Contesting tears
Subtitle: the Hollywood melodrama of the unknown woman
By: Stanley Cavell.
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Chicago
Language: eng
Number of pages: 255
ISBN-13: 9780226098142; 9780226098166
Subjects: Motion pictures for women; Women in motion pictures; Melodrama in motion pictures; Marriage in motion pictures
Description: What is marriage? Can a relationship dedicated to equality, friendship, and mutual education flower in an atmosphere of romance? What are the paths between loving another and knowing another? Stanley Cavell identified a genre of classic American films that engaged these questions in his study of comedies of remarriage, Pursuits of Happiness.

With Contesting Tears, Cavell demonstrates that a contrasting genre, which he calls "the melodrama of the unknown woman," shares a surprising number and weave of concerns with those comedies.

Cavell provides close readings of four melodramas he finds definitive of the genre: Letter from an Unknown Woman; Gaslight; Now, Voyager; and Stella Dallas. The women in these melodramas, 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.
Notes: Contains bibliography (p. 231-239), filmography (p. 241-242) and index.
Table of contents: title: Naughty orators: negation of voice in Gaslight; title: Psychoanalysis and cinema: moments of Letter from an unknown woman; title: Ugly duckling, funny butterfly: Bette Davis and Now, voyager; title: Postscript: to whom it may concern; title: Stella's taste: reading Stella Dallas.