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The Woman’s Film of the 1940s

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 forms of cinematic melo-
drama 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 empha-
sized 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.

Alison L. McKee is an associate professor in the Department of Television,

Radio, Film, and Theatre at San José State University, California.
Routledge Advances in Film Studies
1 Nation and Identity in the New
German Cinema
Homeless at Home
Inga Scharf
2 Lesbianism, Cinema, Space
The Sexual Life of Apartments
Lee Wallace
3 Post-War Italian Cinema
American Intervention, Vatican
Interests
Daniela Treveri Gennari
4 Latsploitation, Exploitation
Cinemas, and Latin America
Edited by Victoria Ruétalo and
Dolores Tierney
5 Cinematic Emotion in Horror
Films and Thrillers
The Aesthetic Paradox of
Pleasurable Fear
Julian Hanich
6 Cinema, Memory, Modernity
The Representation of Memory
from the Art Film to Transnational
Cinema
Russell J.A. Kilbourn
7 Distributing Silent Film Serials
Local Practices, Changing Forms,
Cultural Transformation
Rudmer Canjels
8 The Politics of Loss and Trauma
in Contemporary Israeli Cinema
Raz Yosef
9 Neoliberalism and Global
Cinema
Capital, Culture, and Marxist
Critique
Edited by Jyotsna Kapur and
Keith B. Wagner
10 Korea’s Occupied Cinemas,
1893–1948
The Untold History of the Film
Industry
Brian Yecies with Ae-Gyung Shim
11 Transnational Asian Identities in
Pan-Pacific Cinemas
The Reel Asian Exchange
Edited by Philippa Gates &
Lisa Funnell
12 Narratives of Gendered Dissent
in South Asian Cinemas
Alka Kurian
13 Hollywood Melodrama and
the New Deal
Public Daydreams
Anna Siomopoulos
14 Theorizing Film Acting
Edited by Aaron Taylor
15 Stardom and the Aesthetics of
Neorealism
Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini’s Italy
Ora Gelley
16 Postwar Renoir
Film and the Memory of Violence
Colin Davis
17 Cinema and Inter-American
Relations
Tracking Transnational Affect
Adrián Pérez Melgosa
18 European Civil War Films
Memory, Conflict, and Nostalgia
Eleftheria Rania Kosmidou
19 The Aesthetics of Antifascism
Radical Projection
Jennifer Lynde Barker
20 The Politics of Age and
Disability in Contemporary
Spanish Film
Plus Ultra Pluralism
Matthew J. Marr
21 Cinema and Language Loss
Displacement, Visuality and
the Filmic Image
Tijana Mamula
22 Cinema as Weather
Stylistic Screens and
Atmospheric Change
Kristi McKim
23 Landscape and Memory in
Post-Fascist Italian Film
Cinema Year Zero
Giuliana Minghelli
24 Masculinity in the
Contemporary Romantic
Comedy
Gender as Genre
John Alberti
25 Crossover Cinema
Cross-cultural Film from
Production to Reception
Edited by Sukhmani Khorana
26 Spanish Cinema in the Global
Context
Film on Film
Samuel Amago
27 Japanese Horror Films and
Their American Remakes
Translating Fear, Adapting Culture
Valerie Wee
28 Postfeminism and Paternity in
Contemporary US Film
Framing Fatherhood
Hannah Hamad
29 Cine-Ethics
Ethical Dimensions of
Film Theory, Practice, and
Spectatorship
Edited by Jinhee Choi and
Mattias Frey
30 Postcolonial Film
History, Empire, Resistance
Edited by Rebecca Weaver-
Hightower and Peter Hulme
31 The Woman’s Film of the 1940s
Gender, Narrative, and History
Alison L. McKee
“My tears mix with the ink as I write him letters—letters with only the barest hope that he’ll so much
as read them!” Duchesse de Praslin (Barbara O’Neil), All This, and Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940).
The Woman’s Film of
the 1940s
Gender, Narrative, and History

Alison L. McKee
First published 2014
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
The right of Alison L. McKee to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McKee, Alison L., 1961–
The womanʼs film of the 1940s : gender, narrative, and history / by
Alison L. McKee.
pages cm. — (Routledge advances in film studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Women in motion pictures. 2. Sex role in motion pictures.
3. Motion pictures—United States—History—20th century.
4. Historical films—United States—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN1995.9.W6M383 2014
791.43′6522—dc23
2013046601
ISBN: 978-0-415-83306-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-50658-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
 For my mother,
Mary Driscoll McKee
(1919–1987),
whose narratives were lost;
for Charles,
who listened to mine;
and
for Harold,
who made writing them possible
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

List of Figures xi
Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: To Speak of Love 1

1 Film Theory, Narrative, and the 1940s Woman’s Film 14

2 The Fate of One Governess: Lost Narrative, History, and

Gendered Desire 38

3 Melodrama, History, and Narrative Recovery 73

4 Temporality and the Past: Haunting Narratives and

the Postwar Woman’s Film 99

5 By My Tears I Tell a Story/The “Absent” War 131

6 Telling the Story Differently: Toward an Androgynous

Spectatorship and Interpretation 160

Bibliography 193
Index 199
This page intentionally left blank
Figures

(Frontispiece). “My tears mix with the ink as I write him letters—
letters with only the barest hope that he’ll so much as read
them!” Duchesse de Praslin (Barbara O’Neil), All This,
and Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940). iv
2.1 Henriette’s audience of schoolgirls listens attentively to her tale. 46
2.2 Henriette (Bette Davis) narrates her own history to students
at Miss Haines’s School for Young Ladies. 47
2.3 The Duchesse de Praslin’s “heavy, flowing pen strokes.” 52
2.4 Rebecca’s “bold, slanting” handwriting. 52
2.5 The Duc (Charles Boyer) positioned between his wife (Barbara
O’Neil) and the governess (Bette Davis). 53
2.6 The Duchesse de Praslin (Barbara O’Neil) lounges in her chair
during the interview with Henriette Deluzy-Desportes. 53
2.7 Henriette Deluzy-Desportes (Bette Davis) strikes a similar
pose as the Duchesse (Barbara O’Neil) during her interview
for the position of governess. 54
3.1 That nameless, faceless Hamilton woman. 79
3.2 Emma’s (Vivien Leigh) desire animates narrative space. 84
3.3 The centrality of Emma’s (Vivien Leigh) desire. 85
3.4 “What a century it’s been!” 88
3.5 A passive Smithy (Ronald Colman). 93
4.1 Lucy (Gene Tierney) places the portrait of Captain Gregg
(Rex Harrison) in their shared bedroom. 107
4.2 Captain Daniel Gregg (Rex Harrison) in The Ghost
and Mrs. Muir. 109
4.3 Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan) in Letter from an Unknown
Woman. 109
4.4 The points of view of Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney) and Captain
Gregg (Rex Harrison) are spatially and metonymically
linked across the divide of gender difference. 112
xii Figures
4.5 Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney) and Captain Gregg (Rex Harrison)
share a point of view across gender lines articulated
metonymically in spatial terms: “Like looking down from
high up, all dizzy and unsure.” 113
4.6 “You seem to be very earthly for a spirit.” 114
4.7 Captain Gregg (Rex Harrison) fades away through
special effects. 115
4.8 Filmscape: a time of history and a time of repetition. 123
4.9 Half physical reality, half mindscape. 124
5.1 “He wishes!” 140
5.2 Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) gazes at the scene of her own
narrative desire. 152
5.3 Laura (Celia Johnson) wanders the streets after her aborted
liaison with Alec (Trevor Howard) in Brief Encounter. 155
5.4 Lisa (Joan Fontaine) wanders the streets after her aborted
liaison with Stefan (Louis Jourdan) in Letter from an
Unknown Woman. 155
6.1 An androgynous point of view, an impossible shot. 167
6.2 Laura’s (Dorothy McGuire) point of view. 177
6.3 Oliver’s (Robert Young) point of view. 179
6.4 and 6.5 Catherine (Olivia de Havilland) is often caught
between her suitor (Montgomery Clift) and her father
(Ralph Richardson). 184
6.6 Catherine (Olivia de Havilland) is trapped in the Sloper
house on Washington Square. 185
Acknowledgments

The writing of a scholarly book, no less than filmmaking during the classical
Hollywood era, is a collaborative effort. Although the former may bear the
title of a single author, he or she has been inspired, influenced, helped, and
mentored by a whole host of individuals and institutions, sometimes over
many years. This book is no different.
To Janet Bergstrom, whose faith in me has always been unwavering, even
when my own resolve faltered, and whose acumen, insight, and work in
theory, history, and critical method have always set a prodigious example,
I owe a debt of intellectual and personal gratitude that I can never repay.
This book would not exist without her insight, support, or friendship.
My sincere thanks and gratitude go to Charles Wolfe, whom I initially
met as a first-term college freshman and from whom I took my first three
American film courses: there is no finer teacher, more eloquent lecturer, or
more generous scholar of America film history than he. I have kept his example
before me always.
To the brilliant, witty, and self-deprecating Garrett Stewart, who was the
first to inspire, encourage, and mentor my interest in narrative theory in
both literature and film when I was a young graduate student and who has
remained a steadfast friend over the years, I am forever indebted.
At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where the seeds of
this volume took root, Nick Browne’s perspicacity in graduate seminars put
me on my mettle. Teshome Gabriel was unfailingly generous in his praise of
my burgeoning concept of “lost narrative” and would routinely hail me with
a welcomed cup of coffee at his habitual outside seat at the North Campus
dining commons at UCLA. He is much missed by many. Jonathan Kuntz,
an encyclopedic source of information about anything to do with American
film, was and is always at the ready to answer any question I have. Steve
Mamber turned me on to the home movies sequence in Rebecca with his
characteristic sense of humor, irony, and detail, and Peter Wollen inspired
me with a simple question about patriotism and the love story in That Ham-
ilton Woman that ultimately led to the third chapter of this book. To them
all I owe my deepest thanks.
xiv Acknowledgments
No one could have had a finer, more stimulating, and inspiring cohort
with whom to go through a rigorous doctoral program and share ideas
in the making than I. Among them (in strict alphabetical order!): Richard
Allen, Rhona Berenstein, Vicki Callahan, Kelley Conway, Maria Elena de
las Carreras, Nataša Ďurovičová, Cynthia Felando, David Gardner, David
Gerstner, Hamid Naficy, Edward R. O’Neill, David Pendleton, Nita Rollins,
David Russell, Ayako Saito, and Britta Sjogren. Each provided invigorating
support and much laughter along our shared and respective routes. I would
not be who I am today without their collective influence and example.
To each of the many thinkers, critics, and historians whose work I con-
sider at length or in passing in the following pages, I owe an enormous debt.
My thoughts were formed always in relation to their work, and my profes-
sional and intellectual life has been the richer for it in ways that citations and
bibliographies cannot measure.
My thanks go to the librarians, curators, archivists, and assistants at the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library
(especially Jonathan Wahl, Benjamin Friday, and Marisa Duron), the USC
Warner Bros. Archives (in particular, Jonathon Auxier), UCLA’s Special Col-
lections, and the National Archives, Paris, for their endless patience and help
during my time at each location.
At two very different points, UCLA and San José State University sup-
ported the research and writing of this volume with both time and financial
assistance. They helped make this book possible.
Routledge’s acquisition, editorial, and production processes were support-
ive and seamless from start to finish, thanks to terrific teams that included
editor Felisa N. Salvago-Keyes, editorial assistant Andrew Weckenmann,
and copyeditor Jennifer Zaczek.
I have a large community of Facebook friends who graciously tolerated
my minute book-related status updates with good humor (and no doubt a
bit of eye-rolling), and they helped me stay the course. Skype played a role
as well: many a video chat with dear friends and colleagues, including Elena
Creef, Kimb Massey, and Ayako Saito—often at extremely odd hours—kept
me focused, moving forward, and (most importantly) laughing when my
subject was tears and melodrama. To three additional kindred spirits along
this academic path—Tanya Bahkru, Ursula K. Heise, and Britta Sjogren—go
my love and appreciation. Collectively, these cherished people have kept me
sane—or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Finally, to Harold and a multitude of cats for their indefatigable patience
and support during the writing of this project goes an appreciation I can
never adequately express but feel most profoundly. They have my heart.
***
An earlier, partial version of chapter 2 was published as “ ‘L’affaire Praslin’
and All This, and Heaven, Too: Gender, Genre, and History in the 1940s
Woman’s Film,” in The Velvet Light Trap, vol. 35. Copyright © 1995 by the
University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.
 Acknowledgments xv
An earlier, partial version of chapter 3 was published in “What’s Love
Got to Do with It? History and Melodrama in the 1940s Woman’s Film,”
Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal 39, no. 2 (December 2009)
5–15, and as “ ‘It Seems Familiar, but I Can’t Quite Remember’: Amnesia
and the Dislocation of History and Gender in Random Harvest (1942),”
Bright Lights Film Journal 69 (August 2010).
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
To Speak of Love

“IF ONLY IT WERE SOMEONE ELSE’S STORY AND NOT MINE”

A middle-aged woman with handsome, expressive eyes sits in an armchair

across from her husband in their comfortable, middle-class living room,
where they are passing the evening. A fire burns quietly, and their two young
children are in bed for the night. He is doing a crossword puzzle, as is
apparently his custom, and requires a missing word to complete a line from
Keats, which he seeks from his wife: “ ‘When I behold upon the nights
starr’d face / Huge cloudy symbols of a high—?’ Something in seven let-
ters.” “ ‘Romance,’ I think,” she replies, after a moment. “I’m almost sure
it is,” and tells him it will be in the Oxford Book of English Verse. “No,
that’s right, I’m sure,” he says, as he writes it into his puzzle. “Because it
fits in with ‘delirium’ and ‘Baluchistan.’ ” A moment passes. The woman
rises to put some music on the radio, and almost immediately the sound
of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto fills the room. The woman sits
again and takes up some needlework but is soon diverted. Not by anything
external this time, such as a question from her husband, but rather (we
are about to learn) by her recent painful memories of a love unexpectedly
found and far too quickly lost, chronicled in an exquisitely crafted series of
flashbacks. For this is David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), and as the film
quickly makes clear to its audience, we have just entered the narrative ter-
rain of the woman’s film—in which love and loss are often twins, in which
the experience of female characters is marked and rendered as subjective,
and in which feminine subjectivity itself performs a haunting game of hide-
and-seek within and across the landscape of narrative.
I invoke Brief Encounter because it is a woman’s film par excellence, and
the sequence I have described is eloquently emblematic of concerns that
this cycle of films addresses in the 1940s. As the passage so clearly demon-
strates, if hermeneutics and puzzles are the traditional cinematic province of
the male (think of the detective films and film noir also popular during the
1940s), then romance (albeit in the popular rather than the literary Keatsian
sense) is deemed the province of women: it is, in fact, with love and romance
that the woman’s film is so often intimately preoccupied. Occupying what is,
2 The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s
from a patriarchal perspective, a fantastic no-man’s land lying somewhere
between “delirium” (a morass of emotion verging on madness) and “Balu-
chistan” (at the time still a British province of India, a far away and exotic
locale near which romance may reside without troubling British colonial
patriarchy too particularly), romance and desire are the very stuff of which
this ordinary woman’s inner landscape in these films is comprised. Although
momentarily invisible to the eye, their haunting presence is already evoked
in the strains of Rachmaninov’s music, associated throughout the film with
this woman’s subjectivity.
“Fred. Fred. Dear Fred. There’s so much that I want to say to you. You’re
the only one in the world with enough wisdom and gentleness to under-
stand. If only it were someone else’s story and not mine. As it is, you’re the
only one in the world that I can never tell. Never, never.” So begins Laura
Jesson’s (Celia Johnson) one-sided inner dialogue with her husband (Cyril
Raymond), spoken in a celebrated voice-off that rivals and even exceeds the
beauty and nuance of the equally well-known voice-off in Max Ophüls’s Let-
ter from an Unknown Woman (1948) only three years later. As in Ophüls’s
film, the voice-off is a prelude to a lengthy flashback to a woman’s painful
tale of love found and lost, and as voice-offs and flashbacks tend to do in
any genre, they highlight the act of transmitting narrative, even of the dif-
ficulties that occasionally inhere in that task. In the woman’s film, when
such narrative structures exist, they are inextricably linked to questions of
desire, usually of that of the female protagonist, and of the representability
of that desire narratively (in the story world of the film), culturally (in the
world in which the film was created), and institutionally (in terms of the
film industry that produced it). In Laura’s case, her desire is at least three-
fold: it encompasses a romantic and sexual desire (however thwarted) for
Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) with whom she has fallen in love; a desire to
know (another kind of life from the surface calm of her ordinary middle-
class existence); and a desire to tell (her story), which ultimately she both
does and does not do. Precisely because it is so manifestly about her own
desire(s), Laura can never tell her story to the one person whom she feels
would understand it best—her husband—for fear of hurting him. Thus, her
tale takes the form of what I shall call in this volume a “lost narrative,” one
that is structured as a story that, paradoxically, cannot be told yet must be
told, a tale that can be communicated only with the greatest of difficulty.
In such lost narratives in the 1940s woman’s film, as I shall discuss in
ensuing chapters, processes of transmission and elision within the tales are
highlighted and are the result of multiple pressures brought to bear upon the
stories—again, narrative, cultural, and institutional. My critical approach
to elision both is predicated upon and departs from Freud’s view of ellipsis
within the dreamwork, because for Freud an absence cannot necessarily be
filled in with a corresponding “presence”; rather, such gaps or absences can
suggest many others, as well as refer to, and cause a reinterpretation of, the
manifest content. Thus, in the following chapters, I will be arguing in part
 Introduction 3
for a kind of feminist “guerilla” reading of woman’s films that, like older
“recuperative” interpretations, read against the grain and allow for the elu-
cidation of those lost narratives. At the same time, however, I will extend the
textual reading process into historical research that will inform such read-
ings. For example, the flashback structure that marks Brief Encounter is not
present in Noël Coward’s original Still Life (1936), the brief one-act play on
which the film is based. These flashbacks accentuate the process of narration
and the difficulties that inhere in the task of Laura’s telling her story at all.
As well, mindful of the need for the film to pass the British Board of Film
Censors to secure its release, the filmmakers decided that the consummated
affair between Laura and Alec in Still Life would be recast as a narrowly
averted unconsummated love affair in Brief Encounter (as the Production
Code Administration’s story summary for the film’s distribution in the United
States in 1946 put it, using an editorializing tone, the two go to the flat of
a friend of Alec’s, and “fortunately, the friend arrives before anything can
happen, and [Laura] runs away in horror, oppressed by the feeling of deg-
radation” [italics mine]). (Story Summary, Brief Encounter).Together, these
two simple decisions greatly affected the shape of the film’s presentation of
this tale of desire, love, and loss, recasting it as Laura’s story more than Laura
and Alec’s and affecting the cinematic treatment of a woman’s desire, as I
shall suggest in a subsequent chapter.
Because Brief Encounter is marked by flashbacks, it inevitably also raises
issues of temporality (time in the film is alternately elongated, compressed,
and even repeated). As Richard Dyer observes, “Time, its pressure, its fleet-
ingness, is endlessly referenced in the film” (1993, 45). In turn, issues of
temporality are related to issues of representing the past generally and his-
tory more specifically, as Maureen Turim has pointed out:

If flashbacks give us images of memory, the personal archives of the

past, they also give us images of history, the shared and recorded past.
In fact, flashbacks in the film often merge the two levels of remember-
ing the past, giving large-scale social and political history the subjective
mode of a single, fictional individual’s remembered experience.
(1989, 2)

On the one hand, Brief Encounter, shot in 1945 before the end of World
War II, is set just prior to the beginning of the war, and on the surface it
would seem that the very private tale Laura tells has little to do with a pub-
lic history generally or with World War II specifically. And yet some of the
emotional response it generated in its original audiences derived from its
indirect invocation of the unseen war nearing an end during the time of the
film’s production. Indeed, Kent Puckett argues that Brief Encounter

is almost entirely about war . . . many of the film’s images, scenes, and
sounds would have reminded contemporary audiences of wartime: war
4 The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s
monuments that mourn a war to come; trains and train stations that
conjure the boredom of life between battles; cups and cups of tea that,
in their very abundance, invoke the ongoing privations of rationing; and
train whistles that sound like buzz bombs” (2011, 58).

In the skilled hands of David Lean, who was known for his early work in
sound editing, the omnipresent train whistles also give voice to the threat
of imminent departure and farewell, as well as to the inner shrieking of the
human heart when it is torn from a thing or person it loves.
And so it is that Brief Encounter also points to a tension between private
and public histories and women’s relationship to them, which is something
that a number of 1940s woman’s films do. It is common to assert that Hol-
lywood film specifically (to which the English Brief Encounter obviously
does not belong, although it participates in the conventions of the woman’s
film) represents historical events in terms of the story of its impact on indi-
viduals rather than on larger social, political, cultural, or economic groups.
However, much remains to be said about the discursive relationship that
the woman’s film constructs among history, temporality, narrative, gender,
and subjectivity. If classical woman’s films often represent history neither
accurately nor with much historiographical complexity, what exactly do
they do with history? Are the love stories told by the woman’s film truly
“situated outside the arena in which history endows space with meaning,”
as Mary Ann Doane has suggested (1987, 96)? Or do some woman’s films
combine issues of history and gender in ways that are narratively meaning-
ful, if rarely historically accurate or ideologically progressive? Moreover,
how do answers to these questions further our understanding of what is at
stake in the classical woman’s film and in existing critical studies of them?
These are some of the questions that this volume ultimately explores in the
chapters that follow.

A PHANTOM GENRE?

In 1999, advocating for what he called a “process-oriented” approach to

genre in which parameters are forever shifting and transforming in an inter-
active process among film, producers, critics, and audiences, Rick Altman
traced a brief history of the terms “melodrama” and “woman’s film.” Not-
ing that producers are more flexible in their conception and application of
generic categories than academics and critics, Altman prefaces his remarks
by observing, “We critics are the ones who have a vested interest in reusing
generic terminology, which serves to anchor our analyses in universal or
culturally sanctioned contexts, thus justifying our all too subjective, tenden-
tious and self-serving positions” (1999, 71). Invoking both Russell Merrit’s
and Ben Singer’s astute observations that melodrama has been a “slippery
 Introduction 5
and evolving category” (71), Altman then returns to the work of Steve Neale
(1993), concluding that

it seems clear that a major goal of the 1993 article is to demonstrate

that scholars have misused the term melodrama and its derivatives in
describing what are now often called “woman’s films.” As Neale shows,
in the 40s and 50s melodrama meant something else; recent critics thus
make improper use of the term when they apply it to “the weepies.” Yet
a generation of feminist critics has systematically used the term melo-
drama in reference to the female-oriented films of the 40s and 50s. Their
analyses have taken for granted—and thus reinforced—the existence
and nature of this genre and its corpus.
(72)

There are multiple difficulties here in Altman’s assessment. Present in Alt-

man’s quotation of Neale’s work is a curious idea that there is a definitively
“proper” use of the term “melodrama” (and, by extension, “woman’s
film”)—as opposed to different historical and interpretive uses of it as Neale
describes them. Some critics, like Linda Williams (1998, 2001), consider
melodrama a transgeneric mode of expression rather than a discrete genre,
as do I, which might be applied to many genres, as evidenced by the histori-
cal record to which Altman points by way of Neale. Further, if a conflation
of the terms “melodrama” and “woman’s film” is a topic of Altman’s writing
here, he himself conflates and flattens differences between “melodramas” of
the 1940s and those of the 1950s. Others, I among them, would question
Altman’s phrase “female-oriented films of the 40s and 50s,” noting distinct
differences (notwithstanding some similarities) between the “ ‘feminine’
excesses of 40s ‘weepies’ and 50s films directed by Douglas Sirk” (71). For
me, what differentiates the woman’s film of the 1940s from the 1930s and
from the family melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s is not so much the pre-
sumed address to a female audience (a key point for Doane, as I will discuss
in a subsequent chapter), as its different narrative emphasis and dynamic.
While woman’s films from the 1930s and 1940s occasionally share similar
plots, the 1940s woman’s film speaks to the issue of desire gendered as femi-
nine in a more direct way than does its 1930s counterpart, in part because
the 1930s woman’s film, produced during the Great Depression, is often at
least as preoccupied with class and economic issues as it is with questions of
desire. The 1940s woman’s film, on the other hand, foregrounds the issues
of subjectivity and desire usually (though not always) at the expense of an
explicit consideration of class.1 The world it depicts is usually comfortably
middle- or upper-middle class, and questions of economic survival generally
pale before questions of sexual, emotional, or psychic well-being. Both the
1930s and the 1940s woman’s film generally differ from the melodramas
of the 1950s, however, in that there is a strong tendency in the 1950s to
6 The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s
focus on the configuration of the nuclear family, and particularly on the role
of father (and son as potential father) within that family. Even when the
1950s family melodramas do center on a female protagonists and her desires
(as, e.g., in Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession [1954] and All That Heaven
Allows [1955]), they usually do so in ways that foreground the woman’s
relationship to her family rather than the woman as (relatively) autonomous
being and her own experience of subjectivity.
While acknowledging Neale’s point and, by association, Altman’s, that
the very real earlier and broader application of the term “melodrama” was
to such films as the war, adventure, horror, and thriller categories, I find
curious in Altman’s assessment of Neale an implicit assumption that there
is a singular, proper way to apply the term—as if, somehow, feminist critics
of the 1970s and 1980s made some kind of error in asserting the existence
of the woman’s film as a genre, as opposed to asserting a deliberate political
and aesthetic call to critical and filmmaking action. Beginning with Molly
Haskell’s work in 1973, then moving on through Mary Ann Doane’s The
Desire to Desire, Altman rightly asserts that “one of the major tasks of femi-
nist film criticism over the past twenty years has been to rehabilitate the term
woman’s film and thereby restore value to women’s activities” (1999, 77)—
still, however, without fully seeming to appreciate the complexity of those
films and of the nuances of their importance to feminists. That is, even as
Altman recognizes the existence of a political project and, indeed, makes
it part of his point about the influential role that Doane and others played
in defining and arguing for the existence, however blurry, of a genre of
woman’s films that might earlier have been discussed according to different
paradigms, he asserts,

I do not mean to claim that Doane was by herself capable of turning

a motley assortment of old films into a widely recognized genre, but
I would suggest that a major purpose of The Desire to Desire is to
establish the woman’s film as a genre.
(75)

A “motley assortment of old films”? Even if writing facetiously or ironically,

Altman here seems to reproduce the exact contempt that he himself quotes
Haskell describing as far back as 1973: “As a term of critical opprobrium,
‘woman’s film’ carries the implication that women, and therefore women’s
emotional problems, are of minor significance” (Haskell [1973] 1974, 154).
After nearly forty years of dedicated scholarship about women and cinema,
such an attitude is disquieting, as is Altman’s surprise at how long it took
for critical attention to be paid to the genre:

We have already noted the extent to which the building of genres is often
a critical, rather than a production-based, concern, so the only thing
surprising about Haskell’s attempt to rehabilitate the woman’s film by
 Introduction 7
broadening and strengthening its definition is the delay between the
production of the films in question and the moment of critical invention.
(73)

Not so surprising, really, considering that second-wave feminism got its start
in the late 1960s and early 1970s and that genre studies was initially domi-
nated by male practitioners and scholars in Anglo-American film studies
criticism at that time.
For the purposes of this volume, then, I regard melodrama as a mode of
expression that is present in a range of genres and forms of media and art and
the 1940s woman’s film as a loose cycle of films produced during that decade.
Both the periodization of my project (the 1940s) and my acceptance of the
term “the woman’s film” to denote a (more or less) coherent body of work
and a legitimate field of inquiry acknowledge my debt to the work of extraor-
dinary feminist scholars before me and accept the assumption that many films
from the 1940s are not only “about women” in some unique sense but were
also, in fact, originally targeted by the Hollywood studio system for what it
presumed, rightly or wrongly, was a female audience thrown into prominence
by World War II. I am less interested in defining (or defending) a specific genre
or corpus, however, than I am in exploring certain issues of gender, narrative,
and history that surface within some woman’s films from this decade, often
though not always as a related constellation of concerns, and in engaging
in conversation with those feminists and scholars who share these interests.
My selection of relatively few films for this volume is an eclectic one that is
intended to be suggestive rather than definitive. I occasionally point toward
other titles that are equally relevant (I could point to many more or to differ-
ent ones entirely); it is always my intention to suggest rather than proscribe
issues for continued debate about woman’s films belonging to this decade.
But why revisit the 1940s woman’s film now? Hasn’t enough been written
about these films in past decades? Altman’s overview of the 1970s and 1980s
does point to a very fruitful period for studies of melodrama generally and
the woman’s film specifically, although I would also argue that the de facto
conflation of 1950s family melodrama and the woman’s film by Altman itself
indicates that further work remains to be done. More importantly, however,
as cultural studies made increasingly significant contributions to the field of
film studies and as the field itself entered a new phase in the early twenty-
first century, morphing to include new research and analytic paradigms of an
increasingly digital age, debates having to do with issues of film narrative, cin-
ematic spectatorship, and desire were prematurely truncated and displaced.
As I shall discuss in the first chapter, the earlier brilliant studies of narrative,
gender, and subjectivity were more or less abandoned at the exact point at
which alternative critical models might have begun to be theorized in ways
that were less pessimistic and allowed for a greater play of meaning and sense-
making in classical cinema generally and in feminist film theory in particular.
In part, of course, this was due to an increasing sense of frustration with these
8 The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s
earlier models that sometimes seemed to ignore a range of issues pertaining
especially to class, race, and sexuality and that LGBTQ and cultural studies
productively sought to correct. At the same time, however, debates about the
nature of classical narrative, identification, and subjectivity in classical cinema
remain unresolved from this earlier period. Reexamining them now through
a revised critical lens can not only further enlarge our understanding of an
important historical period of cinema and theorizations about it but also,
by extension, cast new light on contemporary filmmaking genres that derive
directly or indirectly from the woman’s film (such as romantic dramas, or
rom-drams, and to a lesser extent, romantic comedies, or rom-coms).
Thus, in the first chapter of this volume, “Film Theory, Narrative, and the
1940s Woman’s Film,” I examine the way in which much of contemporary
film theory over the past forty years—feminist or otherwise—focused on the
gaze and on paradigms of looking, usually with the intent of exposing ideo-
logical assumptions present in the very conventions of cinema, particularly
narrative cinema produced in Hollywood. For the sake of convenience and
shorthand, I retain the notion of “classical Hollywood cinema” throughout
this volume to refer to a period between, roughly, 1920 and 1960, and to
argue that its representational modes and strategies are not as monolithic
and standardized in relation to gender as has occasionally been suggested.
Narrative cinema itself has been theorized largely, though not entirely, as
a relay of looks. However, as Teresa de Lauretis points out in an investiga-
tion of the “structural connection between sadism and narrative” in Alice
Doesn’t (1984), issues of narrative and narrativity—that is, the dynamics of
narrative and the principles of movement that underlie all narrative, what-
ever the medium—were usually neglected in favor of technical, economic,
ideological, or aesthetic aspects of filmmaking and film viewing in the for-
mulation of theories about the gaze within and at cinema. I discuss the ways
in which feminist film theory of the 1970s and 1980s particularly—and most
ironically—fetishized the gaze as a signifying discourse at the cost of other
meaningful cinematic registers. Arguing that a study of narrativity in itself is
a discrete area of investigation that simply did not develop and does not exist
to any significant degree within film studies, I discuss its potential utility to
and resonance for a study of the 1940s woman’s film that is long overdue.
In chapter 2, “The Fate of One Governess: Lost Narrative, History, and
Gendered Desire,” I apply the ideas in the first chapter to perform a case
study of All This, and Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940), a historical wom-
an’s film adapted from a novel of the same title based on the real-life murder
of the Duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin in France in 1847. I examine not only
the film but also some of the archival historical and fictional discourses sur-
rounding the Praslin affair, concluding that, in all iterations of the Praslin
case—cinematic, novelistic, or overtly historical—a culturally structured
desire gendered as feminine is figured as the motivating force of the (various)
narrative(s) built around it and that its articulation is most powerfully ren-
dered at the level of narrative movement as defined most clearly by literary
 Introduction 9
theorist Peter Brooks. Throughout this volume, I use the term “gendered
desire” to indicate desire coded by a cultural product as masculine, femi-
nine, or sometimes, in specific instances, both.
In chapter 3, “Melodrama, History, and Narrative Recovery,” I explore
critical discussions of melodrama and history, and my interest in the woman’s
film’s construction and articulation of gendered desire in relation to history
continues. Rather than an extended case study, the chapter examines two
very different woman’s films produced during World War II: That Hamilton
Woman (Alexander Korda, 1941) and Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy,
1942). While gendered desire and subjectivity are explicitly foregrounded
in the experiences of both female and male characters in both films, they
also construct relationships among the historical period of World War II
(directly presented or indirectly evoked on the screen), the present moment
and circumstances of the films’ production, and their audiences’ positioning
in relation to those histories.
Chapter 4, “Temporality and the Past: Haunting Narratives and the
Postwar Woman’s Film,” turns to a consideration of loose and very small
subgrouping of the 1940s woman’s film—the postwar romantic ghost film,
represented here by The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947)
and Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948). Looking at the ways in which
a melancholy desire is figured as not only narratively active but also occasion-
ally both masculine and feminine, I then turn away from considerations of
history, per se (highlighted in the preceding two chapters), to broader impli-
cations of temporality, concluding that these romantic ghost films encourage
a reevaluation of the ways in which previous theorists have conceived the
relationship between different temporal modes (eloquently expressed by
Tania Modleski as “the time of repetition” and “the time of history” [1984])
in the 1940s woman’s film, particularly in the aftermath of World War II.
In chapter 5, “By My Tears I Tell a Story/The ‘Absent’ War,” I discuss the
wartime American film Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) and England’s
Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) in order to examine ways in which
desire in these films is usually gendered as feminine, successfully articulated
as such, and yet experienced as both masculine and feminine by men and
women alike in the very forward movement of the narrative itself. In addi-
tion to sharing such moments, Now, Voyager and Brief Encounter each
feature a modern setting and were both produced during World War II, yet
at the level of narrative, neither has anything to do with the war and both
are set in a period immediately preceding its start. Unlike the films I have
examined in earlier chapters, Now, Voyager and Brief Encounter banish
the war and history to their extratextual margins, but that lost narrative is
imbricated with issues of desire in each film and with its reception in inter-
esting and curious ways.
Finally, in chapter 6, “Telling the Story Differently: Toward an Androg-
ynous Spectatorship and Interpretation,” I examine three very different
woman’s films—Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), The Enchanted Cottage
10 The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s
(John Cromwell, 1945), and The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949)—and argue
for a fluid notion of gender in interpreting classical cinema that permits a
way of identifying and reading a film androgynously (and perhaps quix-
otically) in and through narrative. Taking as my point of departure and
speculation the paradigm of the 1940s Gothic romance film in which gen-
dered points of view are explicitly thematized, I discuss the three films in
terms of how they correspond and deviate from that paradigm, examining
how each calls into question the conventional theoretical binaries of mascu-
line and feminine points of view, identification, and narrative interpretation.

CONTESTED TEARS: WHOSE VOICES MATTER?

At the foundation of this volume is the still-unresolved (and perhaps defini-

tively unresolvable) question that has haunted the woman’s film and the
many who have watched and studied them for decades now: Whose stories
do these films really tell? Whose voices do we hear, whose voices matter,
and—in the case of woman’s films that explicitly engage with or evoke
history—whose stories are told and what relationship do these films con-
struct among history, narrative, and gender? Some of these same questions
also reside at the heart of the “history” constructed about the woman’s
film in and through academic discourse of the past forty years. That dis-
course has shaped our perceptions of generic parameters, oeuvres, and issues
deemed worthy of scholarly debate, and it has also participated in wider
conventions about critical and authorial legitimacy within academic film
and media studies itself.
To illustrate my point, let me briefly invoke the mid-1990s work and
reception of American philosopher Stanley Cavell in Contesting Tears:
The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996). Construct-
ing his argument in both implicit and explicit dialogue with his earlier
work on Hollywood romantic comedies (1976), Cavell maintained that
four films—Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), Now, Voyager (Irving Rap-
per, 1942), Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944), and Letter from an Unknown
Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948)—constitute a genre he called the unknown
woman film and that these films “recount interacting versions of a story, a
story of myth, that seems to present itself as a woman’s search for a story,
or of the right to tell her story” (3). An unsurprising assertion to those
familiar with the notable and extensive work in film studies on melodrama
and the woman’s film that was done prior to Cavell’s book, the volume
considers the woman’s film not in relation to issues of gender, feminism,
or its related critical discourses but rather to Cavell’s own earlier study of
what he has termed “comedies of remarriage.” Thus, Cavell positioned
himself outside the notable and highly visible work that sought variously
to identify melodrama as a transgeneric mode of representation up to that
point (e.g., Peter Brooks [1976]), deconstruct a gendered alignment of
 Introduction 11
subjectivity within the woman’s film within a specific decade (e.g., Doane
[1987]), or locate issues of mode, genre, gender, and representation within
a particular social and historical moment—to cite merely a few instances
of such work (Gledhill [1987], Byars [1991]). As a result, in responses to
earlier drafts and presentations of his own study, as well as to the final book
itself, Cavell found himself criticized for ignoring the work of feminists and
film scholars (see, in particular, responses and reviews by Modleski [1990]
and Kaplan [1998]). Asserting “I have no standing, and no motive, from
which to attempt to place these different emphases nor to seek out others,”
Cavell argued for the legitimacy of his own interest in various relationships
among cinema, philosophical skepticism, tragedy, melodrama, gender, and
psychoanalysis, choosing to stay largely within the terms of philosophical
debate most familiar to him. Sketching a timeline for the evolution of his
interests (to demonstrate their autonomy and integrity), he simultaneously
acknowledged that the work of feminist film scholars existed, declared his
independence from that work, and curiously remarked upon his “sense for
a long time of intellectual isolation” (1996,199) as his interests developed.
Feminists might (and did) argue that Cavell’s was a self-imposed isolation,
but E. Ann Kaplan’s assessment of his book in Film Quarterly is interest-
ing to me today for two reasons. First, Kaplan engaged in a conscientious
effort to assess Cavell’s work on the woman’s film and acknowledged her
own investment in the controversy surrounding it. Second, and perhaps of
more interest now, she also identified what she called “anxieties of time and
gender” (as well as discipline) at work in Cavell’s book (Kaplan 1998, 78).
Though she did not discuss them as such in her review, time and gender
are precisely the well-known twin anxieties that haunt melodrama and the
woman’s film specifically, with the melodramatic “too late” generally tied
to an experience of women’s waiting (for love, for recognition) that may
never come or come past the point to make any difference (Doane 1987;
Modleski 1988; Williams 1998, 2001). Read today, Kaplan’s observation
functions almost as a gloss not only on the woman’s film but also on a curi-
ous element of the debate between Cavell and his feminist critics: it played
out as a kind of discursive melodrama in academic circles, with Cavell
himself taking up the traditional position of the woman as the one who
waits (for love, for recognition from his academic peers). Cavell’s anxiety of
time, Kaplan said, emerged partly as his “need to lay claim to the authority
that comes from doing research for so long. Perhaps there is anxiety about
running out of time to complete his projects” (78; emphasis mine). As for
the anxiety of gender, Kaplan pointed to its expression in Cavell’s choice
not to engage with long-standing feminist debates about the woman’s film
that both preceded and were occurring simultaneously with the develop-
ment of his work:

. . . his excuse for not paying attention to the feminist melodrama work
because not “specifically invited to” still strikes me as disingenuous.
12 The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s
Cavell evidently only engages with research that is in line with his own
thoughts: he sees no need to take other points of view into account.
(1998, 78; emphasis in original)

Dramas of invitation and rejection, acknowledgment and dismissal, play out

in Cavell’s own words as he levels a somewhat inverted claim at his critics,
recasting it in somewhat labored but wounded prose:

Even I, for all my overlaps yet asynchronies with the interests of my

culture, have had to recognize that the expression of intellectual indebt-
edness or helpfulness is no longer dischargeable on exactly intellectual
grounds. No doubt it never was. But it is as if a current preoccupation
with an [anti] metaphysics of citationality and of authorship have come
to mask a politics of who is citable by whom and who not.
(1996, 199)

If Kaplan’s review unselfconsciously evokes tropes of the trajectory of a

woman’s film, Cavell’s own words might be said to correspond to scenar-
ios more similar to the 1950s family melodrama of authority and privilege
about which Thomas Elsaesser wrote so compellingly in “Tales of Sound
and Fury” (1972). A palpable sense of resentment and disappointment
seems to permeate Cavell’s comments here: they are a grudging, backhanded
admission that, although he may not have been influenced by others outside
his discipline working on related material, such materials existed. They are
an expression of irritation that his work should “have to” allude to or be
assessed in any kind of relation to that material. They also give voice to
his disappointment that, just as he may not have considered the work of
feminist and other film scholars directly relevant to his project, those same
people, in turn, have chosen not to engage as fully with his work as he might
have wished.
I refer to the debate around Cavell’s work on the woman’s film not to cen-
tralize it or the debate unduly but rather to observe that, taken together, they
dramatize issues that subtend critical discussion within any academic field:
Whose voices “count” and are acknowledged as relevant or authoritative
and why? Perhaps not coincidentally, issues of authority, voice, and interpre-
tation are also matters that many woman’s films emphasize through plot and
assorted enunciative strategies, both visual and aural. As the final chapter of
this volume will indicate, I like to think that my reading of woman’s films
of the 1940s is an act of listening to the voice of desire itself, and that it is
admittedly and unabashedly as much a work of fiction as it is of theoretical
and critical inquiry (if, indeed, the two impulses are distinct). Influenced by a
range of theoretical practitioners and critics and interrogating the absences
and silences within the woman’s film, I occasionally (re)write lost narratives
from the point of view of the characters who have been left in the margins
and tell their stories as they could never have told them. Christine Gledhill
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