SOURCE: "Time and Desire in the Woman's Film," in German Film & Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, edited by Eric Rentschler, Methuen, 1986, pp. 326-36.

[In the following essay, originally published in 1984, Modleski examines the melodramatic elements in Ophuls's Letter from an Unknown Woman.]

Max Ophuls' 1948 film, Letter from an Unknown Woman, which is set in turn-of-the-century Vienna, begins late at night with the hero of the story, Stefan, returning by coach to his home and promising to fight a duel at dawn. That his attitude toward the situation is utterly frivolous is obvious from his remark as he steps out of the coach: 'Gentlemen, I don't so much mind being killed, but you know how I hate to get up in the morning.' Reaching his home, he tells his mute servant, John, that they should prepare for immediate departure since he does not intend to fight the duel. At stake here is a man's word. 'A man's word is his honour', and, as Adrienne Rich observes, this notion of honour usually has 'something to do with killing'.¹ The terms of drama seem already to have been posed with utter clarity. Stefan lives a life of ease, indulgence, and irresponsibility, unwilling to accept the values of duty and sacrifice espoused by his patriarchal society.

We might suspect, then, that the film's movement will involve Stefan's coming to repudiate the former childishness of his ways and to acknowledge the sway of patriarchal law. And indeed the final sequence of the film shows Stefan bravely setting off to keep his word and get himself killed. Thus, though the body of the film concerns the story of Lisa, the woman referred to in the title, it would appear that her story is really a story of and for the man, and, looked at this way, the film seems to provide exceptionally strong support for those critics who contend that there is no such thing as a woman's film, that Hollywood films are always dramas of and for the male.

When Stefan enters the house, he is given a letter which begins, 'By the time you read this, I may be dead'. It is the letter from the unknown woman who has indeed lived her life in and for Stefan, has even had a child by him, and yet has remained silent about her life-long devotion until her words, written in death's shadow, can no longer possibly bring her any benefit. At stake, then, is not only a man's word, but a woman's silence. At one point in the film, Lisa explains her radical refusal to speak about her own and their son's existence; I wanted to be the one woman you had known who never asked you for anything.' As Lisa perceives it, to speak as a woman would mean losing herself and becoming an object like the many other women in Stefan's life. However, when her own impending death releases her from her vow of silence, she only reveals how little of herself there is to know, so thoroughly has she become one with the man. Lisa's is the classic dilemma of what psychoanalysis calls the hysterical woman, caught between two equally alienating alternatives: either identifying with the man or being an object of his desire.

'Silence is the mark of hysteria', writes Hélène Cixous. 'The great hysterics have lost speech, they are aphonic, and at times they have lost more than speech. They are pushed to the point of choking, nothing gets through.'² It seems fair to say that many of the classic film melodramas from the 30s through the 50s are peopled by great, or near-great, hysterics—women possessed by an overwhelming desire to express themselves, to make themselves known, but continually confronting the difficulty, if not the impossibility of realising this desire. In the various film versions of Madame X (another title signalling the woman's anonymity), the heroine's son is defending her from criminal charges, unaware that the woman is his mother. Though she longs to reveal herself to her son, she refuses to speak, for fear of ruining his status and career. In The Old Maid, Bette Davis's character, who has had a child out of wedlock, masquerades as the old maid aunt to her own daughter so that the daughter may marry a suitable—rich, upper-class—man. And Stella Dallas, on becoming aware of her hopelessly lower-class life-style, pretends to be interested in having a sexual affair in order to provoke her daughter to leave her. The central truth about Stella's feelings—that she loves her daughter to the exclusion of all else—remains unexpressed to the end.

In a short but illuminating article on film melodrama, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith has theorised a close connection between melodrama and conversion hysteria. He claims that castration is always at issue in Hollywood melodrama because 'melodrama is fundamentally concerned with the child's problems of growing up into a sexual identity within the family, under the aegis of a symbolic law which the Father incarnates.'³ Now this applies to all the aforementioned films, and perhaps most obviously to Letter from an Unknown Woman, in which the duel may be understood as the castration Stefan finally comes to accept. But, Nowell-Smith argues, acceptance of castration never occurs without repression, and in melodrama, what is repressed at the level of the story often returns through the music or the mise en scène. Hence melodrama's resemblance to conversion hysteria, in which 'the energy attached to an idea that has been repressed returns converted into a bodily symptom.'⁴ Although Nowell-Smith's argument is persuasive, he never notes that traditionally medical science and psychoanalysis have labelled women hysterics.⁵ Yet surely we find here a clue as to why for a large period of film history melodrama and the 'woman's film' have been virtually synonymous terms. If women are hysterics in patriarchal culture because, according to the feminist argument, their voice has been silenced or repressed, and if melodrama deals with the return of the repressed through a kind of conversion hysteria, perhaps women have been attached to the genre because it provides an outlet for the repressed feminine voice.

Peter Brooks argues in his book on nineteenth-century stage melodrama that melodrama may even be defined as a genre which works to overcome all repression in order to achieve full expressivity. In the nineteenth century, it was the beauty of moral virtue that continually sought expression over whatever attempted to silence, or negate it. Often this beauty would be conveyed in visual terms, in the form, say, of a tableau. Nevertheless, melodrama is not primarily about the problems of sight and insight—the problems, that is, of tragedy. Brooks makes this point nicely in his discussion of the special place of the mute in many melodramatic plays:

One is tempted to speculate that the different kinds of drama have their corresponding sense deprivations: for tragedy, blindness, since tragedy is about insight and illumination; for comedy, deafness, since comedy is concerned with problems in communication, misunderstandings and their consequences; and for melodrama, muteness, since melodrama is about expression.⁶

One need only point to the importance of the mute servant John in Letter from an Unknown Woman to demonstrate the force of Brooks's remarks. John is melodrama's equivalent to the figure of blind Tiresias in tragedy. He is, finally, the only character who is able to recognise Lisa and to name her, filling in the signature she herself has not been able to complete at the end of her letter.

It is this essentially melodramatic preoccupation with expression and muteness that Stephen Heath misses when he characterises the entire problem of Letter from an Unknown Woman and of narrative cinema in general as one of 'seeing and knowing'. In effect, Heath is collapsing all genres into one quintessentially masculine genre: tragedy, the paradigmatic example of which is Oedipus, with its privileging of sight and insight. For Heath, the project of the film is to present the woman 'as a desired and untouchable image, an endless vision.'⁸ And indeed a crucial moment of the drama occurs when Stefan, on his way to fight the duel, glances back over his shoulder and sees Lisa standing behind the glass door where he first saw her years ago. The image of the woman, forever silenced, is presented as the lost object whom Stefan may mourn and incorporate, thereby successfully taking up castration. He can now assume his place in patriarchal culture, and Lisa's image disappears from the screen.

But though Heath deplores the repression of the woman effected by turning her into a sight whose only meaning is the insight it offers the man into his life, he himself may be said to maintain this repression. As Brooks points out, melodrama cannot be fully grasped by analysing it solely in terms of seeing and knowing. To continue relying on these terms is to obliterate what may be seeking expression through the women in the films; and it is also to contribute to the hystericisation of the female spectator, who is offered the limited choice between identifying with the man in his active desire or identifying with the passive, apparently mute object of that desire.

But how are we to begin attempting to locate a feminine voice in texts which repress it and which, as we saw in Letter from an Unknown Woman, grant possession of the Word only to men? Nowell-Smith, we have seen, suggests that the repressed aspects of the script reside in the mise en scène. Thomas Elsaesser, in an essay on film melodrama and its historical antecedents, argues that melodrama may best be understood in terms of 'spatial and musical categories' rather than 'intellectual or literary ones'.⁹ Melodrama is, after all, a hybrid form which traditionally combines music and drama. In a brief discussion of the use of fairgrounds and carousels in film melodrama, Elsaesser claims that these motifs 'underscore the main action' and at the same time take on an independent significance. 'What such devices point to', Elsaesser concludes, 'is that in melodrama the rhythm of experience often establishes itself against its value (moral, intellectual).'¹⁰ As wide-ranging as Elsaesser's essay is, tracing the development of melodrama crossculturally through many centuries, he does not address himself to women's particular attraction to the genre. However, it is possible to appropriate his insight for our purposes, and so we will begin by looking at melodrama's rhythm for meanings which are opposed to the male Word.

In Letter from an Unknown Woman, Lisa and Stefan enjoy one night together, and this episode occurs in the middle of the film. They dine, dance, ride in a coach, and visit an amusement park where they sit in a stationary train while on a painted backdrop the scenery of the world revolves around them. Carousel music plays as they discuss the pleasures of travel. When they run out of countries to visit, Stefan pays the attendant to begin again, saying, 'We will revisit the scenes of our youth.' For Lisa these words are prophetic: after losing Stefan for many years and finding him again, she revisits the scenes of their youth in her quest to be reunited with him—returning to the place where they had dinner, buying flowers from a vendor as they had years ago, and going back to his apartments where they once made love. Most painful of all, she revisits the train station where Stefan departed from her so many years before, and this time sends her son away from her—to his death, as it turns out. This excessive repetition characterises many film melodramas, and perhaps reaches its apotheosis in the 1932 film Back Street. At the end of this film the heroine, about to die, revisits in fantasy the scene of her youth when she missed meeting her lover and his mother in the park. As a result of this lost opportunity, she was not able to marry the hero and instead became his mistress, forced to reside in the back street of his life. Her final thoughts materialise on the screen as she pictures herself walking in the dazzling sunlight of the park towards the mother and son who welcome her into their family.

Unlike most Hollywood narratives, which give the impression of a progressive movement towards an end that is significantly different from the beginning, much melodrama gives the impression of a ceaseless returning to a prior state. Perhaps the effect may be compared to sitting in a train watching the world move by, and each time you reach a destination, you discover that it is the place you never really left. In this respect melodrama appears to be quite closely linked to an hysterical experience of time and place. The hysteric, in Freud's famous formulation, suffers from reminiscences. In melodrama, the important moments of the narrative are often felt as eruptions of involuntary memory, to the point where sometimes the only major events are repetitions of former ones. In The Old Maid, for example, four weddings occurring among two generations comprise the large units of the film, huge gaps in time separating some of these units. Melodrama, then, tends to be concerned with what Julia Kristeva calls the 'anterior temporal modalities', these modalities being stereotypically linked with female subjectivity in general (with the 'cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature').¹¹ As Kristeva notes, this conception of time is indissociable from space and is opposed to the idea of time most commonly recognised in Western thought: 'time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival—in other words, the time of history.'¹² The train which first carries Stefan away from Lisa and then takes her son to his death is a train that departs, progresses, and arrives, whereas the train on which Lisa prefers to travel is one which, like the woman, always stays in its place. And as the world turns, visiting inevitably becomes a revisiting.

Two conceptions of time here seem unalterably opposed: the time of repetition, which for Lisa means never entering history, but forever remaining childlike, fixated on the scenes of her youth. And the time of history which Stefan definitively enters at the end of the film when he takes his journey by coach to meet Lisa's husband and his own death. For Stefan this means, as we have already observed, that he must put away childish things and repudiate the self-indulgent life he has been leading in order to become a responsible adult. It is no mere coincidence that Stefan's entry into historical time and adulthood occurs simultaneously with his coming to accept the binding power of the word and the sway of death. For to quote Kristeva, this 'linear time is that of language considered as the enunciation of sentences . . . and . . . this time rests on its own stumbling block, which is also the stumbling block of that enunciation—death.'¹³ And with the entry into historical time and language occurs the birth of desire: Stefan looks back at Lisa with recognition and longing only when the possibility of possessing her is forever lost. In accepting his place in language and history, he must assume a certain relation to desire: one based on an expectation destined to remain eternally unfulfilled.

But I have been a bit disingenuous in considering the antinomy between 'hysterical time' and what Kristeva calls 'obsessional time' to be based on sexual difference. Superficially it appears that in the film woman's time is hysterical time and man's time is obsessional time. Closer analysis, however, reveals that Stefan is the hysteric until the last few moments of the film, whereas Lisa adopts an altogether different relationship to time and desire which points beyond this deadly antinomy. For Stefan is the one who truly suffers from reminiscences. He cannot remember the name or the face of the woman who is the mother of his child and who is also, as the film implies, his muse. In a way, he has had a family, a career, and an entire life and never known it: the woman has lived it for him. When he sees Lisa, he struggles to overcome his forgetting and, in anguish, speaks of something which lies just over the edge of his memory. Unable to remember the woman who alone gives his life significance, Stefan is doomed to an existence of meaningless repetition, especially in relation to women, who become virtually indistinguishable to him. Moreover, it might plausibly be argued that insofar as Lisa is forced to keep repeating events, she is to a certain extent enacting his compulsion, for she herself has not forgotten a single moment with him.

That men may be hysterics too is an important point for feminism. Perhaps we have too quickly and unreservedly accepted theories of feminine hysteria. For if it can be said, as Lisa herself does say, that she has had no life apart from the moments with Stefan and his son, it is equally true that Stefan has had no life except the one Lisa has lived on his behalf. She has undergone all the joys and sorrows attendant on loving, possessing and losing a family while he, the father of that family, has remained oblivious. The woman and her emotional life is what Stefan has repressed and, like John Marcher in Henry James's 'The Beast in the Jungle', he is doomed to keep suffering his fate without ever having known it.

Intuitively, of course, we ally melodrama with the feminine insofar as it is a genre quintessentially concerned with emotional expression. Women in melodrama almost always suffer the pains of love and even death (as in Dark Victory) while husbands, lovers, and children remain partly or totally unaware of their experience. Women carry the burden of feeling for everyone. Letter from an Unknown Woman simply takes this situation to its furthest extreme and shows that though women are hysterics with respect to male desire, men may be hysterics with respect to feminine 'emotion'; unable to experience it directly, they gain access to it only at second hand.

Lisa's letter might be said to perform the 'talking cure' for Stefan. If women are traditionally considered hysterics because, in Catherine Clément's concise formulation, they feel in the body what comes from outside the body, we can again see how Stefan is placed in the position of hysteric, as throughout the long night it takes to read the letter the disembodied feminine voice is repeatedly shown to be speaking through the mute Stefan.¹⁴ And just as Freud said that the hysteric is a visual type of person whose cure consists in making a '"picture" vanish "like a ghost that has been laid to rest", . . . getting rid of it by turning it into words', so too is Stefan cured when after reading Lisa's letter, he looks back at her image behind the glass door, and looks back again to find that the picture has vanished.¹⁵ The ghost of femininity—that spectre that haunts cinema—has been laid to rest.

Stefan's trajectory represents an interesting variant on that which Laura Mulvey claims is typical of one strain of melodrama. In her 'Afterthoughts on Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', she suggests that there is a kind of film in which 'a woman central protagonist is shown to be unable to achieve a stable sexual identity, torn between the deep blue sea of passive femininity and the devil of regressive masculinity.'¹⁶ Mulvey points to Freud's theories of femininity, according to which the young girl first goes through an active masculine phase before attaining the 'correct' feminine position. In Letter from an Unknown Woman, it is the man who first goes through a feminine phase before reaching the active, phallic phase and thus achieving a stable sexual identity. It is possible that Stefan's experience is analogous to that undergone by the male spectator of melodrama. For it may be that insofar as films like this are appealing to men (and there is plenty of evidence to suggest that Letter from an Unknown Woman strongly appeals to male critics), it is because these films provide them with a vicarious, hysterical, experience of femininity which can be more definitively laid to rest for having been 'worked through'.

And it may be that one of the appeals of such a film for women is precisely its tendency to feminise the man, to complicate and destabilise his identity. There is a moment in Letter from an Unknown Woman when confusion in sexual identity reigns supreme—the moment when after years of separation Lisa sees Stefan again at the opera. Briefly we see a close-up of Stefan through a soft focus filter, the device typically used in filming beautiful women. The image appears against a grey background which renders its diegetic status uncertain. The cutting from Lisa to Stefan further enhances this uncertainty, as it is unclear how each is placed in relation to the other and who is looking at whom. Finally, ambiguity reaches almost vertiginous extremes when over the image of Stefan, which is strongly coded to connote what Mulvey calls 'to-be-looked-at-ness', Lisa's voice says in some panic, 'Somewhere out there were your eyes and I knew I couldn't escape them.'¹⁷ Nowell-Smith argues that often the '"hysterical" moment of a text [that is, the moment when the repressed element returns to find expression in a bodily symptom] can be identified as the point at which the realist representative convention breaks down.'¹⁸ Here we find a classic example of an hysterical moment in which the possibility of feminine desire being actively aimed at the passive, eroticised male is briefly glimpsed while being explicitly denied at the verbal level. Interestingly, in Heath's discussion of this scene, he for once listens only to the words, which articulate woman's traditional position as object of the look, and completely misses the subversive element of feminine desire which is struggling for expression in the body of the text.¹⁹

Partly because the erotic is conventionally equated with the feminine, it is paradoxically not the virile, masculinised male, the so-called 'man's man', who elicits woman's desire in many of these films, but the feminine man: the attractive, cosmopolitan type (John Boles in Stella Dallas, Only Yesterday, and the first version of Back Street) or the well-bred, charming foreigner (Charles Boyer in the second version of Back Street; Louis Jourdan in Letter from an Unknown Woman). Moreover, the man with 'feminine' attributes frequently functions as a figure upon whom feminine desires for freedom from patriarchal authority may be projected. Here I disagree with Mulvey who claims that in classic women's films like Stella Dallas the masculine figure enables the heroine to postpone the power of patriarchy.²⁰Stella Dallas, in fact, provides a clear example to the contrary.

At the beginning of the film, Stephen Dallas, played by John Boles, is the son of a failed patriarch. His father, having gone bankrupt, has committed suicide, and Stephen has retreated from the world to take a management position in a rural factory. He is frequently figured as the rather lovely though unwitting object of Stella's desirous gaze as she watches him from behind her white picket fence or stares at his photograph in a newspaper clipping. He seems to be in all ways the antithesis of Stella's harsh and repressive father, and on him Stella pins her hope of escape from this patriarch. In a stunning sequence which ends the opening section of the film, Stella's father discovers that Stella has not been home all night. He sits with his back to the camera in the foreground of the picture and bangs his fist on the table shouting that Stella must never come home again. The mother cowers in the background and Stella's brother stands arguing with his father in the middle ground. This is a scene straight out of a nineteenth-century melodrama in which the stern patriarch prepares to exile his fallen daughter into the cold, cruel world. The sound of Stella's voice interrupts the argument, and the brother opens the door to Stella and Stephen who are coming up the porch stairs announcing their marriage. As the son runs back into the house, the screen door bangs shut on the couple, still outside, and the image fades. Patriarchy and its cruelties and excesses seem to be abruptly left behind, and the next scene shows Stella, now living in the city, returning from the hospital with her new-born daughter. However, the power of patriarchy has merely been postponed, since Stephen proves to be more domineering than Stella can bear. So she relinquishes her desire for men altogether and transfers it exclusively to her daughter.

The feminised man is attractive, then, because of the freedom he seems to offer the woman: freedom to get in touch with and to act upon her own desire and freedom to reject patriarchal power. The latter point is made forcefully in Letter from an Unknown Woman, whose family romance involves two sets of fathers: the true fathers and the false fathers.²¹ The false fathers—representative of patriarchal values and attitudes—are firstly, Lisa's stepfather, a man attached to the military who takes Lisa away from Vienna and attempts to marry her off to a stiff, boring young lieutenant; and, secondly, the stepfather of Lisa's son, a military man always prating about duty, sacrifice, and responsibility. This is the man with whom Stefan is destined to fight the duel. Stefan, the father of Lisa's child, is one of the true fathers. Although he is a womaniser, this activity paradoxically womanises him, for it immerses him in a sensuous existence stereotypically associated with the feminine and running counter to the life of self-denial espoused by Lisa's husband. And then there is Lisa's real father, who, though dead, is very much alive in Lisa's imagination. On the train in the amusement park Lisa tells Stefan of all the make-believe journeys she and her father took when she was a little girl, vividly evoking the pleasures and pains encountered in various climates. Lisa's father strikingly resembles the pre-Oedipal, imaginary father Julia Kristeva has theorised.²² He is the spokesman for creativity and play and as such he represents a potential escape from the two neurotic modes of existence in which Stefan is successively trapped: the hysterical and the obsessional. If Stefan, who could be a great pianist, were to heed the message given him by Lisa through the imaginary father, he would no longer be forced to choose between a sensuous but meaningless and repetitive existence and a life given over to duty and sacrifice.

The 'pre-Oedipal' father is, I would argue, another manifestation of the feminised male who helps the woman reject the repressive father by authorising her own desire. For while Lisa appears here to be doubly an hysteric, invoking the words and activities of one man for the benefit of another, she is actually articulating a relation to the world that in the film is uniquely her own. On the train and elsewhere Lisa demonstrates an allegience to the imagination which she considers superior to lived experience.²³ Clearly this applies to her entire existence, since she has had only one brief interlude with Stefan in a lifetime of desiring him. Like the voyages she took with her father, her journey with Stefan has gone nowhere, has been an adventure mainly of consciousness.

But that it has been conscious makes all the difference. We have seen that Letter from an Unknown Woman enacts a process of mourning for the man. Stefan has forgotten everything he has had and never realised what he could have had, and therefore in reading the letter he must work through the pain of loss and nonfulfilment in order to 'lay the ghost to rest'. Lisa, however, has remained fully aware of what was and what might have been; and having buried nothing she has no need to mourn. Hélène Cixous finds in the question of mourning a difference between men and women. I would like to quote her at length because her words open up the possibility of a new way of thinking about women's experience in melodrama and women's response to melodrama:

Man cannot live without resigning himself to loss. He has to mourn. It's his way of withstanding castration. He goes through castration, that is, and by sublimation incorporates the lost object. Mourning, resigning oneself to loss, means not losing. When you've lost something and the loss is a dangerous one, you refuse to admit that something of yourself might be lost in the lost object. So you 'mourn', you make haste to recover the investment made in the lost object. But I believe women do not mourn, and this is where the pain lies. When you've mourned it's all over after a year, there's no more suffering. Woman, though, does not mourn, does not resign herself to loss. She basically takes up the challenge of loss . . . , seizing it, living it. Leaping. This goes with not withholding; she does not withhold. She does not withhold, hence the impression of constant return evoked by this lack of withholding. It's like a kind of open memory that ceaselessly makes way. And in the end, she will write this not withholding, this not writing; she writes of not writing, not happening.²⁴

On the train which goes nowhere, Lisa describes journeys which did not happen, and the exquisite enjoyment they occasioned. In doing so, she articulates one of the basic pleasures of melodrama, which is also fundamentally about events that do not happen: the wedding that did not occur; the meeting in the park that was missed; and, above all, the word that was not spoken. Not speaking is very different from keeping one's word—the very phrase suggests the withholding and the resistance to loss which Cixous attributed to masculinity. Lisa resists speech not out of a need to hoard the word and not only because she wants to be different from Stefan's other women. Rather, she refuses to hold on to a man who has forgotten her, and what's more important, refuses to hold him to an obligation. Not seeing the relationship in terms of an investment or debt—that is, in terms of the property relations which, according to Cixous, structure masculine sexuality—she will not make him pay. So she takes up the challenge of loss and lives it. And from one point of view this challenge is more radical than the one Stefan takes up at the end of the film, resigning himself to his loss and the fate which consequently awaits him.

Cixous's words invite us to look deeper into the experience of loss which is at the heart of melodrama. After all, what lingers on in our memories long after the films have ended are just those moments when the heroine relinquishes all that has mattered in her life: Lisa saying goodbye to her son at the train station, where he promises, like his father before him, to see her in two weeks; Stella Dallas standing behind an iron fence watching her daughter's wedding through the window; Bette Davis's heroine in Dark Victory waiting in a darkened room for death to overtake her, having cheerfully sent her husband off to a medical convention. Cixous, in a rather poetic manner, suggests that in order to understand women's experience of loss, we must go beyond the traditional psychoanalytic model based on the male's castration anxiety and his relation to the lost object. Nor do we gain in understanding by relegating woman to the position of hysteric, where film critics and theorists have been eager to place her. For though I began this paper by indicating that Lisa, the archetypal melodramatic heroine, seems to fit neatly into the psychoanalytic category of hysteric, I would now like to point to the inadequacy of this model for understanding the position of woman in the woman's film.

The experience Lisa attempts to articulate on the train to nowhere is neither obsessional nor hysterical. It is not obsessional, for it does not entail moving forward through time and space towards an ever-receding goal until one reaches the stumbling block of death. She shows that one can be moved without moving. And it is only superficially the experience of an hysteric. According to Freud, the hysteric, who suffers from reminiscences, is 'linked to place'.²⁵ Now, this would seem accurately to characterise Lisa as she sits in a train that stays in place and reminisces about past journeys with her father. But the point is that Lisa does not suffer from reminiscences, as Stefan does. She voluntarily and even joyfully evokes them, here as elsewhere ceaselessly gives way to them, demonstrating the possession of the 'open memory' Cixous describes. Hence the impression of constant return, which in her case has nothing compulsive about it. In his discussion of the film, Stephen Heath remarks, 'Repetition is the return to the same in order to abolish the difficult time of desire, and the resurgence in that very moment of inescapable difference.'²⁶ This is only partly true: it is true of Stefan, who, because he does not recognise the object of his desire, makes his experience with Lisa a mere repetition of those he has had with other women. For Lisa, however, and perhaps for all the women in melodrama constantly revisiting the scenes of their youth, repetition and return are manifestations of another relationship to time and space, desire and memory, and it is of this difference that the text speaks to me.²⁷

NOTES

¹ Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (New York: Norton, 1979), p. 186.

² Hélène Cixous, 'Castration or 'Decapitation?' trans. Annette Kuhn, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1, Autumn 1981, p. 49.

³ Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, 'Minnelli and Melodrama' (reprinted in this anthology, pp. 70-74).

⁴ Ibid., p. 73.

⁵ A point made in passing by Griselda Pollock in her 'Report on the Weekend School', which appears in Screen vol. 18, no. 2, p. 109.

⁶ Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 56-7.

⁷ Stephen Heath, 'The Question Oshima', in Questions of Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981), p. 148.

⁸ Ibid., p. 146.

⁹ Thomas Elsaesser, 'Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama' (reprinted in this anthology, pp. 43-69).

¹⁰ Ibid., p. 48.

¹¹ Julia Kristeva, 'Women's Time', trans. Alice Jardine and Harry Blake, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1, Autumn 1981, p. 16.

¹² Ibid., p. 17.

¹³ Ibid., p. 17.

¹⁴ Catherine Clément, 'Enslaved Enclave', in New French Feminisms (eds.) Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), p. 134.

¹⁵ Quoted in Joan Copjec, 'Flavit et Dissipati Sunt', October, 18, Fall 1981, p. 21.

¹⁶ Laura Mulvey, 'Afterthoughts on "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" Inspired by "Duel in the Sun'", Framework, nos. 15/16/17, 1981, p. 12.

¹⁷ Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', in Women and the Cinema, (eds.) Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary (New York: Dutton, 1977), p. 418.

¹⁸ Nowell-Smith, 'Minnelli and Melodrama', pp. 70-74 of this anthology.

¹⁹ Heath, Questions of Cinema, p. 148.

²⁰ Mulvey, 'Afterthoughts', p. 15.

²¹ Nowell-Smith discusses the way melodrama 'enacts, often with uncanny literalness, the "family romance" described by Freud—that is to say the imaginary scenario played out by children in relation to their paternity, the asking and answering of the question: whose child am I (or would I like to be)?' See p. 73 of this anthology.

²² Julia Kristeva, 'Woes of Love', lecture given at the Center for Twentieth Century Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 2 November 1982.

²³ For example, on the way to the amusement park, Stefan remarks that he only visits it in the winter, never in the spring when it is so much more beautiful. Lisa replies that perhaps he prefers to imagine its beauties rather than to experience them.

²⁴ Cixous, 'Castration or Decapitation?', p. 54.

²⁵ Quoted in Kristeva, 'Women's Time', p. 15.

²⁶ Heath, Questions of Cinema, p. 156.

²⁷ I would like to thank Kathleen Woodward and the Center for Twentieth Century Studies for generously providing me with a fellowship which enabled me to research and write this essay.