The treatment of adultery in Hollywood film in the middle years of the last century is the subject of this book. I am looking at a period that begins with Bette Davisâs role in That Certain Woman, released in the autumn of 1937 and ends with Meryl Streepâs role in Out of Africa, which premiered around forty-eight years later, a few days before Christmas 1985. And my approach is to explore specific passages in the work of the Hollywood stars that are the focus of my next four chapters: Bette Davis, Joan Fontaine, Kim Novak, and Meryl Streep.
Why these stars in particular? While adultery figures more centrally in some of these star careers than in others and in some of their films more than in others, in each case the best known and most admired work invokes it; Davis as the mistress and mother in Now, Voyager, Fontaine as the adulterous wife in Letter from an Unknown Woman, Novak pretending to be an adulterous wife in Vertigo, Streepâs relation to the role of mistress in both the past and the present in the two worlds of The French Lieutenantâs Woman. These films are not exceptions; in each case they are part of a group of dense and successfully achieved films where thinking about marriage and adultery is both appropriate and productive, and where exploring it in one film helps us to read the others. My argument is that adultery is a kind of narrative where our understanding of the role cannot be detached from an exploration of the persona of the star in question. All four of these stars play the role of mistress, but they bring to it very different qualities, as different as the expectations that we bring to their performances.
There is also a simple and practical reason. Looking at these compelling films permits a coherent selection from a huge amount of material. Anyone familiar with Hollywood production will be aware of the number of films, from the well-known to the most obscure, which involve, invoke, or turn on matters of adultery. The subject is spread through (I suspect) every identifiable genre and mode, and it persists from the earliest filmmaking to the present. To attempt to give a narrative history of it would be more or less a slanted recapitulation of the history of Hollywood cinema. To survey it, even with relative thoroughness, would amount to a list that would be useful and unhelpful in the ways that lists must be.
Taking as the object of study something that need not initially be thought of in connection with adultery, namely a specific period in a starâs career, we can explore how adultery appears there, when it is more and when less present, and in what ways, and when it is absent. The approach also generates a range of films in each case, from melodrama to comedy, from the hit to the flop, from the acknowledged masterpiece to the forgotten or ignored, and the mass of films which are not quite any of these. And of course the choice of films is determined by the complex amalgam of forces that operated in the starsâ careers.
This willâI hopeâbe seen as offering a different view of some films which have been the subject of extensive discussion in other terms. For example my route to Vertigo is not via Hitchcock, or James Stewart, but by way of the films Kim Novak had already made, and those she was to go on to make. Part of the thinking behind this is to attempt to return us to something a little bit closer to the position of the filmsâ original audiences. I mean those who did not know that they were seeing a masterpiece when they sat down to watch Vertigo, but were happy to bring their expectations of Novak (and Stewart, and Hitchcock) to the entertainment.
One feature of this approach is that the studies that comprise the body of this book move directly from films that have become canonical texts in academic film studies to the less well known. This movement is not random, but dictated by the order of production in the filmography in question. With a couple of exceptions, ones when it seemed sensible to vary it slightly to look at two related films together, I have followed the careers chronologically.
My approach also involves not attempting to mount comprehensive discussions of the literature surrounding the canonical films, and I am mostly leaving aside scholarship which is not directly relevant to the topic of adultery. To do otherwise would I think fatally imbalance the studies, and return the book to being weighted towards a few famous titles. This may be regarded as a grievous sin, but I hope that readers will look for insights in what follows rather than concentrating on its limitations.
The mixture of the well-known and the obscure also has implications in terms of my reliance on the readerâs knowledge. Where it is appropriate I have tried to outline the narratives of the films, but in a number of more well-known cases I have assumed knowledge of plot, character and incident. In each of these I have made the position clear in the opening of the discussion in question.
Background
Films addressing adultery draw on a huge and formidable historical body of material in western thought and culture, vast in terms both of timespan and different types of work. 1 To list just a few contexts: the Old and New Testaments, and works springing from these sources such as the various artworks of âChrist and the Woman Taken in Adulteryâ, 2 or the work of John Milton. Then there is Greek myth, opera, song and other music, Arthurian and other romances, classical theatre and particularly some works of Shakespearean drama. Approaching the modern period there is the nineteenth and early twentieth century novel and the theatre of the same period. The list of those forms of major artwork which have not at some point invoked the subject of adultery might be a rather shorter one. And this leads to the discussions of adultery prompted by the primary texts, the work of thinkers such as Denis de Rougemont and RenĂ© Girard. 3 Then there are other major writers whose thought bridges the divide between adultery in art and its presence in human society; Freud and those who have followed his work, and the contributions of anthropologists and philosophers.
The most comprehensive and illuminating introduction to the subject that I am aware of is the long introductory chapter of a seminal book on the subject, Tony Tannerâs Adultery and the Novel. 4 Tanner touches on a number of the contexts listed above, and he makes the argument that it is the nineteenth century novel that has marriage and adultery, not just as a topic, but as its central subject:
Marriage, to put it at its simplest for the moment, is a means by which society attempts to bring into harmonious alignment patterns of passion and patterns of property⊠The bourgeois novelist has no choice but to engage the subject of marriage in one way or another, at no matter what extreme of celebration or contestation.
Tanner concludes that adultery is âthe main, if the undescribed, topic for the bourgeois novelâ. 5 By the bourgeois novel he means roughly the novel after Daniel Defoe and before D. H. Lawrence, the period which gave rise to the group of European novels which we think of as some of the canonical texts of adultery: Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Cousin Bazilio, Effi Briest. 6 It is outside the scope of this book to discuss this further, but I shall be drawing particularly on Tannerâs work at intervals in what follows.
How Do We Define Adultery?
Like other configurations in our understanding of sexual lives, this feels like a question with a deceptively easy answer which immediately appears in need of complication. It is possible to attempt to categorise variants of the plot of adulteryâto map adulteryâby looking at who is committing an act or thinking of one. We might start by saying that what is called for are two relations, that between a man and a woman who are married to each other, and that between one of these two and a third party, who might be married, or single. 7 We should not lose sight of this, as it is certainly the core which defines the canonical examples that come to mind. But as Tanner has pointed out, the linguistic root of this group of words (adultery, adulterate, adulterator, adulterer, adulteress) carries an implication of admixture, of the mixing up of elements that are different to each other. 8 So at the heart of the matter is something about confusion of qualities (and individuals and roles) that ought to be, or have been, separate. This is not unique, as can be seen from a parallel example: Richard Dyerâs discussion of the term Pasticcio, in his very helpful summary of different types of mixture in art and culture. 9 If we accept that adultery emerges from this feeling of mixing up, it is perhaps the more reasonable that we should not expect our encounters with it to fall into a set of neatly bounded categories.
Let us return for the moment to the central cast of adultery, a married couple and a lover. By a lover I mean someone who expresses love outside the social arrangements we make for it, but not someone who necessarily expresses that love by undertaking any particular physical act. We will certainly recognise adultery in narratives that tell of, or show us, a sexual encounter taking place between a lover and a figure who is the husband or wife of another. But there are many narratives in which either nothing that could be called a physical adulterous act takes place, or the act itself has only a marginal status, referred to but not foregrounded. Such storylines nonetheless depend on our knowledge of adultery and its meaning, and would be reduced to nonsense if we tried to understand them without reference to it. 10 The adulterous act may turn out to be less important for us or for the players in the drama than other elements such as the thought of adultery, or the consequences of it. This leads to a distinction, or rather a polarity: from adultery texts in which adultery is physically and repeatedly enacted, to the opposite end of the scale, those in which it is impossible to imagine it taking place. 11
Critical Approaches
This distinction is reflected in the critical writing on adultery, particularly on the eighteenth and nineteenth century novel, where most of the scholarship is concentrated. The position taken by Bill Overton in his The Novel of Female Adultery is to define adultery using the criterion that voluntary sexual intercourse has to take place between the adulterous partners. Justifying this, Overton states that the primary focus of his study is âadultery as a social, an ideological, and a legal factâ, and elsewhere he dismisses texts which show us ârelationships which are not in fact adulterousâ. 12 A contrasting position is that adopted by Tanner, in which adulterous desire is a sufficient criterion, and indeed the literature of rejected, postponed or unconsummated adultery is as significant, or possibly in some respects more significant, as the work in which physical acts of adultery do take place. 13
My position in what follows is to observe when adultery is a fact, but to understand it also as a fantasy, involving memory, imagination and desire. In some cases I will be looking at films which acknowledge the concept of adultery and the adulterous, its presence in the minds both of those involved (even when the word adultery itself is never used) and in the viewer. So what we are exploring are worlds in which adultery matters, ones in which it has an immediate purchase on the lives in the film, whatever acts do or do not occur.
Adultery and Absence
Adultery can have to do with absences as much as what is present. An exemplary literary case is âThe Adulterous Womanâ, a short story by Albert Camus. It is told from the point of view of Janine, the...