Stella Dallas Research Articles

Intersectional Feminism and the Woman Spectator: A Historical Perspective

To what extent does a woman relate to the female on screen when she sits in front of it? Who establishes her image in the public eye and what misogynistic roles suppress her individuality both on and off screen? Many feminist cinema theorists have written extensively about the evolution of the female spectator throughout the years, including Diana Anselmo, Laura Mulvey, and bell hooks. However, a recurring issue in this lengthy discussion is the junction of multiple identities. This investigation is made more complex by intersectional feminism, which acknowledges that racial, class, and gender intersections all influence how women watch. This study uses intersectionality theory to conduct a critical analysis of movies such as La Souriante Mme Beudet (1923), Stella Dallas (1937), Imitation of Life (1959), La Noire de... (1966), and Thelma and Louise (1991) through the lenses of psychoanalysis, feminist theory, post-colonialist theory, and critical race theory. This theoretical framework challenges and examines the ways in which films uphold or question societal injustices in addition to illuminating the ways in which women from diverse backgrounds interact with the medium.

“Beauty and the Beast”: Romance, Reform, and Mystery in the Films of Lon Chaney

“Beauty and the Beast”: Romance, Reform, and Mystery in the Films of Lon Chaney

On Being Fashionably Incorrect: Woman’s Film, Fashion, and Stella Dallas

Despite the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, the decade of the 1930s in America was an unprecedentedly productive time for Hollywood, and the woman’s film, which depicts the life of an adult female protagonist and is designed to appeal mostly to female spectators, was one of the flourishing genres that survived the Great Depression. While scholars have viewed classical Hollywood cinema as an ideological apparatus, representing dominant ways of seeing the world and reinforcing hegemonic views, this essay proposes Hollywood films as a version of modernism that is not exclusive, arcane, and anti-modern, but inclusive, mass-produced, and highly susceptible to the experience of modernity. Drawing on Miriam Hansen’s notion of vernacular modernism marked by texts’ susceptibility to reflect and confront the constitutive ambivalence of modernity, this essay focuses on the woman’s film and fashion in tandem and examines how in the woman’s film fashion is represented through the female protagonists’ costumes and circulated in the form of a discourse. This essay argues that the woman’s film of the 1930s tends to associate the heroine’s experiences of modernity involving fashion and glamour with the themes of class rise and acquiring manners, and that in case of maternal melodrama, as manifested in King Vidor’s 1937 film Stella Dallas, the pattern is inverted. That is, the heroine’s sartorial practices do not necessarily lead to her class rise, but bespeaks her subversive individuality immune from ideological views on fashion.

Refusal and disowning knowledge: re-thinking disengagement in higher education

This paper addresses both ‘student engagement’ in contemporary universities, and student ‘disengagement’ – where the latter is often seen as a failure of performance, or absence of will. In a bold move, the paper asks whether students should be engaged in their university education, and whether there is value in forms of disengagement. It finds an original way in which student disengagement can be understood by drawing on the writings of Stanley Cavell – on the philosophical appeal to what we say, our search for criteria, and on ideas of acknowledgement and avoidance in his work on Shakespearian tragedy. It shows what is at stake in our attunement with, and dissent from, criteria, and how such dissent can be educative. The paper considers the film ‘Stella Dallas’, in which Stella’s aversion to, her disengagement from, her culture’s criteria, is not a passive withdrawal, but rather the finding of voice, her education as a grownup. The paper concludes that disengagement, understood as aversion, dissent and refusal of voice, is not to be seen always as a lack of action or of care, but as the opposite: the active voicing of what we will, or will not, consent to in our education.

New Deal Cinema and the Politics of Sympathy

New Deal Cinema and the Politics of Sympathy Stephen Schryer (bio) Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal: Public Daydreams by Anna Siomopoulos. New York: Routledge, 2012. Pp. 166. $125.00 cloth. In her insightful new book Hollywood Melodrama and the New Deal, Anna Siomopoulos explores how 1930s and 1940s US popular cinema mediates popular anxieties about the unprecedented expansion of federal power during the New Deal. Deftly moving between readings of Gabriel over the White House (1933), Bullets or Ballots (1936), Fury (1936), Stella Dallas (1937), The Emperor Jones (1933), Double Indemnity (1944), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), and The Killers (1946) and expositions of welfare-state theory by 1930s intellectuals and public figures, her work offers a compelling and precisely contextualized account of how state policies shape cultural productions and vice versa. At the book’s heart is Siomopoulos’s careful delineation of a homology between New Deal presidential rhetoric and Depression-era cinema. On the one hand, much of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s popularity rested on his use of melodrama to generate sympathy for the Great Depression’s victims and support for New Deal programs. This rhetoric helped “offset the advanced rationalization of new government bureaucracy and . . . justify the encroachment of the state into the private lives of U.S. citizens” (2). On the other hand, Depression-era films gave expression to public fears and fantasies about FDR’s policies; their melodramatic conclusions, [End Page 683] however, ultimately endorsed New Deal ideology. In particular, both FDR and 1930s and 1940s cinema used melodrama to affirm a conventionally liberal individualism in ways that helped undermine public support for more radically redistributive social policies. In developing this argument, Siomopoulos enters into a long-standing debate about the ideology of melodrama. For Lewis Mumford and other mass-culture critics of the 1930s, melodrama was a conservative form that reinforced existing social hierarchies. In the past forty years, beginning with the work of Peter Brooks, critics have challenged this assessment. Brooks highlighted melodrama’s origins in the French Revolution, describing it as a potentially revolutionary genre; more recently, critics like Linda Williams have argued that melodrama plays a crucial role in establishing sympathy for marginal social groups. Siomopoulos’s position more closely approximates Mumford’s than Brooks’s or Williams’s. Drawing her subtitle (“public daydreams”) from Mumford’s work, she argues that “Hollywood melodramas of the ’30s and ’40s maintained their resemblance to private daydreams— individual fantasies with no public valence—at the same time that the melodramatic conventions of these films consistently supported New Deal public policy” (4). For her, the politics of sympathy that Williams discovers in Hollywood melodrama is precisely the problem with these films; both presidential rhetoric and Depression-era cinema draw on the language of sympathy in order to perpetuate individualistic solutions to economic crisis. Both FDR and Hollywood melodrama focus on “private individuals rather than public movements and on private solutions to public problems” (5). In criticizing this politics of sympathy, Siomopoulos draws on Hannah Arendt; compassion, she complains, “is not a critical or rational enough emotion upon which to base social justice because it responds to suffering with simple, self-evident solutions” (66–67). Sympathy promotes individual acts of charity rather than systemic social change. Unlike Mumford, however, Siomopoulos carefully highlights the ideological contradictions that run through her chosen films. Her readings all follow a similar pattern; she shows how the films mediate Depression-era dissatisfaction with the New Deal but then affirm New Deal policies in their final, melodramatic scenes. Gabriel over the White House, for instance, released shortly after FDR’s first inauguration, registers public fears that FDR would expand the powers of the presidency for corrupt personal gain. The film draws a series of analogies between an ineffective president (Judd Hammond, played by Walter Huston) and [End Page 684] his archnemesis, a mafia crime boss; both are equally ruthless and equally dedicated to private consumption. However, after a Road-to-Damascus-style conversion, President Hammond learns to channel his gangster-like energies toward the public interest, morphing into a benevolent dictator who increasingly resembles FDR. Interestingly, Siomopoulos suggests that this filmic tension between critique and affirmation of New Deal ideology...

‘Let me see her face when he kisses her, please’: Mediating Emotion and Locating the Melodramatic Mode inStella Dallas

This article explores melodrama's capacity to evoke strong emotional responses with a focus on the ending of King Vidor's Stella Dallas (1937). It suggests a consideration of the phenomenological concept of instrument-mediation as coined by Vivian Sobchack as a filmic structure that fosters melodrama's emotional appeal and the spectator's engagement with it. It suggests a self-reflexive element in highly emotional film scenes that inscribes the spectator's subject position into the film, thus enabling the film to impact the spectator's body. This reflection of a spectator's perspective enables and fosters the communication of emotionality. Consequently, instrument-mediation describes one function and strategy of the melodramatic mode.

Montage and Tableau in King Vidor's Stella Dallas

The final moments of King Vidor's melodrama, Stella Dallas is famous as a tableau of exquisite pathos and feeling. This paper examines Stanley Cavell's reading of Vidor's tableau of an unknown woman in relation to Linda Williams's earlier feminist reading, it examines Cavell's dispute with Williams and seeks to offer a different reading of the film that takes the contemporary art historical discourse about tableau as its guide, and comes to the conclusion that Vidor's tableau anticipates the 'return to painting' that marks Jeff Wall's famous photographic lightbox Picture for Women. Vidor's tableau is itself a lightbox that articulates the tension in American culture and life between the propriety of social order and the impropriety of modern social mobility.

“Two Mothers United”: Interclass Female Friendship in Stella Dallas

Much has been made of Olive Higgins Prouty's character Stella Dallas, who appeared first in serial form in 1922 followed by a best-selling novel in 1923. Like other Prouty novels, Stella Dallas was adapted into film only two years later in 1925 and again in 1937. Directed by King Vidor and starring Barbara Stanwyck, the 1937 adaptation garnered Oscar nominations for Stanwyck, inspired a long-running radio show, and attracted much scholarly attention. In this essay, I argue that the story of Prouty's titular character can be in large part attributed to its overarching narrative of mother love as sacrifice. Yet this narrative includes a subtext of interclass female collusion that drives the plot and has mass appeal. Stella and Helen collude to exploit their class differences both as women and as maternal figures in the making and maintenance of the early twentieth-century status quo of motherhood and of womanhood, but also of interclass white female relations.

Stanley's Taste

Stanley Cavell closes Contesting Tears with a chapter titled “Stella’s Taste: Reading Stella Dallas”, devoted to the 1937 movie, directed by King Vidor, which Cavell compares to the other movies he has studied in the book and finds “to be the most harrowing of the four melodramas to view again and again.” Cavell’s reading of this movie is organized against what he calls the generally “accepted view” of the film where there are two key interpretive moments: in one, Stella, the protagonist, on vacation with her teenage daughter, Laurel, at a fancy hotel, tries to impress Laurel’s new friends by dressing up and ends up making a fool of herself, in a spectacle of bad taste; Stella then finds out what people thought of her and realizes she has embarrassed Laurel, eventually deciding to drive her daughter away from her, towards her father (Stella’s now ex-husband); this takes us to the second key moment: the final scene, where Stella anonymously watches her daughter’s wedding from the sidewalk, through a window, and walks away, which is generally seen as confirming Stella’s sacrifice, representing the dissolution of motherhood — hence, of her identity.

Working-class women and women ‘working’ class: Literary masquerade in the inter-war years

In Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), Pierre Bourdieu argues that the individual who employs fashionable attire to create an impression of being higher in society than he or she is ‘constantly overshoots the mark for fear of falling short, betraying his uncertainty and anxiety about belonging in his anxiety to show or give the impression that he belongs’. An opposite reading is presented in Footnotes on Shoes (Shari Benstock and Suzanne Ferris, 2001) and in Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular culture, and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (Nan Enstad, 1999). Both provide examples and analyses of women who consciously overshoot the mark ‘because it feels good’ and because it functions as a means of controlling one’s own image. This tension is at the heart of critical explorations into the practice of ‘class-passing’, a form of masquerade achieved through the visual technologies of beauty and fashion. Embedded within this practice is the question: Who manages the impression being created and for what purpose? This article looks closely at two examples of literary class-passing in American literature of the inter-war years, 1919–1939. Both novels feature a female protagonist who attempts to transform her class position by donning garments ‘above’ her class station. Both novels were written by popular women writers, Imitation of Life (1933) by Fannie Hurst and Stella Dallas (1923) by Olive Higgins Prouty, whose status as popular writers barred them from the restricted definition of serious, modernist literature that guided writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The plots these and other women writers of the time created presented a lower-class protagonist who successfully class-passed through her assumption of high-brow fashions, in effect, fashioning herself into a different social position. For women writers of the time, this ability to break seemingly unbreakable class barriers held special resonance; as popular, female writers, they held a similarly lower-class position within the literary canon, and the barriers against their critical acclaim were as seemingly unbreakable as the barriers against their class mobility. By authoring texts of fashioned class-passing, these women writers acted out what they hoped to achieve in their own lives: an equally successful attempt at canonical passing.

Three Versions of Stella Dallas

Three Versions of Stella Dallas

Race, Class, and the Pressure to Pass in American Maternal Melodrama: The Case of Stella Dallas

THE SUBSTANTIAL BODY OF SCHOLARSHIP concerning King Victor's Stella (1937) attests to the richness of the film and to its capacity to illuminate the complex representations of motherhood in American culture. Stella tells the story of a working-class woman who aspires that her daughter Laurel might gain acceptance in her father's upper-class milieu, only to discover that her own lack of pedigree threatens her child's social future. Stella chooses, therefore, to sever her relationship with her child so that Laurel might live as a member of the upper class-a decision that raises questions about the nature of class hierarchies and the possibilities of class mobility in American society. Scholarly analyses of Stella struggle with these questions, particularly when it comes to Stella's capacity to make choices and follow her own desire, for while Stella demonstrates that she can behave in an upper-class manner when she must, she apparently chooses not to and thereby estranges herself from her beloved daughter, an act that seems incompatible with Stella's maternal devotion. My contribution to the discourse on Stella's ostensibly paradoxical acts of selfactualization and self-sacrifice is to contend that much of the film's narrative logic emerges from the tradition of racial passing narratives, specifically scenarios where a person with black parentage is able to pass for white. Stella employs the logical structure of passing scenarios and associates Stella's character with stereotypes of black womanhood in order to present Stella's class status as a physical and inherited trait-a conceit that allows audiences to accept Stella's self-exclusion from the promise of the American dream. drama of self-sacrifice and maternal disappearance in Stella corresponds to larger patterns in American maternal melodrama. Christian Viviani outlines this trend in Who Is Without Sin?: Maternal Melodrama in American RIm, 1930-39, where he explains that in the 19305 the pressures of the Depression made Americans less interested in melodramas set in a romanticized European milieu and more determined to address domestic issues, either by representing Americans' economic and social problems or by offering escapism to a beleaguered population (85). Thus began the Americanization of the maternal melodrama, where maternal sacrifice became a high priority: The maternal melo in its American vein is an apologia for total renunciation, total sacrifice, total self-abnegation (96). Stella's sacrifice of her maternal bonds corresponds to this American model; unlike the mothers in European melodrama, who have their children confiscated, American mothers give up their children in order to protect them from their damaging social influence. I argue that American melodrama's substantial variations from the European model are founded on the unique racial dynamics of American society, where one's racial identity, both actual and perceived, has a central role in kinship structures and social relations. My analysis of Stella will Illustrate how the emphasis on maternal sacrifice in the Americanized maternal melodrama emerges from America's racial history and its corresponding narrative tradition of the child whose social capital rests on the mother's disappearance and anonymity. Typically, the melodrama scholarship on race focuses on films featuring multiple nonwhite characters and directly addressing racial conflicts. Stella may seem like an unusual choice to extend the discourse on race, for although are black characters in the film, their appearances are brief and scattered, to the extent that some viewers might not even notice their presence. Indeed, E. Ann Kaplan, In her seminal article Mothering, Feminism and Representation: Maternal Melodrama and the Women's RIm 1910-40, asserts that there is no race issue in Stella Dallas (133). However, if we closely examine the narrative functions of the black characters, each playing a mammy or Aunt Jemima role, while reevaluating the complexities of Stella's motherhood within the parameters of race drama, It becomes clear that American traditions of racial passing narratives, representations of black women's motherhood and sexuality, and the peculiar relationship between race and class In American society together account for the unique characteristics of American maternal melodrama, and not only in instances where race Is clearly at issue. …

Adapting Stella Dallas: Class Boundaries, Consumerism, and Hierarchies of Taste

In her 1961 autobiography, Olive Higgins Prouty reflected that [t]he feature of most interest about Stella Dallas is, I think, number of its reincarnations. First serialized for nearly two million readers of American Magazine in 1922 and published in book form in 1923, Prouty's poignant tale of class hierarchy and maternal sacrifice went on to become a 1924 stage play, a 1925 silent an Oscar-nominated 1937 film starring Barbara Stanwyck, and a long-running radio soap opera. Indeed, Stella outlived her creator, reappearing in a third film starring Bette Midler in 1990. Yet to Prouty these adaptations, filled with melodrama and sentimentality, were something of an embarrassment: How much better if Stella had never emerged from covers of a novel. Certainly adaptation of Stella to stage and screen and finally radio did not help me to acquire kind of reputation I desired (Pencil Shavings 156). It is doubtful, however, that avoiding mass media would have spared Prouty from being, like so many popular and critically acclaimed women novelists of 1920s and 1930s, relegated to dustbins of history by a masculinist, modernist establishment. (1) Arguably, Stella and her creator have been remembered only because of these adaptations: while novel went out of print for nearly four decades, 1937 film remained in circulation and was elevated to canonical status by feminist scholars in 1980s as an exemplary woman's film, a powerful alternative to Hollywood's male gaze. Only since its 1990 reprinting as part of a literary cinema classics series, illustrated with stills from has Prouty's novel gained a modicum of scholarly attention. (2) My concern here is less to establish Prouty in canon than to examine what novel and its reincarnations reveal about evolving discourses of class, taste, and cultural hierarchy in America. The adaptation and reception history of Stella Dallas provide a particularly valuable case study not only because Prouty's comment so clearly exposes intense anxieties centered on boundary lines of literature and mass culture but also because Stella's story is so explicitly and centrally concerned with issues of taste and class distinction. In all versions, Stella Dallas depicts in excruciating detail difficulties faced by a working-class woman who marries above her station. Rather than living happily ever after, in Cinderella fashion, Stella quickly alienates her husband with her flashy dress, coarse manners, and lowbrow tastes, and they separate. Although daughter of this mistaken marriage grows up beautiful and refined, it soon becomes clear that Stella's hopeless vulgarity threatens her daughter's social chances. (3) When Laurel loyally refuses to leave her mother to live with her father and his elegant new wife, Stella drives her away, destroying girl's respect by pretending to love a boorish alcoholic whom Laurel loathes. Stella ends up alone and anonymous, but glowing with maternal pride, standing in a dark, rainy street to glimpse through a distant window spectacle of her daughter's new life (in novel, her debut; in films, her wedding to a wealthy young man). Even after being reunited with her married daughter in radio serial depicting the later episodes in life of Stella Dallas, Stella continued to struggle to reconcile her devotion to Laurel with what program's announcer daily described as the differences in their tastes and worlds. (4) The long popularity of this tale suggests that American mass culture throughout first half of twentieth century--particularly those genres created by and for women--was far more attuned to, even obsessed with, intricacies of class distinctions and barriers than usually acknowledged by our myths of America as a classless society. Yet, as story was repeatedly reinvented in new periods and media, we can observe significant shifts both in ways that class distinctions are defined and in degree of sympathy given to Stella's aspirations. …

Imagine there's no woman: ethics and sublimation

Jacques Lacan claimed that his theory of feminine sexuality, including infamous proposition, the Woman does not exist, constituted a revision of his earlier work on the ethics of psychoanalysis. In Imagine There's No Woman, Joan Copjec shows how Freud's ragtag, nearly incoherent notion of sublimation was refashioned by Lacan to become key term in his ethics. To trace link between feminine being and Lacan's ethics of sublimation, Copjec argues, one must take negative proposition about woman's existence not as just another nominalist denunciation of thought's illusions about existence of universals, but as recognition of power of thought, which posits and gives birth to difference of objects from themselves. While relativist position currently dominant insists on difference between my views and another's, Lacan insists on this difference within object I see. The popular position fuels disaffection with which we regard a world in a state of decomposition, whereas Lacanian alternative urges our investment in a world that awaits our invention.In book's first part, Copjec explores positive acts of invention/sublimation: Antigone's burial of her brother, silhouettes by young black artist Kara Walker, Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills, and Stella Dallas's final gesture toward her daughter in well-known melodrama. In second part, focus shifts to sublimation's adversary, cruelly uncreative superego, as Copjec analyzes Kant's concept of radical evil, envy's corruption of liberal demands for equality and justice, and difference between sublimation and perversion. Maintaining her focus on artistic texts, she weaves her arguments through discussions of Pasolini's Salo, film noir classic Laura, and Zapruder film of Kennedy assassination.

Charles Chesnutt's Cultural Exchange: Race and the Reading of Melodrama in "Her Virginia Mammy"

Late nineteenth-century African-American literature is undergoing a renaissance, signaled by both the re-publication of fiction and non-fiction at academic presses and increased scholarly attention to works of such turn-of-the-century writers as Frances Harper, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt.1 Within the last fifteen years, many critics have successfully situated these texts within African-American cultural traditions. Yet expressive forms like sentimentalism and melodrama that are central to much popular mainstream literature and to Harper's, Hopkins's, and Chesnutt's writing have not drawn as much serious attention. In spite of Hazel Carby's, Carla Peterson's, and Claudia Tate's intelligent treatments of sentimental and melodramatic AfricanAmerican women's texts, great doubt remains about whether melodrama's formulas can bear the weight of the serious issues, such as racial disharmony and social alienation, that turn-of-thecentury African-American writers insistently portrayed. Countering such limiting appraisals is necessary if we are to see individual works and their possible cultural effects more completely. Closely examining Chesnutt's Her Virginia Mammy (1899), a short story about a biracial woman's passing into white society, sheds light both on melodrama's complicated narrative mechanisms and on its complex address to readers. Indeed, like other melodramas of cultural transgression, such as Sui Sin Far's The Wisdom of the New, Chesnutt's story illustrates melodrama's capacity to speak to different audiences by presenting and affirming conceptions of character and moral values that would seem to be diametrically opposed. In many ways, however, Her Virginia Mammy seems to confirm many critics' and readers' assumptions about melodrama's tendency to offer a formulaic, unambiguous rendering of experience that plays to audience members' facile emotions. Like other melodramas of racial passing, Her Virginia Mammy foregrounds a biracial protagonist's efforts to suppress her complex racial heritage and to identify herself as white. And like such popular maternal melodramas as East Lynne, Stella Dallas, and Imitation of Life,

Fashion, Visibility, and Class Mobility in Stella Dallas

Fashion, Visibility, and Class Mobility in Stella Dallas

Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman

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 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.

Deviant eyes, deviant bodies: sexual re-orientations in film and video

Engaging feminist and queer theory ranging from Nancy Chodorow to Judith Butler to Valerie Solanis's SCUM Manifesto, Straayer considers the wealth of films made by and for nontraditional viewers. Straayer investigation ranges from Stella Dallas to Mrs. Doubtfire, experimental lesbian and gay films from the classic Maedchen in Uniform to the contemporary Go Fish, and music video icons such as David Bowie, Dead or Alive, and Divine to investigate transgressions of traditional gender boundaries.

Agency and Stella Dallas : Audience, Melodramatic Directives, and Social Determinism in 1920s America

Agency and Stella Dallas : Audience, Melodramatic Directives, and Social Determinism in 1920s America

A woman's view: how Hollywood spoke to women, 1930-1960

Now, Voyager, Stella Dallas, Leave Her to Heaven, Imitation of Life, Mildred Pierce, Gilda...these are only a few of the hundreds of that poured out of Hollywood during the thirties, forties, and fifties - films that not only delivered on their inherent promise to entertain but also opened a door to the Other, the Something Else, that audiences came to the theater yearning to see and feel, if only for a couple of hours. Films widely disparate in subject, sentiment, and technique, they nonetheless shared one dual purpose: to provide the audience (of women, primarily) with temporary liberation into a screen dream - of romance, sexuality, luxury, suffering, or even wickedness - and then send it home reminded of, reassured by, and resigned to the fact that no matter what else she might do, a woman's most important job was...to be a woman. Now, with boundless knowledge and infectious enthusiasm, Jeanine Basinger illuminates the various surprising and subversive ways in which women's films delivered their message. Basinger examines dozens of films, exploring the seemingly intractable contradictions at the convoluted heart of the woman's genre - among them, the dilemma of the strong and glamorous woman who cedes her power when she feels it threatening her personal happiness, and the self-abnegating woman whose selflessness is not always as noble as it appears. Basinger looks at the stars who played these women (Kay Francis, Barbara Stanwyck, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Susan Hayward, Myrna Loy, and a host of others) and helps us understand the qualities - the right off-screen personae, the right on-screen attitudes, the right faces, the right figures forcarrying the right clothes - that made them personify the woman's film and equipped them to make believable drama or comedy out of the crackpot plots, the conflicting ideas, and the exaggerations of real behavior that characterize these movies. In each of the films the author discus