could undertake the more complex and challenging project of examining the contradictions in classical films that is what is repressed or unresolved.

(86)

To identify and account for contradiction within classical cinema, and to examine “what is repressed or unresolved”—indeed, to move beyond contradiction to overt rather than repressed instances of both feminine and masculine subjectivity in the woman’s film in particular—I believe it is necessary to go outside the boundaries of traditional feminist film theory. The eclectic path that I have chosen has been influenced by classic literary narratology from the 1970s and 1980s, later work in cultural studies, historical work within archives, and more nuanced critical readings of gender and sexuality that have emerged since second-wave feminism. Partly because I am writing and working in my own historical moment and partly because it has always been my own inclination to do so, I am committed to reading 1940s woman’s films in a manner that permits recognition of the genuine pleasures and even the occasional sense of empowerment that I experience as a woman in watching them. This pleasure is not unalloyed with uneasiness—how could it be?—but it exists, nonetheless.

Doane’s sustained study of the woman’s film is at once inspiring, extraordinarily well argued, and persuasive—and also, finally, frustrating—in its theoretical insistence on the alignment between psychoanalysis and spectatorship as the ultimate map by which meaning, as well as subjectivity, are navigated and validated within classical film narrative. If psychoanalysis constructs an impossible position for woman with respect to desire, as Doane asserts, then it seems to me that her attempt “to trace a coincidence of cinematic scenarios and psychoanalytic scenarios of female subjectivity” (21) runs the almost certain risk of replicating, as much as revealing, the impossibility of desire for women within the woman’s film. In fact, Doane actually ends up shutting down the signifying possibilities of cinematic structures of subjectivity through her readings of the films, annihilating the very presence of the subjectivity she denies from the start in a tautological system of argumentation. Although her choice of films is dictated primarily by the films’ inclusions of a number of cinematic structures associated with subjectivity and specifically aligned with female characters—voice-over, point-of-view shots, dreams, hallucinations, flashback memories—for Doane, these elements in the films, at their most expressive, amount only to “perturbations and discrepancies which are frequently not quite successfully contained by the narrative process” (34). She cautions against reading such moments as “a viable alternative to the unrelenting objectification and oppression of the figure of the woman in mainstream Hollywood cinema” (4), reading them instead as examples of contradiction within patriarchal ideology itself. Yet I will argue in subsequent chapters that some of these moments, read differently, speak to representations of women that paradoxically do challenge objectification and the circumscription of women performed by patriarchal ideology even as they also participate in those systems.

In my view, not only do a number of woman’s films successfully invoke feminine subjectivity and desire in the course of their narratives, but some of them also lucidly and intelligently explore what it means to represent subjectivity across the binary construction of gender itself: that is, in some woman’s films, both female and male characters may experience desires of various kinds, and their subjectivities and points of view are not always irreconcilably articulated. Sometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitly, the woman’s film interrogates desire, giving deliberate voice to those contradictions that Mulvey and Doane identify as embedded in patriarchy and that they see unconsciously reflected in moments of disturbance not wholly contained by the narrative process. Moreover, they do so in ways that sometimes call into question strictly bifurcated cultural and critical notions of irreconcilable male and female subjectivity and at times peaceably work through gender difference in terms of equity rather than oppression.

In contrast to Doane and to now-classic feminist approaches to evaluating the production of meaning(s) in relation to gender in the classical Hollywood film generally and the woman’s film specifically, I am less interested in the concept of “subject positioning” and more in narrative movement, per se, as discussed in the next section, where I examine the woman’s film of the 1940s not only in relation to but also apart from questions of spectatorship and identification. Cinema is more than a simple (or even complex) relay of looks within and at it. This is not to deny the relationship between subjectivity and visuality by any means; it is, however, to assert that subjectivity is articulated in classical cinema as a process that is more dynamic and subtle than a series of structured viewing positions through which a film shuttles its viewers. While Doane ultimately asserts that the genre offers its female spectators only a simulation of female subjectivity and thus finds the woman’s film an essentially disempowering experience for its female spectators, I believe that an “alternative to the unrelenting objectification and oppression of the figure of the woman in mainstream Hollywood cinema” (4) is precisely what the woman’s film often offers and that we must turn to eclectic methods to find it. There is something far more interesting than resistance to patriarchal recuperation going on in some woman’s films. What ultimately links such disparate films as Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) or the historical romance All This, and Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940), or the romantic ghost fantasy The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947), in my mind, is the manner in which these and other woman’s films construct narratives about and motivated by desire that functions actively within these films as the unstated but very real impetus of the narratives. In fact, desire itself becomes gendered—as sometimes masculine; sometimes feminine; sometimes alternating, oscillating, overlapping, or even entirely coinciding.

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