Abstract
Stanley Cavell’s approach to film is distinguished by his insistence on a deep connection between the recurring preoccupations of certain classical Hollywood genres, on the one hand, and the philosophical problem of other minds skepticism, on the other. In his groundbreaking 1981 book Pursuits of Happiness, Cavell argued that a series of films he dubbed “comedies of remarriage” represent profound and original sources of thought about the conditions in which one can come to know the subjectivity of another. According to Cavell, these films demonstrate how this knowledge is achieved, not through an abstract intellectual argument, but through a certain mode of living together: a practice of marriage that Cavell calls, following John Milton, a “meet and happy conversation.” In this chapter, I focus on Cavell’s attempt, in his 1996 book Contesting Tears, to elaborate a “companion genre” to the remarriage comedies, one that he terms “the melodrama of the unknown woman.” This later work is remarkably ambitious in its attempt to bring the themes of Cavell’s earlier writings on film into a closer conversation with some of the characteristic concerns of feminism, especially the structural injustice built into traditional forms of marriage. Through his renewed openness to doubt about whether marriage can constitute a scene of genuine acknowledgment between men and women, the Cavell of Contesting Tears presents a profound challenge to his own earlier work. For all of its ambitions, however, Contesting Tears has the air of an unfulfilled promise: it has neither found a comfortable place in Cavell’s oeuvre nor been warmly received by the feminist thinkers he hoped to engage. I aim to celebrate the ambitions of Contesting Tears, to explain why the project failed and to draw a series of lessons from its failure for how we should inherit Cavell’s approach to aesthetic understanding.
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Notes
- 1.
Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Hereafter abbreviated PH.
- 2.
Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Hereafter abbreviated CT.
- 3.
For the reception of Cavell’s work on melodrama among students of his work generally, see Timothy Gould, “Review of Contesting Tears,” Philosophy in Review 17 (1997): 241–43; Espen Hammer, Stanley Cavell (London: Polity, 2002), pp. 113–18; and Richard Eldridge, Stanley Cavell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 221–30.
- 4.
Cavell has explored these connections in a number of contexts: in addition to his film work, perhaps the other most notable example is his writings about Shakespeare’s plays; see especially “Othello and the Stake of the Other” and “Recounting Gains, Showing Losses: Reading The Winter’s Tale,” both collected in Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Updated ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
- 5.
In this sense, my reading of the melodramas actually brings them much closer to the remarriage comedies than Cavell does: in my view, both genres uphold (successful) marriage as a privileged scene of acknowledgment, in particular acknowledgment between men and women. In the melodramas, the failure of this scene corresponds to a general failure of acknowledgment.
- 6.
“Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say? A Book of Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
- 7.
“Knowing and Acknowledging,” 263.
- 8.
PH 88.
- 9.
CT 54.
- 10.
CT 117.
- 11.
In CT , Cavell introduces two more specific doubts about the marriages depicted in the remarriage comedies. First, he points to the persistent “privileging of the male” in the education of the woman: “In these comedies the creation of the woman … takes the form of the woman’s education by the man; hence a critical clause in the story these films tell and retell is the discerning of what it is about this man that fits him to be chosen by this woman to provide that authorization of her, of let us say her desire. This suggests a privileging of the male still within this atmosphere of equality. The genre scrutinizes this in the ways, even in this atmosphere, the male is declared, at his best, to retain a taint of villainy. This so to speak prepares the genre for its inner relation to melodrama” [CT 5]. Second, he notes the absence of the mother-child relationship in the remarriage comedies: “The woman is virtually never shown with her mother and is never shown to be a mother. Whether the absence of literal mothering is the permanent price or punishment for the womanʼs happiness, or whether a temporary and mysterious aberration of a disordered world, is not decided. What is decided is that the happiness achieved in remarriage is not uncontaminated, not uncompromised” [CT 116]. Both the “villainy” of the male and the mother-child relation are central themes of the melodramas.
- 12.
CT 4. Cavell largely defines the relation between companion genres as one of negation: thus characteristic features of the remarriage comedy are negated in the melodrama of the unknown woman. For example, the melodramas negate the role of marriage in the education of the woman. As Cavell puts it: “The chief negation of these comedies by these melodramas is the negation of marriage itself—marriage in them is not necessarily reconceived and therewith provisionally affirmed, as in remarriage comedy, but rather marriage as a route to creation, to a new or an original integrity, is transcended and perhaps reconceived” [CT 6]. The concept of companion genres seems to me in general a rich and promising one. But I suspect that thinking of the relation between companion genres as one of negation is overly narrow and itself a cause of Cavell’s difficulties in CT. Here it leads Cavell to assume that both genres must contain “a route to creation,” but in one case this route leads through marriage, in the other not.
- 13.
CT 127.
- 14.
CT 33. These characterizations of feminist film scholarship are disputed by E. Ann Kaplan, “Review of Contesting Tears,” Film Quarterly 52 (1998): 77–81.
- 15.
Cavell identifies Tania Modleski’s “Time and Desire in the Woman’s Film” Cinema Journal 23 (1984): 19–30 and Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16 (1975): 6–18, as paradigmatic instances of the kind of feminist criticism he seeks to resist in Contesting Tears. Cavell’s writing on melodrama has in turn been criticized by feminist scholars: see Modleski, “Editorial Notes: Reply to Cavell”, Critical Inquiry 16 (1990): 237–44, and Feminism without Women: Culture and Criticism in a ‘Postfeminist’ Age (New York: Routledge, 1991); E. Ann Kaplan, “Review of Contesting Tears”; and Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
- 16.
Cavell sometimes presents the withdrawal of the melodrama women from marriage only as a necessary prologue to the reconfiguration of marriage in their worlds. Thus he writes that “the experience of being unknown” as it appears in the melodramas may be regarded as a starting point, after which “marriage is to be reconceived” [CT 22]. From this point of view, however, he should not say that the women of the melodramas themselves complete a transition to integrity, or that they have transcended marriage.
- 17.
CT 6.
- 18.
CT 47.
- 19.
CT 7.
- 20.
In a similar vein, Cavell speaks of the melodrama women as making a “certain choice of solitude… as the recognition that the terms of one’s intelligibility are not welcome to others” [CT 12]. Like the language of “talents and tastes,” this language of choice seems at once to underestimate the degree to which the melodrama women are limited from the outset to a set of bad options, and to overstate the degree to which they succeed in finding “terms of intelligibility,” even for themselves.
- 21.
Cavell notes that irony is the distinctive mark of the unknown woman’s language. He writes that “Something in the language of the unknown woman melodrama must bear … the weight borne by the weight of conversation in the case of remarriage comedy… I identify this opposing feature of language as that of irony” [CT 47]. He goes on to note that it “serves to isolate the woman of this melodrama from everyone around her” [CT 117]. It seems to me he fails, however, to take full account of the implications of this observation.
- 22.
Gaslight, George Cukor, dir., 114 minutes, MGM Studios, 1944/2006, DVD.
- 23.
CT 48.
- 24.
CT 60–61.
- 25.
For other approaches to deepening the dialogue between Cavell’s work and feminism, see Nancy Bauer, How to Do Things with Pornography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015); Teresa De Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994); Sandra Laugier, “The Ethics of Care as a Politics of the Ordinary,” New Literary History 46 (2015): 217–40; and Toril Moi, “‘I am a Woman’: The Personal and the Philosophical,” in What is a Woman? And Other Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) and “Literature and Philosophy, Cavell and Beauvoir,” in Richard Eldridge, ed., Stanley Cavell and Literary Studies: Consequences of Skepticism (New York: Continuum, 2011).
- 26.
One of the great merits of Cavell’s approach in this area is that it resists the tendency, prevalent in much other work on philosophy and film, to read already fully formed philosophical questions into films and to ask how a given film “answers” those questions. Cavell instead takes the films as, among other things, an invitation to shift our sense of what a certain familiar philosophical question is really about; see, for example, his remarks on his juxtaposition of Capra and Kant in PH 9–10. I say more about this difference in ways of connecting philosophy and film in “The Meaning of Life and the Pottersville Test,” Film and Philosophy 17 (2013): 38–46.
- 27.
For an exemplary treatment of a character archetype in this spirit, see Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” in The Immediate Experience: Movies, Comics, Theatre and Other Aspects of Popular Culture (Enlarged ed., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
- 28.
In “Virtue Ethics and Literary Imagination,” Philosophy and Literature 42 (2018): 244–56, I raise a set of related worries about philosophers’ tendency to focus on character in their readings of literary texts.
- 29.
This chapter started life as my contribution to a colloquium on Cavell held at The New School for Social Research in the fall of 2016. I am grateful to Zed Adams for organizing that event and to my audience for thoughtful discussion. I have also benefitted from subsequent exchanges about Cavell, melodrama and feminism with Norton Batkin and Sandra Laugier. The chapter was improved enormously by perceptive comments from Erica Holberg and Dan Wack. Finally, I am indebted to Garry L. Hagberg for suggesting that it might find a home in this volume.
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Elliott, J.R. (2018). Other Minds and Unknown Women: The Case of Gaslight. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97466-8_2
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