Precocious Charms by Studlar Gaylyn

Author:Studlar, Gaylyn
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520255579
Publisher: University of California Press

FIGURE 54. Jones as a ghostly girl who inspires a failing artist (Joseph Cotten). Portrait of Jennie (dir. William Dieterle, 1948). Author's collection.

Nowell-Smith's account is in keeping with Freud's understanding of hysteria as developed from his case studies. In one of the most important, Freud narrativized his analysis of fourteen-year-old Ida Bauer, whom he called “Dora” (after a servant girl) in his case study, “Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria.”13 Ida Bauer suffered from various symptoms without organic causes, including a limp.14 Interested in hysteria's sexual etiology, Freud became fascinated with Ida Bauer's rejection of the sexual advances of a middle-aged man ("Herr K.”), whose wife was the mistress of her father. Revising his belief that hysteria was based on the repression of memories of sexual trauma (frequently the result of fathers molesting their daughters), Freud decided Dora's/Ira's hysterical symptoms were somatic expressions, the work of the unconscious that converted troubling ideation (her repressed desire for Herr K.) that the subject did not want to bring into consciousness.

Although much of film theory builds on Freud's concept of hysterical conversion to explain melodrama, the sexual etiology of hysteria is sometimes obscured in this scholarship. In his pioneering analysis of Duel in the Sun Robin Wood asserts that “the star image of Jennifer Jones is centred on hysteria” Wood defines hysteria very broadly, “in its wider, popular sense.” He sees hysteria almost exclusively as ideological, as women's instinctive breaking of patriarchal rules.15 Wood's approach is in keeping with feminists such as Catherine Clément and Hélène Cixous, who celebrate hysteria as a woman's response to powerlessness rather than as evidence of the hyperbolic body that acts out an internal struggle over sexual desire and identity.16

While vital to targeting Jones's importance, Wood's analysis desexualizes hysteria in relation to the performance of femininity; this avoids theoretical challenges and historical complexities. Therefore, I am returning to a psychoanalytically informed definition of hysteria in which sexual conflict is at the core of the phenomenon. I will consider hysteria as a process that signifies, as one psychoanalyst suggests, both “an exaggerated feminine aspect—emotional, impulsive and infantile—a caricature of feminine nature” and crucial evidence of an internalized “battle between the sexes” that is somatically “enacted in the body.”17 I am operating from the assumption that, within midcentury film melodrama, hysteria was not necessarily an accurate representation of then current or past psychiatric thought but was exaggerated and mythologized as a rhetorical tool to address the troubled process of gendering women—especially adolescent or juvenated females—within a society that was anxious about youthful female sexuality.

Jones's films serve as a fictional model of hysterical, juvenated femininity that resonated with contemporary concerns. Psychoanalysis was popularized in the United States in the 1940s. As World War II put a strain on American social norms and shifted expectations for femininity, the use of psychoanalysis and psychology to monitor fighting men would be applied to females, including teenage girls, in and out of film. Concerns about female sexuality were reflected broadly in U.S. culture and in Hollywood melodrama as symptomatic of that culture.

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