Hysteria and the Camera in Letter from an Unknown Woman

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I am indebted to Paul Young for generously reading drafts of this essay and offering indispensable advice. I am also indebted to Christina Neckles for encouragement and insight at crucial stages of the essay's development.

Donald Jellerson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. He finds that an interest in film studies and psychoanalysis helps him think about renaissance texts, just as his work in renaissance texts helps him think about film and psychoanalysis.

Notes

1. See Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 198–209. Despite the many appropriations, revisions, and criticisms to which Mulvey's essay has been subject, it seems to remain an all but unavoidable reference for feminist film theory. In each of the three recent issues of the feminist film journal Camera Obscura (63–65), for instance, at least one essay prominently features Mulvey's 1975 work. In Camera Obscura 64, no less than three of the issue's essays cite Mulvey. Yvonne Rainer's brief essay in Camera Obscura 63 poignantly describes the “cri de coeur” to which Mulvey's essay gave rise in a historical moment in which feminist activism enjoyed a collective sense of urgency unmatched in years since. See Yvonne Rainer, “Mulvey's Legacy,” Camera Obscura 63 (2006): 168–69. Part of my purpose here is to critique Mulvey's essay, yet I do so with a strong sense of respect for and indebtedness to the legacy of feminist film theory.

2. Edward Branigan productively explores the difficulties in locating the narrative point of view in this film, though he believes “that it is marked by a relentlessly masculine attitude.” Narrative Comprehension and Film (London: Routledge, 1992), 177.

3. Tania Modleski, “Time and Desire in the Woman's Film,” Cinema Journal 23:3 (1984), 19–30.

4. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999), 247. The emphasis is Žižek's.

5. Here and throughout, I quote the film from the continuity script edited by Virginia Wright Wexman with Karen Hollinger. Letter from an Unknown Woman: Max Ophuls, Director, (Rutgers University Press, 1986).

6. Jacques Lacan writes the following of his contention that the “unconscious is structured like a language”: “by still preserving this ‘like’ (comme), I am staying within the bounds of what I put forward when I say that the unconscious is structured like a language. I say like so as not to say—and I come back to this all the time—that the unconscious is structured by a language.” On Feminine Sexuality: the Limits of Love and Knowledge, translated by Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 1998), 48. This is important because it interrupts the logic that Mulvey puts forward in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Mulvey bases her argument on the “ultimate challenge: how to fight the unconscious structured like a language (formed critically at the moment of arrival of language) while still caught within the language of patriarchy” (199). Mulvey holds out the threat of a syllogism: if language is patriarchal, and the unconscious is structured like a language, then the unconscious is dominated by the patriarchal. But Lacan makes clear that while the unconscious and language share structural similarities, they are not equivalent; nor does the dominant language directly structure the unconscious. The unconscious, as psychoanalysis makes clear, is more accurately described in relation to the dominant (symbolic) language as a site of negotiation. I also question what I see as a corollary to Mulvey's influential argument as it plays out in film theory. Despite the threat of her syllogism, Mulvey holds out the promise of such a thing as a “female unconscious” (ibid). Feminist critics such as Mary Ann Doane modify Mulvey's argument, but still rely on formulations like “the tendency of psychoanalysis to focus on the male psyche at the expense of that of the female.” Mary Ann Doane, “The ‘Woman's Film’,” in Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, eds. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), 68. Following Judith Butler and others, we do well to ask whether or not there can be such a thing as a “male” or “female” psyche in any stable sense, or whether these terms are always negotiable and in process. See, for instance, Judith Butler, “Introduction” in Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 1–23.

7. Note that these distinctions amount to little more than an entry point into the way in which Letter functions from a psychoanalytic point of view. For a much more complete psychoanalytic theorization of the position of the viewing subject in the cinema in terms of some of the categories I suggest here such as the camera, the dream, and so on, see the seminal book by Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema, translated by Celia Britton et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982). I am aware that my “camera” may be considered a convenient fiction for an ideal spectator, in the same way that the simulacra “Lisa” and “Stefan” are stand-ins for “real” people. It is, in fact, that very fictionality—the gendered constructedness of the positions “Lisa,” “Stefan,” and the negotiating “camera”—that I claim can be best described with the model of hysteria. Some may object to this methodology. For instance, Stephen Prince argues that “questions about how people process, interpret and respond to cinematic images and narratives are empirical questions, or, at the least, incorporate an empirical dimension, which can be investigated by observing the behavior of real viewers.” Empirical data, he suggests, are precisely what psychoanalytic interpretations lack: “psychoanalysis is a discipline without reliable data.” Stephen Prince, “Psychoanalytic Film Theory and the Problem of the Missing Spectator,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, eds. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 72–3. In this essay I will unabashedly argue for an ideal (ultimately hysterical) viewer for this film, in the absence of what Prince might call empirical data. This is a way to fully appreciate the accomplishment of the film, which consists in giving us powerful, convincing simulacra that reveal something about the obsessions and gendered psychic structures of their moment. There is no way around the fact that this is, in some sense, circular. It is a circuit however, that I believe is valid and compelling. It is a way of understanding the film and its reception that I believe empiricism cannot recover, replace, or invalidate.

8. See Elaine Showalter, Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Juliet Mitchell, Mad Men and Medusas: Reclaiming Hysteria (New York: Basic Books, 2000).

9. Micale notes in Approaching Hysteria that, “hysteria is not a disease; rather, it is an alternative physical, verbal and gestural language, an iconic social communication” (182; also qtd. in Showalter, Hystories, 7).

10. Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), 17.

11. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality (New York: Methuen, 1987), 129.

12. To my mind, Stanley Cavell has speculated most profitably on how we might read Stefan's response at the end of the film. See Cavell, “Postscript (1989): To Whom It May Concern,” Critical Inquiry 16 (1990) 264ff; and Cavell, “Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Melodrama of the Unknown Woman,” in The Trial(s) of Psychoanalysis, ed. Francoise Meltzer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 253ff.

13. Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, transl. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton, 2006), 300.

14. On this point, see Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005).

15. Branigan speculates in a related passage: “Modleski's psychoanalytic method and Wood's notion of an alternative plot are ways of interpreting those multiple narrations in the film that create a feeling of uncertainty and anxiety in the spectator. I believe that such approaches also point toward a reconceptualization of that other subjectivity in film—the author—the source, ironically, of a film's objectivity. It may be that the fractured collection of narrations we encounter in a text—including what has been excluded (or, in psychoanalytic terminology, repressed or censored) by a narration—is all that we can ever know about that underlying authorial omniscience that has generated a world of characters. The splitting into many voices is the voice” (191). Branigan's analysis here bears a similarity to my own, yet rather than positing a foreclosed “authorial omniscience,” I attempt to describe the “splitting into many voices” as “the voice” of the camera, which can be more precisely understood by analogy with the negotiation of unconscious processes. In this view, the “uncertainty and anxiety in the spectator” is created by the way in which the film implicates us in the desires and hysteria of its protagonists. Branigan cites the work of Modleski, “Time and Desire,” and Robin Wood, Sexual Politics and Narrative Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

16. The film also links patriarchy with sartorial concerns such that control of clothing becomes a metonymy for control of women. A later scene will make this clear. Working at a dress shop, Lisa models a dress for an older man. The man presses the shop owner not about purchasing the dress, but about what we take to be a purchase of Lisa herself. Other scenes follow in which jewelry and clothing signify ownership of women.

17. Following Charcot, Freud calls the consistent inability to recognize one's own symptomology or its effect on others the “belle indifférence of a hysteric.” Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, transl. James Strachey (New York: Basic Books, 1957), 135.

18. See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, transl. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton, 1961), 12. Modleski also deals extensively with this phrase from Freud, linking reminiscence and “ceaseless returning” alternately to Stephan, Lisa, and melodrama itself: “in this respect melodrama appears to be quite closely linked to an hysterical experience of time and place” (23). Modleski ends, however, by insisting on a gendering of a certain kind of “repetition and return” as a feminine “relationship to time and space”—“and it is of this difference that the text speaks to me” (29). I suggest that the camera itself hysterically “suffers from reminiscences” even as it stages the cyclical returns of both masculinized and feminized hysterical symptoms. The camera implicates us in the desires and hysteria of both protagonists. To separate out feminized from masculinized “manifestations” of “repetition and return” and selectively privilege one over the other is certainly possible (as the varied response to this film shows), but, to my mind, it minimizes and works against the film's accomplishment, which is to hystericize its viewer and destabilize and multiply gendered identifications. Another way of saying this in the parlance of recent gender theory is to suggest that the film works to encourage a “queer” viewer. As queer theory teaches us, in Lee Edelman's words, “queerness can never define an identity; it can only ever disturb one” (No Future, Durham: Duke University Press (2004), 17).

19. Jacques Lacan, “Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis,” in Écrits, 108.

20. My argument here aligns with the work of Gaylyn Studlar, whose excellent analysis suggests that, accepting certain theoretical modifications, “female masochism” is the proper frame for understanding the film. My sense of the applicability of “hysteria” is meant to include “masochism” as a subset in a broader model. My reservation about Studlar's analysis, however, is that she must assign to Lisa a pre-oedipal (and female) etiology for her masochism. I prefer an examination of the etiology specifically provided for us by the film rather than an extrapolation of psychic events that are not supplied. As Lisa herself reminds us, her “birthday” is the moment we see her appear on the screen (36). Gaylyn Studlar, “Masochistic Performance and Female Subjectivity in Letter from an Unknown Woman,” MLN 98 (1983), 25–57. See also Glynis Kinnan, “His Story Next to Hers: Masochism and (Inter)Subjectivity in Letter from an Unknown Woman,” Style 32 (2001), 258–69.

21. At the introduction of the young Lieutenant we hear obsessively about “honor.” His uncle introduces him, saying, “may I have the honor to present my nephew,” and the young man salutes and kisses the hands of the ladies, saying “I have the honor to kiss your hand” and to Herr Kastner, “I have the honor sir.” The overdetermined information about who has the “honor” here is complemented by such elements as ringing church bells, pious bible-carrying, and the military dress of the men. But the young man admits to playing “second trumpet” as a cadet, unaware of the (again phallic) double endendre, his rival a famous musician to whom he is destined to play “second trumpet” in Lisa's estimation. In response to his offer of marriage and his “qualifications for an outstanding military career,” Lisa rejects him. At the same time, Lisa refuses the mise-en-scène as the materialization of a psychic threat: the bibles, bells, and white dresses that draw everyone toward the church, the swords and military music enforcing the tempo and character of life in Linz, and so on.