From: rhh@alice.att.com (r hardin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: john wesley hardin
Keywords: was a friend to the poor
Date: 15 Apr 92 00:58:08 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill NJ



>Cite a few instances.  I am certainly open to the possibility that
>great films have been made that overcome this.  I think great
>literature has been written that overcomes this -- perhaps the
>most interesting those poems that the poet wants to (or seems to
>want to) produce to justify ideology but give the lie to that
>ideology.  Paradise Lost.  Hamlet.  What are some examples?
>This means that I don't think all consciousness is completely
>saturated by ideology.  If I believed that there would be
>no point or place of resistance.

I was alluding to Cavell's analyses, and the reaction to it, of

Now Voyager
Stella Dallas
Letter from an Unknown Woman
Gaslight
Adam's Rib
Blonde Venus


``I will note my view of these things only far enough to give the
suggestion of a coherent alternative view of the pair in _Letter_
to that given in Modleski's paper.  The importance for me is not that
her view may be wrong but that it is internal to these structures to
invite competing interpretations.  Melodrama, in its negations of
communication, of what I call conversation, may be said to be
about interpretation, about the fact that an interpretation
contains as part of its grammar that there is a competing
way, a way this eclipses.  This is one reason that Wittgenstein's
duck-rabbit is a figure for interpretation. (Another reason
is that competing interpretations may not see different things but
may see a totality of things differently.)  Shakespeare's melodramatic
invitations to the competition of meaning is the fabulous case.
_Gaslight_ is the member of the genre of the melodrama of the unknown
woman that makes the competition of interpretation its explicit
narrative theme, a man's efforts to drive a woman mad by depriving her
of a voice in her self-interpretation.  Competing interpretation is,
redescribed, the feature of irony I assign the genre, and it seems to
me a neglect of this feature that allows Modleski to be confident in
speaking of `Lisa's letter [as performing] ... the talking cure for
Stefan'.''

and the reaction from Modleski

``There is a certain `postfeminist' irony in Stanley Cavell's recent
work, which focuses on what he calls melodramas of ``unknown
women.''  Wishing to create the impression that he is the first
person to discover the worth of these texts and to approach them
with intellectual seriousness and critical generosity, Cavell claims
to be saving them from ``feminist condescension'' - although, in fact,
much feminist discussion of the so-called weepies has aimed to rescue
the genre from the contempt of _male_ critics.  Inasmuch as Cavell,
despite this specific charge against feminists, fails to cite any of
the women working in his area, fails to _name_ them (Doane, Jacobs,
LaPlace, and other have written powerful critiques of Now Voyager
and other Bette Davis films), and inasmuch as Critical Inquiry
exempts Cavell from the minimal requirements of scholarship, both
parties perpetrate the very condition being analyzed: they participate
in a system in which women go unrecognized, their voices unheard,
their identities ``unknown.''  Thus Woman can be maintained as an
enigma - the dark continent which men explore, colonize, and ``defend,''
claiming exclusive rights to territory they need to see as virgin.''

to which Cavell's response was what I gave to you.  How could I
not think of it?

Critical Inquiry v16 n2, v17 n1
Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, the Constitution of Emersonian
	Perfectionism.  The Carus Lectures, 1988
Languages of the Unsayable, the play of negativity in literature and
	literary theory