The Woman’s Film

why?

One question insists: why does the women's picture exist? There is no such thing as "the men's picture," specifically addressed to men; there is only "cinema," and "the women's picture," a sub-group or category specially for women, excluding men; a separate, private space designed for more than half the population, relegating them to the margins of cinema proper. The existence of the women's picture both recognises the importance of women, and marginalises them. By constructing this different space for women (Haskell's ‘wet, wasted afternoons’) it performs a vital function in society's ordering of sexual difference.

(Mary Ann Doane, The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s [Indiana, 1987], 3, quoting Pam Cook)

*** *** *** *** *** ***

I still stand by my "Visual Pleasure" argument, but would now like to pursue the other two lines of thought. First (the "women in the audience" issue), whether

the female spectator is carried along, as it were by the scruff of the text, or whether her pleasure can be more deep-rooted and complex. Second (the "melodrama" issue), how the text and its attendant identifications are affected by a female character occupying the center of the narrative arena. So far as the first issue is concerned, it is always possible that the female spectator may find herself so out of key with the pleasure on offer, with its "masculinization," that the spell of fascination is broken. On the other hand, she may not. She may find herself secretly, unconsciously almost, enjoying the freedom of action and control over the diegetic world that identification with a hero provides. It is this female spectator that I want to consider here. So far as the second issue is concerned, I want to limit the area under consideration in a similar manner. Rather than discussing melodrama in general, I am concentrating on films in which a woman central protagonist is shown to be unable to achieve a stable sexual identity, tom between the deep blue sea of passive femininity and the devil of regressive masculinity.

[Mulvey, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor’s ‘Duel in the Sun’ (1946)”]

Kaplan argued that a female viewer was positioned by the film, like Stella herself, as

powerless witness of a scene that excluded her. I argued that although this final

scene functions to efface Stella, the female spectator does not necessarily acquiesce

in the necessity of this sacrifice, nor does she identify solely with the effaced Stella

at this final moment.

I argued, in other words, that there was room for some negotiation in a female

viewing position that was animated by the contradiction of identifying both as

a woman and a mother. The crux of my argument, however, rested upon a fairly

complex reinterpretation of psychoanalytic concepts of fetishistic disavowal. I

claimed that the female spectator is as capable of experiencing the contradiction

between knowledge and belief in an image as any healthily neurotic male viewer.

However, in arguing that women spectators could be voyeurs and fetishists too,

though with a difference, I unfortunately recuperated the monolithic gaze paradigm

of spectatorship that I had wanted to escape. What seemed to be at issue was the

question of spectatorial unity: could a female spectator be divided in her reactions

to a work that was not ironically parodying the powerful maternal emotions of pride

in the success of the child and, simultaneously, sorrow in loss? I answered, against

Kaplan, that such division was possible, but the way I cast the division, as Brechtian

distanciation and critique, avoided the more crucial and obvious question of spectatorial

emotion in melodrama.

*** *** ***

The only way I could retrieve what I sensed to be the importance of melodrama was to argue that such moving images also made us angry, that women were not their dupes; we were critical too. I wrote: "It is a terrible underestimation of the female viewer to presume that she IS wholly seduced by a naive belief in these masochistic images.... For unlike tragedy, melodrama does not reconcile its audience to an inevitable suffering. Rather than raging against a fate that the audience has learned to accept, the female hero often accepts a fate that the audience at least partially questions."

Though I still agree with this today, I am struck by the unwillingness to recognize the importance of melodramatic pathos-of being moved by a moving picture. Both drawn to and repelled by the spectacle of virtuous and pathetic suffering, feminist critics were torn: we wanted to properly condemn the abjection of suffering womanhood, yet in the almost loving detail of our growing analyses of melodramatic subgenres--medical discourse, gothic melodrama, romance melodrama maternal melodrama--it was clear that something more than condemnation was taking place. An opposition to female suffering was certainly an important goal of feminism, but in the process of distinguishing our "properly" feminist distance from melodrama's emotions we failed to confront the importance of pathos itself and the fact that a surprising power lay in identifying with victimhood.

(Williams, “Melodrama Revised,” 46-47)

“double mimesis”

In the woman’s film, the process of remirroring reduces the mirror effect of the cinema, it demonstrates that these are poses, postures, tropes—in short, that we are being subjected to a discourse on femininity.

This “double mimesis” occurs in the woman’s film at moments in the text where the woman appears to produce a reenactment of femininity, where her gestures are disengaged from their immediate context, made strange….In Dark Victory, Bette Davis mimes sight; she pretends to be able to see in order to be the good housewife, packing for her husband, even finding a hole in his sock through the sense of touch.

(Doane, The Desire to Desire, 180-81)