Contesting Tears

The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman

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by Stanley Cavell

University of Chicago Press

Due/Published December 1996, 208 pages, paper

ISBN 0226098168

This is Cavell's own answer to his previous book, Pursuits of Happiness in which he examined questions of friendship, equality, romance, and mutual education in the context of American film, particularly in classic comedies of remarriage. Here, he continues the investigation with a look at a contrasting genre, what he calls "the melodrama of the unknown woman." The four films that Cavell focuses on are, Letter from an Unknown Woman, Gaslight, Now Voyager, and Stella Dallas. The women in these melodrama, like the women in the comedies, demand equality, shared education, and transfiguration, exemplifying for Cavell a moral perfectionism he identifies as Emersonian. But, unlike the comedies, which portray a quest for a shared existence of expressiveness and joy, the melodramas trace instead the woman's recognition that in this quest she is isolated. Part of the melodrama concerns the various ways the men in the films (and the audiences of the films) interpret and desire to force the woman's consequent inaccessibility. So, its Cavell as we are used to seeing him, joining his interest in or love of film, with his equally intense engagement with philosophical questions, And in this book we get Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, and Barbara Stanwick to boot!!! Who can beat that?