Pepsi and the Pill: Motherhood, Politics and Film in Britain and France, 1958–1969 9781800736924

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Pepsi and the Pill

PEPSI AND THE PILL Motherhood, Politics and Film in Britain and France, 1958–1969   

Melissa Oliver-Powell

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2023 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2023 Melissa Oliver-Powell All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Oliver-Powell, Melissa, author. Title: Pepsi and the pill : motherhood, politics and film in Britain and France, 1958-1969 / Melissa Oliver-Powell. Description: [New York] : Berghahn Books, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022019191 (print) | LCCN 2022019192 (ebook) | ISBN 9781800736917 (hardback) | ISBN 9781800736924 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Motherhood in motion pictures. | Motion pictures— Political aspects—Great Britain. | Motion pictures—Political aspects—France. | Motion pictures—Social aspects—Great Britain. | Motion pictures—Social aspects—France. | Counterculture in motion pictures. | LCGFT: Film criticism. Classification: LCC PN1995.9.M63 O55 2023 (print) | LCC PN1995.9.M63 (ebook) | DDC 791.43/65252—dc23/ eng/20220524 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019191 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022019192 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-80073-691-7 hardback ISBN 978-1-80073-692-4 ebook https://doi.org/10.3167/9781800736917

Contents   

Acknowledgements

vi

Introduction. Generation Pepsi

1

Part I. ‘Conception’

35

Chapter 1. Maternal Products and the British Kitchen Sink

42

Chapter 2. The Mass Reproduction of Mothering: Une Femme Mariée and Le Bonheur

61

Part II. ‘Gestation’ Chapter 3. The ‘Permissive’ Myth: Conservatism, Change and Contraception in Swinging London Chapter 4. Scene and Unscene: Reimagining Abortion in La Génération Pepsi Part III. ‘Delivery’

87 96 133 173

Chapter 5. Whose Lineage is it Anyway? Migration and Racist Futurities

178

Chapter 6. Queer Communities and Queer Failures in British Film

220

Conclusion. Reproducing the Future

245

Bibliography

250

Filmography

262

Index

265

Acknowledgements   

My heartfelt thanks go to Deborah Martin and Stephanie Bird, my doctoral supervisors at UCL, for their invaluable input and support with this project in its first life. This book would not have been possible without their rigour and encouragement at every stage, for which I am immensely grateful. My thanks also to Jo Evans and Claire Lindsay at UCL and to Emma Wilson at Corpus Christi College Cambridge for their belief in this research and their thoughtful comments and excellent suggestions during the upgrade and Viva processes. Thank you also to Claire Thomson at UCL, through whose fascinating teaching on Nordic cinemas I discovered my passion for European film as an undergraduate, and Florian Mussgnug, who started me on a pathway towards an academic career. Lastly from UCL, I am forever thankful to Roland François Lack. This book, and my way of thinking about cinema as a whole, would certainly not be what it is without his irreplaceable influence. His unique and inspiring passion, and incomparable knowledge of French cinema are greatly missed. I developed this book over three years as an early career academic at the University of Exeter and would like to thank my colleagues in the film department there for the tremendous amount of support, inspiration and wisdom they offered during that time. In particular, I am immensely grateful to Fiona Handyside for many late evening conversations about Godard, Varda, Rohmer and Jean Seberg over many glasses of wine, conversations which sparked new directions for the fourth chapter of this book. I also want to thank the inimitable Benedict Morrison for three years of transformative discussions on queer theory. I am also very grateful to my current department at the University of York, in particular for the professional support I have had from Helen Smith and Erica Sheen in working through the final stages of this book. Thank you also to Janine Bradbury for sharing with me her excellent ongoing research on passing in anglophone literature, which opened up new ways of thinking about Sapphire in Chapter Five. I am grateful also to Amanda Horn and Sulaiman Ahmad at Berghahn Books for their patience, kindness and enthusiasm throughout the editorial process, and to the anonymous reviewers, whose thorough and reflective comments were tremendously valued in bringing this book into the world. And finally, all my love and admiration, as always, go to my wife, Aimee, without whom nothing would be as bright.

INTRODUCTION

Gendering ‘Generation Pepsi’   

‘Ce film pourrait s’appeler… les enfants de Marx et de Coca-Cola.’ ‘This film could have been called … The children of Marx and Coca-Cola.’

This phrase, originally appearing in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1966 Masculin féminin, became famous not only as an alternative title for the film but also as an aphorism for the prevailing moods of youth culture in 1960s Western Europe. The statement appears towards the end of the film, as one of the typically Godardian intertitles that occur abruptly and unpredictably throughout its duration, disrupting languid sequences of the day-to-day experiences of young Parisians and their meandering flirtations with sexual and political maturity. In the preceding scene, two of the film’s secondary characters, Catherine and Robert, talk in a kitchen. More monologue than dialogue, the conversation is dominated by Robert – a vociferous armchair socialist – who oscillates between prying into Catherine’s sex life and sermonizing about revolution, labour and the completion of activities, while in back of shot, Catherine quietly completes the washing up. Godard’s film is led by a cast of baffled youth. Along with Robert, the film’s protagonist, Paul, talks earnestly about workers’ rights, but forgets ongoing strikes; endlessly discusses sex, but shrinks bashfully from the sight of his own semi-naked body; and in his day job as a survey taker, insistently directs at women questions that he is himself hopelessly unprepared to answer. Paul’s naivety is often comical, but the interest of Godard’s collocation of Marx and Coca-Cola persists in its concise expression of the noise, excitement and contradiction of a generation navigating multiple deluges of change from cultural, political, economic and technological fronts. On the one hand, ‘the children of Marx’ seemed to indicate the growing political consciousness of the postwar generation and its palpable appetite for social change and new ideas (or at least the expression of new ideas), erupting in the short-lived but seismic student protests of May 1968. On the other, ‘the children of Coca-Cola’ became symbolic of a very different type of revolution, taking place on the cultural-

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commercial frontier of everyday life. The juggernaut soda brand here represented the increasing influence on Western European youth of Americanization, globalized mass production, popular culture and hyper-commercialism, with its feverish collage of bright advertisements and branded decadence. As is further suggested by the two alternative titles of Godard’s film, sexuality and youth permeate the entire equation. After all, though the student movements of 1968 burgeoned to address myriad societal discontents, the tinderbox issue in France was the repression of sexuality through gender segregation in university dormitories. The imaginaries of this decade, moreover, have often been strikingly Oedipal in tone; in reflections on the period in France and Britain, its youth-driven dissent has frequently been characterized as a series of revolts against the father figures of the previous generation, both institutionally – personified in leaders such as General de Gaulle and Prime Minister Harold Macmillan – and culturally, as in Truffaut’s famously scathing critique of the ‘cinéma de papa’ (‘dad cinema’). The idea of ‘children’, therefore, is as significant as that of Marx or Coca-Cola. Godard’s phrase maintains in its construction a more or less triadic understanding of the two-parent nuclear family. However, if the mid-sixties generation have as their parents Karl Marx and Coca-Cola™, then they surely emerge from an immaculate conception. Marx may be a chosen, intellectual father, but the generation is, apparently, motherless. If Coca-Cola was thought to occupy this position, then it is (mass) reproduction itself, not a thinking being, that is at stake: the function of motherhood at its most mechanical level, but absolutely no mothering subject. After all, women in general occupy quite a different space to men within this construction. While the young sons of Marx and Coca-Cola vacillate between solicitous subject positions as militants or consumers, the women of this generation are confronted not only with their own relationship to political agency and consumer subjectivities, but by a mass culture that positions them and their bodies as commodity forms. Such duality is reflected in Masculin féminin in particular through Madeleine, Paul’s love interest, who is developing a promising career as a pop singer and who, shortly after the intertitles meditating on the ‘children of Marx and Coca-Cola’, becomes iconographically associated with a series of American billboards promoting the ‘Pepsi generation’. Alongside this conflicted relationship to a modern mass culture of images, advertisement and programmed desire, furthermore, the women in the film also reflect dynamic shifts in the construction of female sexuality in the 1960s. Increasingly liberalized sex discourses were accompanied in this period by the development of oral and other forms of contraceptives and by high-profile feminist campaigns in Britain and France demanding greater reproductive autonomy, including adequate sex education and decriminalized abortion. While the

Gendering ‘Generation Pepsi’

3

fixation of young men like Paul and Robert on their sexuality is largely a matter of expression and personal pleasure, that is, for the women it is not only a question of eroticism, but also a navigation of their relationship to motherhood and reproduction in its biological and social forms. However, like the apparent absence of mothers from the political imagination of this revolutionary youth, these gendered and intergenerational dynamics have often been forgotten in considerations of the youth-oriented and New Wave French and English cinemas of this period. Taking its cue from Godard, therefore, this book is also interested in the fissional collision of politics, culture, sexuality and their representation in the young cinemas of the 1960s in England and France. Its focus, however, is on the maligned mothers and daughters on the fringes of Godard’s para-holy trinity, shaped not only by Marx and Coca-Cola, but by Pepsi and the pill.

‘Think of the Children!’: Theorizing the Mothering Subject and the Rhetoric of the Child In order to appreciate the extent to which the figure of the mother has been subject to multiple cultural erasures, it is necessary to outline some key critical mappings of the mother (or her absence) that inform the theoretical direction of this book. It is a leading contention of Pepsi and the Pill that the mother is a figure both ubiquitous and elusive in French and English cinema. Mothers are everywhere in theoretical, cultural, psychological and artistic narratives of the self, yet rarely as a self. Like an unconscious, they are beneath the surface, haunting other characters’ stories and psyches but without speaking audibly. The mother is both omnipresent and radically absent; the image of the mother, as a relational object and cultural symbol, is deeply embedded across many of the film narratives I discuss, yet the mothering subject breaks through rarely, and often only with a degree of radical intervention. Laura Mulvey famously argues in her seminal essay on the male gaze that the aesthetic and narrative mechanics of classical Hollywood cinema are paradigmatically organized to identify with the male protagonist as a thinking, desiring agent – ‘the man’s role as the active one of advancing the story, making things happen’ – and to objectify the female body – ‘women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness’ – erecting all manner of obstacles to her interiority.1 Since the late 1950s, I suggest, popular Western film movements have also tended towards conspiring on the side of youth. Especially in the intensely personal young European cinemas of the 1960s, the typical subject of identification is the child, adolescent or young adult, and is usually male.

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Mothers and motherhood, therefore, become significant predominantly as functions of someone else’s subjectivity, psychologically indispensable as objects and Others, but widely absent from cultural representation as selves. There are similarities herein between the objectification of the (m)Other and the ways in which psychoanalytic feminist theorists have identified the objectification of women and femininity in patriarchal discourse in general. Certainly, these issues cannot always be neatly separated; patriarchal ideologies of motherhood are frequently deployed in ways that suppress, erase or demonize the subjectivities of all women, regardless of whether or not they would actually consider themselves mothers, or even potential mothers. Thus, even an active decision not to have a child does not constitute an exemption from maternal oppression; women who participate in social or biological mothering and child-free women are all, in different ways, subject to discursive gendered policing by way of a maternal idealism that positions the passive, self-less imago of the ‘good mother’ as the only acceptable telos of feminine identities. As part of a radically liberating feminist politics, therefore, specific attention to discourses and subjectivities of mothering becomes urgent. The point I wish to make here is that mothers – both the Mother as an ideal and mothering subjects as complex, living people – are exposed to particularly intense forms of objectification that are conditioned by the ideological relationship to the Child. Not just the man, but the male child has become the paradigmatic subject and beneficiary of patriarchy, and a highly emotive one at that; by counterweighting contrast, the mother is confined within a double bind of objectification, as both that child’s primary object of desire and the (ideally) nurturing environment in which he develops. The construction of child-as-subject and mother-as-object has significant theoretical resonances. The reduction of the mother to a remote psychic force (affecting, but not affected) is perhaps shaped most clearly in Freudian psychoanalysis, in which the mother becomes persistently an inhuman and phantasmatic cipher to the inner worlds of her children, while her own interiority is at best a gaping sign of dread. Throughout psychoanalytic theories of the self, the mother has become a relational object par excellence, the measure of Otherness against which the child-citizen defines itself as a coherent cultural subject.2 Throughout the majority of these theories of subject development and the vast universe of imaginative representations in film and literature that both inform and reproduce them, a mother is not really a person, she is something that happens to a person. The child is entitled to the ‘authentic’ experience and expression of culture, while the mother is expected – and with remarkably little gratitude – to willingly relinquish her subjectivity, her language and her specific relationships in order that the sovereign child might have his in abundance, according to the laws of patriarchal bequest. Reflecting intimately on her own

Gendering ‘Generation Pepsi’

5

experiences of maternal ambivalence, Adrienne Rich expresses poignantly the state of coercive non-being produced by patriarchal psychological discourses of motherhood: Most of the literature of infant care and psychology has assumed that the process toward individuation is essentially the child’s drama, played out and against and with a parent or parents who are, for better or worse, givens. Nothing could have prepared me for the realization that I was a mother, one of those givens, when I knew I was still in a state of uncreation myself.3

Psychoanalytic tradition constructs the mother as a vital presence in the individual’s early, pre-linguistic stages of development, throughout which Freud suggests the infant often experiences the mother as part of itself, and subsequently as a prominent figure in and of the unconscious. Subversively, therefore, rather than as containing the child, the mother is symbolized as contained within the child. In order to participate satisfyingly in (patriarchal) culture, furthermore, it becomes necessary for the subject to separate from and renounce the ‘actual’ mother. This model of the self paradigmatically excludes a self-determining maternal voice. It is worth clarifying here, however, that not all feminists see Freudian psychoanalytic traditions as actively complicit in this suppression of women as mothers. Juliet Mitchell in particular has written a detailed and compelling defence of Freud against such claims. She argues that: The greater part of the feminist movement has identified Freud as the enemy. It is held that psychoanalysis claims women are inferior and that they can achieve true femininity only as wives and mothers. Psychoanalysis is seen as a justification for the status-quo, bourgeois and patriarchal, and Freud in his own person exemplifies these qualities. I would agree that popularized Freudianism must answer to this description; but the argument of [Mitchell’s] book is that a rejection of psychoanalysis and of Freud’s works is fatal for feminism. … If we are interested in understanding and challenging the oppression of women, we cannot afford to neglect it.4

She argues instead that feminist thinkers should read Freud’s work descriptively, thereby tapping into its considerable potential as a diagnostic toolkit that can help to analyse the highly cultural – rather than ‘natural’ – positions of women and mothers within the careful and intricate systemic oppressions of patriarchy. She argues that this ‘oppression has not been trivial or historically transitory – to maintain itself so effectively it courses through the mental and emotional bloodstream. To think that this should not be so does not necessitate pretending it is already not so. On the contrary, once again we need pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’5 Rather than as an inevitable or desirable situation, Mitchell’s symptomatic rereading of Freud sees the installation of Oedipus as the pre-eminent and universal model for subjective social

6

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development as a ‘massive defeat’6 for women. The relegation of the mother to Otherness and objecthood is therefore not a state of (patriarchal) affairs that must be accepted with motherly good nature – indeed, it should be railed against – but it must be understood. The sovereignty of the child-as-subject is further elucidated through Lee Edelman’s work on the rhetorical invocation of the Child in political discourse. Proposing a distinction between the child (a historical and material individual) and the Child (a phantasmatic and ideological construct), Edelman argues that the Child is seen in Western societies as the ideal model of citizenship, an articulation in the imaginary of the perfected collective and individual self: ‘That figural Child alone embodies the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation’s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights “real” citizens are allowed’.7 This potential omnipotence, needless to say, is always only imminent – ‘the Child has come to embody for us the telos of the social order and come to be seen as the one for whom that order is held in perpetual trust’8 – but its value, and that of the Child, are actively realized in the present. In Edelman’s view, this imagined Child is the logic that subtends all political rhetoric. In order to be thinkable (let alone persuasive), any and all public action must be undertaken in the interests of ‘the children’; the Child ‘remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention’.9 A succinct facsimile of this attitude of imagined societal futurity appears in that long-running staple of popular transatlantic family programming, The Simpsons (1989– ), in the minor character of Helen Lovejoy, the sanctimonious wife of the town’s reverend, who appears whenever a moral panic strikes the community to deliver her catchphrase, ‘Won’t somebody please think of the children!’ With apposite irony, the character’s own neglected and delinquent child is introduced in a single episode and then largely forgotten throughout the rest of the series’ gargantuan lifespan. After all, the imagined Child – in whom all cultural value is invested – is rarely in the same place as most actual children. In other words, rather than a sincerely altruistic compassion for the other, or for a collective humanity, reproductive futurity represents a cultural fantasy, and an unapologetically self-interested one at that, promising a version of individual immortality for the speaking subject at the centre of cultural power. This book follows Edelman’s arguments on reproductive futurity, particularly insofar as it illustrates the sovereign subjectivity of the Child imagined within political narratives. Elsewhere, however, I seek to make significant departures from the usages that Edelman makes of this idea. The critique shaped within No Future is located within a logic of reproductive futurity that is distinctly and absolutely heteropatriarchal, and while Edelman is very clearly critical of this in a symptomatic sense, he does not offer a thorough exam-

Gendering ‘Generation Pepsi’

7

ination of the radically gendered organization of the construct. Within Edelman’s articulation of reproductive futurity, that is, homophobic conservatism is vigorously and tenaciously unsettled, but the masculinity of the sovereign Child-subject is taken for granted and left relatively unchallenged on its own terms. While deconstructive examinations of reproductive futurity can offer extremely valuable tools for feminist critiques and reimaginations of family, Edelman’s implicit concentration on a Child-subject who enjoys (and, indeed, is constituted by) masculinized privilege, and on the disruptive potential of queer men, marginalizes this opportunity. The engagement with reproductive futurity within this book therefore seeks to reappropriate its critical energies to understand the plurality of ideological forces at work in the reification of the Child, with particular attention to how this figure is both produced by and reproduces patriarchy. Alongside reproductive futurity, I also use the term ‘cultural futurity’ to draw attention more closely to the terms by which the future invoked in this logic issues predominantly from existing centres of social power, and is therefore both specific and exclusive. That is, the future imagined by way of the Child is not free to self-determine, but is articulated within the ideological trajectories of existing dominant cultures. Edelman argues that ‘the social order exists to preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional freedom more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all, put at risk the Child to whom such a freedom falls due’.10 However, I emphasize throughout this book that the politicized Child – and the mother both denigrated and cathected into producing him – is never even notionally ‘universal’, but always already particularized by gender, race and class, as well as sexuality, which is Edelman’s dominating interest. Edelman’s book goes on to pursue the ‘impossible’ project of taking ‘the side of those not “fighting for the children,” the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism’.11 Herein, he emphasizes the ‘ethical value [of queerness] insofar as it accedes to that place, accepting its figural status as resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of such resistance from every social structure’,12 focusing predominantly on the disruptive potential of the queerness of male homosexuality. What his argument does not consider, but which can be excavated from it by bringing his thesis into dialogue with second-wave feminist theory from writers such as Luce Irigaray, Adrienne Rich, Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, and (in a markedly different way) Simone de Beauvoir, are the gendered implications of the privileging of the child, particularly as concerns the impact upon the mother. Initially, by considering Edelman’s theory alongside these writers’ feminist arguments on the masculinization of citizenship and (phal)logocentrism,13 the presumption of the masculinity of the figural Child (which Edelman in some respects repli-

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cates uncritically) becomes clearer; the future and its imagined intellectual and material prosperity is held in trust for sons, not daughters. For all of Edelman’s radically queer agitation, reproductive futurity remains in his work largely a drama played out between powerful conservative men and non-reproductive queer men, over the cultural capital of the male Child. Women and girls are therefore minimized as objective reproductive material within this conflict, rather than being regarded as complex subjects with real and significant stakes within it. Particularly pertinent herein is the implicit office of mothers. Edelman’s theory does little to account for the demands that reproductive futurity makes of mothering women, who are also suppressed by rather than complicit in this ideological formulation. But surely, the cultish veneration of the Child that underpins cultural narratives of being necessitates the subordination of the Mother and demands the sacrifice of her selfhood and access to expression. If the Child she (re)produces embodies progress, agency, even humanity itself, then surely any pretension to desire, selfishness or subjectivity on her part is a cardinal societal sin as well as a personal evil. The son has become our cultural protagonist, leaving the mother a choice of identity between supporting cast or villain. Moreover, while the Child will always succeed in the imaginary – inexhaustibly symbolizing a horizon of perfection – his mother will always fail, always representing the insurmountable gulf between that horizon and reality. The Mother has become to dystopia what the Child is to utopia, at best an eruption of anxiety when the knowledge of human fragility can no longer be repressed, and at worst held responsible for the inevitable failures of her children – collectively and individually – to reach their potentials. Jacqueline Rose describes mothers as ‘the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which it becomes the task – unrealisable, of course – of mothers to repair’.14 She demonstrates this through analysis of the hypocritical buffeting of mothers within contemporary news media and other forms of public discourse, in which they are symbolized as both radically powerless (the vulnerable, suffering mother) and supremely responsible: From all sides, in Europe and the US, we are accosted by increasingly shrill voices, telling us that our greatest ethical obligation is to entrench our national and personal borders, to be unfailingly self-regarding and sure of ourselves. It is a perfect atmosphere for picking on mothers, for branding them as uniquely responsible for both securing and jeopardising this impossible future.15

What makes this state of affairs even more pernicious is the fact that the Mother described here has almost nothing to do with the rich, complex experiences of mothering and the diverse individuals who engage in them.

Gendering ‘Generation Pepsi’

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In order to account more fully for the profound and particular effects of reproductive futurity on women and mothers, I draw here on the work of a range of feminist theorists who take a detailed interest in legal, psychoanalytic and cultural representations of motherhood, which are set in tension with lived experiences of mothering. Though distinct in their nuances and angles of approach, feminist theorists such as Irigaray, Kristeva and Rich have all been instrumental in articulating the violent absence of mothers as speaking subjects from dominant cultural discourses. Irigaray writes particularly expressively on the suppression of autonomous mothering identities within patriarchy and the marginalization of women by way of the Mother. A fundamental conviction within her work is that ‘any theory of the subject has always been appropriated by the “masculine”’.16 ‘Woman’, and to an even greater extent the Mother, as they have come to be expressed in dominant cultural discourses, are not self-declared beings, but a myth told by men, as a constituent part of the male self. The mother acts as an ‘origin story’,17 an imago of femininity constructed by and confirming patriarchal fantasy. The imposition of the masculine model, according to Irigaray, further leads to suppression of the rights and expression of the feminine, giving cultural monopoly to the figural father and mastery over the public and private to men. The law of the Father makes all things, all children, all ideas, all desires, belong to him: ‘For the patriarchal order is indeed the one that functions as the organization and monopolization of private property to the benefit of the head of the family. It is his proper name, the name of the father, that determines ownership for the family, including the wife and children.’18 Woman, meanwhile, is ‘nothing but the receptacle that passively receives his product’.19 Mothers are made absent from the theory; through appropriation of the feminine generative capacity, motherhood is made a raw resource, to be sculpted and hallmarked by the masculine. Although life began in mothers’ bodies, then, the Mother herself becomes a square peg as a figure for subjective life, which draws its anthropomorphic and phallocentric model under the insistence of being the only possibility; ‘[Culture] has blindly venerated the mother-son relationship to the point of religious fetishism, but has given no interpretation to the model of tolerance of the other within and with a self that this relationship manifests.’20 In her effacement from representation, her exile from subjecthood, Irigaray suggests, borrowing a term from Freud, that the relation to the mother (and with this, the mother-as-subject and any relations belonging to her) has become ‘the “dark continent” par excellence’.21 She is made absent, and the law-of-the-father forbids any attempt to find her. All that is left for mothers within patriarchal cultures and their discourses is a lexicon of ‘filthy, mutilating words’.22 Irigaray describes the visceral, denigrating discourse around them:

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The mother has become a devouring monster as an inverted effect of the blind consumption of the mother. Her belly, sometimes her breasts, are agape with the gestation, the birth and the life that were given there without any reciprocity. Except for a murder, real and cultural, to annul that debt? To forget dependency? To destroy power?23

Any physical signs of femaleness and their representation are largely covered over by the self-aggrandizement of the masculine. The father not only ‘forbids the bodily encounter with the mother’,24 but imposes his language and law in her place. The ‘phallus [is] erected where once there was the umbilical cord’,25 and the proper name (a mark of paternal pedigree) ‘replaces the most irreducible mark of birth: the navel’.26 The mother is radically excluded from subjective expression. Irigaray’s rereadings of Freud encourage a deconstructive approach to effacing representations of mothers within law, language and cultural representation, and suggest that mothering subjectivities, though lost or hidden, may potentially be rediscovered. Along similar lines, Adrienne Rich suggests that the ‘cathexis between mother and daughter – essential, distorted, misused – is the great unwritten story’.27 She argues that ‘this relationship has been minimized and trivialized in the annals of patriarchy. Whether in theological doctrine or art or sociology or psychoanalytic theory, it is the mother and son who appear as the eternal, determinative dyad’, and she sees this effacement as the patriarchal imagination’s paranoid anxiety over feminine power and any form of intimate solidarity between women.28 In the Freudian psychoanalytic formula, boys, in order to develop ‘normally’, are injuncted by the law of the father to turn away from and denigrate the mother; hereafter, Freud argues, ‘One thing that is left over in men from the influence of the Oedipus complex is a certain amount of disparagement in their attitude towards women, whom they regard as being castrated’.29 Rich argues, furthermore, that patriarchy not only promotes misogyny in sons, but internalizes it in daughters: Thousands of daughters see their mothers as having taught a compromise and self-hatred they are struggling to win free of, the one through whom the restrictions and degradations of a female existence were perforce transmitted. Easier by far to hate and reject a mother outright than to see beyond her to the forces acting upon her.30

Since megalomaniacal patriarchal discourse works so hard – and often so effectively – to minimize the presence of the mothering subject, all that appears to remain is an echo of oppressions. Rich calls this ‘matrophobia’, which is ‘the fear not of one’s mother or of motherhood but of becoming one’s mother’.31 Mothering subjects, therefore, are multiply invisibilized and isolated from representa-

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tion. Fundamental to the feminist projects of both Irigaray and Rich is the need to resist this bereavement, to represent individuals who mother as speaking selves and to understand the mothering relation as an intersubjective rather than a one-sided experience. This approach, then, remains radically critical of reproductive futurity and its reification of the Child at the expense of actual living subjects; moreover, Irigaray and Rich’s theories are acutely aware that if the Child is primary subject, then the Mother, long before anyone else, is forced into the ideological position of primary object. However, they offer a different way out of this bind to Edelman’s school of anti-relational queer theory, moving beyond the (welcome) collapse of ideological machinery to a reconstruction of kinship and gender that imagines new and more fluid forms of relationality. This branch of maternal feminist theory has been well received within literary studies, and Cixous and Rich especially have been popularized within feminist research interested in motherhood in poetry and literature.32 However, the potential uses of these theories within film and visual media disciplines remain largely untapped. Major works on motherhood in film studies have tended to follow a valuable but limited canon, which has focused on Hollywood studioera melodrama, and established a pantheon of extensively discussed ‘maternal’ films including Stella Dallas (1937), Marnie (1964), Now, Voyager (1942) and much of Douglas Sirk’s Hollywood-based output. Critics such as E. Ann Kaplan,33 Suzanna Danuta Walters,34 Jackie Byars,35 Tania Modleski36 and Annette Kuhn37 have produced important and influential work in this regard, but in some respects, the psychoanalytic ‘motherhood turn’ of the late 1980s and early 1990s has cast too long a shadow over the corpus and theoretical parameters of research on motherhood in film. This work is certainly valuable and highly interesting in its own right, but the strength of focus on conversations around mothers in Anglophone melodrama, drawing heavily on Freudian psychoanalysis, has to some degree unintentionally foreclosed other possibilities. The only major idea of European second-wave feminism that has yet been adopted widely into feminist film theory is Julia Kristeva’s concept of the abject. Throughout Kristeva’s work, she imagines the maternal body as a site of psychic ‘splitting’.38 The mother and the maternal body described within several of Kristeva’s theories are more or less imaginarily dismembered and then exiled away from themselves to occupy various extremes of idealization and denigration. For Kristeva, abjection is a process of denigration that bears particular psychological connections to the body of the mother; maternal excess is that which is cast off, abjected, in order to define the clean and proper self.39 This develops the psychoanalytic schema of the split from the mother in the Freudian subject-formation process by theorizing what becomes of the maternal debris inevitably (but silently) jettisoned in the process of this imaginative surgery;40 ‘It lies outside, beyond the set, and does not seem to agree to the

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latter’s rules of the game. And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master. … To each ego its object, to each superego its abject.’41 The abject is an outside, an absence of reason according to dominant discourse, and profoundly Other – all of which can be understood as maternal characteristics within patriarchal narratives. Elsewhere, Kristeva argues that the horror of the abject is fundamentally a horror of unstable boundaries, or the loss of the clear psychic and social separations between self and Other that are established during the early development of the subject in Freudian psychoanalysis; this horror is therefore conditioned by the capacity of ambiguous substances, bodies or even ideas to suggest a return of the aspects of the maternal of which patriarchal social orders necessitate the repression; Kristeva argues that various religious rituals are then invented to ‘ward off the subject’s fear of his very own identity sinking irretrievably into the mother’.42 Writers including Barbara Creed,43 Sarah Arnold44 and to a lesser extent Lucy Fischer45 have tapped into the rich resources offered by Kristeva’s abject for understanding certain extreme images of maternal monstrosity, and have produced detailed feminist work on figures of disgust, filth and motherhood in horror film that are closely informed by these aspects of Kristeva’s work. These readings of Kristeva function particularly well for horror film, a genre that lends itself extremely readily to psychoanalytic symbolism, and feminist theories of abjection allow film scholars such as Creed, Arnold and Fischer to do valuable work in understanding and deconstructing the impulses of misogyny and mother-hate at work in these images. However, as with the canonization of a small number of classic Hollywood melodramas as a more or less definitive corpus of ‘motherhood films’, the forcefully psychoanalytic application of Kristevan abjection to horror film marks an approach to analysis of mothering in cinema that remains somewhat inward-looking and ahistorical. Both Kristeva’s originating theory and its usages within film scholarship, therefore, risk replicating an idea of ‘the mother’ or ‘the maternal’ as a universalized figure untouched by the many and complex contingencies of time and culture – a figure all too familiar from the spectral mother-as-object mapped in the negative spaces of reproductive futurity. The cultural and temporal overextension of Kristeva’s psychoanalytic theories is, in fact, a point that is critiqued incisively and persuasively by Imogen Tyler in her fascinating monograph Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain.46 While finding substantial value in the structures and effects of Kristeva’s abject, Tyler also raises the concern that ‘Kristeva’s argument that psychoanalysis might effect a radically cosmopolitan form of pan-European subjectivity relies on the primacy of an unchanging psychological origin story in which the abjection of the maternal (matricide) is the root of all violence and hatreds’.47 Tyler’s critical appropriation of abjection allows her to explore not the universal, but the particular processes of ‘social abjection’ as

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they manifest in legal and cultural forms. Similarly, my approach in this book is to read such universalized figures of motherhood strictly descriptively, as fantasied products of European patriarchal social orders. There is also another side to the Kristevan coin of maternal symbolization in patriarchy that has been less widely taken up within film scholarship, with the notable exception of Kaja Silverman’s theoretically rich monograph The Acoustic Mirror, which draws extensively on Kristeva’s semiotic ‘chora’ to investigate the female voice in cinema.48 Alongside her ideas on maternal abjection, Kristeva also uses images of sacred mothers (particularly the Madonna) to show how a ‘purified’ maternal body has been appropriated to objectify mothers and make maternal representations respond to various needs of the masculine subject. The type of European religious discourse described by Kristeva has been instrumental in neutralizing and emptying out the mother, and European ideas of maternity are heavily subsumed under Christian ideology.49 Kristeva argues that this maternal imaginary has been made to serve as ‘an adult (male and female) fantasy of a lost continent: what is involved, moreover, is not so much an idealized primitive mother as an idealization of the – unlocalizable – relationship between her and us, an idealization of primary narcissism’.50 The Christian ideal of motherhood is tied to the sublime; it is the clean surface (ready for projection) left after the filth and defilement of the maternal abject has been wiped away. This maternal imaginary is a potent site of projection for much psychic activity, inevitably entailing the silencing of the Mother in favour of the Child. As with her theories of abjection, there is an extent to which Kristeva’s ideas on the sacred maternal – if unqualified – may be taken as overdetermining. In ‘Motherhood [According to Giovanni Bellini]’, for instance, Kristeva offers useful thinking on the processes of becoming-a-mother within European patriarchy, outlining the co-optation of motherhood by the needs of both scientific and Christian discourses, both of which result in an alienation and objectification of mothers’ autonomous experiences of themselves.51 As she progresses through her analysis of Bellini’s paintings of the Madonna and Child, however, her argument tends to replicate a somewhat nostalgic image of idealized motherhood universalized within European imaginations of the Madonna. On the other hand, if her arguments on the sacred maternal in ‘Stabat Mater’ and elsewhere are considered as descriptive rather than prescriptive, they offer useful resources for feminist analysis of the politics of ideologies of motherhood, which speak productively to the maternal absences of Edelman’s reproductive futurity. After all, the mothering object that this conservative ideology tacitly depends upon is discursively constructed as apolitical and universal, when it is, of course, anything but. Between the abject and the sacred, between her position as the most powerful and powerless person in the world, the mother becomes, in Adrienne Rich’s words, ‘a field of contradictions:

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a space invested with power, and an acute vulnerability; a numinous figure and the incarnation of evil; a hoard of ambivalences, most of which have worked to disqualify women from the collective act of defining culture.’52 Simone de Beauvoir, in her notorious chapter on motherhood in The Second Sex, deals with similar issues on the contradictions and outrages of the idealization of motherhood and its effects. Beauvoir’s feminist magnum opus was first published in 1949, and translated into English shortly after. Her provocative work on motherhood and the maternal and reproductive subjugation of women in post-war France remained highly influential for European feminists throughout the 1960s, and her thinking provides rich resources for the theoretical direction offered by this book. In line with her much-cited assertion that ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’,53 Beauvoir is throughout her work consistently emphatic that the ideological figure of the mother as ideal, nurturing object exists only as a self-satisfying fiction of patriarchy, and has nothing at all to do with the lives and experiences of actual women who mother. She argues that ‘no maternal “instinct” exists: the word hardly applies, in any case, to the human species. The mother’s attitude depends on her total situation and her reaction to it [which] is highly variable.’54 Through her blistering critique of the ideological patriarchal institutionalization of motherhood as ‘nature’, Beauvoir offers an incisive view of the figure of the mother-as-ideal-object through a deconstructive kaleidoscope. I suggest that Beauvoir’s thinking on this point produces further useful feminist dialogues with Edelman’s implicitly masculinist reproductive futurity. For Beauvoir, the objectifying cathexis of the Mother is also conditioned by the reification of the male Child as patriarchal protagonist. However, although, as I have suggested, women and mothers tend to retreat all too graciously from Edelman’s formulation, Beauvoir describes this drama distinctly from the perspective of the many women (infinitely diverse, radically contextualized and irreversibly subjective) who are interpellated as the Child’s placid, universal Mother. Beauvoir is an early feminist commentator to suggest clearly in her philosophy that the maternal relation is not one of subject and object, but is in fact profoundly intersubjective: ‘The transcendence of the artisan, of the man of action, contains the element of subjectivity; but in the mother-to-be the antithesis of subject and object ceases to exist; she and the child with which she is swollen make up together an equivocal pair overwhelmed by life.’55 More than just incidentally or casually intersubjective, then, the maternal body might be seen here as a primary philosophical model for intersubjective understanding within social interactions more broadly. However, once the child is born, and as the relations between mothers and children develop in response to dominant ideological forms, patriarchal cultures, societies and even legal systems (as shall be explored in greater depth in Part II of this book) force this relation to occupy an

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adversarial mode, in which the odds are hopelessly stacked against the mother, and which Beauvoir sees as a violent manoeuvre against women’s subjective expression. Working from this foundational critique of the distortions of patriarchal institutionalizations of motherhood, Beauvoir proceeds to explore in often visceral depth the experiences of mothering subjects who are put to ideological and physical work under these conditions. She argues, in the first instance, that patriarchal motherhood is never capable of delivering the satisfactions it promises to women (which are those of a passive object); one of the fundamental and cynically deceptive preconceptions of patriarchy, she argues, ‘is that maternity is enough in all cases to crown a woman’s life. It is nothing of the kind. There are a great many mothers who are unhappy, embittered, unsatisfied.’56 And in any case, the ideological machinery that produces the promise of the Child as the ‘supreme aim’ and pleasure of any woman – a claim that, as Beauvoir insists, has ‘precisely the value of an advertising slogan’57 – is full of contradictions and hypocrisies. She demonstrates this through the example of men’s coercion of their partners’ abortions, which was not uncommon in Beauvoir’s France: From infancy woman is told over and over that she is made for childbearing, and the splendors of maternity are forever being sung to her. The drawbacks of her situation – menstruation, illnesses, and the like – and the boredom of household drudgery are all justified by this marvellous privilege she has of bringing children into the world. And now here is man asking woman to relinquish her triumph as female in order to preserve his liberty, so as not to handicap his future, for the benefit of his profession!58

We see clearly here a manifestation of the narcissistic hypocrisies buried within the mechanisms of reproductive futurity, which may claim that ‘children are our future’, but only really means those who are ideologically convenient for the patriarchal subject in whose image that future is undoubtedly formed. Furthermore, within a lived relationship to an actual child (who is, after all, not just an image or fantasy), Beauvoir describes how the chaos and complexity of maternal subjectivities are pathologized as shameful and must be silenced, repressed or denigrated to a monstrous elsewhere in order for patriarchal futurity to maintain its constitutive interest in the sovereign son-as-subject. In her chapter on motherhood, Beauvoir outlines a few illustrative examples of how women’s highly particularized material circumstances, dispositions, preferences and personal histories may all impact on the very different ways in which they experience and practise their motherhoods. Within this infinite difference and heterogeneity within and among mothering subjects, the flattening ideal of the mother-as-object must be no more than an alienated elsewhere (for whose absence ‘actual’ mothering women are nonetheless held mercilessly responsible). Beauvoir argues that

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the distortion begins when the religion of Maternity proclaims that all mothers are saintly. For while maternal devotion may be perfectly genuine, this, in fact, is rarely the case. Maternity is usually a strange mixture of narcissism, altruism, idle daydreaming sincerity, bad faith, devotion, and cynicism.59

There is a great deal in common here, in fact, with the work of later feminist psychoanalysts such as Rozsika Parker, Wendy Holloway and Brid Featherstone, who directly take to task the masculinist and filial biases of conventional psychoanalytic theory and practice in their work on ‘maternal ambivalence’ and the complexities not of having or being affected by, but of being a mother.60 Becoming-a-mother in patriarchy takes place in the midst of these contradictions, twisting and contorting impossibly between the Ideal (object) and the experience (subject) of mothering. Beauvoir envisages a number of ways out of this: collective practices of nurture and shared childcare, intersubjective kinships, freely available and destigmatized contraception and the liberation of women’s opportunities for fulfilment outside of or alongside childbearing and -rearing, to name a few. However, she never ceases to remind us that becoming-a-mother under the objectifying strictures of patriarchy is an experience that is often physically and psychically painful. In different ways, the feminist theories offered by Beauvoir, Rich, Irigaray and Kristeva, which focus on the cultural analysis and radical reclamation of mothering, present two key strains of value for investigating the representation and ideologies of motherhood in film. The first of these is diagnostic: these approaches offer a sophisticated toolkit for dissecting the ways in which mothering subjectivities are marginalized and absolutist idealizing and denigrating narratives perpetuated within dominant cultural discourses – a toolkit that can be productively applied to aesthetic and narrative forms in European film. The second is creative, analysing or imagining the ways in which representations of mothering women and experiences may be mobilized as potentially radical and subversive spaces. The liberation of mothering and the texts it may create are, after all, indispensable resources for any feminist project that seeks a holistically radical counternarrative to patriarchal gender relations. Following Rich, Andrea O’Reilly shows how oppressive constructions of motherhood within cultural imagination are damaging not only to women who actively engage in mothering, but to women in general, defining ‘two meanings of motherhood, one superimposed on the other: the potential relationship of any woman to her powers of reproduction – and to children; and the institution – which aims at ensuring that that potential – and all women – shall remain under male control”’.61 Rich, in fact, sees the mother–daughter relation – when derepressed – as a prototype for feminist sisterhood:

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When we can confront and unravel this paradox, this contradiction, face to the utmost in ourselves the groping passion of that little girl lost, we can begin to transmute it, and the blind anger and bitterness that have repetitiously erupted among women trying to build a movement together can be alchemized. Before sisterhood, there was the knowledge – transitory, fragmented, perhaps, but original and crucial – of mother-and-daughterhood.62

The type of creative feminine solidarity envisaged here, however, ‘gives rise to the daughter’s empowerment if and only if the mother with whom the daughter is identifying is herself empowered’.63 For all of these theorists, this is only possible once the patriarchal machinery producing the ideology of motherhood has been sabotaged. As is always the case when writing on any form of identity marginalized by a dominant culture, it has been necessary in researching this book to grapple with the fitness of existing terminology within a language that has in many ways naturalized the very suppressions we seek to dismantle. I therefore outline here some notes clarifying a few of the terms used in Pepsi and the Pill. One of the points of nomenclature most familiar to anyone interested in the topic of feminism and mothering is the fact that almost all words commonly used in the English language to describe a woman who is not a biological mother are disparaging, implying some form of failure, loss or disappointment (‘childless’, ‘spinster’ and so on). The most popular feminist counter-terms to these are ‘unchilded’ and ‘child-free’. Where applicable, I have tended towards the latter, as ‘child-free’ is the furthest from a state defined by negation, but, as Rich among many other feminists has pointed out, none of these terms are completely satisfactory.64 As well as adequately describing chosen states of non-mothering, however, I encountered almost immediately difficulty in navigating the perhaps surprisingly delicate decisions over when and how to refer to individuals as mothers. The films and political contexts I discuss encompass a wide and diverse range of relationships to motherhood, and it soon became apparent that this eclectic range of characters both fictional and historical could not be comfortably collected under the single, often rather closed term ‘mother’. The inadequacies of this expression became particularly clear when investigating relational nexuses that complicate normative connections between biological and social mothering, such as abortion, queer collectives and chosen families, and the economic exploitation of working-class and migrant women’s ‘motherwork’. In these cases, not all biological mothers or pregnant women will or want to become mothers, and not all individuals who engage in mothering – either consistently or episodically – have any biological or legally recognized relationship to motherhood. I therefore use throughout this book the term ‘mothering subjects’ in an

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effort to leave open the concept of mothering to a range of possible interactions. It is also my hope that this term is somewhat freer of normative limitations of ‘mothers’ by bio-legal determinism, social position and gender (though the vast majority of mothering subjects I discuss here are women, some are not, nor should mothering subjectivities be foreclosed by biological parenthood). This is also occasionally supplemented by the term ‘pregnant subjects’ in Chapters 3 and 4 when it is necessary to emphasize the active choice to not become a mother in questions of abortion and unplanned pregnancy. In conjunction with this, I also follow the distinction between ‘motherhood as an institution and a nonpatriarchal experience of mothering’, which Andrea O’Reilly sees as a central development of Rich’s work.65 This separation also underscores the important distinction between ‘motherhood’ as a set of ideological figures and discourses, and ‘mothering’ as a diversified and fluid experience, and one of a range of activities undertaken by mothering subjects, rather than an allencompassing definition. Otherwise put, the distinction is between the Mother (a product of repressive ideological discourses incommensurate with any living individual, and acting as the negative space around the Child, an equally phantasmatic figure) and mothering subjects. It is worth re-emphasizing, furthermore, that at no point in this book do I wish to re-endorse the primacy of biological reproduction, or to promote a biologically deterministic view of either motherhood or gender. Quite the contrary, what drives my interest here is the highly constructed and political nature of any conservative discourse of motherhood that feverishly lays claim to the ‘natural’. However, while representing and taking autonomous ownership of mothering and maternal bodies is undoubtedly a significant part of affirming the presence of mothering subjects in culture and society, it is important to be mindful of the capacity of some strains of corporeally focused feminism to cathect, essentialize and reduce female biology in this process. Elizabeth Grosz’s ‘corporeal feminism’,66 for instance, despite a compelling argument for the cultural-historical contingency of women’s bodies and emphasis on the importance of women’s bodily self-definition, proceeds to overdetermine women as biologically homogeneous, erasing a great deal of difference in women’s lived experiences of anatomy, sexuality and fertility. Some of Irigaray’s later work, similarly, is over-literal about the political usage of the ‘female body’, as in her essay ‘So When Are We to Become Women?’,67 in which she identifies reproductive technologies as a mechanical monster of patriarchy for the modern age, continuing to produce women’s motherhood rather than empowering reproductive identities. Replicating such limitation as is imposed by patriarchal ideology, only differently transposed, these theoretical distortions should be avoided; mothering bodies must not be idealized, but particularized. There are endless ‘bodily encounters’ with mothering and

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maternity, and the incorporation of heterogeneous corporeal and affective experiences of motherhood should expand rather than generalize its subjective discourses. This book offers a deconstructionist critique of the vast and impossible distance between ideologically loaded and essentializing discourses of the ‘naturalness’ of (institutionalized) motherhood, and the diversity and complexity of mothering subjects and maternal or kinship practices. Central to the theory underlying this book is the conviction that the imaginary properties of the Mother and the Child are two of the most profoundly ideological figures to operate within dominant cultural discourses, and that both work to suppress the autonomous expression and self-realization of mothering subjects. Edelman’s work in No Future is incisive on the deployment of the Child in political rhetoric and how it engenders revulsion towards nonreproductive sexualities, but it does not consider the multiple oppressions that this obsessive heroization of the Child-citizen-self produces for women and mothers. However, the collected work of the feminist theorists discussed above provides rich resources – from a number of different angles – for understanding how mothering subjects are suppressed by the intellectual and material institutionalization of motherhood, as well as for imagining counter-discursive strategies of resistance, disruption, reconstruction and creation. The aesthetic and narrative forms of film are a particularly vital collective cultural site in which these ideologies can be consolidated or disrupted, and the political and cinematic landscapes of Britain and France are vibrant terrains for playing out collisions between ideology and experience. Marked by swells of youth activism alongside enduringly widespread social conservatism, and seeing the rise of energetic and exciting new waves of cinema in Oedipal revolt against their domestic film industries, the meanings of motherhood, gender and family were widely at stake in both nations in the 1960s. The following section briefly sets out some of the bodies of film central to this book and the key sociopolitical contexts that inform their relationship to motherhood.

Immaculate Births: The Young Cinemas of the Sixties The Sixties were a period of substantial creativity and novelty for British and French cinema. In cinema, the turn of the decade was particularly marked by a new generation of film-makers’ largely premeditated breaks with established modes of film production and style. In both countries, a restless and quasiOedipal body of film criticism from young writers and film-makers had grown up over the 1950s, railing against what they saw as an artistic stagnation in their dominant domestic film industries. In France, this call for fresh ideas was famously led by the film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, in which major figures

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such as Alexandre Astruc and André Bazin had been publishing their theories on auteurism since the post-war years. Manifestos envisaging the face and pulse of a new cinema were also published in the mid-1950s by young directors who would later become leading figures in the new waves of film-making. In France, this took the form of François Truffaut’s patricidal invective against the French cinema’s ‘tradition of quality’ in ‘A Certain Tendency in French Cinema’, in which he criticizes the lack of originality in his national cinema, drawing a stark distinction between ‘metteurs-en-scène’ – workmanlike, but uninspired directors of derivative pictures – and ‘auteurs’ capable of producing imaginative, original and personal cinematic art.68 In Britain, the Oedipal revolt was announced by a statement signed by Lindsay Anderson, Lorenza Mazzetti, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson – all of whom had cut their teeth in documentary production – to accompany a programme of their short and medium-length films. They identified a shared direction in their work, arguing that ‘Implicit in this attitude is a belief in freedom, in the importance of people and in the significance of the everyday’.69 Between the last years of the 1950s and the early 1960s, these critical stirrings burgeoned into a fully fledged period of energetic and innovative new film-making from young directors with strong ideas about the purposes and possibilities of the medium. These periods and the New Wave movements they anticipated are among the most critically discussed phases of both countries’ national cinemas. The French New Wave, indeed, is perhaps one of the single most frequently studied film movements the world over. The British output of this period – variously defined as the British New Wave, Free Cinema, working-class or social realism, or the ‘kitchen sink cycle’ – cannot claim a similar international pedigree, but is nonetheless a definitive moment within British independent cinema. These movements, and most of their key film-makers, have accrued expansive libraries of high-quality scholarship from film theorists and historians, and the movements have been examined and re-examined from several angles. Youth is consistently recognized as an absolutely central and vitalizing concern throughout these movements. By and large, the New Wave movements at the turn of the decade were characterized by films focused on intimate experiences of contemporary youth, made by driven young directors and largely consumed by young audiences. The theoretical precursors of both movements placed emphasis on the personal and the present. In 1963, Penelope Houston, then editor of Sight and Sound, described the changing face of British cinema: A few years ago, if the British cinema had an immediately identifiable image, it would have been a shot of Kenneth More, jaw boldly jutting, on the bridge of a destroyer. At the moment, the national cinema would more readily be summed up in a view of a boy and girl wandering mourn-fully through the

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drizzle and mist of industrial Britain, looking for a place to live or a place to make love.70

In the case of France, the shake-up to the established conventions of film style, themes and production was even more restless. As Richard Neupert describes it, the ‘rule of thumb was to shoot as quickly as possible with portable equipment, sacrificing the control and glamour of mainstream productions for a lively, modern look and sound’.71 This stylistic modernity is often seen not only as a novel approach to film-making, but as symptomatic of a new wave of youth culture writ large. As historians of the movement and the 1960s in general frequently point out, the term ‘nouvelle vague’ was only latterly attached to film-making, having been originally coined by journalist Françoise Giroud in L’Express in 1957 to describe the styles and mores of the young generation more broadly.72 Giroud wrote prolifically on this topic, producing surveys and sociologies of youth culture that took stock of changes in fashion, musical and literary tastes, political attitudes, sexual behaviours, gender roles and more; her work has provided invaluable documents for scholars of youth in 1960s France leading up to the May 1968 protests, and for feminist historians in particular.73 What she found was ‘a new spirit abroad in French cultural life. She found a generation impatient with the attitudes of its elders and eager to throw off many aspects of the legacy of the past.’74 Geoffrey Nowell-Smith’s contextually driven account also underscores the importance of Giroud’s work and similar insights for historicizing the New Wave, its ‘newness’ and its impact, as without this textured social background, What Giroud saw as a wide-ranging political-cultural movement, with its roots at the time of Dien Bien Phu, the Suez crisis, and the Soviet invasion of Hungary, thus gets reduced to a purely aesthetic and cinematic phenomenon whose origins are found in a critical doctrine rather than in the wider world.75

While Giroud in fact makes little mention of New Wave cinema, he argues, this work has a great deal to say about the generation that were about to become its main audience.76 The New Waves proper of French and British cinema were ultimately shortlived phenomena; by strict definitions, both lasted only a few years and were all but over not long into the decade.77 However, the reinvigorations of style and theme they had brought about continued to reverberate throughout the 1960s, and new independent films continued to focus on youth, mobility and swiftly changing social landscapes. Already markedly divergent in how they approached and articulated these themes during the New Waves, British and French cinema took very different paths through the rest of the decade. Growing anti-establishment strains in French youth culture accelerated towards the

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student protests of May 1968, and in step with this trend of increasing political consciousness, many young directors and critics turned their enthusiasm towards Marxist theories and radical practices of film-making. Cahiers was once again at the forefront of the charge; the change in direction towards fully fledged Marxist criticism was confirmed in an editorial written by Jean-Louis Comolli and Paul Narboni in response to the 1968 protests. In this article, they called for a re-examination of the aims and interests of the magazine, including ‘awareness of its own historical and social situation, a rigorous analysis of the proposed field of study, the conditions which make the work necessary and those which make it possible, and the special function it intends to fulfill’.78 The article set out an agenda for French film criticism and aesthetics that was far more openly materially and politically engaged than the auteurist theory of Bazin, Astruc and Truffaut. British audiences, meanwhile, were growing frustrated with working-class realism by the early 1960s, and with Billy Liar in 1963, British cinema ‘took the train south’,79 precipitating a wave of ‘Swinging London’ films focusing largely on the sexual and romantic lives of young people in the modern capital. This group of films receives a degree of critical disparagement; Nowell-Smith casually dismisses the entire cycle, remarking ‘A more general and less happy outcome [was] a host of “swinging London” films later in the decade, about which on the whole the less said the better’.80 This is a shame, as – whatever their flaws – this group of films is valuable and in fact unique within the period for its privileging of the experiences and stories of young women rather than young men, and gives extensive space to the representation of women-focused issues including unplanned pregnancy. This book therefore gives commensurate attention to films of this cycle alongside New Wave and social realist film-making to give a more complete picture of the diverse ways in which issues of motherhood, reproductive rights, sexuality and national culture were approached in 1960s film. The entire output of the French and British film industries and the consumption patterns of its audiences were of course far more diverse than this overview suggests.81 However, it is the French and British New Waves, the ‘Swinging London’ cycle, British social realism and French and Francophone West African radical film-making in the late 1960s to which the majority of attention is dedicated in this book. Further detail is given in each chapter on the contexts of these movements and their particular and often complex relationships to contemporaneous social and political questions. Despite their stylistic eclecticism, these different movements and cycles are united by an investment in some form of personal or political realism and a driving interest in the experiences of young women and men in their immediate cultural environment. These films were all very much creatures of the moment, coolly rejecting the Hollywood imports, melodramas, big-budget studio epics and period literary adaptations

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that made up much of the British and French popular cinemas in the postwar era. The ‘father’ cinemas that both New Waves were kicking back against were largely characterized in Britain by the dominance of the duopoly of the Rank Organisation and Associated British, which favoured prestige pictures, heritage literary adaptation and war films, and in France by the Centre national de la cinématographie (CNC)’s eagerness to establish a French cinematic ‘tradition of quality’, leading to an industrial focus on ‘French themes, historical events, and great literature’.82 In other words, the lion’s share of funding and support for film-making in both cases went towards representing the bygone. Exploding onto a scene that was thus characterized by careful, dignified heritage imagery, therefore, there was much that was new about the New Waves: novel modes of funding, quick and mobile location shooting and new sources of material (largely original and sometimes partly improvisational stories for the French New Wave; adaptation of contemporary working-class fiction and drama for Free Cinema). However, what I am particularly interested in here is what was in both contexts a dramatic shift from national cinemas that were institutionally focused on collective representations of a shared national past, to new cinemas that took firm and passionate interests in the here-and-now of the individual. There are clearly marked differences in the immediate subject matter of the British and French New Waves. The French New Wave was famously contemptuous of the ‘message picture’, or film à thèse, and avoided overt moralism, didactic invocation of political issues or ‘narrative for its own sake’.83 The British New Wave, on the other hand, was set against a backdrop of working-class industrial towns in the North of England, and from its inception was more or less explicitly engaged with the class politics of modernity. Despite these differing orientations towards political commentary, however, all of these films share a passionate interest in representing youth, intimacy, sex and the domestic everyday. This closeness to the home, the family and the passage to sexual maturity, therefore, makes their general lack of attention to mothers and motherhood all the more curious. Though, as discussed above, mothers in cultural representation have tended to be relegated to the ‘elsewhere’ of the everyday, the domestic here becomes a canvas of masculine experience. Mothers, and the relationships of young pregnant women to motherhood, are by and large sidelined (the 1963 film A Taste of Honey, discussed in Chapter 6, is a rare and relatively solitary exception here). Occasional critics have attempted to distance the New Waves from domestic concerns, and the nomenclature of the ‘kitchen sink cycle’ to describe the British independent films of the early 1960s has proved particular cause for debate. Nowell-Smith exemplifies this attitude in his comment that ‘“Kitchen-sink realism”, a derogatory label originally given to the painting of John Bratby and others in the 1950s, is not even accurate, since, apart from

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Look Back in Anger (1959) and possibly A Taste of Honey, the films do not have particularly domestic settings’.84 The latter claim is difficult to accept, as the family home is without exception a symbolically, aesthetically and narratively important setting throughout this cycle of films; even when the characters and action depart from it, it is a primary site of tension and psychological richness. It is also my conviction here that condescension towards the term ‘kitchen sink film’ is itself to some degree rooted in a form of misogyny that identifies the most traditionally maternal-feminine space in the home with inferiority, intellectual poverty and smallness (especially relative to the masculine-coded spaces of the workplace and the pub). This book therefore continues to deploy the term ‘kitchen sink cycle’ in good faith, as an effort to resist the replication of these gendered valuations and underscore the primary importance of the domestic as a political space. The representations of mothers, mothering and motherhood in these spaces have, all in all, been left largely unexamined as independently significant issues. When mothers are present, their most pressing role seems to be within the unconscious of the usually male protagonist; this is also the role in which mothers have received the greatest degree of critical attention. By far the most discussed of New Wave mothers is Gilberte Doinel of Truffaut’s Les 400 coups (1959), who – as shall be discussed in Chapter 4 – is almost universally discussed as a Freudian monster whose only purpose is to wreak psychic havoc on her protagonist-son. This tone of discussion begs the question posed by Irigaray of whether ‘the feminine has an unconscious or whether it is the unconscious’.85 However, while there has been little work on the New Waves or any British or French cinemas of the 1960s dedicated specifically to the figure of the mother or the gendered domestic, issues of gender and sexuality more broadly have been considered across the period. This is relevant firstly in relation to the empirical genderedness of the young cinema movements; both New Wave movements have been widely critically acknowledged as ‘boys’ clubs’.86 The Cahiers critics and the young film-makers making their debuts during the heyday of the French New Wave were overwhelmingly young men. Agnès Varda is sometimes invoked as a surrogate ‘grandmother’ of the New Wave – somewhat bizarrely, as she was still only in her early thirties at the beginning of the 1960s. However, by far the best-known women of the French New Wave were in front of rather than behind the camera. The emphasis of these cinemas on auteurism (and its enduring influence) has also meant that in all cases the substantial contributions of women as writers, editors and in other less high-profile roles have been marginalized.87 Detailed and convincing criticisms of the patriarchal tendencies of the New Wave cinemas of the 1960s have also been numerous. In their lengthy and influential accounts of British cinema of the 1960s, Robert Murphy and John

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Hill both underscore the unabashed chauvinism of much of the ‘angry young men’ literature that inspired the films,88 and Moya Luckett89 provides a briefer but significant feminist defence of the Swinging London films. Of the many feminist critics of the French New Wave, Geneviève Sellier has perhaps been the most blistering, and provides an extensive and contextualized argument that ‘New Wave cinema is in the first person masculine singular at a moment when the first surveys of young people were showing a considerable gap between the aspirations of young men and those of young women’.90 However, across the spectrum, critical discussions of gender and feminist issues in 1960s cinema have overwhelmingly privileged matters of romance and sexuality, examining the roles and representation of young women within the modern heterosexual dyad, critiquing tendencies towards patriarchal objectification and exploring feminine sexual subjectivities. The relatively novel figure of the sexually liberated young single woman predominates. Melanie Bell discusses this figure specifically as the typified heroine of 1960s British cinema.91 She argues that ‘[w]hile the free and liberated young woman was a commercially potent image for advertisers, filmmakers, and others, the figure represents a victory of image over reality’.92 Not only did these images and their reception smooth over many of the deeper prejudices and structural inequalities that continued to inform women’s lived experiences and invest in an easy image of carefree, enfranchised and empowered femininity that had yet to be realized, but, Bell asserts, ‘mainstream cinema … was inhospitable to expressions of femininity that questioned the dominant image of the mobile, free young woman’.93 As I argue in depth in Chapter 3, the films that engage with such narratives – particularly those of the Swinging London cycle – do in fact complicate this figure considerably. However, as Bell’s appraisal indicates, to focus on sexual expression only is to draw a limited picture of modern femininities in the 1960s. Sellier similarly reviews and critiques accounts of ‘Mademoiselle New Wave’ in France, concluding – much like Bell – that the image of the comprehensively sexually liberated young woman involves no small degree of myth-making, interpreted either as ‘the will to invent an “ideal” woman for men, a woman finally liberated from the puritan education that made her off limits until marriage, or as a quite paranoid vision of changes in female behavior – two hypotheses that are not in the least contradictory’.94 As historians such as Margaret Atack,95 Sylvie Chaperon,96 Lisa Greenwald97 and Alison Smith98 have pointed out, though feminist organizations – and the family planning campaign in particular – were gaining traction throughout the 1960s, second-wave feminism and reproductive rights did not become a mass movement in France until the years following 1968. In fact, although the May 1968 protests are often considered the origin point of the MLF (Mouvement de Libération des Femmes, or Women’s Liberation Movement, one of the leading second-wave feminist orga-

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nizations in France), feminist concerns tended to be marginalized during the protests.99 Chaperon argues that, despite the considerable presence of women and feminists within the protest movement, they were excluded from positions of power and relegated to gender-stereotyped roles; ‘Les étudiants monopolisent la parole, même quand il s’agit de parler des femmes. … Les femmes tapent les tracts et nettoient les salles; les garçons font les discours.’100 The result of all these factors is that across the decade, the personal and political tended to be articulated from masculinist perspectives; this point has been well made by numerous researchers on the film and culture of the 1960s in both countries, yet between the New Waves’ focus on young masculinities at the beginning of the decade and the emphasis on (non-feminist) radical politics and the dismissal of the Swinging London films at its end, discussions of gender in 1960s British and French cinema have tended to take this work to task predominantly on issues of sexuality. What gets buried here, then, is the complexity and diversity of gender politics and feminist issues in this period, the vital ways in which they informed youth culture and intergenerational tensions in a changing political landscape, and how this both influenced and was influenced by film. This book foregrounds motherhood as an important way into this complexity. A feminist reading of this decade and its film movements should not give special attention only to the position and representation of women within the (potential) heterosexual couple, but should consider women’s position within a nexus of existing and potential relations that are shaped by nationalistic ideologies. The young cinemas of the 1960s in France and Britain deal with domestic intimacies and social identities against a backdrop of a rapidly changing cultural landscape influenced by dynamic shifts in pop culture, post-war consumerism, the decline of European imperialism, liberalizing social and legal attitudes to sex and increasingly widespread access to contraception. Motherhood and reproduction are of pre-eminent significance throughout all of these issues, and this book puts forward three pivotal ways in which this perspective sheds new light on important elements of the contexts and aesthetics of this body of films. Firstly, it brings to bear feminist considerations of intergenerational relationships and tensions in these cinemas. The New Waves’ revolts against their father figures are widely recognized, but between the apparently immaculate (father-only) conceptions of these movements and the foregrounding of young ‘New Wave women’ as love objects, the mother of the older generation is all but forgotten. Secondly, it allows ingress into the hugely important but as yet under-examined issue of the relationship between film and reproductive rights discourses; it is here, rather than in the representation of women’s attitudes to sex itself, that these films are at their most interesting in relation to the experiences of young women. Finally, motherhood and its wider ideological connections to the politics of nationalism are particularly revealing in relation

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to cultural representations of marginalized identities within Eurocentric politics and cultural representation in this period, particularly Black and migrant experiences and homosexuality (both male and female). Motherhood should therefore not be theoretically packed away and annexed yet again to the private sphere at the edge of discourse. Motherhood, mothering, pregnancy and reproduction are instead deeply and energetically intertwined with the most public of political issues. This book proceeds in three parts: ‘Conception’, ‘Gestation’ and ‘Delivery’. Each part responds in detail to one of the perspectives outlined above, beginning with a discussion of the political climates relevant to the issue at stake, in order to embed the film analyses firmly within their sociohistorical contexts. The first part of the book, ‘Conception’, deals with conceptual constructions of the child-as-active-subject and mother-as-domestic-object dominant in cultural and political usages of familial and gendered imagery. Chapters 1 and 2 focus respectively on canonical films from the English social realist or ‘kitchen sink’ film cycle and films by two important New Wave-associated directors, Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda. Contextually, Part I takes as its focus widespread social concerns over consumerism, mass culture and the mass production of household commodities, which were forcefully expressed as a central thematic issue within both relevant bodies of film throughout the early to mid-1960s. The thriving materialist culture of capitalist mass production in prosperous, post-war consumer economies and the new signs, forms and discourses that accompanied it were cause for ambivalent societal responses in both countries, from excitement and pride to introspective anxieties over the integrity of social organization and the meaning of the human. The young cinema movements of both countries that I discuss responded energetically to these ambivalences, meditating extensively on the effect of these consumer cultures on individual identities and the possibility that these too could be mass produced and replicated. This part argues that motherhood as a symbolic matrix is particularly integral to the films’ representations of these concerns. While the thrill and power of modern production had iconographic links to youthful, Americanized masculinity and Hollywood, the mother figure in these films appears overwhelmingly connected to its underside of cultural decline and depersonalization. The films discussed in Part I, in differing ways, use the traditional metonymy of the mother as the static heart of the private and public family to frame mother characters as nerve centres for cultural anxiety, whether as aggressors, victims or both. Chapter 1, ‘Maternal Products and the British Kitchen Sink’, takes a selection of key English social realist or ‘kitchen sink’ films and argues that the mother in the home is produced by the films’ masculine identification and patriarchal undertones as a figure particularly heavily invested with the dangers

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of consumer culture. In these films, the ‘bad mother’, preoccupied with material objects, represents a threat of domestication, objectification and moral enfeeblement that the protagonist must overcome in order to maintain his subjectivity, individuality and masculine agency. Chapter 2, ‘The Mass Reproduction of Mothering: Une Femme Mariée and Le Bonheur’, looks at more critical approaches to this idea in works by Varda and Godard. In it, I consider contemporaneous discourses and critiques of consumer culture, Americanization and mass production in France and argue that motherhood and mothering figures are seen to have particularly intimate relationships to anxieties over ‘reproducibility’. I show how Varda and Godard use domestic objects, settings and cultural images to explore these issues, converging on the figure of the traditional mother as the foremost symbol of mass reproduction. The second part,‘Gestation’, concentrates on the representation of unplanned pregnancy in film. With a close focus on abortion and reproductive rights, I look at how these issues are represented in English and French cinema, relating this to contemporaneous debates around the decriminalization of abortion in both countries. This part not only looks at moments of ambivalence in experiences of pregnancy, but also considers thinking on abortion as a ‘gestational’ moment for ideas on motherhood, as the debates that occurred in Britain and France essentially pitted the rights of existing women against those of an as yet imagined child. The significance of political debates over abortion, contraception and reproductive rights for feminist activity and thought in France and Britain during this time frame can hardly be overstated, and there has been a great deal of work documenting the legal histories of these campaigns. However, in bringing to light abortion and unplanned pregnancy as significant themes in contemporaneous cinema, this chapter breaks entirely new critical ground. It also seeks to illustrate how film representations do not merely supplement but offer important new insight to historiographies of reproductive rights, as they move away from the abstracted or polarized precedents of legal-historical literature and towards alternative narratives that instead foreground personalized experience and moral ambivalence and produce complex ethical relationships with victimhood. Chapter 3, ‘The “Permissive” Myth: Conservatism, Change and Contraception in Swinging London’, takes films from the kitchen sink and Swinging London cycles and analyses the representation of abortion experiences from the identificatory perspectives of male and female characters, focusing in particular on their construction of guilt and victimhood. It begins by bridging thematically from Part I and setting out attitudes to representing abortion in the kitchen sink cycle, looking in particular detail at the well-known and controversial abortion scene in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960). The main body of the chapter is then devoted to a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of the remarkably prominent thematization of abortion and unplanned

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pregnancy in Swinging London films popular from the mid- to late 1960s. Chapter 4, ‘Scene and Unscene: Reimagining Abortion in La Génération Pepsi’, is similarly wide-ranging in scope, giving an in-depth account of trends in representations of abortion immediately before and during the New Wave. It concentrates on how the idea of the female ‘victim’ of abortion is presented and relates this closely to the historical context of reproductive rights in France. This is framed initially by a discussion of the solicitation of sympathy through excessive victimhood in earlier French melodramas, before moving on to a discussion of how approaches in the New Wave tended to subvert this trend. Finally, the third part, ‘Delivery’, deals with the emergence of films that problematize the homogeny of mainstream motherhood narratives. Focusing on the idea of ‘mothering in the margins’, this part deals with difference within experiences and representations of mothering practices and kinship structures that are not addressed by mainstream European ideological mothering constructions. The part engages with two particularly urgent expressions of marginalized mothering experiences: the intersection of race, motherhood and family in (neo)colonial Britain and France – including films that deal with both migrant kinships and interracial parenthood – and the presence of queer identities within familial discourse. The aims of this final part are twofold. In the first instance, it works towards highlighting significant erasures in the homogenizing ideologies of motherhood described throughout the book and relates these to discursive anxieties of contemporaneous social politics. Secondly, it considers the potential for deploying filmic representations and film-making practices as political tools in the development of alternative subjective spaces for mothering identities and kinships. Chapter 5, ‘Whose Lineage is it Anyway? Migration and Racist Futurities’, concentrates on interactions between discourses of ethnicity and migration and ideologies of motherhood in a selection of films from both countries. In particular, the contribution of this chapter is to analyse the representation of domesticity in these films and to show how mother figures become problematically attached to nationalistic identities. The chapter is closely informed by contextual detail and aims to highlight potent interactions between political rhetoric and film representation. Chapter 6, ‘Queer Communities and Queer Failures in British Film’, explores the (often relatively tacit) incidence of queer characters in films that feature unplanned pregnancy, mostly concentrating on British social realist and Swinging London films. A complicated trend is developed here in which queer-coded characters are often briefly represented as utopian kinship solutions for female protagonists with difficult or ambivalent relationships to motherhood, before ultimately dissolving into unfeasibility. This chapter puts these trends into the context of changing social and legal attitudes to homosexuality, and theorizes the representation of ‘impossible’ queer kinships within the context of Edelman’s arguments on reproductive futurity.

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Notes 1. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 19–20. 2. For instance, Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1977); ‘Family Romances’, in On Sexuality; ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’, in On Sexuality; ‘Female Sexuality’, in On Sexuality; ‘Some Psychic Consequences of the Anatomical Distinctions Between the Sexes’, in On Sexuality; and ‘Femininity’, in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 22, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964). 3. Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (London: Virago, 1977), 35–36. 4. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (London: Penguin, 1974), xv. 5. Ibid., 362. 6. Ibid., 110. 7. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), 11. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 3, original emphasis. 10. Ibid., 11, my emphasis. 11. Ibid., 3. 12. Ibid. 13. Hélène Cixous, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing (London: I.B. Tauris, 1996), 63–65. 14. Jacqueline Rose, Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty (London: Faber and Faber, 2018), 1. 15. Ibid., 7. 16. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. Gillian C. Gill (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), 133. 17. Ibid., 42–43. 18. Luce Irigaray, ‘The Power of Discourse and the Subordination of the Feminine’, in This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, (1985), 83, original emphasis. 19. Irigaray, Speculum, 18, original emphasis. 20. Luce Irigaray, ‘The Culture of Difference’, in Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 2007), 39. 21. Luce Irigaray, ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’, in The Irigaray Reader, ed. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 35, original emphasis. 22. Ibid., 41. 23. Ibid., 40. 24. Ibid., 39. 25. Ibid., 38. 26. Ibid., 39, original emphasis. 27. Rich, Of Woman Born, 225. 28. Ibid., 226. 29. Freud, ‘Female Sexuality’, 376. 30. Rich, Of Woman Born, 235. 31. Ibid., original emphasis.

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32. See, for instance, Andrea O’Reilly (ed.), From Motherhood to Mothering: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004). 33. E. Ann Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama (London: Routledge, 1992). 34. Suzanna Danuta Walters, Lives Together/Worlds Apart: Mothers and Daughters in Popular Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992). 35. Jackie Byars, ‘Gazes/Voices/Power: Expanding Psychoanalysis for Feminist Film and Television Theory’, in Female Spectators: Looking and Film and Television, ed. E. Deidre Pribram (London: Verso, 1988). 36. Tania Modleski, Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women (New York: Routledge, 1988). 37. Annette Kuhn, ‘Women’s Genres: Melodrama, Soap Opera and Theory’, in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 251–66. 38. Julia Kristeva, ‘Motherhood [According to Giovanni Bellini]’, in French Feminism Reader, ed. Kelly Oliver (Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 177. 39. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 53. 40. Ibid., 54. 41. Julia Kristeva, ‘Approaching Abjection (abridged)’, in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 230. 42. Julia Kristeva, ‘From Filth to Defilement (abridged)’, in The Portable Kristeva, ed. Kelly Oliver (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 254. 43. Barbara Creed, ‘Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection’, in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 251–66. 44. Sarah Arnold, Maternal Horror Film: Melodrama and Motherhood (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 45. Lucy Fischer, Cinematernity: Film, Motherhood, Genre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 46. Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London: Zed Books, 2013). 47. Ibid., 30. 48. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988). 49. Julia Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, in Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 133. 50. Ibid., original emphasis. 51. Kristeva, ‘Motherhood [According to Giovanni Bellini]’, 176. 52. Rich, Of Woman Born, 102. 53. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (London: David Campbell, 1993), 281. 54. Ibid., 537. 55. Ibid., 521. 56. Ibid., 548. 57. Ibid., 550. 58. Ibid., 516–17. 59. Ibid., 540.

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60. Rozsika Parker, Torn in Two: The Experience of Maternal Ambivalence (London: Virago, 2005); Wendy Holloway and Brid Featherstone (eds), Mothering and Ambivalence (London: Routledge, 1989). 61. Andrea O’Reilly, ‘Introduction’, in From Motherhood to Mothering: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, ed. Andrea O’Reilly (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 2, original emphasis. 62. Rich, Of Woman Born, 225. 63. Andrea O’Reilly, ‘Mothering against Motherhood and the Possibility of Empowered Maternity for Mothers and Their Children’, in From Motherhood to Mothering: The Legacy of Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born, ed. Andrea O’Reilly (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), 164, original emphasis. 64. Rich, Of Woman Born, 249. 65. O’Reilly, ‘Mothering against Motherhood’, 159. 66. Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Towards a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994). 67. Luce Irigaray, ‘So When Are We to Become Women?’, in Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 2007). 68. François Truffaut, ‘A Certain Tendency in French Cinema, France, 1954’, in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Culture: A Critical Anthology, ed. Scott MacKenzie (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 133–44. 69. Lindsay Anderson, Lorenza Mazzetti, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, ‘Free Cinema Manifestos (UK, 1956–1959)’, in Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Culture: A Critical Anthology, ed. Scott MacKenzie (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2014), 149. 70. Penelope Houston, cited in Duncan Petrie and Melanie Williams, ‘Introduction’, in Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema, ed. Richard Farmer, Laura Mayne, Duncan Petrie and Melanie Williams (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), 1. 71. Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema, 2nd ed. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), xvii. 72. Françoise Giroud, ‘La Nouvelle Vague: Portraits de la Jeunesse’, L’Express, 5 and 12 December 1957. 73. For instance, Sylvie Chaperon, Les Années Beauvoir: 1945–1970 (Paris, Fayard, 2000), 341–42; Lisa Greenwald, Daughters of 1968: Redefining French Feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 88–92. 74. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, Making Waves: New Cinemas of the 1960s (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 143–44. 75. Ibid., 144. 76. Ibid. 77. Neupert, History of the French New Wave, xv–xvi; Nowell-Smith, Making Waves, 129, 143. 78. Jean-Luc Comolli and Paul Narboni, ‘Cinema/Ideology/Criticism’, in Film Theory and Criticism, 7th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, [1969] 2009), 686. 79. Alexander Walker, cited in Nowell-Smith, Making Waves, 138. 80. Nowell-Smith, Making Waves, 138. 81. Petrie and Williams’s Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema and the supporting database for their project give an excellent holistic breakdown of the British film industry in the 1960s. 82. Neupert, History of the French New Wave, xxii–xxiv.

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83. Peter Brunette, ‘But Nothing Happened: The Everyday in French Postwar Cinema’, in The Quotidian in Postwar French Culture, ed. Lynn Gumpert (New York: New York University Press/Grey Art Gallery Study Center, 1997), 80. 84. Nowell-Smith, Making Waves, 129–30. 85. Irigaray, ‘Power of Discourse’, 73, original emphasis. 86. Geneviève Sellier, ‘French New Wave Cinema and the Legacy of Male Libertinage’, Cinema Journal 49(4) (2010), 153. 87. Sue Harper, Women in British Cinema: Mad, Bad, and Dangerous to Know (London: Continuum, 2000) discusses and redresses this issue in excellent detail with regard to twentiethcentury British cinema. 88. Robert Murphy, Sixties British Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1992), 28–33; John Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism: British Cinema, 1956–1963 (London: British Film Institute, 1986), 147–58. 89. Moya Luckett, ‘Travel and Mobility: Femininity and National Identity in Swinging London Films’, in British Cinema, Past and Present, ed. Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (London: Routledge, 2000), 233–46. 90. Geneviève Sellier, Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema, trans. Kristin Ross (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 7. 91. Melanie Bell, ‘Young, Single, Disillusioned: The Screen Heroine in 1960s British Cinema’, The Yearbook of English Studies 42 (2012), 79. 92. Ibid., 80. 93. Ibid. 94. Sellier, Masculine Singular, 149. 95. Margaret Atack, May 68 in French Fiction & Film: Rethinking Society, Rethinking Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 96. Chaperon, Années Beauvoir. 97. Greenwald, Daughters of 1968. 98. Alison Smith, French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005). 99. Chaperon, Années Beauvoir, 341. 100. ‘The male students monopolized the conversation, even when it concerned women. … The women typed up the tracts and tidied the rooms; the young men did the talking.’ Ibid., 346–47.

PART I

Conception  

At the heart of what I have discussed in my introduction is the fundamental proposition that – within the dominant social, cultural and political forms of orthodox patriarchy – the Mother and Child couple are paradigmatically cast in an imbalanced relation that predetermines the Child as subject and the Mother as object. The predominance of the (male) child-as-subject is underpinned foundationally within the developmental models of classical Freudian psychoanalysis, and is made the subject of valuable ideological critique within Edelman’s Lacanian queer theory. Yet none of these approaches give any consideration whatsoever to what it is like to be made a mother within these ideological circumstances or, indeed, within the actual (patriarchal) societies and material relations that they structure. Interventions from feminist thought are therefore urgently needed in order firstly to deconstruct the limited misogynistic blueprints offered by reproductive futurity (to mothering women, but also to feminine subjects always already addressed by patriarchal ideology in terms of their potential maternity, as well as non-feminine subjects whose fluid relationships to mothering and parenting might be restricted by that same discourse). Feminist theories of mothering are also vital in exploring and promoting the creative and heterogeneous universe of mothering subjectivities and relations possible outside of the hierarchical fantasy of the patriarchal family. The approach taken in this part begins with the former, aiming to analyse critically the concept(ion) of the domestic mother-as-object in British and French New Wave cinema. In an even more ideologically rigid formulation of the gendered hierarchy that underlies relations between men and women, representations of the patriarchal mother–child couple tend to place the son on the side of culture, action and authenticity and relegate the mother to the opposing pole of passivity and shallowness. This part, on ‘maternal products’, will look in more detail at domestic objects, the environment of the home and the mother’s place within it as represented in English and French film in the 1960s, and will explore how a discourse of domestic spaces and commodities is used to reflect on or reinforce ideological templates of motherhood and the mother figure in the family home.

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The post-Second World War period of the twentieth century was a time of great cultural, social and economic change in France and Britain. Mass culture and mass production became hugely important social concerns and cultural themes, alongside intermeshed discourses of globalization, decolonization and the decline of European empires, and the cultural sovereignty of a USA seen through a pristine Hollywood lens. The rhythms of cultural, political and economic change in Europe can scarcely be disentangled; a healthy post-war economy and means of production led by American-style capitalism precipitated general improvement in material standards of living, accompanied by a wealth of new cultural forms and technologies that revolutionized the faces of the British and French everyday. On the other hand, the role of Britain and France on the world stage was changing, as their empires rapidly shrank throughout the mid-twentieth century, marked particularly by extended independence conflicts across India, Algeria and South East Asia. As their political global presence diminished, the cultural pseudo-empire of the United States only continued to grow. Much change, furthermore, was in evidence within the private and domestic spheres; the frequency with which accounts of this period in Europe draw on empirical measures of and metaphorizing language around domestic commodities (mainly white goods, but also entertainment technologies, such as the television) as a pre-eminently crystallizing expression of societal change and progress is striking.1 Attitudes of French and British publics to this swiftly transforming culture, however, were deeply ambivalent. True enough, certain camps met these cultural and technological developments with a great deal of enthusiasm, but others, equally, responded with nostalgic anxiety.2 John Hill describes these attitudes in Britain: Mass production, it was argued, eschewed the values of individual design and craftsmanship in favour of an imposed standardisation and phoney egalitarianism of taste; while the mass media (particularly television, with its subservience to ratings and advertisers) necessarily gravitated towards the popular and lowest common denominator.3

Concern was expressed by politicians, artists and commentators that the commodification of everyday life and the influx of mass production and consumer culture would engender cultural poverty: Politicians of all shades regarded affluence as cloaking real economic achievement or as late-imperial ostentation. Psychologists held ‘affluence is synonymous with decadence’ and character-weakening pleasures like pastel, soft toilet paper. It was virtual and artificial – bought on hire-purchase for as little as one per cent down and based on false needs contrived by advertising … . All told, it was argued, private affluence came at the expense of public squalor.4

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Mistrust of domestic commodities occurred, furthermore, on a gendered landscape. The man, as the locus of ‘authentic’ culture, could also be positioned as its guardian; the feminine relation to the vagaries of modernity was seen often as more susceptible and precarious. Moreover, the mother figure, in her typically domestic situation, could be characterized as supremely primed to be both seduced and victimized by mass culture and its deluge of things. The ideological as well as practical consequences of decolonization and modernity in Britain and France also had an effect on domestic identity discourses. The Algerian War was a significant moment within French political self-perceptions, and was thematized by artists and intellectuals, including Godard (Le petit soldat, 1960/1963).5 The effect of the collapse of the British Empire on domestic English identity has also been a subject of critical debate in recent decades. What Stuart Ward has defined as the ‘minimal impact thesis’, or the argument that the effects of decolonization were mainly felt within the formerly colonized states while making little impression on British culture and popular identity, has been contested by a number of cultural historians.6 Jeffrey Richards7 and Martin Francis8 have addressed the national identity figure of the white, male imperial hero, through its transference to the gentleman Second World War hero and finally its mutation into a gendered and raced sense of Englishness symbolized by ‘the quiet street and the privet hedge’.9 In general, however, writers on end of empire cultures in Europe suggest something of a shift inward in national identity formation, documenting multiple examples of practical, figurative or linguistic turns towards home.10 Part of the shift in focus towards domestic, as opposed to global, identities also concerned anxieties over migration and cultural integrity. Bill Schwarz11 suggests how figurative reversals appeared to take place at this point whereby former colonizers (in a gesture of egregious and racist hypocrisy) adopted the emotional and self-symbolizing standpoint of colonized subjects, feeling domestic cultures and identities threatened by immigration.12 Home, in this context, came to be represented as an embattled site of national identity among destabilizing figures of modernity. The nature and specific circumstances of change differed between and within Britain and France, although the global dominance of the USA provided a homogenizing force. Kristin Ross describes how modernization in France occurred at a feverish pace, and how lived experiences of change were located in the everyday; French people ‘tended to describe the changes in their lives in terms of the abrupt transformations in home and transport’.13 In the UK, the reigning shibboleths of social progress were the culture of ‘affluence’ and the ‘classless society’, epitomized in Harold Macmillan’s much-famed (and much-derided) assertion that the British public had ‘never had it so good’.14 Both countries also saw a proliferation of artworks and creative thought that variously explored, celebrated and criticized the advent of mass culture and

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mechanical reproduction in the twentieth century. The films I discuss in the following chapters are part of this zeitgeist, but other significant artefacts include British pop art and fashion culture and the French Situationists. A turn towards the quotidian also took place within French critical theory, led by theorists such as Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord and Roland Barthes, producing rich bodies of thought that denaturalized the semiotics and ideologies of cultural consensuses of daily life.15 It is important to underscore at this stage that the nature of commodity forms, their sites of use and distribution, their marketing and their meanings in society were all radically gendered phenomena.16 Certain privileged consumer products have become ubiquitous in media accounts of European modernity; the car, the washing machine, the fridge and the television have come to be particularly mythologized objects, with a special relation to the symbols and materials of everyday consumer realities. These products are also gendered, as Ross illustrates in a paradigmatic example: ‘The car was billed as “l’amie de l’homme” – user-friendly, that is, to soothe any anxiety provoked by the intrusion of strange huge machines into one’s daily life, and “man’s friend” also as a conjugal partner to what were commonly billed as “les amis de la femme”: household appliances.’17 It could also be suggested that societal concerns over the mass production industry itself had an ideologically gendered dimension. As argued by Nancy Chodorow, while ‘[t]he sex-gender system is analytically separable from, and it is never entirely explainable in terms of, the organization of production, [in] any particular society the two are empirically and structurally intertwined’.18 Therefore, ‘production’ falls into the language of masculine virility, connoting growth, linear progression, masculine manual labour and workspaces, whereas ‘reproduction’ is feminine. As demonstrated above, such reproductivity is symbolized in patriarchy as a frightening place to be, in which the uniqueness of the subject comes under blunt threat, ‘[e]ndlessly encircling the speculum of a primal place. Passing from inside to outside without ever, simply, being resolved, resorbed, reflected.’19 Mass reproduction, and the concomitant loss of identity, authenticity and individuality, were substantial cultural concerns, and, as discussed below, it would not be hyperbolic to suggest that anxieties over the ‘effeminacy’ of consumer culture played a part in public and artistic wariness towards it. On a more material level, however, I also argue that beyond their essential relationship to gender, critiques of modern commodities and consumer culture in the films discussed here can be used to explore attitudes to the maternal specifically. It is not just ‘woman’ in general who is placed at the centre of the commodified universe, but a specific and archetypal figure of woman: the mother-in-the-home. She is the centre of the familial domestic scene and the

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nucleus of the palimpsestic modern arsenal of domestic goods; traditionally, she selects and buys the domestic goods, labours in the home and administers to the family. The following two chapters look at the collision between discourses on modern consumer culture and discourses on gender and family in a selection of English kitchen sink and French post-New Wave films. Chapter 1 deals with the former English social realist cycle. This group of films is characteristically suspicious of consumer and mass culture in a way that is clearly gendered; the housewife is often a shallow dupe, threatening the authentic virility of the working-class man. A narrative of intergenerational conflict also often sets the young male protagonist against the more or less villainous figure of the oldergeneration mother, whose voracity for the superficial bagatelles of consumer capitalism threatens the ‘good’, authentic values of traditional masculinity. The chapter pays particularly close attention to John Schlesinger’s A Kind of Loving (1962) as a paradigmatic example of these themes. The situation tends to be slightly more ambivalent in the French films (after all, one of the key reactionary propositions of the New Wave was against the commercialization of films, which, as the ‘cinéma de papa’, was given a patriarchal character that was hardly reverential); however, as critics such as Geneviève Sellier20 have explored, there are strongly gendered undercurrents to the portrayal of consumerism as or against culture. Unlike the English films that presented a clear critique of mass culture and its ‘inauthentic’ reproductions, the cinema of the post-New Wave directors tends towards investigation and collage rather than thesis. Chapter 2 focuses mainly on Une femme mariée (A Married Woman) (1964) and Le bonheur (Happiness) (1965), analysing Godard’s and Varda’s explorations of consumerist modernity in relation to the domestic and the mother figure to argue that these films offer nuanced critical reflections on the imaginative intertwining of motherhood and mass reproduction in capitalist patriarchy. These chapters are concerned with the mother figure’s relation to and the maternal nature of consumer products in film. They also broach another facet of the ‘maternal product’, looking not only at the products directed at mothers, but the Mother as product, addressing the notion of (conceptual) motherhood as produced by discourse and ideology, and the Mother’s relation to mechanization in the era of mass reproduction. I have chosen these directors and groups of films because discourses on modernity, commodity culture and identity, often brought broadly into dialogue with sexuality and gender, are manifest concerns, and the existing scholarship on the films tends to reflect this. The development offered here, however, is to concentrate on how a specific type of maternal-domestic femininity emerges as a particularly volatile site of criticism and contention within these discourses. I argue that beyond the established binary gender hierarchy, there is further division at the pole of femininity in

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which the home and mothering women become particularly crucial artefacts in narratives of identity and modernity, and are especially open to stigmatization. This is further consolidated by the received positioning of the point of cultural identification for these anxieties as masculine, a structure reflected throughout the films, whether critically or unconsciously. The chapters in this part move beyond existing critical interest in how these bodies of film engage with the politics of consumerism and mass culture to demonstrate how these issues are also deeply intertwined with discourses of domesticity, intimacy, gender and patriarchal ideologies of the mother-in-the-home. Notes 1. For instance, Lawrence Black, ‘The Impression of Affluence: Political Culture in the 1950s and 1960s’, in An Affluent Society? Britain’s Post-War ‘Golden Age’ Revisited, ed. Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 85. Black uses the UK’s Retail Price Index and the types of items appearing on it between the 1950s and 1960s to illustrate changing standards in typical household commodities and material lifestyles. Michèle Cone similarly uses statistical prevalence of household commodities as an expression of societal change in France; ‘By 1968 half of all French households owned a washing machine, and cars were no longer a luxury’ – Michèle Cone, ‘“Métro, Boulot, Dodo”: The Art of the Everyday in France, 1958–72’, in The Quotidian in Postwar French Culture, ed. Lynn Gumpert (New York: New York University Press/Grey Art Gallery Study Center, 1997), 50. 2. In this case, Henri Lefebvre’s account of the ‘discourse of the optimist’ and ‘discourse of the nostalgic’ are instructive – Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life: Volume 3, trans. John Moore (London: Verso, 2008), 6–9. 3. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 12. 4. Black, ‘Impression of Affluence’, 86. 5. Le petit soldat was made in 1960, but not released until 1963 due to political censorship in reaction to its presentation of the Algerian War. A thorough account of the chronology of Godard’s early film-making is given in Roland François Lack, ‘The Point in Time: Precise Chronology in Early Godard’, Studies in French Cinema 3, no. 2 (2003): 101–9. 6. For instance, John M. MacKenzie, ‘The Persistence of Empire in Metropolitan Culture’, in British Culture and the End of Empire, ed. Stuart Ward (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 21–36; Stuart Ward, ‘Introduction’, in British Culture and the End of Empire, ed. Stuart Ward (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 1–20; Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939–1965 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Jeffrey Richards, ‘Boy’s Own Empire: Feature Films and Imperialism in the 1930s’, in Imperialism and Popular Culture, ed. John MacKenzie (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), more specifically on the effect of imperial figures in popular culture. 7. Jeffrey Richards, ‘Imperial Heroes for a Post-Imperial Age: Films and the End of Empire’, in British Culture and the End of Empire, ed. Stuart Ward (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 8. Martin Francis, ‘The Domestication of the Male? Recent Research on Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century British Masculinity’, The Historical Journal 45, no. 3 (2002): 637–52.

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9. Wendy Webster, Imagining Home: Gender, ‘Race’, and National Identity, 1945–64 (London: UCL Press, 1998), 65. 10. For example, Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995) describes the pseudo-familial imagery of Algerian independence as ‘The Great Divorce’. Francis, ‘Domestication of the Male?’ reviews critical work on the ambivalence of male domesticity in England as opposed to in the colonies, analysing how men in England consistently negotiated the boundary between home and public, and alluding to the post-war promotion of companionate marriage. Bill Schwarz, ‘“The Only White Man in There”: The Re-Racialisation of England, 1956–1968’, Race and Class 38 (1996): 65–78 looks at a popular perception of immigration as ‘bringing home’ the colonial frontier. It should be noted that many of these accounts underpin the complexity of these turns towards home, particularly problematized by enduring figures of imperial masculinity and the prevalence of adventure fiction, for instance. Generally, however, a trend can be noted that draws greater attention to domestic borders and cultures in the period of post-war decolonization. 11. Schwarz, ‘Only White Man’. 12. This topic is also discussed in Ross, Fast Cars; Schwarz, ‘Only White Man’; Webster, Imagining Home; and Webster, Englishness and Empire. 13. Ross, Fast Cars, 5. 14. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism and Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton (eds), An Affluent Society? Britain’s Post-War ‘Golden Age’ Revisited (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004) give excellent contextual accounts of the ‘affluent society’ and its reflection in culture. 15. For example, Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957); Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life; Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (London: Black and Red, 1977); or reviewed throughout Lynn Gumpert (ed.), The Quotidian in Postwar French Culture (New York: New York University Press/Grey Art Gallery Study Center, 1997). 16. Mary Ann Doane, ‘The Economy of Desire: The Commodity Form in/of Cinema’, Quarterly Review of Film and Video 11, no. 1 (1989): 23–33 is a highly detailed and nuanced essay on women’s relation to the commodity form, particularly in relation to film and the screen image, and elaborates on the complexity of the relationship, which includes a dual movement that sees women as both having and being the commodity. 17. Ross, Fast Cars, 24. 18. Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1999), 8. 19. Irigaray, Speculum, 76. 20. Geneviève Sellier, ‘Gender, Modernism and Mass Culture in the New Wave’, in Gender and French Cinema, ed. Alex Hughes and James S. Williams (Oxford: Berg, 2001).

CHAPTER 1

Maternal Products and the British Kitchen Sink   

The kitchen sink films are strongly invested in representing a contemporaneous, contextual reflection of English society. A major part of this was engaging with the ideas of ‘classlessness’ and the ‘affluent society’, which became the watchwords of reigning political and cultural narratives that sought to characterize the era. Ideologies such as those expressed by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in his speech delivered in Bedford in 1957, in which he famously claimed that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’,1 championed the image of post-war Britain as entering a golden age of equality and prosperity; ‘affluence’ reflected an abundance of material comforts for all and ‘classlessness’ suggested that this raising of living standards would engender social equilibrium.2 As with most totalizing cultural narratives, however, the lived realities were hardly so simple. For one thing, the discourse was not wholly practically true; despite an undeniable general rise in living standards, wealth was not evenly distributed across Britain, and cultural and economic class differences persisted, albeit in new guises.3 Furthermore, affluence did not work as propaganda, as negative social connotations and counter-narratives quickly cropped up; ‘Far from anything desirable, affluence was a by-word for what seemed wrong in society.’4 Reactions to affluence were multifaceted. Particularly prevalent cultural anxieties, however, concerned impressions of moral decay – the dilution, or softening, of virtuous British character. Central to these anxieties over cultural change is a discourse of consumerism: ‘Affluent’ was settled upon as ‘neither wholly neutral nor pejorative’. Galbraith concluded with the (aptly domestic) analogy that ‘to furnish a barren room is one thing, to continue to crowd in furniture until the foundation buckles is another.’ Never having had so many goods, it was maintained, was not the same as never having had it so good.5

Commentators therefore worried that affluence and mass production perhaps made life too comfortable, and what is more, undermined the nature of the skilled workplace and the organization of the home. Rather than appearing as neutral objects within independent moral-cultural discourse, commodities themselves are given moral personalities. I argue, furthermore, that women in

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the home, as housewives and mothers, as caretakers of future generations, are seen with particular harshness as being taken in by modern consumer culture and as catalysing its destructive and enfeebling elements. Lesley Whitworth discusses how the culture of affluence necessitated a relatively sudden change in the spending habits of traditional British housewives; they were no longer encouraged to master the art of saving, but that of spending, or the ‘art of selfishness’.6 She argues that mothers’ skills in aesthetic judgement and discriminating consumption took the place of the skill of ‘making do’ as the measure of their domestic competencies.7 This abrupt turnaround in a single generation from a society of rationing to one of abundance was a cultural shock to the system, and the deep-set traditional ideology of the homemaker-Mother could hardly keep step with the changes. The newly available household goods that, in a way, mechanized many traditionally perceived domestic-maternal functions became metaphors for cultural and spiritual decay. Lawrence Black notes this perception: ‘Consumerism was desiccating political passions – “the sound of class war is drowned by the hum of the spin-dryer”, Tory MP Charles Curran’s obituary of Aneurin Bevan noted.’8 He further illuminates how this could even be the case within socialist-feminist circles: ‘Delegates at Labour’s 1964 Women’s conference wondered “what had become of the housewives of the past, who had known exactly what a shilling meant” and harangued “gullible … housewives buying a washing machine when they did not even have a plug to plug it in.”’9 These are some of the cultural perspectives with which the kitchen sink cycle engages. A representational affinity between women, familial domesticity and mass culture is clear and often morally didactic. It is important here to reiterate the typical viewing position of this cycle; undeniably, the films tend towards masculine identification, usually centring narratively and psychologically on young male protagonists, and often maintaining traditionally ‘masculine’ values. It has also been pointed out that they describe the English working class from something of an anthropological outsider’s perspective; Terry Lovell has argued that the ruling viewpoint in these films is the Hoggartian ‘scholarship boy’.10 This leads, Lovell suggests, to a romanticized view of ‘traditional’ working-class culture as unequivocally noble and pure, and consequently understands mass culture as a polluting foreign body. This externalized and didactic viewpoint is further explored by Andrew Higson in his discussion of the ‘fetishization of certain iconographic details’11 to build a realism that he describes both as ‘poetic’ and ‘moral’. Higson argues that ‘[t]he Romantic tendency [of the films’ partly auteurist aesthetic] is held in check by the continuing demand for moral commitment, but there inevitably remains a tension here between the sociological and the aesthetic, the moral and the poetic’.12 However, the moral and the aesthetic are interwoven within the rhetorical organization

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of different domestic spaces, setting the virtue of the old-fashioned against the taint of the newfangled. There is a clear gendered quality to this opposition, positing work and ‘traditional’ pursuits as masculine, and leisure and mass culture as feminine.13 D.E. Cooper argues on the contempt expressed by the ‘angry young men’ that what these writers really attack is not so much women, but a much wider target, effeminacy. … Effeminacy is simply the sum of those qualities which are supposed to traditionally, with more or less justice, to exude from the worst in women: pettiness, snobbery, flippancy, voluptuousness, superficiality, materialism. The effeminate society is one that displays all these.14

Effeminacy, therefore, includes that of reproduced consumer objects in the feminine household. It was not just that women brought more ‘inauthentic’ commodities into the home, that culture itself was moving increasingly into the home or that the housewife was sharing her perceived motherly duties with machines – household commodities themselves were seen as feminizing. Such paranoia over effeminacy, reproduction and the loss of individual, masculine power engendered by the mass reproduction of domestic objects is perturbingly close to essential (phallocentric) psychoanalytic theories of maternal separation and its anxieties. In Freudian understandings of subject development, the mother is a cultureless space that must be escaped in order for the (male) child to become a producing subject. As Freud saw it, following the boy’s discovery that his mother has no penis, the mother (and all femininity with her), once so highly admired and prized, is made irreparably inferior; ‘One thing that is left over in men from the influence of the Oedipus complex is a certain amount of disparagement in their attitude towards women, whom they regard as being castrated.’15 She becomes the site of lack par excellence, an emptied vessel. She comes to stand in the unconscious for the disgrace of femininity and the unhappy state of more or less absent being. Freud argues for the belief in her having been castrated, which leads to the boy’s fear of femininity as punishment. The psychic remedy for this is for the boy – in order to maintain his uncastrated masculine subjectivity – to cut ties with the mother and align himself with the protective space of patriarchy and the law of the father. As Juliet Mitchell has importantly underscored in her revisionist account of feminist uses of Freud, this analysis of gender relations and the maternal is descriptive rather than prescriptive, ‘not a recommendation for a patriarchal society, but an analysis of one’.16 And as she further argues, its symptoms take on a particularly acute form within capitalist societies.17 Establishing a dialogue between Freud, feminist psychoanalysis and a critical reading of Friedrich Engels, Mitchell argues that ‘[i]n economically advanced societies, though the kinship exchange system still operates in a residual way, other forms of economic exchange – i.e.

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commodity exchange – dominate and class, not kinship structures prevail’.18 In some senses, the reduced status of women and mothers as objects of exchange and possession within patriarchy becomes displaced onto the commodity forms of mass-reproduced objects within consumer capitalism. At the extreme of sexist cultural panic, then, could the young man shut indoors within the family home, submerged within the universe of mechanically reproduced succubi and household commodities that displace his productive faculties, fear that he will never escape the castrating Mother? These are some of the key issues at stake in A Kind of Loving. This film centres on Vic, a young man from a dignified and ‘authentic’ working-class family, capitalizing on the virtues of the affluent society by progressing to a white-collar job as a draftsman. Vic begins a volatile relationship with Ingrid, a secretary at the same company, and, after Ingrid falls pregnant, he must negotiate the world of adult and family responsibilities alongside masculine ambition. The key obstacle to happiness is the fact that Vic must move in with Ingrid’s mother, a caricatured articulation of precisely the sort of feminine-maternal abomination that the underside of affluence was feared to spawn; represented as an overbearing, materialistic harridan, her very presence, not to mention her aesthetic and moral influence over the home, thoroughly emasculates Vic. It is hardly novel to underscore the hard time women are given in this cycle of films, a point that has been discussed at length by critics such as John Hill,19 Terry Lovell20 and Robert Murphy.21 Lovell, notably, argues that films such as A Kind of Loving and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning go out of their way to ensure that new, morally impoverished forms of consumerism are symbolically attached to femininity rather than well-paid working men, pointing out that in both films the ‘“new working-class” households are female-headed, father-absent, despite the anomaly that the working-class aspirations they represent could only be realized by women through access to a male wage’.22 However, it should be emphasized that it is not ‘too late’ for the young women of these films, who are typically represented as imperilled by the seductions of mass consumer culture, but subject to rescue by a strong-enough patriarch. Older mothers or maternal figures, however, are divided along a traditionalistic dichotomy. On one end is the ‘good, working-class mother’ counterpoint, found always in patriarchal households, such as Vic’s mother in A Kind of Loving, Joe Lampton’s aunt in Room at the Top (1959) or Look Back in Anger’s Ma Tanner,23 who may well have stepped fully formed from the pages of Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, in the guise described by Terry Lovell as ‘the middle-aged, shapeless and a-sexual figure known as “Our Mam” [celebrated] from the perspective of the adult son’.24 Biological maternity, in these cases, is secondary to social and moralized motherhood; these are kindly, formidable and hard-working – if weathered – yardsticks of traditional values, who

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seem to mother not only their genetic offspring but entire communities, and take little interest in modern pleasures and material goods. On the other side of the binary, ‘bad mothers’ are represented as irredeemably ensnared by the vapid consumerism to which they fall so easily victim. Seen from the point of identification with Vic, the film presents Ingrid’s mother as the harbinger and personification of the cultural ruin of thoughtless consumption, from which it is Vic’s responsibility to save both himself and Ingrid – in other words, to ensure that subjectivity remains at the seat of male power, fenced off from the incompetent influence of maternal reproduction. The idea of femininity as a ‘trap’ or a threat to productive male independence is a trope of the kitchen sink cycle. Vic respects ‘good’, traditional working-class values and customs; he is also moving up in the capitalist world as a producer and provider. His relationship with Ingrid, however, confounds his narrative trajectory of masculine progression. Vic’s family also respects a traditional model of gender relations, in which the men are productive providers and the women skilled domestic labourers. Several key indoor scenes involving Vic’s family take place at kitchen tables, at which the men sit and eat the unpretentious, wholesome and nourishing food served dutifully by the women. Vic clearly aspires to this image of familial harmony, claiming that ‘what [he] want[s] to find is a girl like our Christine [his sister, who is strongly identified with their mother]’. Finding one of Vic’s soft-core pornographic magazines, his younger brother – conflating marriage and sex – comments that he ‘bet[s Vic] would like to be married to her’. Vic’s response is to draw a clear delineation between girls one marries and girls one doesn’t, uncritically echoing the sentiments described in Irigaray’s discussion of the comparative ‘exchange values’ of mothers, virgins and prostitutes (or in this case, any women who have premarital sex).25 Before marrying, he is free to enjoy the latter, though not obligated to respect them. Moving into Ingrid’s mother’s house, however, Vic enters an intense matriarchy, which proves almost literally castrating; ‘Subordinated to an all-female household, Vic loses his potency, no longer making love to his wife.’26 With no father figure in sight, the masculinist narratives and hierarchies that organize normative conceptions of the family and the subject are in jeopardy. As was discussed in the introduction to this book, the Mother is imaginarily precluded from authentic cultural expression and subjectivity; accordingly, in this film, the materialist matriarchy that threatens to usurp the normative way of things is a chaos of meaningless objects and petty vanities hovering over a vacuum. The discourse of hierarchical moral difference between ‘matriarchal’ mass culture and ‘patriarchal’ authenticity is richly articulated in this film through the aesthetically contrasting mise en scène of the two homes. Lovell sees this as a distinct trend throughout the film cycle; ‘In the films [homes] both rough and respectable carry the aura of “authenticity” by comparison with those house-

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holds that have adapted to the styles and values of mass consumerism.’27 Such a distinction, for instance, is thematized in Room at the Top, which addresses the negotiation of traditional working-class values, integrity and self-respect with the allure of material temptations and social climbing. Class distinctions are marked acutely within the interiors of the family homes, between the impoverished but dignified home of Joe’s aunt – a Hoggartian motherly figure whose main purpose in the film is as a repository and guardian of traditional values – and the mansion, replete with luxury and material comforts, in which Susan – who symbolizes Joe’s aspirations to ever-increasing social and material capital – lives. Rather than simply existing within their respective environments, the women themselves are expressions of the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ object of modern culture. Joe’s pursuit of Susan – inspired explicitly by his eagerness to reject his working-class roots – is not a romance (however disingenuous) but an expression of his erroneous devotion to the false idols of commodity culture, which proves ultimately destructive to his happiness. The mise en scène within Vic’s family home is plain, but visually characterized as warm and ‘honest’. There are markedly few modern commodities; a small television set can be seen in the first kitchen shot behind Vic’s father, but is never watched; in fact, the father sits polishing the trombone he plays as part of a working-class music hall band, with his back to the television, indicating the triumph of traditional over modern leisure activities. The members of the well-sized family tend to be foregrounded, often filmed collectively in shot to underpin the image of togetherness and harmonizing values. It is, overall, a ‘humanized’ domestic landscape, maintained by the benefaction of a benevolent patriarch and ministered by the ‘good mother’ and her daughter. Productive culture and masculine entertainments remain outside, in the subjective world of activity, whereas the home is an obliging refuge. The interior that surrounds Ingrid and her mother, however, is framed as the aesthetic and moral antithesis of the ‘good home’, and much of its ‘corrupting’ character is expressed through the visual excess of modern mass-produced commodities. The houses themselves are embedded within the discursive partisanship of tradition against modernity, authenticity against facsimile, masculinity against effeminacy; Vic’s family live in an old-fashioned terrace, whereas Ingrid and her mother are within one of the newer builds encroaching on the community, framed by the film as a feminizing space challenging the integrity of patriarchal working-class traditionalism. The ‘old versus new’ tension is precisely the same conflict that underlies one of the most famous scenes from Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The film’s hero, Arthur Seaton, is a model for the ‘angry young man’ in whom this cycle of films took such an interest. He is a symbol of northern English working-class pride, vigorous masculinity, free sexuality and youthful rebellion, captured in

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his famous voiceover line, ‘whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not’. As in A Kind of Loving, central to the film’s substance is an exploration – through the lens of the young male protagonist – of the tensions between what appears to be a feminizing domesticity and virile, masculine mobility, and between morally impoverished mass-produced commodities and the ‘authentic’ pleasures of working-class culture. Having experienced a series of punishments for his licentious behaviour and attitudes, in the final scene of the film, Arthur and his girlfriend, Doreen, sit on top of a hill, which Arthur remembers roaming and blackberrying on as a child, but which, as the wide shot of the landscape shows us, is shrinking under a large building development of modernized semidetached houses, which bulges over the otherwise classically pastoral composition. Along with the previous scene, in which Arthur and his friend fish in a small stream in front of the angular and aggressive lines of an electric pylon, the landscape captures Arthur’s imagination of conflict between what he finds ‘natural’ and formative of his masculine working-class identity and the impersonal artificiality of materialist modernity. After Doreen dismisses Arthur’s speculations about living in an ‘old’ (hence, traditional) house, insisting that she will want a modern one with an indoor bathroom, Arthur throws a stone at one of the new-build houses as a gesture of protest against modernization and its supposed concomitant cultural dilution. The gesture is one of symbolic rage, keeping Arthur’s fate ambiguous, and leaving the scene subject to a range of interpretations. The film’s director, Karel Reisz, insisted that the moment was a mark of futility, claiming that ‘[the] stone-throwing is a symptom of his impotence, a self-conscious bit, telling the audience over the character’s shoulder what I think of him’.28 Yet, as Richards and Aldgate also make clear, this has hardly prevented audiences from reading the scene and the character by and large enthusiastically as a figure of working-class potency and protest.29 As argued by Roy Armes, ‘there is no real surrender to conventional formulas in its anticipation that Arthur too will be tamed by a girl as tough as himself but with a very different set of ambitions for a more middle-class life style’.30 Thus, the young man is able to persist as, in some shape, figurative of self-awareness and ‘authenticity’. In Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and A Kind of Loving, and indeed throughout the wider cycle, it is young women who are seduced by the new, more materially comfortable, but supposedly morally inferior homes, and the young men who resist, championing more robust, patriarchal cultural heritage mapped to older, traditional homes. The shots within Ingrid’s house are deeper, and, with only the three characters, as opposed to Vic’s larger family, this device leads to the ‘feminine’ interior shots feeling emptier of people, but fuller of objects. The mise en scène is littered with gaudy knick-knacks, in stark contrast to the warm practicality of Vic’s house. However, it is not so much the presence as the nature of commod-

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ities that underpins the divide; the modern, ‘feminine’ household is marked by frivolity and lack of meaning. The excess of objects is largely an assembly of purposeless ornaments, effeminate floral prints and cosmetic items, cluttered incoherently together on dressing tables, mantelpieces and display cabinets. The aesthetic contrasts are even inscribed on the bodies of the respective mother figures; while Vic’s ‘good’, selfless mother dresses with modest dignity in the home, in clothes suitable for maternal domestic labour, Ingrid’s mother makes herself too visible. The curation of her flashy jewellery, cat eye glasses, coiffed hair and elaborately patterned outfits suggest that the overly commodified modern home she inhabits is an extension of the mother’s supposedly vain and superficial nature. The first scene that takes place within Ingrid’s home also features a specific and morally positioned genre of commodities: dressing for her date with Vic, Ingrid sits applying make-up and beauty products in front of a machine-cut triple mirror. We do not see Ingrid face-on, but rather through her reflection in the mirrors. Her mother, furthermore, appears behind her, also as a mirrorimage rather than her ‘original’ self. This telling shot serves to underline two key epicentres of social anxiety over consumer culture: effeminate narcissism and reproduction, and the loss of identity therein. Mary-Ann Doane illuminates the discursive links between narcissism, one of ‘the few psychical mechanisms Freud associates specifically with female desire’,31 and consumerism, which always involves the consumption of self-images.32 Doane argues that the symbolic and historical address of women as the pre-eminent model of the consumer in late capitalism accords women only ‘a particularly maligned form of subjectivity or agency’.33 Though it may at first seem contradictory, this is ultimately entirely compatible with the position of the same women as a commodity form in themselves, as ‘[the] process underlines the tautological nature of the woman’s role as consumer: she is the subject of a transaction in which her own commodification is ultimately the object.’34 In the paranoid logic of this film, therefore, Ingrid and her mother are not simply representative of the feminine world of commodities threatening ‘authentic’ culture, or the consuming funnels by which emasculating commodities enter into the home: they are part of this world. A significant element of sceptical social narratives against consumerism, furthermore, is mistrust of mechanical reproduction, the fear in practical terms that it will undermine the value and skill of the traditional craftsman, and in ideological terms that it will erase the individuality of the self and that identities too might become reproduceable.35 Women and mothers are perceived as particularly susceptible to the corruption of this culture, since, as discussed in the introduction to this part, the idea of femininity as reproduced and passive is already culturally current.36 This hierarchical division that belittles mater-

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nalized reproduction within the home and elevates ‘masculine’ production in the social world of paid work is emphasized particularly in Nancy Chodorow’s work in The Reproduction of Mothering, in which she argues that [i]n Western society, the separation of domestic and public spheres – of domestic reproduction and personal life on the one hand and social production and the state on the other – has been sharpened through the course of industrial capitalist development, producing a family form reduced to its fundamentals, to women’s mothering and maternal qualities and heterosexual marriage, and continuing to reproduce male dominance.37

Chodorow further argues that it is ‘assumed that the public sphere, and not the domestic sphere, forms “society” and “culture” – those intended, constructed forms and ideas that take humanity beyond nature and biology and institute political control. Men’s location in the public sphere, then, defines society itself as masculine.’38 In the ideal patriarchal system, Chodorow explains, mothers reproduce nurturant capacities in their daughters (and curtail them in their sons); but this endless work of biological and social reproduction becomes the quiet conditions for the perpetuation of patriarchal society. The potential drawing of sons and fathers into circular, ‘feminine’ or ‘maternal’ modes of existence, bending back the linearity of masculine power (represented here by the threat of mass-reproduced objects), amounts to a disorder in the system. Within the paranoid logics of misogyny, the maternal without the masculine is a crisis of human identity: reproduction without culture. The cautionary reference to reproducibility in the scene in which Ingrid and her mother are framed within the same mirrors is twofold: firstly, the image alludes to a fear of the impoverished reproduced commodity, and secondly, to the notion that Ingrid and her mother, as deteriorating commodities, are themselves located within a cycle of reproduction. In the combined mirror image (and the two women continue to be filmed frequently in tight, shared shots throughout the film, until Vic can achieve his patriarchal ‘break’ with the maternal vortex), it is suggested that Ingrid is in imminent danger of becoming her (already corrupted) mother. In Freudian schools of psychoanalytic thought, it is the entry of the father into this family that provides the capacity for subjectivity and linearity requisite for progression, or as Sean Homer (following Jacques Lacan) has it, ‘[through] the intervention of a third term, the Name-ofthe-Father, that closed circuit of mutual desire between the mother and child is broken and a space is created, within which the child can begin to identify itself as a separate being from the mother’.39 In this film, latently representing the authorizing law of the patriarch, it is Vic and his masculine heritage that can save Ingrid, himself and their future family from what appears to be suggested as too much feminizing commodification.

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It is Ingrid’s own pregnancy and movement towards motherhood that obstructs Vic’s self-narrative. It is not that fatherhood does not belong in this narrative; he is aspiring to a girl like ‘our Christine’, in keeping with the figure of the agreeably self-less ‘good’ mother. Ingrid, however, is identified more closely with the commodified pornographic images of women he enjoys. Before the pregnancy, the relationship and the flirtation with Ingrid and her apparent self-commodification is relatively manageable for Vic; the courtship runs more or less on his terms, he can ‘escape’ at his leisure and is still easily able to sit with his friends and talk about football at work and engage in masculine pursuits. He is able to maintain his masculinity and cultural ‘authenticity’ without much compromise; during their second date, for instance, Ingrid and her friend become distracted by a display in a shoe shop window. Vic is able to express his anger and walk away, resulting in Ingrid’s profuse apology. With Ingrid’s pregnancy, however, Vic becomes ‘trapped’ by the world she represents. The aesthetics and staging of the scene in which, after Ingrid reveals her pregnancy, Vic proposes to her dutifully but with great reluctance marks his mood of melancholy, resignation and captivity. As Vic and his friends rowdily leave a dance hall to go to the pub, Ingrid fretfully takes Vic aside to inform him of the pregnancy. With Ingrid front of shot, they retreat to a darkened side room, in which the gloomy proposal takes place. The photography of the sequence marks it as almost funereal in quality, shot in markedly low lighting, with Vic’s face cast in dark shadow, his eyes barely visible. The shot of Vic positions him in front of glass doors, through which we can still see the lively dance hall and the bright room from which his friends have now departed, taking with them the possibilities of masculine mobility and the robust pleasures of homosociality, as Vic sees it. In the reverse shot, by contrast, a dark and gaping corridor stretches forebodingly behind Ingrid. The drab and hasty wedding ceremony is equally morose; Vic’s entry into this type of domesticity, in other words, signifies the death of masculine freedom. Once they are married, the overbearing presence of Ingrid’s mother and the looming threat that she is being reproduced in Ingrid throws the normative masculine organization of the family into chaos. Her role as the archetypal castrating mother is almost literally in evidence in the fact that, Ingrid claims, the proximity of her mother prevents her from having sex with Vic after marriage. The mother emasculates Vic at every turn; during the first entry into the house, she commands the space while Vic skulks sullenly behind the women, talks loudly and incessantly over him about game shows and popular television, and prevents him from smoking in the bedroom. His action of secretly stubbing the cigarette in one of the many purposeless knick-knacks is a telling but futile gesture of resistance. The castrating mother, whose over-presence and actions disassemble the ideology of the patriarchal family, is a recurrent figure in the

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cycle, often, as in this case, obstructing masculine potency by safeguarding her daughter’s sexuality, or by overindulging in materialism. In the most extreme instance, Colin, in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962), believes his forceful mother to have literally murdered his father to claim (and fritter away on luxuries) his life insurance, in a violent and subversive dismantling of Oedipal patriarchy. Another of the prototypical ‘angry young men’ protagonists, Colin, much like Arthur Seaton and Vic, is fiercely proud of his working-class identity; he rages against bourgeois authority, and frequently directs his contempt and gestures of defiance at domestic symbols of overconsumption. From the very start of the film, furthermore, the extent to which Colin situates his identity within imagined patriarchal genealogy is clear: a handheld travelling shot following Colin, in his borstal uniform, running along an empty country road is accompanied by his voiceover, opening with ‘running’s always been a big thing in our family; especially running away from the police’, invoking an intergenerational pride in rebellious comradeship. However, as we soon find out through Colin’s flashbacks, the father depicted in the film is – literally and symbolically – in a reduced state, sick and bedbound. The misogynistic ideological allegory of Colin’s suspicions of his mother’s involvement in the death is clear: the dignified patriarch who holds together the traditions of working-class community is under existential threat from the matriarchal and emasculating force of ‘inauthentic’ modern consumerism; and the murder site will be the cushioned maw of the home. The film’s identification of immoral consumption with unchecked motherhood beyond the law of a powerful patriarch is underscored in the shopping spree montage in which Colin’s mother, her ‘fancy man’ and Colin’s much younger siblings gleefully spend the father’s life insurance payout. The editing style of this sequence is strikingly incongruous with the rest of the film. Accompanied by an overly cheery musical score, the pacy montage cuts together shots of the mother purchasing fur coats, hats, textiles, a new mattress and a comically overstated haul of tins, sweets and luxury food items, edited with consciously ridiculous animated star transitions, suggesting that the dizzying aesthetics of television advertisements encourage endless consumption of new commodities. This highly ‘artificial’ editing style is, furthermore, a pronounced contrast with the almost Bazinian realism, deep shots and lengthy takes of the exterior sequences of Colin running and socializing in outdoor spaces. André Bazin – whose work on film aesthetics was a major influence on the neorealist and New Wave movements from which The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner draws substantially – sets out a distinction in the supposed moral character of montage editing and long takes shot in depth. Of the latter he writes:

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depth of focus brings the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality. Therefore it is correct to say that, independently of the concerns of the image, its structure is more realistic; … it implies, consequently, both a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on his part to the action in progress. While analytical montage only calls for him to follow his guide, to let his attention follow along smoothly with that of the director who will choose what he should see, here he is called upon to exercise at least a minimum of personal choice. It is from his attention at his will that the meaning of the image in part derives.40

Even the film aesthetics associated with Colin’s mother, therefore, become identified with ‘inauthenticity’ and moral inferiority. Read alongside Bazin’s theories on the political values of editing styles, the realist aesthetics associated with Colin’s viewpoint emphasize independence, activity and subjective consciousness. The scenes that are dominated by the presence and desires of the mother, however, are aggressively identified with superficiality, control and falseness. The mother may appear formidable here, but she remains only an instrument of the programmed satisfactions of mass reproduction, encased within a flashy aesthetic that – within the Bazinian model – restricts individual agency. During this shopping sequence, Colin is present, but (ultimately ineffectually) resists his mother on narrative and aesthetic levels. In each shot, he sets himself apart from the rest of the family, glowering, smoking and disapproving. The activity of shopping-as-leisure is in itself constructed as feminizing; as John Fiske sets out, ‘The deep structure of values that underlies patriarchal capitalism now needs to be extended to include earning as typically masculine, and, therefore, spending as typically feminine. So it is not surprising that such a society addresses women as consumers and men as producers.’41 Colin’s performance of boredom and distaste can therefore be read – within the gendered logic of the angry young man – as an assertion of continued masculinity, on behalf of himself and his father. However, his protest goes unnoticed, and the subsequent shot shows the newly furnished family living room, centring on a new television set. The mother’s growing independent sovereignty over the home – her increased dominance over the mise en scène and film style – is suggested as inexorably linked with the emasculating onslaught of mass culture and the existential threat of the loss of the ‘authentic’ subjectivity guaranteed by patriarchal inheritance. Within this drama of masculinist cultural anxiety, then, the too-present mother contaminates the subject with too much (mass) reproduction. A particularly privileged instance in A Kind of Loving encapsulates the antithesis between ‘authentic’ masculine culture and the feminine home through

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opposing spaces and objects; this is the moment in which Vic and Ingrid compete over whether they will spend their evening attending his father’s concert or watching television: ‘it is the traditional working-class concert of the brass band – “this substantial pocket of music, so untouched by the mass media”, according to Brian Jackson in his study of working-class community – which Vic is prevented from attending by his night’s viewing of television in A Kind of Loving.’42 This sequence marks a clear binary between the authentic pleasures of traditional masculine art forms and the insipid emptiness of the feminized home. The preceding scene, in which Vic argues with Ingrid and her mother about whether they will attend the concert (Ingrid is reluctant, as she finds it old-fashioned, and would rather visit the cinema) ends with Vic decisively concluding, ‘well, we’re going anyway’. The film cuts to a scene within the music hall, in which the brass band plays to an enormous audience. Each shot is full of people, re-emphasizing the unifying ‘human’ values of this type of tradition. During the father’s trombone solo, the camera focuses on Vic’s family sitting in a row in the crowd, tracking slowly along the faces of his family, until finally settling on the two empty chairs reserved for Vic and Ingrid. This image suggests an emasculating public humiliation for Vic; evidently, he has been unable to impose his patriarchal law on the new household, consequently being displaced from ‘authentic’ masculine culture into the home. This amounts to a subversion of normative patriarchal ideology; as described by Irigaray and Kristeva, social coherence is predicated on masculine genealogies, along which male subjective identities progress, and into which women are absorbed as reproductive instruments. Within the mother’s home, Vic is unable to establish himself as patriarch, and in the juxtaposed music hall scene, he is quite literally removed from his family line. Swallowed by the castrating mother, he, rather than she, has become absent. The scene cuts abruptly to the television in the centre of Ingrid’s mother’s living room. In fact, they have neither attended Vic’s concert nor, as Ingrid suggested, gone to the cinema, but stayed in for a night of television; in other words, the mother has imposed her will. Worse still, the programme shown is one of the game shows that Ingrid’s mother characteristically enjoys – and frequently talks about in her effusive but insubstantial monologues that fill the soundtrack with noise while the camera focuses on Vic’s brooding – and for which Ingrid is also threatening to develop a penchant. Within the cultural mind-frame that the film references, this type of television (facile, domestic, unintellectual and unashamedly capitalistic) epitomized the very worst of affluence.43 Mistrust of television – as opposed to cinema, in which these films, as part of a cinematic cycle, must invest political hope – as an expression of impotent mass culture similarly occurs in several films of the cycle, and particularly in The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner and Saturday Night and

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Sunday Morning. In the latter, Arthur’s contempt for his parents – described by Arthur as having ‘a television set and a packet of fags, [but] dead from the neck up’ – who lack any virility, agency or fierceness of class pride, manifests in images of him sneering at their frail and inarticulate forms fixed passively in front of the television as he prepares to go out actively into the world. In the first scene, in which Arthur returns home from his factory job and hands his mother a generous portion of his wages, his father sits blankly in an armchair in front of the television (Arthur pointedly takes a wooden chair turned away from the television at the back of the room). He tries to engage his father with news about a worker injured at the latter’s workplace that day; not only is the father unaware, but the reverse shot in the conversation shows only the back of his head and the glossy image on the television, marking, from Arthur’s perspective, the displacement of subjective human interaction by the deferred impersonality of mass-produced images. In The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, the new television forms the centrepiece of the itinerary of emasculating mass-produced frivolities, which proceeds to aesthetically and symbolically reorganize the family home. Reminiscent of Vic’s stubbing his cigarette inside a feminine trinket, or Arthur Seaton shooting a ceramic dog with his air rifle, the scene in which Colin and his friend contemptuously tamper with the volume controls of and mock the picture on the television (somewhat heavy-handedly, the broadcast is a Macmillan speech extolling the virtues of the ‘affluent society’) is a symbolic, if practically futile, gesture of defiance enacted upon the ‘bad object’ of effeminate domestic consumption. The television, within these narratives, becomes almost rhetorically weaponized in the cold war between ‘emasculating’ mass culture and patriarchal, ‘authentic’ subjectivity. Despite A Kind of Loving’s aesthetic and narrative identification with Vic, it would be a mistake to claim that it wholly sympathizes with him throughout; like Ingrid, he has flaws to overcome – principally, his over-enjoyment of women and their images as commodities, as a symptom of the corrupting elements of affluent and permissive society; this is not so much a critique of the objectification of women as it is a caution against overindulgence in massproduced objects. Nonetheless, the underlying sense is that Ingrid’s mother and her consumerist household and lifestyle create a poisonous atmosphere, which catalyses the worst traits in the young couple. The consumerist matriarchy, the film suggests, is unliveable; without the ordering influence of the patriarchal subject, the maternal-feminine family and the abundance of household consumer commodities linked with it become a reproduction of nothing. An object in a world of objects, selfish and overbearingly present, the ‘bad mother’ is the conduit through which cultural ruin and its material trappings enter. Women are both slaves to and part of this modern world of objects that threatens to take over. Men, if they are not careful, might become its slaves; the implicit

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cultural anxiety of A Kind of Loving is that the domestic will bloat outwards into the landscape of the subject and ‘inside’ will take over, displacing culture from the masculine outdoors. Vic, forced to sit in front of the television in his mother-in-law’s home, and not even allowed his own house-key, is potentially trapped within the vapid domestic queendom of the castrating mother. Key to the film’s resolution is the unquestioned assertion that the young couple must ‘escape’ the mother in order to make life liveable; furthermore, this escape must be led by Vic. According to the Oedipal logic of A Kind of Loving – and frequently throughout this cycle of films – it is possible for the young couple to achieve mature happiness, create an adequate family and overcome the corrupting spectre of consumerism only by making the mother forcibly absent. It is true that, as in many of the British New Wave films, married life here is connected with an air of disappointment and compromise, the loss of fantasy and individualistic aspiration, and bittersweet acceptance of the rather quieter realities of domestic partnership; as John Hill argues, ‘the rejection of fantasy and acceptance of compromise is closely related to the problem of sexual choice, the question of a female partner’.44 However, the ending of this film can hardly be called tragic. In contrast to the emotional climax that precedes it, with Vic’s leaving the house, and his ultimate decision to return, the end scenes are quiet, but the communication between the couple is more sincere; compromise can also connote maturity. It is at this point that Ingrid confesses to Vic that, despite her previous defences of her mother, it was the mother’s presence that prevented her from having sex with him, even though she wanted to. Now, united against her, a more normatively patriarchal relationship can be established. As she is free from the overbearing influence of her own mother, and her gradual absorption into the same spiral, the implication is that Vic can now, according to the traditional Oedipal model, make Ingrid more like his mother. The underlying ideology of A Kind of Loving stresses the importance of the father as the ‘third term’ and the containment of cultural futurity within the son. The contemporaneous influx of consumer goods and the revolutionizing of production and the traditional skilled workplace in affluent Britain on some level engendered anxieties over the potency of the (figural) father. Some of the most well-known films of this cycle, such as Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, exploit the sons’ perspective to portray father figures emasculated and spiritually or actually killed by the same type of materialistic, selfish and mass-culture-enslaved ‘bad’ mother as we see here. The condemnation of these women is extreme and partisan. Nonetheless, it is significant that this cycle so often represents the powerful mother as supremely open to the contagious moral corruption of culturally weak and castrating commodities. Through her, the films suggest, this rot is imagined to spread through the social fibre of the family. It is then up to male subjects to

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resist, because independent women are portrayed as incapable of saving themselves or defining meaningful identities; the self-ish mother’s corruption is reproduced in her daughters. A Kind of Loving militates against the possibility of healthy mother–daughter bonding. As I discussed in my introduction, the erasure of mother–daughter affinities within patriarchy – and of the potential possibilities, powers and creative models these relations might offer for building intimate solidarities with other women – described as the ‘great unwritten story’ by Adrienne Rich45 has been a site of energetic contemplation for many second-wave and psychoanalytic feminist thinkers. Luce Irigaray also expressly positions mutual understanding and affection between mothers and daughters as an essential site of feminist empowerment, and argues passionately that the patriarchal mandate to renounce and devalue this relationship must be resisted, as this disavowal ‘uproots them [women and girls] from their identity, their subjectivity’.46 Within the ideological operations of Oedipal patriarchy, however, this potentially enriching and subversive form of feminine intersubjectivity is not only repressed, but identified as an actively harmful space. In A Kind of Loving, this feminine couple, and the modern consumer society with which it is symbolically entwined, is represented as cannibalistic and culturally barren: a veneration of the object on the borrowed throne of subjectivity. Were we to imagine the film from another perspective, through a more balanced aesthetic lens, we might conclude that several requirements of Marianne Hirsch’s suggestion of the Demeter and Persephone story as an alternative narrative model of familial experience and self-identity to Oedipus are in fact met. Hirsch writes: ‘Unlike the Oedipus story, Demeter and Persephone’s tale is told from the perspective of a bereaved Demeter, searching for her daughter, mourning her departure, and effecting her return through her own divine power.’47 The mother–daughter story of Demeter and Persephone originates in an intimate bond between the two women, and dedicates space to the feelings of loss and mourning experienced by the mother once the patriarchal ‘third term’, embodied here by Hades, severs this relation, imposes his sexual domination over the daughter and absorbs her into his lineage and culture; the maternal experience here is an affective landscape to which dominant patriarchal narrative structures rarely permit expression. Hirsch suggests that the Demeterian model can also constitute a disruption to the linearity of patriarchal time; ‘[l]oss is presented as inevitable, part of the natural sequence of growth, but, since time is cyclical, mother-daughter reunion forms a natural part of the cycle.’48 The Demeter plot therefore represents both a formal and a political challenge to the structures of masculinist dominance, centring a mother–daughter closeness and anti-patriarchal protectiveness that is given little figuration within Oedipal standards, or else is

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represented as perverse. In A Kind of Loving, a potentially Demeterian protest against Vic’s misogynistic treatment of Ingrid is accordingly caricatured and transformed into an act of cultural violence. Even accepting the abrasiveness with which she is portrayed, Ingrid’s mother’s actions are generally inspired by love for and protection of her daughter from a man who, after all, clearly views Ingrid as a sex object and does not desire an emotionally committed marriage with her. Ingrid is by no means unhappy with her maternal relationship until Vic encourages her that it is correct to be so. However, despite the empowering potential of Hirsch’s proposed paradigm shift, we should not fool ourselves that the grafting of this model onto a patriarchal framework will necessarily do Demeter justice; if Hades is heroized, after all, she is the villain. Reading the film in a way that is sympathetic towards feminine subjectivities and the importance of strong intergenerational feminine bonding outside of strict patriarchal frameworks would require a substantial effort in reading against the grain, against which the film’s aesthetics and narrative structure militate at every point. In A Kind of Loving, Oedipal and Demeterian narratives conflict explosively, and the former, with its collected wealth of historical potency, wins out. From this perspective, absence is vengefully imposed on the mother figure. Ultimately, she must be forcibly exorcized from the narrative for masculine subjectivity (and culture itself ) to continue. Even her illicit presence, however, though paradoxically over-visible, becomes a form of absence; through its connection with a meaningless modern world of sterile, reproduced objects, ‘maternalized’ culture and cultural models are suggested as emptiness. The suggestion is that the mother must remain absent, because her presence in itself, other than as a conduit for patriarchal discourse, offers nothing. Notes 1. Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton, ‘Introduction – the Uses (and Abuses) of Affluence’, in An Affluent Society? Britain’s Post-War ‘Golden Age’ Revisited, ed. Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 1–13. Their introduction complicates the simplistic optimism that this phrase is often perceived to represent, emphasizing that the full speech also contains anxieties over the potential moral deterioration produced by ‘having it too good’. 2. See, for instance, Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism or Black and Pemberton’s 2004 edited volume. 3. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 7–9. 4. Black, ‘Impression of Affluence’, 87. 5. Ibid. 6. Lesley Whitworth, ‘Anticipating Affluence: Skill, Judgement and the Problems of Aesthetic Tutelage’, in An Affluent Society? Britain’s Post-War ‘Golden Age’ Revisited, ed. Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 169. 7. Ibid.

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8. Black, ‘Impression of Affluence’, 91. 9. Ibid., 92. 10. Terry Lovell, ‘Landscapes and Stories in 1960s British Realism’, in Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, ed. Andrew Higson (London: Cassell, 1996), 171–72. Her argument is that the spectatorial model offered in the majority of British New Wave films is similar to that of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1998), which is the somewhat anthropological and romanticizing viewpoint of the working-class scholarship boy, now a middle-class intellectual, returning home to the community in which he grew up, but of which he is no longer a part. 11. Andrew Higson, ‘Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the “Kitchen Sink” Film’, in Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, ed. Andrew Higson (London: Cassell, 1996), 136. 12. Ibid., 138. 13. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 156; Lovell, ‘Landscapes’, 160. 14. D.E. Cooper, ‘Looking Back on Anger’, in Age of Affluence 1951–1964, ed. Vernon Bogdanor and Robert Skidelsky (London: MacMillan, 1970), 257–58, original emphasis. 15. Sigmund Freud, ‘The Dissolution of the Oedipus Complex’, in On Sexuality: Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and Other Works, trans. James Strachey, ed. Angela Richards (London: Penguin, 1977), 376. 16. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism, xv, original emphasis. 17. Mitchell develops her discussion on Freud, class and capitalism particularly in ‘The Holy Family and Femininity’, the concluding chapter to Psychoanalysis and Feminism. 18. Ibid., 378. 19. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 146–75. 20. Lovell, ‘Landscapes’. 21. Murphy, Sixties British Cinema, 28–33. 22. Lovell, ‘Landscapes’, 168. 23. Despite being a widow, she continues to visit and tidy her husband’s grave (his final ‘household’) and respect his values, as well as acting as a de facto mother for the protagonist, Jimmy Porter, for whom she provides material and emotional encouragement. Even without the actual presence of a conventional patriarch, therefore, she continues to perform cheerfully the good mother role. 24. Lovell, ‘Landscapes’, 161. 25. Luce Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, in This Sex Which is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 26. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 157. 27. Lovell, ‘Landscapes’, 166. 28. Cited in Jeffrey Richards and Anthony Aldgate, Best of British: Cinema and Society, 1930– 1970 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 141. 29. Ibid., 142. 30. Roy Armes, A Critical History of the British Cinema (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978), 272. 31. Doane, ‘Economy of Desire’, 31. 32. Ibid., 30. 33. Ibid., 24. 34. Ibid. 35. A sentiment described, for instance, in Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (London: Pimlico, 1999), and his discussion of the loss of the aura and ‘unique existence’ of the work of art.

60 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

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Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering; Irigaray, Speculum. Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering, 10, my emphasis. Ibid., 9. Sean Homer, Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge, 2005), 53. André Bazin, ‘The Evolution of the Language of the Cinema’, in What is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1967), 35–36. John Fiske, Reading the Popular (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989), 22. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 155. Black, ‘Impression of Affluence’, 87, also illuminates, through reference to Mary Whitehouse’s ‘Clean-Up TV’ campaign, how television could also be connected with societal ideas of sexual perversity and moral corruption. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 159. Rich, Of Woman Born, 225. Irigaray, ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’, 44. Marianne Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989), 5. The idea is also touched upon in Rich, Of Woman Born, 238–40. Hirsch, The Mother/Daughter Plot, 5.

CHAPTER 2

The Mass Reproduction of Mothering Une femme mariée and Le bonheur  

As in Britain, the effects of modernization, mass consumer culture and the influx of abundantly available commodities revolutionized the physical, social and intellectual landscape of post-war France. Kristin Ross1 has produced a detailed analysis of processes of modernization in France, emphasizing the rapidity of change. Americanization was a pre-eminent factor in shaping ‘modernized’ France, as American capitalist iconography, commodity forms and modes of production exploded into the cultural foreground, creating not just new aesthetic models, but new forms of desire. As traditional military and political empires slowly disintegrated in the mid-twentieth century, Americanism was increasingly prevalent as an ‘informal global empire’.2 Certain products entered the collective imagination as standard-bearers of modernity, which, as in Britain, included the car, the television and household white goods. Henri Lefebvre cites as privileged products ‘the car, the fridge, the radio, the television [which] are allocated the following missions: expropriating the body and compensating for this expropriation; replacing desire by fixed needs; replacing delight by programmed satisfaction.’3 An underlying image here is the insidious mechanization of the human; rather than simply complementing or facilitating various aspects of life, these objects can be seen as actually altering the nature of the individual and their relationship to desire. As discussed in the introduction to this part, furthermore, these commodities could be placed on a gendered axis, also producing differently gendered aspiration figures; the masculine-coded car, for instance, allowed man to master space, to become ‘l’homme disponible’,4 whereas the washing machine continued to define women within the home, imaginarily reproducing an idea of the pristine American-styled housewife, who was well off, confident, attractive and neat, which became at this time an aspirational figure of ‘hygienic self-assurance’5 in Europe, based on commercial and cultural imaginaries that idealized North American health and vigorousness. Iconographically, the car was connected to the extraordinary of modern culture – speed, exploration, sex appeal, adventure and often danger, and the opening up of new spaces and geographies of being – whereas white goods

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(static by nature) were more a mark of change in ‘ordinary’, everyday life. The latter became significant in the ‘turn towards the everyday’ that was particularly popularized in metropolitan France at this time. The particularly French fascination with the intrigue of banality and the ‘art of the everyday’ has long been a topic of substantial interest for critics. Lynne Gumpert’s edited book on the quotidian in post-war French culture does particularly interesting work in bringing together a selection of essays on the emergence of the everyday across myriad cultural forms. She argues that Looking back at the visual arts since then reveals that the fascination with the everyday has been realized in a multitude of ways, from the disruption of ‘high art’ foisted by the Dadaists and the integration of daydreams and the Freudian unconscious by the Surrealists, to the appropriation of popular culture and advertising images by American and European pop artists.6

Indeed, there are many notable French artists and critical theorists, including the film-makers of the New Wave, whose work takes a profound interest in representing and deconstructing the everyday. Ross’s analysis puts Lefebvre at the beginning of this tradition.7 His Critique de la vie quotidienne was instrumental in establishing the everyday as an object and method of study and in ‘elevating to the status of a theoretical concept what in the minds of most other thinkers was nothing more than the drudgery of routine’.8 In a similar vein, Roland Barthes’s Mythologies aimed to plumb the discursive and imaginative make-up and semiotic depths of a host of everyday artefacts (including wrestling matches, hairstyles and detergents) in order to explore their underlying ideologies. His enterprise was one of ‘deciphering’: ‘The activity of the mythologist is one of decipherment, but to decipher, wrote Barthes, is always to struggle against “une certaine innocence des objets”.’9 In other words, everyday life is the product of an accepted consensus of various behaviours, activities and usages of material items, which are accepted not because they are neutral, but rather because we have accepted and become inured to the ideologies that construct them; however, it is because they are deeply ideological in this way that they merit examination. This type of approach, centralizing the quotidian within cultural commentary and understanding the everyday as a principal staging ground for the interplay of tacit ideologies, became an established trend in French art and thought, and is a useful and relevant context for reading the everyday, the domestic, gender and the mother figure in French cinema. Attitudes towards the everyday in art and writing included elements of critique and celebration; it could be vibrant, rich and enlivening, but also overwhelming, superficial or dehumanizing. Michèle Cone describes the diverse spectrum of popular and artistic responses, including the objets détournés popularized by artists such as Yves Klein and Marcel Duchamp, arguing that al-

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though ‘the focus on excess, waste, and detritus might imply a negative view of the modern every-day … [in fact the] proliferation of consumer objects that accompanied the modernization of France throughout the sixties aroused more enthusiasm than criticism among the newly thriving middle classes’.10 More often than not, therefore, responses combined a mixture of feelings about the modern quotidian, an ambivalence that perhaps suitably reflected the sensory and information overload that defined incipient consumer culture. Some key criticisms of mass culture came from the Situationists and Debord in particular, whose chapter on ‘The Commodity as Spectacle’ in Society of the Spectacle is a moment of high vitriol against the dehumanizing and degrading capacity of the commodity form: The loss of quality so evident at all levels of spectacular language, from the objects it praises to the behavior it regulates, merely translates the fundamental traits of the real production which brushes reality aside: the commodity-form is through and through equal to itself, the category of the quantitative.11

The question here, then, remains one of authenticity (spectacle over substance). A strong connection, furthermore, was drawn consistently between the everyday, consumer objects and spectacle, inspiring vibrant and novel artistry as well as societal anxieties over cultural integrity that addressed individual meaningfulness as well as the perceived threat to French national identity posed by American popular culture. The everyday came to be a central point of French post-war art, and is clearly prominent in New Wave cinema. In an essay on the everyday and French cinema, Peter Brunette sees the centrality of the quotidian in French art-house films, in which ‘the everyday seems to function as a context or backdrop of relentless ordinariness from or against which the extraordinary – which is always composed of the ordinary, merely, perhaps, rearranged – can suddenly flash out and be registered’,12 as a direct counterpoint to classical Hollywood traditions, in which linear narrative drives the film, and the inclusion of the everyday is in the interest of an ‘effet de réel’13 intended to make the extraordinary more persuasive. From the polarized characterization of ‘action/event’ and ‘quotidian’, he also designates the former, Hollywood style as ‘masculine’ and the latter, everyday French (or more broadly, Western European) style as ‘feminine’.14 Given the brevity of the essay, the gendered analogy is necessarily broad and essentializing, and practical inquiry into individual films of the New Wave raises a number of problems with this gendered taxonomy. Nonetheless, it is interesting that everyday life in French cinema has been identified so readily with the feminine. As with the British films, I argue that the everyday, the domestic and the litany of consumer goods that shaped the surface of the quotidian in French

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post-war film are often maternal in character. Ross defines an underlying critical assumption: ‘women “undergo” the everyday – its humiliations and tediums as well as its pleasures – more than men. The housewife, that newly renovated postwar creation, is mired in the quotidian; she cannot escape it.’15 Again, women – and here I add, particularly women in the home, as mothers or motherlike figures associated ideologically with domestic labour – are perceived as particularly powerless in the face of the changing culture of the everyday, becoming the home’s porous epidermis, through which modern consumerism and its ideologies seep into the domestic. Andreas Huyssen describes how (comparably to the hierarchy expressed in the British films) the proximity of women to everyday commodities was discursively accorded a moral character in early reflections on mass culture, referring to ‘the notion which gained ground during the 19th century that mass culture is somehow associated with women while real, authentic culture remains the prerogative of men’.16 Though these reductive personifications were later problematized by various schools of thought, he continues to argue, many of their everyday tropes and figures, particularly those pertinent to the ‘feminizing’ capacity of mass culture, persisted into the twentieth century.17 In much of the work of the New Wave, and particularly in several films by Godard and Varda, who often take a special interest in these topics, the issue of commodity objects and gender becomes reflexive. Whereas the kitchen sink films tend to present partisan and frequently misogynistic critiques of the cosmetic connections between women and consumerism, Godard and Varda often blend this discourse with enquiries into the state of the human en masse in the culture of mass reproduction. These themes and questions had already emerged prominently in French critical thought, particularly through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir.18 In her novel Les belles images,19 as well as her major theoretical work, The Second Sex,20 Beauvoir was incisively critical of post-war Western consumer culture, and specifically of its address of the female body as itself a consumer object, constructing women as alienated expressions of commercialism, ‘[weaving] together analysis of women’s experiences with economic and social alienation and their objectification as wives and mothers’.21 Beauvoir sees the self-interest promoted through consumerism as something of a Trojan horse of women’s empowerment and self-definition, leading ultimately to more objectification, more dependence.22 There is, therefore, a rich critical background on which to draw when discussing consumerism and the materiality of the everyday in French culture. Substantial work has also been produced on the relationship between consumerism and female sexuality.23 However, it is this idea of woman-as-sexual-object that tends to be focused upon critically, rather than women in the specifically maternal ideation. My aim here, therefore, is to examine the particularity of

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representations of maternal consumerisms, and how the mother’s existing pervasive identification with reproduction and objecthood blends into discourses of mass reproduction and consumer objects with disturbing ease. The films I discuss take the figures of women as mothers and in the home as key points of interest in their critiques of consumerism. Already waist-deep in the symbolism of reproducibility, the mother figure often emerges at the centre of anxieties over the commodification of the human and the loss of unique identity. This chapter concentrates on Godard’s Une femme mariée and Varda’s Le bonheur to examine the relationships between the mother figure, materialist culture and the commodification of the human. Along with 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (2 or 3 Things I Know about Her) (1967), Une femme mariée is one of Godard’s richest explorations of gendered commodity culture, and, importantly, centres on a young mother as a lens for viewing this world. Varda’s Le bonheur treats similar themes; focusing on a young married couple and their children, this subtle, deeply ironic and often misunderstood film examines the manufacturing of a mass-market ideal of happiness. I explore themes of maternal role playing and reproducibility and the place of advertising images and commodities within the films. In doing so, I am interested in developing an analysis of women and consumerism in this group of films beyond an emphasis on the sexual objectification of women and towards an understanding of how the specific imaginations of women’s motherhood conditions gendered critiques of commodification. The issue of the reproducibility of the human and the erosion of subjective identities among the chaotic iridescence of mass consumer culture can be usefully illuminated through the concept and practice of role playing. Role playing is, after all, the mass reproduction of personal identities; the individual seeks recognition as a chosen ‘type’ through the performance of familiar clichés and shorthands in order to communicate quickly to the other an impression of self, based not on personal historical narrative, but on a pre-digested archetype that is the mean average of countless societal commonplaces, gestures and experiences. The more perfectly the role is performed, the more ‘complete’ the actor is considered to be. This is particularly pertinent for motherhood, which, as we have seen, is treated with a more than usual degree of rigidity. Women and mothers are ideologically perceived as having a deeply ingrained cultural relationship to role playing. This idea has an abundant heritage of theoretical formulation; particularly apt for the present discussion on the constructedness of femininity, developed originally by Joan Riviere, and later adapted by Jacques Lacan, is the concept of the ‘feminine masquerade’.24 This suggests that the traditional character of woman is an artificial mask not commensurate with the complex identity of the individual who wears it, but apparently necessary if she is to thrive within a patriarchal system. It is worth emphasizing that the

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masquerade analogy ends at the point at which the mask can be taken off to reveal the ‘true’ individual behind it. There is no clean division between essence and artifice; ‘The problem for women, therefore, is not whether they put on the mask of femininity or not but how well it fits. In short, femininity is masquerade.’25 These ideas are synthesized in MacCabe, Eaton and Mulvey’s reading of Une femme mariée in relation to the female protagonist: Charlotte is nothing more than a perfect image. But this perfect image, this mask of visibility (which composed of make-up, clothes and so on, has an indexical relationship to the woman’s body) is furthermore a symbolic sign. It represents the concept of woman in a given social formation – that is, the equation of woman = sexuality. This feminine mask is the passport to visibility in a male-dominated world.26

In Women on the Market, Irigaray produces a general schema of how the various components of femininity are commodified and made to correspond to degrees of use, exchange and ‘natural’ values. The mother here is one of three fundamental value types (the others being the virgin and the prostitute), which Irigaray appraises thus: As mother, woman remains on the side of (re)productive nature and, because of this, man can never fully transcend his relation to the ‘natural.’ His social existence, his economic structures and his sexuality are always tied to the work of nature … But this relationship to productive nature, an insurmountable one, has to be denied so that relations among men may prevail. This means of the father and enclosed in his house, must be private property, excluded from exchange.27

Using these theories, we might surmise that traditional discourses leave the maternal-feminine subject with little flexibility within the role she is expected to perform, and little recognition as a coherent agent outside of this role. The role, in other words, is reproduced and reprinted infinitely onto generations of mothering subjects. This point is also emphasized in relation to consumerism by Beauvoir. In her passage on female narcissism in The Second Sex, she illustrates the idea of reproduction and role playing through the idea of the woman’s ‘double’.28 She describes the paradox of the materialist woman’s desperate search for ‘specialness’ or ‘uniqueness’, which seems only to repeat and underscore her state of reproducibility. It is, after all, paradoxical that this ‘uniqueness’ should be conceived of as achievable through purchase and commodity objects. The process of gendered role playing becomes particularly interesting within the period at hand, and is a point of aesthetic and semantic fascination for Godard and Varda. With consumer capitalism, these roles and assembled clichés become purchasable commodities, to the point where the communicated character scarcely requires the presence of the human subject. In this way, for

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instance, a leather biker jacket, a pair of stilettos, an apron or a vacuum cleaner might already tell a story about a ‘type’ of person prior to the presence of the individual subject. Irigaray’s schema descriptively attributes a specific and protected value to the mother; according to this, the mother is a privately consumable object, but the idea of appraising or even contemplating her exchange value (like that of the virgin or prostitute) seems sacrilegious to the patriarch; ‘As both natural value and use value, mothers cannot circulate in the form of commodities without threatening the very existence of the social order.’29 Nonetheless, phallocentric consumer culture exploits a discursive loophole to monetize the mother figure by selling the image and role (back) to mothers themselves. This practice has been clear in advertising discourses since the twentieth century; marketers for a plethora of products, from formula and nappies to soaps, holidays and ready meals, engage extensively with the synthetic fabric of the good versus bad mother narrative. They sell not only their products, but all the clichés of the ideal, serene, nurturing mother and the domestic bliss that surrounds her, while implying that ‘without this product, you will fail’. Part by part, the ideal of impeccable, wholesome mothering becomes materially attainable through specific purchases. Without crossing the taboo of maternal exchange value, mothering women purchase the same image of themselves as the good mother. Were we to take these advertising messages seriously, we might surmise that these products could bear the ideology of the mothering role to the extent that the mothering subject need hardly be present. It is worth mentioning that the type of ideal maternal ‘object’ sketched here is a different model to the sexless, shapeless, Hoggartian ‘our mam’ fetishized throughout the British New Wave. The mother characters in many of Godard and Varda’s films (let alone the patent Oedipal overtones of nearly all of Truffaut’s work, as well as occasional figures within the films of Jacques Demy, such as Lola [1961]) seem to be under pressure to play perfectly all of the roles in Irigaray’s schema, switching seamlessly between them according to the situation. Resembling a latent desire for a Madonna in whom are happily reconciled all stages of womanhood (she is mother, daughter and wife to her son, virginal yet pregnant), these women confront expectations to be everything: mother, wife and prostitute, ‘pure’ and wholesome, yet sexually competent and seductive. This feminine role playing is thematized in Une femme mariée. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier frames the narrative interest of the film as Charlotte’s search for ‘truth’ among overwhelmingly vocal modernity: ‘trapped in the center of a whirlwind of words, gestures, things, and noises, the married Woman, in the space of a single day, turns to newspapers and to men (her husband and her lover) with equal devotion in an effort to find anything that can tell her the truth.’30 Her actions in the film may be read, therefore, as indicative of an attempt (however irresolvable) to lift away the ‘feminine mask’. All of these

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sources, however, ultimately offer only instruction on how to play her existing roles more precisely. The film charts Charlotte’s efforts to exist, to distil the ‘authentic self ’ from the role, yet entirely appropriately, there is no climactic breakthrough moment; ‘the heroine plays her role out to the end’.31 Knowledge of the ‘real’ Charlotte, in opposition to the plastic feminine mask, is also a point of concern for her two lovers: her husband, Pierre, muses aloud about where Charlotte ends and the ‘image he has of her’ begins. There is an underlying anxiety in both men’s behaviour towards her that they too do not have a firm grasp on the ‘real’ Charlotte. At the same time, however, they both resist any sign of a Charlotte that gestures away from the curated clichés to which they subscribe. Instances of their denial are numerous. Particularly illustrative examples include Pierre’s lifting her skirt on returning from a trip to check what type of underwear she is wearing or her lover, Robert’s, criticism of Charlotte for powdering her face with too much make-up; after she refuses to change it, he comments that women ‘live for men but do nothing for them’, a remark that, in the context of the film’s overt detailing of Charlotte’s bombardment with aesthetic models of feminine desirability, must be taken as outrageously hypocritical. If we pursue the obvious analogy between make-up and the figurative ‘feminine mask’, it is significant that Robert does not ask Charlotte to entirely remove her make-up, but encourages her to create an illusion (of femininity) that is not clearly recognizable as illusion. Charlotte’s role is, of course, just as real and just as unreal as any mask, any stroke of mascara, any glamorous photo portrait; despite the characters’ efforts, artifice and essence do not separate cleanly. Charlotte’s roles as perfect wife, mother and lover are commodified and marketed to her, ‘programmed’ into daily life;32 motherhood and femininity as contrived roles and societal impositions become inseparable from motherhood and femininity as experiences. The original title of Godard’s film, which used the definite ‘la’ rather than indefinite ‘une’,33 is more aptly expressive of the potential of these identity discourses to create a sense of a generic maternalfeminine product in place of mothering subjects. Not only is Charlotte discursively produced through the desires and narrations of her husband, lover and young son, but her ineluctable consumption of images imposes an idealized role on her, emanating from an idea of the male-patriarchal gaze as a universal principle as well as from the male characters who represent it. In one scene, Charlotte is shown quite literally measuring herself against a timeless beauty standard; following instructions from a women’s magazine, she uses a tape measure in front of her bathroom mirror to compare her own body to the ‘ideal’ ratios of the Venus de Milo’s breasts. Yosefa Loshitsky identifies this scene as evincing how ‘women view themselves and are viewed by others as sex objects’.34 More importantly, the scene (which is also mirrored later by Charlotte’s cleaner, a woman dissimilar to Charlotte

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in age, class, profession and body shape, but who finds the same magazine and also physically measures herself ) implies an objective model of womanhood, designed by men, that has precise dimensions, proportions and measurements against which women can (and implicitly should) compare themselves. In consumer culture, the aspects of the perfect feminine body can easily be packaged, marketed and monetized, and it is not a great leap from here to commodifying behavioural aspects of identity, such as mothering activities and the facilitation of domestic labour, in lifestyle media and publications – or indeed the sexual gratification of husbands, which is represented in the film through Charlotte’s discovery of vinyl records promising to instruct women on ‘how to strip for your husband’ among a guest’s possessions. To return to Irigaray’s paradigm, the ‘natural value’ aspect of Charlotte as a fertile, nurturing mother is fundamental to her idealized role(s). Charlotte’s husband and her lover both desire a biological child with her. Charlotte already has a young son – Nicolas – from a previous relationship. However, the idea of fathering35 another man’s child is seen as a poor substitute for the genealogical completion of the familial image. This desire is expressed by both men in the script, as well as through the repeated visual motif of their hands stroking Charlotte’s disembodied mid-section, caressing the location of her womb. Both men, furthermore, appear to assume themselves, as Charlotte’s sexual and emotional partners, entitled to this element of her ‘value’; Robert, despite knowing that Charlotte is married, does not entertain the idea that she might become pregnant by anyone but him, and Pierre continues to demand of Charlotte when rather than if they will have a child, despite her lack of apparent interest in another pregnancy, and her insistence that she, after all, already has a child. Neither, therefore, recognizes any significant degree of subjectivity on the part of Charlotte as a (potential) mother. In this case, Charlotte is commensurate with her Irigarayan market value. The men are, of course, also role playing; their efforts to exert control over Charlotte’s appearance, actions and choices, to ensure that they appear to and with Charlotte in a certain way, and to exploit her maternal value in the interest of propagating a familiar myth of masculine posterity all construct a conventional performance of the husband and father. Nonetheless, though the film questions the extent to which all identity roles are mass produced, the roles that are being performed are scripted for a patriarchal system, which allows men more power and more choice; that which Nancy Chodorow identifies as the ‘reproduction of mothering’36 is also the reproduction of patriarchy. Through their occupations, passions and philosophies, Robert and Pierre are shown to be quite distinct from one another, without becoming caricaturally polarized, presenting nuanced romantic and existential options, whereas there need only be one Charlotte. Rather than attesting to the character as an empowered and sexually

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adventurous woman, the gendered balance of the love triangle suggests her as a generic blueprint for a mass produced design of maternal-feminine market value. Varda’s Le bonheur approaches similar issues of reproducibility and the absence of subjectivity to Une femme mariée, though from an apparently different perspective. In purely superficial terms, the love triangle of Le bonheur is a reversal of that in Une femme mariée, featuring a man involved with two women. However, given that both films are conscious of their positioning within the culture of gendered power, the ideological results they present are far from mirror images of one another. Though male role playing is present, and sometimes abundantly clear – such as François’s aspirations to pictureperfect familial happiness or Robert’s profession as an actor and connection to Hollywood visual clichés – in all cases it is the women for whom the demands of the roles cause the greatest anxieties and problems. In Le bonheur, Varda engages with the material facsimiles and well-worn adages of familial bliss to produce an ironic and disturbing investigation into the objectifying character of role playing, and particularly into how the pressure on women to mimic the factory-perfect wife and mother can prove destructive to the mothering subject. Varda uses the narrative and visual language of a stereotypical, saccharine idyll, borrowing not only from received ideas on the ‘perfect’ family, but also from aesthetic tropes that construct these ideas, particularly critiquing contemporaneous women’s media that sold housewives and mothers the narrow image of their own fulfilment. As with Une femme mariée, men, husbands and fathers are no less susceptible to the powers of social role-imaging, but the roles they are offered tend to be more empowered. Though scholars such as Alison Smith are justified in asserting (in opposition to responses at the film’s release that mistook Varda’s deeply ironic use of romantic clichés as ‘approval’ of François’s actions) that ‘François as much as the two women is merely a puppet in the hands of the cliché’,37 it is important, once again, that masculine and feminine role playing according to this type continue to replicate hegemonic gendered terrain. It is therefore the reproduction, the absent subjectivity, of the idealized wife and mother that is the charged factor here. The behaviour of the family throughout Le bonheur is extremely clichéd and uncannily overfamiliar. Thérèse and François speak as if from a melodramatic script compiled from various B-movies and pulp romance novels. We have little sense of Thérèse’s character beyond her all-consuming role playing as a Madonna-like model of domestic perfection. Indeed, it was precisely Varda’s use of visual and textual romantic clichés that led to the film’s frequent dismissal as trivial, naïve and overly ‘feminine’ by critics who failed to recognize Varda’s deployment of profoundly ironic imitation as a careful feminist strategy.38 Rebecca J. DeRoo, however, offers an excellent and detailed revisionist account of the film’s subversive feminist counter-discourse, arguing that ‘Varda’s

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irony is visual rather than narrative; Le Bonheur’s visual rhetoric dismantles its sentimental storyline.’39 One deviation, perhaps, from the traditional model of the ideal housewife may be the fact that Thérèse participates in the ostensibly public workforce through paid labour, working from home as a seamstress. Varda’s choice of working-class women for her female protagonists is significant; DeRoo raises the important point that while Le bonheur draws extensively on many of the ideas and even specific images from two of the most influential feminist texts of the time – Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) – it also expands on the often implicitly middleclass focus of these ideas, ‘considering the ways that social class and gender constrained the choices available to women, particularly housewives’.40 Varda’s focus on working-class motherhood is therefore vital in emphasizing the ‘matter of the double shift’41 (within the home and the workplace) for women for whom unpaid domestic work was not a choice, and paid ‘public’ work primarily a question of economic necessity rather than personal fulfilment. The constant interweaving of Thérèse’s professional craft with her housework – in contrast to François’s carpentry workshop and his leisure activities within the home, which are distinctly separated into discrete periods of work and rest – emphasizes both as forms of labour requiring thoughtful feminist attention. The character of Thérèse’s work is also important to consider within the wider meanings of the film’s representation of gender and (material, biological and social) reproduction. While Thérèse’s activity within the public sphere of paid work complicates the figure of the economically and intellectually alienated housewife critiqued by Beauvoir and Friedan, her occupation as a seamstress can be relatively securely accommodated within the patriarchal family hierarchy. As they are represented here, sewing and dressmaking fall squarely within the semantic field of nurturing motherliness, and Thérèse, unlike François, conducts her work from within the home, in a highly ‘feminine’ space, displaying a meticulously curated mise en scène of domestically connoted objects (a dressmaking mannequin, sewing machine and fresh flowers). Some of the childcare is shared with a grandmotherly next-door neighbour, but in general, Thérèse is able to intertwine her paid work with domestic labour; spatially, she remains primarily ‘in the home’ rather than in the workforce. Furthermore, the nature of her work is significant; during the film, she is making a wedding dress for a woman who visits with her mother. All three women seem ‘naturally’ to agree on the idea of a good marriage, wedding and dress (all relatively merged within the idolized image); François returns home during the conversation, and as Thérèse greets him, the customer is told by her mother that that is the right way to speak to one’s husband. The image for the ideal dress, furthermore, derives from a fashion the customer has seen in Elle magazine. In making and selling wedding dresses – literally and symbolically from

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a received pattern – Thérèse is both produced by and a reproducer of the trite, pre-packaged family romance. Varda depicts women in patriarchal culture as victims of a gendered discourse that demands their presence as objects only, but, as Ruth Hottell suggests, also as victims afflicted with a degree of cultural Stockholm syndrome: ‘In Le Bonheur, Varda exposes the hypocrisy of bourgeois, romantic ideas of happiness, but her heroines do not reject their own complicity in the vicious cycle designed to hide the injustices at the edges of the system.’42 Through role playing, the good mother model perpetuates her own subjective absence and promotes the same agenda to other women. Through the sale of these ideals and the physical commodities required to costume them among women themselves, a maternal ideal can be exchanged and acquired without the indignity of displaying the mother at market alongside the prostitute. Similarly to Godard’s resistance to or problematization of definitive identity discourses, all of the characters in Le bonheur are presented with an eerie lack of subjectivity. In a manner that critics have justly identified as ironic or even Brechtian,43 Varda uses scripting and visual clichés to keep us at arm’s length from identification with the characters and to underpin the artificial and mimetic nature of their performance of family. We are unsettlingly distanced from any indication of motivation or psychological depth; all the characters act as if by rote. François and Thérèse’s proclamations of love and happiness are hyperbolic and entirely generic, betraying no more sincerity of feeling or psychological realism than a pre-printed message of affection on a greeting card. The minor cast of wider family members, too, behave according to a robotic consensus; at Thérèse’s funeral, the extended relatives, in the presence of François, dispassionately discuss which of them might take custody of the couple’s young children, apparently in tacit agreement that this is the correct next step in the melodramatic plot, rather than considering the relatively atypical narrative twist of a single father. Even the film’s principal bifurcation, François’s affair with Emilie, begins with remarkably little bother. Though one might assume that even the contemplation of the sexual and emotional betrayal of a person with whom one has ostensibly achieved ideal monogamous happiness, of a relationship with no apparent tensions or dissatisfactions, should be a psychologically meaningful event, François is not shown to wrestle with the decision at all. The easy slide into the relationship with Emilie does not even employ the alternative cliché that François is not especially unhappy, but that Emilie offers him something different to Thérèse. In fact, the two women seem uncannily alike. The physical similarities between them seem purposeful (both are blonde, slim, feminine, stereotypically attractive). Interestingly, however, critics have tended to promote a fairly rigid binary distinction between the two women and what François

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perceives them to offer him, which, I suggest, is not really supported with such clarity in the film. Rebecca J. DeRoo, for instance, argues that ‘if Thérèse corresponds to the traditional homemaker, then Emilie represents what was termed in women’s magazines of the late 1950s and 1960s the “modern woman”’,44 and elsewhere expands, ‘As Thérèse’s opposite, Emilie appears to be her own woman, with an independent mind and a sense of her own desires’.45 This interpretation is especially curious given DeRoo’s otherwise meticulous and incisive understanding of the tensions between image and narrative as an energetic site of feminist critique within the film. I argue instead that it is the structure of the film that suggests that the two women should be seen as opposite feminine ‘types’ or polarized sexual options for François, but that this is complicated by the ways in which the women behave and are visually represented. DeRoo defines the ‘modern woman’ as ‘an evolution of the housewife seen as free from the drudgery of the previous generation: she had a career, embraced popular culture and was more sexually liberated’,46 yet these factors do not present an unambiguous distinguishing cipher between Thérèse and Emilie; both work (and both in typically ‘feminized’ service and textile industries), and both undertake the same repetitive household chores when living with François. As DeRoo highlights, Emilie’s apartment does display posters of movie stars in the background, but there is no particular reason to believe that Thérèse is especially out of touch with contemporary pop culture. Even when François compares Thérèse’s and Emilie’s styles of lovemaking while in bed with the latter, despite initially claiming they are different, he draws more similarities than oppositions, conceding that both women enjoy making love and are sexually open (a stance reflected by scenes with similarly composed shots of both couples in bed together). Despite her purported position as the ‘modern woman’ of the pair, furthermore, Emilie is not straightforwardly identifiable with the familiar qualities of the ‘new wave’ women found elsewhere in French cinema of the early 1960s. Firstly, while female protagonists like À bout de souffle’s (Breathless, 1960) Patricia, Masculin féminin’s Madeleine and the eponymous heroine of Varda’s earlier film, Cléo de 5 à 7 (Cléo from 5 to 7], 1962), extend their participation in popular culture through creative and desirable careers within the media, Emilie is only indicated as a consumer rather than producer of popular images. And secondly, while the ‘public’ space of the street (though far more conflicted than it is for men) can represent at least fleetingly some sense of liberating possibilities, sexual and intellectual self-expression, and ‘escape’ from the gendered confines of the domestic home for these characters and others – including La dérive’s (The Drift, 1964) Jacqueline, Jules et Jim’s (1962) Catherine and even to some extent Les 400 coups’ Gilberte, among many more – this division is not so straightforward for either Emilie or Thérèse. Their encounters with the outside world are not structured only by free movement and leisure,

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but also by the continued demands of domestic ideals, childcare and economic necessity. The ‘liberating’ street is bisected by the school gate (literally, in certain shots). Emilie, therefore, does not comfortably settle into position as Thérèse’s opposite even before she becomes her uncanny double; rather, the superficial differences between the ‘modern’ and the ‘traditional’ woman dissolve under the stress of their material conditions as working-class women and mothers. If anything, in fact, rather than exploring one man’s choice between two ‘types’ of wife, the film suggests that idealized images of femininity ultimately tolerate very little expression of difference among women. Furthermore, as the film progresses, Emilie becomes increasingly similar to Thérèse, most interestingly in her appearance and environment. What few differences of appearance and style that are initially apparent between the women dissolve over the course of the film. The aesthetic progression of Emilie’s flat also creeps gradually towards a tacit imitation of Thérèse’s house with each of François’s visits. On his first visit, the walls are entirely white, and the rooms mostly bare, a blank issue of the product waiting to be dyed. Gradually, and with François’s help, she acquires furniture, decorates with white daisies and pictures of Hollywood actors, and adds splashes of colour. After Thérèse’s death, the transformation accelerates; the first time François visits Emilie again, a colour palette associated with Thérèse has begun to dominate the apartment, and the flowers have changed from daisies to an almost identical bunch of purple wildflowers to that kept by Thérèse in her sewing room. Finally, all that is left is for Emilie to physically replace Thérèse in the family home. The progression is disturbing in its subtlety; slowly, unintentionally and parasitically, one woman usurps the place of another as wife and mother, filling the role to exact dimensions. The maternal-feminine function, in other words, has remained constant, oblivious to the expropriation of the mothering subject. DeRoo’s reading of the film as ‘impl[ying] that romantic love is a sham for the modern woman, requiring a sacrifice of self that leads to the same destiny and drudgery as for the traditional homemaker’47 suggests that Emilie is a younger version of Thérèse, perhaps recapturing the sexual excitement potentially depreciating in the daily customs of family life. The most biting melancholy of the film, however, is not that women expecting unique relationships fall easily into the monotony of the housewife and domestic mothering role, but that this role indeed exists independently of a human subject. If the film presents motherhood as unfulfilling, it is only because patriarchal culture invites it to be so entirely generic. As a well-modelled maternal product, Thérèse becomes a swift casualty of her own radical replaceability. As Smith points out, the death scene is the only image that, taken individually, does not suggest a twee cliché of familial bliss.48 It is at this point, too, that the soundtrack breaks off into sudden, striking silence. The death has received varying interpretations, ranging from

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reading it as a clean amputation, as ‘Thérèse has to disappear in order to avoid the appearance of an idyllic family image containing two women, and she does so unhesitatingly and discreetly’,49 to a crystallizing moment of patent subjectivity, which ‘reinstates her position as subject and bares the messy seams for scrutiny, thus winking metaphorically at the spectator in an appeal to those who find themselves excluded from traditional texts and at the edges of tidy representations of happiness’,50 resulting in François’s ‘belated recognition of the importance of Thérèse’s home maintenance and care-giving: just after her death’,51 and thereby exposing the invisible but vital work the mother performs in constituting the patriarchal comforts of the happy family trope. I suggest, rather, that complete self-destruction appears as the character’s single recourse to expression. Having lived as an objective image, she sees her own reproduction in Emilie. The suicide is not a capitulation to François’s (society’s) picture of happiness, nor a satisfying and successful undermining of this picture, but a desperate attempt at unique communication, to produce rather than reproduce meaning, for which, of course, there is no scripted response. As the singular instant that does not adhere to the mass reproduced family romance idyll, this plot point also produces a visual and sensory rupture in the representational rhythms of the film; the camerawork is shakier (introducing less stability in the image and suggesting the presence of an individual behind the camera, a viewer with a constructing gaze), the colours become suddenly less vibrant and the soundtrack sharply stops. Images of François cradling Thérèse’s body proceed in syncopated jump cuts. The effect is disorienting, producing an almost physically felt shock in the viewing experience. The sudden, momentary shattering of the procession of mass reproduced clichés is jarring. Tragically, however, this action is not powerful enough to perform an Irigarayan jamming of the machinery52 of received patriarchal ideologies. With the exception of the brief, if powerful, corpse sequence, it scarcely rattles the axles. Emilie steps into Thérèse’s now vacant wife-and-mother role with minimal anxiety. The mass produced familial idyll continues thereafter much as it had previously. Even a criticism as damning as the mothering object’s selfannihilation cannot undo the pattern of the timeless role reproduction in a single gesture. Both roads – participation or destruction – end in absence. The deeply unsettling closing sequence, in which the family, now including Emilie rather than Thérèse, walk off, hand in hand, through the same forest in which we encounter François and Thérèse in the opening sequence (also, darkly, the site of her suicide), in a reproduced image of family harmony, suggests that Emilie has become a precise replica of Thérèse. The ‘good’ mother figure is a reproducible function; the ideological machinery is fully automated. Varda and Godard are also both interested in exploring the powerfully aesthetic nature of the reproduced identity. The construction of the self – and

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certainly the maternal self – as a product and a purchasable commodity involves extensive engagement with the culture of images. Within a deluge of signs, meanings and advertising discourses, motherhood itself potentially becomes a spectacle. Not only is the identity of the ‘good mother’ marketed piece by piece to women (regardless of their actual lived relationships to biological or social mothering), but because mothers throughout the twentieth century generally did most of the household shopping and purchasing, their success is also measured by their skill in establishing and maintaining the image of the perfect family. The gendered advertising discourses that provide instruction on how this image is to be achieved at a given social moment have been critiqued by feminist scholars as manipulative and disempowering. In her work on commodity forms and culture, for instance, Mary Ann Doane describes how ‘The commodity was at least a small part of the lure tempting the woman to take a job in the first place … But the commodity was also activated as the lure back into the domestic space of the home in the postwar years when the threat of male unemployment was great’.53 In other words, it is argued that household commodities and desirable goods are leveraged in order to bait women into various social positions, in a discourse that could be seen as addressing them as a ‘national mother’ figure, who must act in the best interests of the country as the private mother is expected to act in the best interests of the child. Motherhood and reproduction are already intimately linked in the cultural imagination (in the reproduction of children, identity, gender, values, traditions, nationalities, psychoanalytic narratives and so forth). Much marketing towards mothers only solidifies the sense of a single, inflexible maternal ideal that these discourses establish within a given culture. The result is a mass reproduced mother as a flat and homogenizing image. This does not allow for recognition of difference among mothers, but fabricates a linear and hierarchical spectrum at the end of the production line, along which mothering women are placed according only to their degree of faults and deviations from the blueprint. As with mass produced factory goods, perfection is not celebrated in each iteration of the item, but is in fact its minimal acceptable standard. Godard and Varda critique this absent maternal model-object through use of the same cultural images that form it, using various stylized techniques of montage, colour, sound editing and other strategies to suggest the feverish and ubiquitous nature of these messages and images. For both film-makers, women’s magazines of the period constitute important cultural artefacts and points of reference in the reproduction of a certain type of woman and mother. Ross provides interesting contextual analyses of such magazines in France,54 describing them as providing ‘a veritable roadmap of the quotidian’55 that ‘played a leading role in disseminating and normalizing the state-led modernization effort’56 and, it follows, was instrumental in establishing and naturalizing the objective models of femi-

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ninity included therein. The images in magazines like Elle and Marie-Claire can appear at once ephemeral and timeless, superficial and palimpsestic, providing an exposition of quotidian and up-to-date trends in fashion, interior design, parenting strategies and diets, yet inserting these items into an archetypal ‘good mother’ or ‘ideal femininity’ discourse. Both directors borrow from this aesthetic. Godard, most clearly in Une femme mariée and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, uses a hyper-sensory mass of images of the everyday and mass media. Many commentators have likened his aesthetic to artistic practices of collaging, though Douglas Smith57 more aptly describes it as ‘décollage’ (in French, the practice of peeling back posters to reveal the layers beneath, which speaks more directly to a Barthesian sensibility towards hidden meanings in everyday images, rather than a superficial mimesis). Varda’s work, on the other hand, intermingles visual references to images of motherhood, family and femininity from both high and low culture (magazines, postcards, fine art, photography and many others) to portray the aspirational feminine maternal ideal as at once instantaneous and abiding, seamlessly blending classical compositions with contemporary familiar objects. In the films mentioned above, Godard particularly uses images relating to the female body and domestic goods and brands to collect an impression of how the mothering women in these films might witness their own detachable production as and through objects. In 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, the domestic mothering role is often performed through commodity objects, and this performance is directed towards the camera and audience as well as to the other characters, in, for instance, the incessant positioning of brand-name cleaning products – much reminiscent of a visual interpretation of Barthes’s chapter on ‘Saponides et détergents’58 – exaggeratedly face-on towards the camera in Juliette’s kitchen, or in the final scene in which a small army of domestic products are set out and filmed in a highly contrived manner on an underwatered lawn. Charlotte and Juliette are often depicted consuming women’s magazines and the (self-)images of the ideal woman, mother and housewife that they construct and reconstruct. Godard includes lengthy sequences in both films in which the women read magazines in cafes, crosscutting images of the multitudes of women, clothes and underwear items printed in the magazines, and of the actresses, and using a variety of denaturalizing shot lengths (particularly extreme close-ups), edits and montaging methods to draw attention to the printed image, the film image and the body of the actress as potentially part of the same objectifying discourse. This is one example of how Godard exploits his medium to enrich the meditations on reproduction offered by these films. Since his famous and innovative experimentations with jump cuts during apparently conventional conversation sequences in À bout de souffle, Godard maintains a playful approach to tra-

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ditionally mimetic film, casually undermining any ‘effet de réel’ in arrhythmic intervals. In Une femme mariée and 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, he employs an extensive arsenal of Brechtian distancing techniques (particularly notably, for instance, the actors talking directly to the camera in the former, the introduction of Juliette/Marina Vlady as both actor and character in the latter and any number of denaturalizing non-narrative visual motifs that break almost every rule of conventional filmic storytelling), so that the viewer is generally highly aware that the film is indeed just that, not ‘realistic’ in an escapist sense, but also very much real in its own status as a narrative commodity. As has become familiar through the work of Walter Benjamin, film is, after all, the exemplary art form for the age of mechanical reproduction. Radically alienated from any idea of an ‘original’, as ‘that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art’,59 films are endless cycles of reproduction, reproducing the indexical objects or performances in front of the camera, edited, post-produced and distributed in a homogeneous mechanical format in which no particular copy is naturally superior to another, and imperfections (the perishing of celluloid, a scratch on a disc, a poor screen resolution or slow buffering speed) are the only markers of difference. In Une femme mariée the medium marries uncannily to the theme of Charlotte’s reproduced identity. Several writers have observed the significance of Godard’s mirroring devices in Une femme mariée, of which there are many examples. Godard recycles individual images, not exactly of the same footage, but of strikingly similar compositions, most notably in the repeated motifs of body parts, white sheets and certain heavily posed physical arrangements that Charlotte adopts with her lovers, such as the shots of a mouth in profile, next to another character’s ear, repeatedly whispering ‘je t’aime’. Marc Cerisuelo points out the mirroring structures within individual scenes and over the film as a whole: Certaines séquences sont construites en parfaite symétrie: Charlotte est montrée dans les bras de son mari puis de son amant, les caresses de l’un répondent à celles de l’autre. Le film commence et se termine par une longue scène représentant les deux amants dans un lit. Charlotte descend d’un taxi pour monter dans un autre, etc.60

The filmic representation of Charlotte’s existence, therefore, reproduces itself, underpinning the view of Charlotte as a reproduceable maternal-feminine product. Her ‘narrative’ itself takes the form of a cycle, imitating gendered discourses on the circularity of femininity discussed above. It is interesting, moreover, that Cerisuelo further observes: ‘Le film est un modèle d’équilibre. Après l’apparition de Nicolas, la chaîne des cartons s’interrompt pour reprendre ponctuellement jusqu’à la fin.’61 Cerisuelo does not interrogate this point further, but within a gendered discourse on the particular affinity between reproduction, objectivity

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and mothers, the observation is significant. The son, Cerisuelo’s comment suggests, is positioned at the structural and aesthetic centre of the film. Nicolas, therefore, constitutes a point of uniqueness, meaning and importance, around which the mother’s identity and routine literally orbits. In this sense, Godard’s choice of self-replicating structures in representing the mother could be read as imitating, subtly, feminist critiques of the socially constructed patterns of maternal identity as objectifying and cyclic, ‘with no closure of the circle or the spiral of identity’,62 in which the son is the only term of progression and futurity, of a ‘productive’ subjective identity. The symmetrical and recurrent devices used to represent Charlotte, on the other hand, emphasize her discursive status as one among many objects that construct her identity. Le bonheur also engages with the mass reproduction of the mother through interplays of cultural images and symbolic narratives, asking how far these perpetually self-generating clichés end up standing in for a mothering subject. Here too, the images reproduced in women’s lifestyle media are shown to be instrumental in mass marketing a paper-doll automaton of the perfect mother and wife who performs independently of the mothering subject. While, unlike in many of Godard’s films, little attention is drawn to magazines as physical objects of consumption within the film, DeRoo has presented a compelling analysis of how Varda adopts the visual language of these media throughout the film as a form of ironic critique, using ‘archival excavation of imagery from these magazines to explain how Varda applied their imagery to the subjects, characters and poses of Le bonheur in order to interrogate myths of domestic harmony’.63 DeRoo continues this analysis in her later monograph on Varda. She argues that the montages of domestic labour in Le bonheur make direct and critical reference to advertising images of ‘domestic bliss’ in compositions that would have been highly familiar to and ‘glamorized by popular periodicals such as Elle and Marie Claire’.64 Through a detailed analysis of the magazine source images and their ironic citation in the film, she demonstrates how such images glamorize (and, I add, emotionalize) this maternal labour, customarily representing the mothering subject through only an abstracted hand, disassociated from a full human body or any more expansive sense of self than the apparently complete satisfactions that caring for a husband and children is supposed to provide. DeRoo suggests that ‘this depersonalization has a specific purpose: to promote the viewer’s identification’,65 further emphasizing the requirement of patriarchal ideology for only a single, universal maternal ideal and function, rather than particularized and multifarious mothering subjects. Certainly, the film’s oversaturated and fastidiously framed scenes of domestic bliss seem precisely posed as if for a photoshoot from a good housekeeping magazine. Constantly serene and nurturing, Thérèse floats through the minutely orchestrated idylls immaculately coiffed and made-up, her arms always

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gently and adoringly open to two angelic children who never appear to cry or create mess and nuisance; she is always, nonetheless, sexually available and desirable to her husband, and seems to generate effortlessly the material ideal of familial harmony through seamless curation of beautiful objects (flowers, food, herself ). These images are perfectly arranged in front of the camera to suggest tableaux vivants of magazine clichés. Thérèse, like the women in these images, is performing the absent mother; the point of the narrative is that she becomes generic, and, like the models in the photos, an all but nameless figure whose purpose is to denote rather than speak. The ‘good mother’ is responsible for reproducing this image (a commodity controlled by external forces), which requires her absence; any visible notion of ambivalence on her part damages the goods. In addition to referencing contemporary media construction of identities, critics have often commented upon Varda’s use of compositions and tropes from fine art. Interesting work has been done on investigating references to specific paintings, but more pertinent here is the adoption of a general aesthetic, which, as Smith66 and Hottell have noted, likens the film to impressionist painting in particular, using ‘a cyclical symphony of colors to complicate the implied connection between repetition in nature and the replacement of one woman for another’.67 As well as the importance of the generation of a ‘cyclical’ effect through use of a marked colour palette, the choice of impressionism is eloquent. Well before the time of filming, this style had become clichéd, connoting ‘happy days, sunshine and holidays, or on the other hand a certain celebration of the conventional which has increased with the enormous popularity of reproductions of their work’.68 The characteristics of impressionist art, in other words, fit the film’s themes ideally; the colours are soft and pleasing, the moods gentle, and the most typical and renowned subjects include bucolic outdoor scenes, of which scenery familial figures (often women and children) form a part. In the first scene after the titles, in which the family relax under a tree, we are immediately introduced to the motifs of pastoral impressionism, reminiscent of, for instance, Monet and Seurat; other sequences, such as the scene in which François, Thérèse and Emilie dance (between various couples) at a fête, seem to recall the composition of specific paintings, in this case Renoir’s A Dance at Bougival. The film blends these discourses, from popular media and fine art, demonstrating the deep ingraining of ‘good mother’ ideologies in historical and everyday culture. These various iconographies construct Thérèse as the finished maternal product, to be consumed by François. Throughout the first part of the film, Thérèse is shown working (unobtrusively) to ensure that the image of family happiness remains beautiful and pristine for François in particular. The first line spoken by Thérèse, after tidying the campsite, brushing away the ashes

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of a campfire (committing to something reminiscent of housework even in the outdoors) and hearing her daughter calling for her in the forest, is to instruct the child to be quiet so as ‘not to wake papa’; the idealized view of family happiness is, after all, dreamlike. Thérèse’s advice to her daughter is indicative of her work to maintain the idyllic, peaceful image for François without a hint of imperfection or fatigue (as he begins to wake up, she poses herself back against the tree, as if she has slept next to him throughout). These actions are typical of the good mother-as-object, who curates and preserves the dream and discourse of the family without drawing attention to her own efforts. François’s desire is not, however, for the individual women but for this image of happiness; the transition between the women is seamless because his story requires no present subject. The fiercely policed absence of the ideal mother is visually actualized in the paradigmatic composition of women’s magazines that Varda draws on, which DeRoo calls ‘the ideal of the serving hand’.69 DeRoo’s analysis of the film delves deeply into the ironical intertexts and feminist counter-discourses at work within Varda’s particular use of these images. In the first half of the film, sequences of Thérèse’s hands performing housework are accelerated, sequenced together quickly and smoothly, and conducted to the film’s cheerful soundtrack, reflecting, perhaps, François’s romanticized view of her domestic duties. The second half of the film repeats pointedly similar montages, although the hands are no longer Thérèse’s, but Emilie’s. DeRoo argues that the borrowed image of the serving hand ‘serves as the key to Varda’s visual counter-narrative, which contests traditional notions of domestic harmony that the film seems to advance’.70 She suggests that Varda’s feminist critique arises from the subtle but significant ways in which these meticulously observed citations differ from their referents; whereas the advertising images sought to capitalize on ideas of women’s domestic skill and expertise, the tasks performed by the disembodied maternal hands in Le bonheur are mundane and unsatisfying: for example, Thérèse’s hands roll the rolling pin back and forth several times over a lump of dough. By depicting the repetition inherent in the activity, Varda presents the tasks as dull and unfulfilling. Whereas the magazine text and images imply the woman’s responsibility and know-how, the film portrays only simple duties with no such flattering commentary.71

The longer these tasks are allowed to exist in perpetual, repetitive time, furthermore (and much like Thérèse’s dough beneath her Sisyphean rolling pin), the thinner the ideal of maternal-domestic satisfaction wears, ‘convey[ing] the sense of constant, perpetually unfinished domestic work, which undermines a sense of accomplishment and portrays aspects of housework that the advertisers sought to conceal’.72 Perhaps most unsettlingly, finally, the montages of

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alienated domestic labour cite the idealizing advertisements effectively in reverse. The adverts begin with an anonymous mothering fragment of a body, which then invites an illusory promise of personalization through its capitalistic interpellation of the female consumer as ideal mother; in Le bonheur, on the other hand, the fuller mothering subject precedes her own fragmentation. This reversal of the ideological order precipitates a troubling recognition that the disassociated ideal hand belongs to someone; the mothering subject to whom the serving function is attached is not ‘naturally’ absent, but actively and consciously erased within the creation of the fantasized maternal image. The mothering body in these images becomes a sign of endless reproduction, which can no longer be euphemized as feminine fulfilment. DeRoo’s excellent close work on repetition within and between these particular sequences can be further extended across Le bonheur’s structure and aesthetics more broadly. I am interested here in the mirroring structures Varda uses across the film, which are semantically comparable to those used in Une femme mariée. DeRoo importantly emphasizes how Varda’s translation of the still, stylized magazine cliché from image into montage – thereby introducing the dimension of time that the still image of maternal-domestic harmony seeks to repress and disavow – problematizes the image’s intended message of feminine fulfilment by introducing the (typically hidden) tedious, unsatisfying and endless monotony of labour required to maintain the ideal. However, this idea is not limited to individual scenes and sequences, but extends to the film by and large in images, motifs and even soundtrack. The theme of reproduction and repetition is aurally expressed, for instance, through Varda’s choice of a limited and repeatedly introduced score for the film. As with her visual motifs, a deliberate and powerful refusal is made of anything ‘original’ (no new music was composed for this film); instead, Varda uses and reuses a recording of Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C minor, largely recycling the theme from the fugue rather than the adagio. The choice of a fugue is an extremely apposite musical analogy for the film’s plot and themes. In music, a fugue refers to a composition based entirely around a repeated theme, to which small elements are added, but which is essentially a continuous, repetitive cycle. In classical psychiatry, a ‘fugue state’ is a term indicating loss of awareness of one’s identity. Both meanings are disturbingly apt for Thérèse, who becomes deeply but almost unconsciously disconnected from her subjective identity within the endless repetition of her performance of the good mother. Within the film, passages from Mozart’s fugue are used to cue the cyclical recommencement of one of several visual sequences or motifs that are used throughout. In the same way that Charlotte’s mirroring scenes underscore her, too, as a reproducible object in Une femme mariée, the ‘fugal’ motifs in Le bonheur draw attention to the mass reproduced character of the domestic mother figure

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within familiar coded facsimiles of family happiness. This is all the more disturbing given that the mirroring sequences go on despite the replacement of the mothering woman. The film begins and ends with the family in the forest; we see them packed together in François’s small van driving between the forest and the home; the remarkably similar sequences of actions on which DeRoo comments then show a pair of maternal ‘serving hands’ performing housework, tending to flowers (arranging or watering), ironing children’s clothes (dungarees or a pink dress), cooking (kneading dough or sprinkling salt) and putting the children to bed, and we see other elements that contribute to the stylization of aspirational mass produced maternal-feminine happiness. Even the most intimate and personal moments of the mothers’ familial relations appear reproducible and non-specific; the fugal sequences also involve Thérèse/Emilie making love to François in the same bed, and highly similar images of motherly affection between the women and the children (who seem entirely indifferent to the replacement of the mother figure with another, marginally different copy), amounting to a writing out of the mothering subject from the idealized family story. The representation of the ‘script’ of good mothering as a mechanical function, with an absent subject, echoes (reproduces) the structure of the fugue; with each repetition, small elements are changed or added, the phrases are perhaps differently instrumented, or transposed, as the minutiae of daily activities vary slightly between the two women, but the theme (the symphonic motif, or the patriarchal fantasy of family) continues. Notes 1. Ross, Fast Cars. 2. Malini Guha, From Empire to the World: Migrant London and Paris in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 10. 3. Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 27. 4. Ross, Fast Cars, 22. ‘Available man’: in Ross’s meaning, an expression of modern man, being more or less indifferent to physical and figurative distances between the spaces in which he exists and operates. The worker becomes ‘disponible’ ‘through a recasting of his identity by means of continuous displacement’ (ibid., 40). Commodity objects such as the car and the movie, in other words, allow man to transcend normative geographies and boundaries of existence, within a capitalistic framework. 5. Ibid., 79. 6. Lynne Gumpert, ‘Beyond the Banal: An Introduction to the Art of the Everyday’, in The Quotidian in Postwar French Culture, ed. Lynn Gumpert (New York: New York University Press/Grey Art Gallery Study Center, 1997), 15. 7. Ross, Fast Cars, 19. 8. Ibid. 9. Andrew Leak, Barthes: Mythologies (London: Grant & Cutler, 1994), 10. 10. Cone, ‘Métro, Boulot, Dodo’, 50. 11. Debord, Society of the Spectacle, para. 38.

84 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

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Brunette, ‘Nothing Happened’, 80–81. Ibid., 80. Ibid., 85. Ross, Fast Cars, 24. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 47. Ibid., 47–51. As discussed in Sandra Reineke, Beauvoir and Her Sisters: The Politics of Women’s Bodies in France (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2011), 28–29. Simone de Beauvoir, Les Belles Images (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Beauvoir, Second Sex. Reineke, Beauvoir and Her Sisters, 19. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 672. For instance, Sellier, ‘Gender, Modernism’; Doane, ‘Economy of Desire’. Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’, The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 10 (1929), 303–14. Homer, Jacques Lacan, 101, original emphasis. Colin MacCabe, Mick Eaton and Laura Mulvey, ‘Images of Woman, Images of Sexuality’, in Godard: Images, Sounds, Politics (London: Macmillan, 1980), 91. Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, 185, original emphasis. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 665. Ibid., 185. Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, ‘Form and Substance, or the Avatars of the Narrative’, in Focus on Godard, ed. Royal S. Brown (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 98. Royal S. Brown, ‘Introduction: One Plus One Equals’, in Focus on Godard, ed. Royal S. Brown (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1972), 14. The idea of the programming of the everyday is based on the theory discussed in Lefebvre, Everyday Life, 26. The change was insisted upon by a body of censors who worried that the original title implied general widespread infidelity among French housewives, as discussed in Yannick Dehée, Mythologies Politiques du Cinéma Français, 1960–2000 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000), 81. Yosefa Loshitsky, The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), 160. Here I refer to the activity of fathering as equivalent to mothering, rather than the tellingly common understanding of the term ‘fathering’ as a genetic act. Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering. Alison Smith, Agnès Varda (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 44. Rebecca J. DeRoo, Agnès Varda: Between Film, Photography and Art (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2018), 68. Ibid., 51. Ibid., 52. Ibid., 65. Ruth Hottell, ‘Including Ourselves: The Role of Female Spectators in Agnès Varda’s “Le Bonheur” and “L’Une Chante, L’Autre Pas”’, Cinema Journal 38, no. 2 (1999): 61–62. For instance, Smith, Agnès Varda, 44; Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently: Feminism and the French Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1990), 234; DeRoo, Agnès Varda, 51–69. These readings directly re-evaluate initial interpretations of the film

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

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closer to its release, which took Varda’s ironic directing style literally, and saw the scripting and cinematography as peculiarly poor film-making on her part. Rebecca J. DeRoo, ‘Unhappily Ever After: Visual Irony and Feminist Strategy in Agnès Varda’s Le Bonheur’, Studies in French Cinema 8, no. 3 (2008), 203. DeRoo, Agnès Varda, 63. Ibid. Ibid., 203. Smith, Agnès Varda, 43. Ibid., 44. Hottell, ‘Including Ourselves’, 62. DeRoo, ‘Unhappily Ever After’, 206. Irigaray, ‘Power of Discourse’, 76. Doane, ‘Economy of Desire’, 27. Magazines aimed specifically at a female audience, Ross explains, were ‘born in France in the 1930s, but they knew a significant surge in number, circulation and readership in the decade following World War II’. Ross, Fast Cars, 78. Kristin Ross, ‘French Quotidian’, in The Quotidian in Postwar French Culture, ed. Lynn Gumpert (New York: New York University Press/Grey Art Gallery Study Center, 1997), 22. Ross, Fast Cars, 78. Douglas Smith, ‘(Dé)collage’, in A Companion to Jean-Luc Godard, ed. Tom Conley and T. Jefferson Kline (Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2014). ‘Soaps and Detergents’, in Barthes, Mythologies, 38–40. Benjamin, ‘Mechanical Reproduction’, 215. ‘Certain sequences are constructed in perfect symmetry: Charlotte is shown in the arms of her husband then her lover, the embraces of one correspond to those of the other. The film begins and ends with a long scene showing the two lovers in bed. Charlotte gets out of one taxi to get into another, etc.’ Marc Cerisuelo, Jean-Luc Godard (Paris: Editions des QuatreVents, 1989), 105. ‘The film is a model of balance. After the appearance of Nicolas, the chain of images is interrupted, before resuming until the end [of the film].’ Ibid., 108. Irigaray, Speculum, 76, original emphasis. DeRoo, ‘Unhappily Ever After’, 191. DeRoo, Agnès Varda, 51. Ibid., 60. Smith, Agnès Varda, 26. Hottell, ‘Including Ourselves’, 61. Smith, Agnès Varda, 36. DeRoo, Agnès Varda, 53. Ibid., 55. DeRoo, ‘Unhappily Ever After’, 200. DeRoo, Agnès Varda, 55.

PART II

Gestation  

My argument in Chapters 1 and 2 aimed to demonstrate how the subjectivity of the mother is persistently subordinated to that of the male child or cultural agent. The presence or absence of any self-interest or self-orientation in the mothering woman determines her position within a simplifying good-versusbad-mother binary, which is easily signified in the films discussed. I have also argued that Edelman’s concept of the Child and reproductive futurity can be usefully engaged to illustrate the cultural ideologies and assumptions that bolster this hierarchical positioning. In short, because the child – or, more accurately, the figure of the Child – contains an imminently perfect, collectively authorized fantasy of social futurity, the mothering subject who refuses to relinquish her own agency is adversarially constructed not only as neglectful towards her individual children but as poisonous to the progress and future of an entire given culture. Depersonified and consigned to reproduction rather than production, she is expected to be passive and absent. This part will begin by looking at how the same discourse and ideologies stretch to address a child figure that is as yet almost entirely conceptual. Whereas family narratives often blur the general ideological properties of cultural futurity with the individual qualities of a relevant character, narratives positioned at the cusp of reproduction, involving discourses on sexual liberation, contraception, abortion and reproductive rights (all of which became hugely pertinent issues throughout Britain and France during this period), raise similar tensions between the rights and subjectivities of women and mothers and those of the child in a way that is plainly ideological. In these discourses, the figure of the child that is leveraged is predominantly imaginary. Unlike in representations such as the Oedipal conflicts frequently narrativized into the films of the British kitchen sink cycle, in which the struggle for agency takes place between two or more existing people, in narratives of unplanned pregnancy and reproductive control, the struggle is often between an existing woman and the fantasy of a person (her child), which is peculiarly powerful in that it can be (and often is, within anti-abortion or abortion-sceptical rhetoric) constructed as flawless and exceptionally wonderful,1 while the mother, like all actual living beings, is less than perfect.

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Particularly in cases of unplanned pregnancy and unwilling motherhood, the woman in question is confronted with multiple discourses of the absent mother. Firstly, the same mantle of non-being described as conditioning maternal representations in Part I is ready to receive her too; however she chooses to engage with this (that is, whatever the degree of capitulation or rejection), it is an external construction that she will likely have to consider should she choose to continue the pregnancy. Secondly, abortion and contraception discourses that focus on the rights and fate of the foetus (symbolized already as the ‘child’) erode the presence of the maternal subject from around her uterus, whether its contents are embryonic or only yet discursive. Feminist commentators on abortion and reproductive rights underscore the ways in which legal, political and cultural arguments on these matters put the rights and subjectivity of the woman (as mother) in direct conflict with those of the foetus/ child (as yet more imagined than existent). Sarah Franklin2 and Deborah Lynn Steinberg3 both demonstrate how legal and political discourses on abortion frame the mother and foetus in an adversarial relationship that necessitates the definition of a criminal and hence a victim; the foetus is personified as the victim, despite its lack of legal citizenship or expression in all other senses. For many second-wave feminist theorists, this binarism reflects a patriarchal structure; as described by Adrienne Rich, ‘[the] language of patriarchal power insists on a dichotomy: for one person to have power, others – or another – must be powerless’.4 Both Franklin and Steinberg further describe how – in order to strengthen its claims within this oppositional framework – the foetus is rhetorically imbued with personality; Steinberg describes debates5 over abortion reform in which ‘foetal-centric’ language such as ‘killing’, ‘murder’ and ‘unborn children’ was used (and sometimes by both sides) to emotively construct the ‘victimhood’ of the foetus, despite the legal inaccuracy of such phrasing.6 At the same time, however, Franklin addresses the construction in medical discourse of foetal personhood, which solicits sympathy and subjective identification, while the mother is described in clinical and functional language as ‘host’, demonstrating how ‘a clear antagonism’ (rather than, perhaps, symbiosis) is set up between the two parties, in which a conflict of interests is presupposed,7 legitimating the possibility of a position that supports the rights of the foetus entirely at the expense of those of the mother. It is clear within such constructions that the rights and citizenship of the mother seem to be in conflict with those of the foetus, or rather, I suggest, with those of an imaginary child ‘provided with an entire life cycle through the construction of its developmental potential’.8 This raises several important qualitative questions about the role of mothers and their place within society. These include the matter of to whom the child ‘belongs’ and who has the duty of care towards it: the mother, the father, the state or whatever it is that we

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vaguely term ‘society’? Any or all of these may claim an ideological stake in the imagination of the child not necessarily commensurate with their burden of responsibility for it. Abortion as a legal issue and matter of public concern, furthermore, raises clear questions over women’s agency and control over their bodies, including how far the state may claim jurisdiction over reproduction and women’s fertility. Feminist writers such as Steinberg argue that the legitimation of public interest in the protection of embryos ‘locates the agency of the state within a woman’s body’.9 An associated issue here is the problem posed to legal and political systems by the numerical ambivalence of the pregnant woman, who is strictly neither one nor two people. Abortion reform is a case in which Irigaray’s theoretical advocacy of a politics reflective and respectful of gendered difference10 becomes practically urgent. She argues: One of the distinctive features of the female body is its toleration of the other’s growth within itself without incurring illness or death for either one of the living organisms. Unfortunately, culture has practically inverted the meaning of this economy of respect for the other. It has blindly venerated the mother-son relationship to the point of religious fetishism, but has given no interpretation to the model of tolerance of the other within and with a self that this relationship manifests.11

The discursive inadequacies expressed here have had and continue to have very real consequences for women contending with abortion legislation. This is not to say that Irigaray’s thought would necessarily lend itself to conviction of the one over the other, or the rights of the woman over the foetus in abortion law (this would, after all, and quite contrary to Irigaray’s proposition, be a simple inversion that would replicate the adversarial qualities of the initial standpoint); rather, it underpins the incapacity of the current system to represent or account for bodies other than that of the ideal patriarchal citizen who is, and always will be, essentially one. Evidently, many important (perhaps seemingly theoretical) questions over maternal subjectivity are urgently crystallized in cultural and political dialogues on abortion. Within the 1960s and into the 1970s, furthermore, the issue of reproductive rights and associated questions of sexual liberation and women’s sexual expression particularly were extremely prominent within public and political consciousness in both Britain and France. Abortion reform came to be recognized as one of the definitive issues of this era’s feminism, but its significance as a vital current debate extended far beyond feminist and anti-abortion activist circles. Relevant inroads into women’s fertility and (potential for) reproduction as a legitimate area of public and state interest had already been made within some Western European countries during the pronatalist climate of the immediate post-war years, resulting from national population decline

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after the world wars.12 In France in particular, combatting the low birth rate became an expressly political matter, and motherhood was positioned relatively unambiguously as women’s patriotic duty, leading to incentivizing schemes such as the awarding of the ‘Médaille de la Famille française’ (‘Medal of the French Family’) to mothers of particularly large numbers of children.13 Maggie Allison has highlighted the specifically paternalistic nature of this rhetoric, citing de Gaulle’s imploration to young French couples to ‘provide him with “millions of beautiful babies”’.14 Claire Duchen argues, however, that although pronatalist policy was initially somewhat effective in creating a French post-war ‘baby boom’, the fact that by 1967 a clear majority supported increased family planning resources suggests that ‘Many of the babies born during the baby boom … were babies of reluctant mothers’.15 While it is difficult to absolutely prove or disprove Duchen’s interpretation of these figures, it seems clear that pronatalist policies and attitudes tend to privilege the interests of imagined children and projections of collective cultural futurity even as measures to do so may prove coercive towards women and mothers. In this case, furthermore, it could reasonably be argued that, since reproduction is understood to be in the public interest, society and the state hold high stakes in the ‘ownership’ of the child, while mothers are addressed as reproductive instruments rather than consensual parents with unique relationships to their children. Ann Taylor Allen describes how the pronatalist interests of European states and the public support provided to enshrine motherhood as a national service precipitated questions over whether such activities might effectively ‘buy’ for the state a degree of entitlement within the management of individual families and women’s mothering: If motherhood was indeed a service to the state, some asked, then should the state give financial support to mothers and children? In that case, did the state have the right to require parenthood, to regulate the number of children in each family, or to forbid certain people to reproduce? … If the state supported children financially, then to whom did they belong?16

Though their cultural currency was self-limiting (by the mid-1960s, reproductive issues had quite a different role in public discourse), pronatalist attitudes did set a precedent in post-war Western Europe for women’s reproductive bodies and citizenship to become a matter of public concern. By the 1960s, attitudes towards sex and family dynamics had in many ways altered radically from those of the inter- and post-war years in Europe. Social and technological progress in relation to contraception was instrumental in a period of change in sexual attitudes among the younger generation, making it increasingly possible for sexuality to be expressed, discussed and acted upon more freely than before. The extent and depth of these changes is sometimes

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overstated in anecdotal reflections on the decade, but change was nonetheless occurring. As part of these shifting attitudes, women’s demands for control over their own reproduction through access to birth control and abortion services increased. During this period, writers describe how new female cultural protagonists emerged. In Britain, for instance, Stephen Brooke compares the ‘maternalist’ politics of the first half of the twentieth century (the figure of a political mother acting within a collective and speaking to class politics) to the figure of a more individualist ‘empowered mother-citizen, whose claim on politics was not simply about state allowances, but sexuality’, emerging during the 1960s.17 Duchen makes a comparable argument with regard to French culture, illustrating a shift from the heroization of the domestic mother figure in the post-war period to the rise of a ‘superwoman’ figure at this point, who masterfully balanced traditional domestic duties with public life and paid employment.18 Though this period marked a general liberalizing trend in attitudes towards sex and contraception, this shift was hardly universal. Many responded to the rise of ‘permissive’ culture with anxiety, fear or anger, understanding it as a mark of cultural decay, loss of traditional values and diminishing social responsibility. Among the multitude of arguments against abortion reform was the view that ‘As a form of “permissiveness”, abortion may be seen as a “Casanova’s Charter” for selfish males or, more commonly, as an inducement to the young of both sexes to promiscuity, irresponsibility and lack of respect for human life and religious authority’.19 Tessa ten Tusscher, similarly, argues that demand for abortion rights and other signs of women’s growing sexual independence provoked a reactionary galvanization of traditionalist right-wing patriarchal values among those who opposed them.20 Reproductive rights, therefore, became a vital pressure point to which many conflicting views of and responses to sexual liberation and the changing position of women, motherhood and the family in British and French culture became closely attached. While it is not the case that all feminists automatically identify with a prochoice position, this is generally accepted as a broadly feminist position. After all, the fundamental proposition underlying much demand for increased reproductive rights is that women’s claims to their own bodies and citizenship are equal to or greater than those claims of embryos or the state. Furthermore, a great deal of effective campaigning, lobbying and discursive framing of the issue sprang from feminist groups, writers and thinkers in the Britain and France.21 However, abortion debates were not contained only within two opposing poles of feminists and militant anti-abortionists. Other interests had a stake in and conditioned stances on abortion reform, including religion, eugenics and class politics. Class politics, for instance, intersected ambivalently

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with abortion debates in both countries. A sustained – and justified – caveat, for instance, was that abortion access was unequal among women of different social classes and financial means,22 and hence that abortion reforms would be less meaningful if they favoured middle-class women (for instance, if they were not state-funded, or if access was regionally imbalanced). The question of whether increased reproductive rights would be liberating or oppressive towards working-class women specifically also received differing responses; in both countries, for instance, Marxist and Communist groups initially opposed abortion as the ‘suicide of the working class’,23 though the issue later ‘became about the empowerment of working-class women and men and the protection of working-class families’.24 The issue of eugenics and population control continued to be a further significant factor on both sides of abortion debates; as shall be shown in further detail below, substantial ableist rhetorical shifts take place when opposing ‘defective foetuses’ to ‘perfectly normal children’.25 While further contextual detail will be given with regard to the specific political events, situations and discourses of each country below, it is not my main purpose in this part to engage again with these political histories alone, as there is already much nuanced and detailed work in this area. My intention is to address the far less examined issue of how cultural representations in cinema interacted with, reflected or differed from contemporaneous discourses on reproductive rights. Historical commentators on the topic have sometimes – and often rather passingly – acknowledged film-making as a significant site of representation within societal discourses on abortion and sexuality; for instance, Brooke argues that ‘it is possible that kitchen sink drama and issue films were as important as something like the Wolfenden Report in establishing a space for the discussion of sexual questions’,26 citing several examples of films that foregrounded representations of abortion, and Allison mentions the place of a documentary on abortion, Histoire d’A (1974), within the French debate.27 Agnès Varda’s personal involvement with feminist reproductive rights activism is also widely known. Understandably, however, these accounts go little further than recognizing that film representations did indeed engage with these debates, rather than examining the terms in which they did so or the nature of the representations. Within British film scholarship on this period, it is generally recognized that abortion, along with other newly prominent contemporaneous societal issues, becomes an increasingly conspicuous feature of social realist narratives. That notwithstanding, the involvement of films with abortion and reproductive rights is very rarely given sustained and detailed analysis. Most commonly, mention of abortion in British film frames it as an indexical sign of the ‘gritty’ realism of these films, as part of a general context of ‘permissive culture’, working-class social hardship and increased expression of women’s

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sexuality. There is a similar paucity of work on representation of reproductive rights in French film scholarship; even in the case of Varda – who is unusual in her position as a self-proclaimed feminist film-maker addressing abortion as an unambiguously central issue – critical focus has been drawn towards those films that do not deal expressly with feminist politics and issues. In short, how films of this period represent abortion and reproductive rights has not been given adequate attention as a specific issue, and, furthermore, one that was and remains of substantial importance to the cultural representation of women and motherhood. What is more, representations of abortion (discourses) are very far from homogeneous. Comments made at the time, such as ‘Today people talk about a New Realism – a realistic realism, and that would mostly seem to cover swearing, talking about contraceptives, two people just up to the moment of sexual intercourse and That Long Shot of Our Town from That Hill’,28 suggest that any representation of reproductive control was in itself perceived as progressive, or at least as a tiresome gesture towards progressivism. The articulations of these issues are in fact far more multifarious, nuanced and differentiated than this. Though the sensational ‘shock value’ of abortion scenes or the thematization of contraception as a shorthand for social liberalism cannot be dismissed, the films often reflect much of the complexity and ambivalence of cultural attitudes to reproductive control. Chapters 3 and 4 are intended to redress this gap in current scholarship on this body of films. Understanding reproductive rights as a key issue within feminist theory and practice, and as a lightning rod of family- and genderrelated political discourse, my aim is to deconstruct underlying ideologies and motivations at work within filmic representations of abortion and contraception discourses, but also to examine how these films construct narratives of experiences of abortion and responses to unplanned pregnancy. Theoretical questions will be addressed concerning ideological assumptions about gender, reproductive rights and motherhood (whose child, whose body, whose experience, whose perspective, is being privileged?), as well as how film as a specific medium is well positioned to present emotional and subjective engagements with these experiences. More precisely, I use a selection of films to examine the nature of these representations, how they illustrate criticism or advocacy within attitudes towards sexual liberation, abortion and contraception, whose experience they represent abortion as being, and whether and how far they characterize it as (necessarily) traumatic. I will further engage with the arguments on the absent mother presented so far by understanding filmic representations of pregnancy and reproductive choice as an ambivalent (gestative) moment in maternal ideology, in which the woman in question is variously constructed as a mother and not.

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Notes 1. This rhetorical device is referred to by Sarah Franklin as the argument that ‘every fetus could be a Beethoven’. Sarah Franklin, ‘Fetal Fascinations: New Dimensions to the Medical-Scientific Construction of Fetal Personhood’, in Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991), 199. 2. Ibid. 3. Deborah Lynn Steinberg, ‘Adversarial Politics: The Legal Construction’, in Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991). 4. Rich, Of Woman Born, 67. 5. Her essay concerns the Alton Bill specifically, but demonstrates wider trends in British debates over abortion legislation. 6. Steinberg, ‘Adversarial Politics’, 178–79. 7. Franklin, ‘Fetal Fascinations’, 194. 8. Ibid., 197–98. 9. Steinberg, ‘Adversarial Politics’, 186. 10. As expressed particularly in Luce Irigaray, ‘Each Sex Must Have Its Own Rights’, in Sexes and Genealogies, trans. Gillian C. Gill (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); ‘The Right to Life’, in Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 2007); and ‘The Culture of Difference’, in Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 2007). 11. Luce Irigaray, ‘The Neglect of Female Genealogies’, in Je, Tu, Nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin (New York: Routledge, 2007), 39. 12. Works that specifically address pronatalist culture and policies in France include Maggie Allison, ‘The Right to Choose: Abortion in France’, Parliamentary Affairs 47, no. 2 (1994): 222–37; Claire Duchen, Women’s Rights and Women’s Lives in France, 1944–1968 (London: Routledge, 1994); Jean C. Robinson, ‘Gendering the Abortion Debate: The French Case’, in Abortion Politics, Women’s Movements and the Democratic State, ed. Dorothy McBride Stetson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 87–11; and Dorothy M. Stetson, ‘Abortion Law Reform in France’, Journal of Comparative Family Studies 17, no. 3 (1986): 277–90. 13. Duchen, Women’s Rights, 101. 14. Allison, ‘Right to Choose’, 224. 15. Duchen, Women’s Rights, 199. 16. Ann Taylor Allen, Feminism and Motherhood in Western Europe, 1890–1970: The Maternal Dilemma (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 13, my emphasis. 17. Stephen Brooke, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 9. 18. Duchen, Women’s Rights, 94–95. 19. Jenny Chapman, ‘The Political Implications of Attitudes to Abortion in Britain’, West European Politics 9, no. 1 (1986), 17. 20. Tessa ten Tusscher, ‘Patriarchy, Capitalism and the New Right’, in Feminism and Political Theory, ed. Judith Evans et al. (London: Sage, 1986), 76. 21. In France, for instance, the influence of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex (1949) on abortion discourses within feminist theory is well documented. Concerning the history of feminist activist groups and their work on abortion reform in the period at hand, my views

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22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

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have been informed by, among other sources, Allison, ‘Right to Choose’; Brooke, Sexual Politics; Cathy Roberts and Elaine Millar, ‘Feminism, Socialism and Abortion’, Women’s Studies International Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1978): 3–14; Robinson, ‘Gendering the Abortion Debate’; Stetson, ‘Abortion Law Reform in France’; and Dorothy M. Stetson, ‘Women’s Movements’ Defence of Legal Abortion in Great Britain’, in Abortion Politics, Women’s Movements and the Democratic State, ed. Dorothy McBride Stetson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 135–56. Brooke, Sexual Politics. Allison, ‘Right to Choose’, 225. Similar ideas regarding the British context are expressed in Roberts and Millar, ‘Feminism, Socialism and Abortion’, 9–11. Brooke, Sexual Politics, 4. Steinberg, ‘Adversarial Politics’, 180. Brooke, Sexual Politics, 148. Allison, ‘Right to Choose’, 228. John Krish, Society of Film and Television Arts Journal, issue on ‘The New Realism and British Films’ (Spring 1963), 14.

CHAPTER 3

The ‘Permissive’ Myth Conservatism, Change and Contraception in Swinging London  

In 1967, Great Britain became one of the first European states to decriminalize abortion to a significant degree. Abortion was not a new challenge to British law in 1967. The history of abortion legislation and the passage of the 1967 Act has been analysed often and thoroughly by historians and legal and social theorists.1 Since 1861, the principal law that regulated abortion was the Offences Against the Person Act, which criminalized anybody attempting to ‘procure the miscarriage of any woman’;2 the law was therefore aimed at penalizing the abortionist rather than the pregnant woman (though this person may have been one and the same). As this law was vague with regard to the legality of abortion when performed to save the mother’s life, it was updated in 1929 by the Infant Life Preservation Act, which ‘made it a felony to destroy the life of a child capable of being born alive, provided evidence was available that the mother was pregnant for twenty-eight weeks or more’.3 While this Act appeared to aim at restricting abortion, its severity towards abortion after the agreed-upon threshold of ‘viability’ in fact positioned the first twentyeight weeks of pregnancy as claimable territory for proponents of accessible abortion. This progressive reading of the law was first put into effect in the R. v. Bourne case, in which Mr Aleck Bourne, an obstetric surgeon, successfully defended his provision of abortion to a 14-year-old victim of multiple rape, through arguing that the law allowed for therapeutic abortion on the grounds of protecting the woman’s physical or mental health.4 This landmark case therefore established an available defence for medical professionals who performed abortion, and, though it remained insecure and precarious protection, meant that a relatively small number of arguably legal abortions did take place prior to 1967. Nonetheless, their availability was limited and often performed at substantial private expense; dangerous and amateurish backstreet abortions remained widespread. The 1967 Abortion Act, introduced to parliament as a private member’s bill by David Steel, expanded upon and enshrined the developments of the Bourne case. It allowed abortions to be performed up to twenty-eight weeks5

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into a pregnancy if certain criteria were met, according to the judgement of two doctors. Stephen Brooke summarizes the stipulated conditions for abortion in the initial draft of the bill thus: An abortion would be permitted if two doctors believed that the continuance of a pregnancy ‘would involve serious risk to the life or grave injury to the health, whether physical or mental, of the pregnant woman whether before, at or after the birth of the child’; if there was a ‘substantial risk’ of physical or mental abnormality; if the pregnant woman’s capacity as a mother will be severely overstrained by the care of a child or of another child as the case may be; and, finally, if the pregnant woman was the victim of a rape, under the age of 16, or ‘defective’.6

As Brooke further explains, the third clause, which addressed social pressures of unwanted motherhood, was removed in later readings.7 As was to become fairly typical of initial debates on abortion reform, therefore, the reforms at this stage mainly addressed abortion as a ‘last resort’ that catered for necessity rather than choice. Though the successful passing of an act that – however modestly – relaxed restrictions on and punishments for abortions represented a move toward sexual progressivism, it was not an unambiguous or definitive feminist victory, if it can even be considered a feminist victory at all; commentators have widely emphasized quite how little interest the 1967 Act demonstrated in the rights of women per se. Sally Sheldon illustrates how the Act prioritized the legal protection of doctors as providers of abortion, rather than the rights of women as its subjects.8 She argues that representative bodies of the medical establishment and several MPs supported the bill precisely because it would bring abortion under medical control and surveillance, making it more visible and changing the problem of abortion ‘from [a question of ] of widespread and unquantifiable deviance, to one of isolated, identifiable and treatable individual deviants’.9 According to Sheldon, the rejection of the social clause of the original bill reflects this prioritization of interest.10 However, while a discourse of women’s rights is not centred in the ultimate legislation, it would be equally overreaching to suggest that it was absent from the debates; Joni Lovenduski11 and Keith Hindell and Madeleine Simms12 show how – other motives for support notwithstanding – the widespread and effective activities of feminist campaign and lobbying groups, in particularly ALRA (the Abortion Law Reform Association, of which Simms was a prominent member), were instrumental in the passage of the Act. The support of groups with other interests in abortion reform was beneficial to the short-term aims of feminist campaigners, though it did qualify their successes. The bill’s achievements and the attitudes they symbolized were not immutably enshrined, and abortion legislation has remained a contentious political issue in Britain, with

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those groups who believe the reforms went too far and those who believe they did not go far enough consistently pressuring for change in these opposing directions.13 In her study of the British public’s attitudes to abortion, however, Jenny Chapman suggests that advocacy groups were not representative of the population as a whole, for whom abortion appeared to be a deeply ambiguous question. Chapman’s findings suggest – in broad terms – that throughout the debates, public sentiment has been cautiously pro-choice, with a majority tending to support women’s access to abortion services in ‘last resort’ cases such as those stipulated by the 1967 Act, and that thereafter public opinion became gradually more sympathetic towards social grounds for abortion, such as financial strain or marital status.14 Within these very generalized trends, however, a multitude of complex and often conflicting views on the details of abortion legislation and scenarios are found; as Chapman surmises, ‘Nothing can account for variation so wide and so consistent except the existence of widespread feelings of ambivalence about the rights and wrongs of abortion’.15 The abstracted views expressed in opinion polls and empirical measures, furthermore, would likely not be entirely commensurate with the choices made in individuals’ lived experiences of reproductive control.16 Within the British debates of this period, furthermore, abortion was rarely characterized as mainly a matter of women’s rights and choice. Much critical work has been done on exploring the various factors and interests that informed the debates, and while most commentators underpin the importance of examining the implications of abortion discourses for women and women’s rights,17 critics such as Brooke show how eugenic arguments relying on a general ableist abhorrence of ‘defective children’ were in fact more persuasive in acquiring early abortion reform sympathies.18 In fact, one of the original founding members of the first iteration of ALRA in the interwar years (and its main funder), Janet Chance, was married to the treasurer of the Eugenics Society.19 As Sheldon shows, it was also possible to reconcile the eugenic argument to more traditional ideologies of motherhood: Dr Michael Winstanley (Lib., Cheadle, Steel’s medical adviser for the Bill) makes the related argument that women should be allowed to abort disabled foetuses, because the woman who is forced to give birth to a disabled child will seldom allow herself to become pregnant again. Implicit here is an understanding of the role of law as being to protect and entrench motherhood, to encourage women to adopt the maternal role.20

Given this important and troubling subtext, it is unsurprising that the Thalidomide episode of the 1950s and 1960s is credited with spurring greater support for abortion reform.21

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Another factor that generated further support for the bill and public appetite for reform in the 1960s (even or especially among those not fully supportive of ALRA’s aims) was the prevalence of illegal abortion. The removal of the ‘scourge’ of backstreet abortion from British society was in fact stated as the bill’s principal aim.22 The acknowledged ubiquity of illegal backstreet abortions was evidence that illegality was an inadequate deterrent to women’s acquisition of abortions; thus, decriminalization was seen as a ‘necessary evil’ in order to protect women’s safety.23 Sheldon argues that since the law was well known to be consistently flouted and disrespected, creating an endemic problem of illegal abortion that was dangerous to individuals and problematic to the medical establishment, ‘Decriminalisation would serve to bring unwanted pregnancy and abortion within the ambit of a medical control, where they might thus be more effectively monitored’.24 That Roberts and Millar see this as ‘perhaps the closest that the reformers came to acknowledging the demands of women to control their own fertility’25 is paltry vindication for feminist advocates of women’s freedom to choose, as it seems at best a begrudging capitulation that avoids taking an active stance on women’s choice. A further issue that has been a consistent and important factor of consideration within British abortion discourses is class. Around the time of the initial 1960s debates, Brooke illustrates how socialist politics had an ambivalent relationship with the prospect of abortion, as opinions differed as to whether abortion was considered a top-down form of population control giving the elite power over working-class masses, or whether it would create space for working-class families to gain more autonomous control over their resources and household sizes.26 Indeed, the former concern was given credence by the panic expressed by some members of the political elite over rapid population expansion and ‘problem families’.27 This conflict was compounded by familiar tensions between feminists and ‘orthodox’ Marxists in left-wing political circles over the primacy of class struggle and gender issues.28 The prevalence of this issue diminished over time, however, as general consensus came to understand abortion access as empowering and desirable to working-class women.29 The significant intersection between class and gender within abortion debates instead became equality of access. Given the limitations of abortion provision even after the initial reforms, upper-middle-class women who could afford access to safe abortions in expensive clinics were in a privileged position compared to those who could not, and who may therefore have been more likely to seek backstreet equivalents from untrained practitioners. The division was so distinct and significant that some questioned whether abortion was not predominantly a class issue rather than a women’s issue.30 A final caveat that has often been critically analysed with regard to British abortion reform is the question of the power of the medical establishment in

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controlling women’s reproduction. Fran Amery argues that British abortion legislation has in fact seen a general shift ‘wherein traditionally “female” knowledge concerning pregnancy was gradually displaced by medical terminology and expertise’.31 Along with W. Fyfe,32 she suggests that after a long process of ‘discursive struggle’, the medical profession, rather than women’s rights activists, gained expressive control over the definition and character of abortion issues in government and, it could be argued, in public discourse.33 Though neither writer sees this as a result of active misogyny or opposition to women’s rights, the political and cultural consequences of this process are disempowering towards women and their control over their own bodies and reproduction. Both Amery and Sheldon further show how doctors became significant discursive figures within abortion discourses. Doctors as individuals and as representatives of institutional medical expertise came to be constructed as paternalistic figures, representing the fatherly hand of the state in providing vulnerable women with guidance and support.34 This rhetorical characterization was buttressed by the corresponding infantilizing imagination of women seeking abortions as helpless, beleaguered victims. In Amery’s words, ‘medical control [in parliamentary debate] was legitimized by constructing women seeking abortions as “tired housewives” in need of paternalistic guidance’.35 Despite feminist protestations that what was at stake was women’s bodies and rights, and that the women confronting their unwanted pregnancies should therefore have a symbolizing and effective presence within decision-making processes, a sense was therefore still maintained within political and cultural discourses that (typically male, white and upper-middle-class) doctors were best equipped to decide upon and act in women’s best interests. In this medical procedure – perhaps more so than in almost any other – the doctor is positioned as a figure of both medical and social wisdom who is, bizarrely, considered more able than the woman to decide upon her reproductive future.36 The framing of abortion as an issue that was about women’s protection (meted out by a paternalistic saviour figure), while simultaneously resisting their active participation, held significant cultural currency, to the extent that, as Amery illustrates, in later debates the anti-abortion opposition also recognized the need to engage with it. They countered the image of the benevolent father figure with the suggestion that doctors were abusing their position and the trust placed in them, characterizing them as ‘unscrupulous racketeers who care more about profits than the women they treat’,37 thereby appropriating the language of the pro-choice lobby to argue that ‘abortion harms women’.38 Both sides of the argument, therefore, took the patriarchal fantasy of paternal knowledge and feminine helplessness for granted. Whether kindly or exploitative, the medical establishment was symbolized as a father, and an extensively

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powerful one; the possibility of women’s agency over the maternal body was relatively precluded. Following the decriminalization of abortion in 1967, British public service sex education films aimed at teenagers and young adults suggested mixed attitudes towards premarital sex and pregnancy. Earlier in the 1960s, organizations such as the London Foundation for Marriage Education (LFME) produced materials that positioned contraception as preferably a matter for young married couples to help them plan when – rather than whether – they would have children. The organization’s 1964 film Learning to Live framed careful family planning as a sensible practice wholly in the interest of the well-being of the nation and its children. The opening title card asserts the combatting of ‘sexual ignorance’ as ‘opening a pathway to a happier, more enlightened society’. Premarital sex, meanwhile, is associated with irresponsibility and submission to ‘animal appetites’. Sponsored by London Rubber Industries, the LFME also had a vested commercial interest in promoting the use of condoms over the increasingly popular contraceptive pill, thereby arguably precluding the most obvious means by which women could autonomously control their fertility. By the early 1970s, however, British sex education films seemed to reflect increasingly a youth culture that was becoming more open about sexual expression outside of marriage. Dr Martin Cole’s 1971 Growing Up, produced in conjunction with the Institute for Sex Education and Research, was remarkable among this genre in its extraordinary visual frankness, interspersing the familiar style of cartoon diagrams of reproductive systems with filmed sex acts, naked bodies and extended close-ups of vulvas and erect penises. Though Cole’s gentle and resolutely scientific voiceover ensures a pedagogical rather than erotic tone, the film predictably received outraged responses, but also saw positive feedback from teachers who appreciated its candid educational value.39 It is also striking that this film openly discusses sex in terms of pleasure and recreation, explicitly asserting masturbation and premarital sexual exploration as essential activities in the development of sexual maturity. Indeed, the scene that provoked the greatest outrage was a clip depicting un-simulated female masturbation (considered more offensive than the equivalent scene featuring male masturbation).40 Another, very short film produced by the Family Planning Association in 1973, ’Ave You Got a Male Assistant, Please Miss?, takes a similarly affirmative approach to premarital sex among young people, while framing abortion as undesirable, but certainly not taboo. The young couple on the cusp of sex are interrupted by a voiceover, which gives them statistics on the risks of pregnancy, including reciting that ten thousand legal abortions took place in 1969. The majority of the film then depicts the young man, in comical fast motion, running around busy streets searching for a pharmacy at which to buy condoms.

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The film closes jovially with the tagline ‘There’s no need to make an abortion out of it’. Six years on from the decriminalization of abortion in Britain, therefore, the light tone of the film suggests at least a modest liberalization of public discourse on sex and pregnancy, though prophylactics remain favoured over the pill, and are perceived as a masculine responsibility (the dreaded female pharmacy assistant is, indeed, quickly replaced by a remarkably butch and hirsute man). However, another 1973 short, Don’t Be Like Brenda, demonstrates the persistence of deep-rooted moral censure directed against young women who engaged in premarital sex, especially those ‘unwise’ enough to fall pregnant. The film was written and directed by W. Hugh Baddeley, whose production company specialized in educational films, and was generally conservative in tone, including Christian mission-style informational films about (former) British colonies in Asia and Africa, patriotic historical shorts on British industries and further public service films on reproduction, including The Miracle of Birth in 1970. Narrated mostly through a paternalistic and disembodied male voiceover scripted by Baddeley, the film begins with mawkish cliché images of Brenda and her boyfriend kissing and running through woods together. We are then informed that Brenda has discovered she is pregnant; after an initial show of support, in which her boyfriend suggests they elope and promises to telephone her that evening, we see Brenda waiting anxiously for his call. After a fast-paced melodramatic montage representing her anxiety, Brenda instead receives a call from her boyfriend’s mother, who greets her as ‘little slut’ and informs her that her son is engaged to ‘a nice girl’. The shot ends with Brenda sobbing, before cutting to her carrying her infant son in a blanket to a children’s home, having opted for adoption. The soundtrack switches briefly to Brenda’s internal monologue, as she reflects on the experience as ‘a heart-breaking moment’, but ‘for the best’, as she is unable to provide him with the type of home that she wants for him. However, the film suggests that despite an abundance of hopeful couples, the baby’s heart condition means that he is one of the ‘defective’ children unlikely to be adopted. The male voiceover draws on heavily emotionalizing language, reporting that the boy will grow up ‘with no family of his own – no one he can truly call mother’. To exaggerate even further the stigmatization against Brenda, the film ends by replaying the adoption scene alongside images of the wedding day of another young couple, who ‘wisely’ chose to wait until after marriage to have sex, ending with the imploration ‘So, don’t be like Brenda’. All of the sex education films discussed here are aimed at an audience of young people on the cusp of sexual maturity, yet it is beyond question that Brenda directs its moral imperative towards young women all but exclusively. Abortion, prophylactic contraceptives and the pill are not even alluded to as possibilities, as the film presents marriage and monogamy as the

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sole guarantor against Brenda’s apparently ruinous fate. There is also a notable class dynamic to the film’s moralistic schema: Brenda’s accent, apparent social isolation and lack of means to support her child frame her as lower-middle or working class, while the boyfriend, his mother and the ‘nice girl’ to whom he is engaged are implicitly wealthier and more socially secure. The film is, therefore, particularly intense in its blamefulness and moral chastisement towards lowerincome single women whose free sexuality will, the film assures us, ruin their own lives and those of their children, a message underpinned by the excessive use of footage of babies. Even this small sample of sex education films from the 1960s and into the early 1970s, therefore, suggests a great variation in public attitudes towards sex and contraception. However, the misogynistic conservatism of Brenda, the relatively male-focused joviality of ’Ave You Got a Male Assistant, Please Miss? and the intense vitriol inspired by a rare depiction of female sexual pleasure in Growing Up suggest considerable opposition to the framing of sexuality, pregnancy and contraception through a lens of female subjectivity. From these critical examinations into the histories of abortion and unplanned pregnancy narratives in Britain, it is clear that a multitude of concerns, assumptions and constructions helped to shape the ways in which reproductive rights were discussed and conceptualized within British society, among which women’s rights are less conspicuous than might be expected or hoped. It is, nonetheless, women’s rights and maternal bodies that were and remain the primary location of conflict within discourses of reproductive rights, although, as nuanced enquiries into the framing of the debates demonstrate, various factors complicate this enacted conflict beyond a binary tension between straightforwardly feminist or misogynistic motivations. Appropriately, many of the issues discussed above manifest in various ways and with differing degrees of active consideration in on-screen treatments of abortion, unplanned pregnancy, reproductive control and sexuality in this period. However, while political debates were at times (and however consciously) able to marginalize women and their bodily and social presences and subjectivities within these discussions,41 narrative cinema necessitated the situation of reproductive discourses within the represented experience of one or several characters. While this does not mean that cultural representations were necessarily sympathetic to women’s specific experiences of reproductive control and abortion, it does provide interesting and important material for the examination of forms of engagement with the figure of the pregnant woman. Sexuality is one of the definitive ongoing themes of the kitchen sink film cycle. Though an equally prominent defining interest is in the representation of characters from working-class communities, as has been critically illustrated, the motivations of the cycle’s protagonists tend to privilege individual escape or freedom over class consciousness, and representations of work are mini-

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mal compared to the screen time allotted to leisure activities.42 Consequently, the sexual and (to an extent) romantic pursuits of the characters tend to form the driving force of the narrative. Expressions of sexuality, in fact, supersede work and community as expressions of class; ‘What is, indeed, striking about the “new wave” films is how readily their treatment of “kitchen sink” subjects (“working-class squalor”) became attached to an opening up of the cinema’s treatment of sex.’43 In this case, references to abortion and contraception often have as much to do with experiences of reproductive control and parenthood in specifically working-class England as they do with gender. Interest in these topics was so pervasive in this group of films that it became almost clichéd, hence Brooke’s reference to a ‘requisite abortion scene’ across several films of the period.44 In reality, representations of attempted – let alone successful – abortions are not particularly widespread within this group of films; ultimately, a decision to continue the unplanned pregnancy is almost always made by the characters, suggesting that it is rather the frequent discussion of abortion that gives an impression of its prevalence. As a predominantly male-focused genre, furthermore (with the significant exception of A Taste of Honey), abortion discourses and unplanned pregnancies are often framed primarily – if not entirely – through the narrative interests of a male protagonist.45 Negotiating sexuality (for young men) in the kitchen sink films involves the aspirational avoidance of responsibility; unwanted pregnancy is a persistent spectre at the feast of libertinism. Regardless, few of the men manage to outrun this looming responsibility for long, and most ultimately reconcile to familial duties. Despite the films’ reputation for engaging with a liberal approach to sexuality, therefore, they generally end up consolidating traditional values; patriarchal families are reaffirmed, and individualistic or sexually ‘deviant’ behaviours are punished.46 Within the ‘Swinging London’ films of this period – a trend coming to prominence shortly after the heyday of the social realist cycle – discussions of abortion and reproductive control become even more widespread, and increasingly include women protagonists. Before looking at discourses on abortion and reproductive control in mainly Swinging London films, however, it is useful to examine the treatment of backstreet abortion and motherhood as established in one of the earliest and most critically (and commercially) significant films of the kitchen sink cycle, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning crystallized many of the most important themes of the kitchen sink cycle and British New Wave early on. Based on a play of the same name by Alan Sillitoe (one of the ‘angry young men’ writers), the narrative – closely focalized by the protagonist Arthur Seaton – revolves around concerns of class, youth, sexuality and freedom. The communication of Arthur’s character is ambivalent throughout the film. On the one hand, his

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egocentric behaviour, reckless pleasure-seeking and directionless anger are critiqued and punished by the narrative, suggesting these as cautionary qualities that map the underside of social liberalism. The director, Karel Reisz, said that the film ‘began to ask the question whether material improvements in people’s lives weren’t going to be accompanied by a spiritual crisis’,47 and described Arthur unflatteringly as ‘a sad person, terribly limited in his sensibilities, narrow in his ambitions and a bloody fool into the bargain’,48 suggesting an interpretative possibility that figures in Arthur an array of social ills. On the other hand, however, it is difficult to ignore the potential appeal of the character’s confident rebelliousness, unflappability and working-class pride, which attach to the qualities of masculine virility and ‘authenticity’ similarly lauded in films such as A Kind of Loving (1962), Room at the Top (1958), Look Back in Anger (1959), This Sporting Life (1963) and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962). The commercial success of the film, along with the continued cultural resonance of several adages from the character’s inner monologues, suggest that reception of the character was somewhat divisive (‘Whatever people say I am, that’s what I’m not’, for instance, has persisted as a contemporary expression of new forms of Northern English working-class masculinity and youth rebellion, as the title of the angry young band Arctic Monkeys’ debut album in 2006). As argued particularly by Andrew Higson49 and John Hill,50 though working-class values and community are major themes, the framing of the film is strongly individualistic. Within this individualized narrative, sexuality is a pre-eminently important expression of self through which tensions between self-determination and socially imposed values are played out; the themes of unplanned pregnancy and abortion have a significant role in shaping the terms of this conflict. Throughout the film, Arthur balances relationships with Doreen, a young, attractive and unattached woman who may be a typically good marriage option for him, and Brenda, an older woman married to Arthur’s coworker. After Brenda becomes pregnant, Arthur helps her seek an illegal abortion from his aunt, Ada, who he guesses has knowledge of self-administered termination techniques. Using materials and citations from censors and script-readers who initially vetted the film, Richards and Aldgate illustrate how the representation of abortion was a major point of moralistic contention within the original edit of the film. Comments from one examiner, for instance, include: This is fundamentally an ‘A’ story which gets its ‘X’-ness from being too outspoken about abortion, too revealing in love scenes and too foul-mouthed. … This shows a rather casual attitude to abortion and suggests to the young that if they get into difficulties all they need is to find a kind-hearted older woman who has had a lot of children. Provided that it is not too obtrusive it would probably be acceptable, but I must ask you to bear in mind that this film is

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likely to be seen by a considerable number of young people of 16 to 20 years of age, and to recognize that social responsibility is called for.51

The language used here demonstrates a clear climate of moral panic around representations of abortion. This was not a peripheral critique towards the film, as such commentaries from censors in fact led to the outcome of the abortion in the film being changed; whereas the initial intention was for the abortion to be successful, the strength of opinion from this feedback precipitated changes to the script that eventually saw the abortion failing in the final edit,52 leaving the ultimate result of the pregnancy somewhat unresolved. Despite this mediation, however, the film’s treatment of the conditions that lead to abortion and of the attempted abortion itself is highly interesting. Significantly, this is an example of a relatively early filmic representation of abortion in which the termination is sought within the context of an extramarital affair (in which the woman is the married party, not mistreated but unexcited in her marriage, and the man is a figure of rakish self-gratification). This narrative formulation reframes somewhat the terms of discourses on reproductive control so that women’s experiences are decentred and the potential for abortion to be constructed as a question of women’s self-determination is respectively limited. Regardless of whether or not it is expressly pursued, the capacity remains for reading the act of abortion in terms of respect for the husband. It is, moreover, within this context that the film touches upon an imaginative construction of the figures of the ‘innocent’ and the ‘guilty’ man, in whom are reflected respectively the imminent ‘moral bankruptcy’ of individualistic, ‘permissive’ youth culture and the traditional values of the patriarchal family. In this case, the ‘guilty’ man is confronted with the sordidness and the cost of the abortion, while the ‘innocent’ man is protected at least from these elements (if not always from the revelation of the affair). Meanwhile, it is the body of the pregnant woman that forms the immediate medium of punishment. There is a degree to which the pregnancy and (attempted) abortion can be interpreted as Arthur’s punishments for recklessness and disregard for the patriarchal order of things; we are, after all, closely aligned with his psychology and experience through the representational mechanics of the film (the broadly first-person focus of the images and extensive use of empathetic close-ups on Arthur, as well as the interior monologue device). The unplanned pregnancy is raised as a significant plot point within Arthur’s development, and as a retributory result of his reckless behaviour. This can further be considered within the context of a pseudo-Oedipal assault on the patriarchal family order; as Arthur’s relationship with another man’s wife undermines the cultural prepotency of the father and husband, he must endure punishment. However, though the main narrative and representational focus is on Arthur’s experience and guilt, the

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stakes for the women involved in the abortion plot are not erased. Importantly, in the scene in which Brenda first informs Arthur of the pregnancy, the motivations for procuring an abortion are led by Brenda’s concerns for her own subjectivity and well-being. To Arthur’s assumption that an additional child (which she would presumably pass off as her husband’s) would not much change her family situation, Brenda replies: ‘Don’t talk so daft. What do you think having a kid means? You’re doped and sick for nine months, your clothes don’t fit, nobody’ll look at you. [One day you’ve got a kid] Oh, that’s not so bad … but you’ve got to look after it for the rest of its life. You [Arthur] want to try it sometime.’ In terms of the thematic development, this perspective is minor in relation to the place of the pregnancy and its aftermath within Arthur’s personal narrative, yet it is notable as an indication of maternal subjectivity, and one that points to the material and personal costs of motherhood. In the scene in which Arthur takes Brenda to have the abortion, a spirit of feminine solidarity is represented between Brenda and Ada (Arthur’s aunt and the amateur abortionist, who has ‘had fourteen kids of her own, and [Arthur is] sure she’s got rid of as many others’). Ada behaves in a motherly fashion towards Brenda, treating her with a great deal of sympathy and tacit understanding, while Arthur and his fellow ‘irresponsible’ Lotharios are chastised. Brenda and Ada are both scornful of Arthur for not being ‘careful’ enough and conspiratorially lament the fact that ‘men get away with murder’. During this scene, Brenda and Ada, sitting at the kitchen table, are front-of-shot, while Arthur stands behind, visually secondary to the narrative at this point. The bond between the women, therefore, transcends in this moment Arthur’s relationship to either of them; women are united as victims of abortion and reckless male sexuality. However, this produces a complicated reading in terms of the subjectivity of women and mothers; while the women who are administering and undergoing abortions are presented as less ‘guilty’ than Arthur, they are also far less empowered. Unplanned pregnancies are suggested as caused by men and suffered by women. It is certainly possible – and important – to understand abortion in this context as at least potentially a gesture of resistance on the part of mothers (to control their family size, the conditions under which they procreate, their material circumstances and their relationship to their bodies), yet given the centrality of Arthur as the psychological source of the narrative, it is difficult to claim that the film presents a thorough identification with maternal subjectivities and experiences. In fact, the articulation of the film almost expressly distances this passing sphere of feminine experience from the representation and audience identification. Arthur is soon sent away from the scene of the abortion preparations. The next shots show him outside the house, agitatedly lighting a cigarette. He peers through a misty window, attempting to watch the proceedings in the kitchen;

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at this point, the film cuts to a point-of-view shot, similarly watching – at a distance – the women obscured through the glass and behind various kitchen objects. The perspective is awkward and unclear. The next shot cuts to a close-up of Arthur’s face, suggesting a far greater proximity to his experience on the part of the audience. The actual process and experience of abortion are therefore represented (or rather, unrepresented) as within an arcane sphere of feminine knowledge, unknowable to men and to the masculine-coded audience. The amateur abortion technique itself is implied as ritualistic and occult, an ‘old wives’ trick’ described by Brooke as the ‘ceremony of “bringing it off ” with gin and a hot bath’,53 furthering the construction of abortion as an undesirable and unspoken reality of women’s lives. While Brenda is preparing for and undergoing the abortion, furthermore, the film focuses intently on Arthur. As Brenda and Ada are in the kitchen, one of Ada’s sons returns home, whom Arthur persuades to take a walk with him. During the walk, they witness a drunken man throw a pint glass through a shop window; when an older, female neighbour threatens to summon the police, Arthur defends the man, in a somewhat futile gesture of class solidarity (against those who inform to the police), in a move towards re-establishing ‘authentic’ and worthy working-class masculinity, and possibly as an attempt to alleviate his guilt around the abortion and the betrayal of paternal values that engendered it. This scene ensures that the dramatic impetus of the narrative is once more centred on Arthur. Though sometimes tacitly, it is his burden and his psychological struggles that are largely foregrounded throughout most of the representation of and around the abortion. ‘Guilt’ imagery is abundant throughout this sequence. When Arthur meets Brenda outside his aunt’s house, we see a church in the background, whose choir can be heard on the soundtrack, connoting the traditional patriarchal values that Arthur has undermined, and the shop whose window is broken is a funeral parlour (the man’s rationale for the vandalism is that he wants flowers for his dead mother’s grave), connecting the theme of death and fractured family to the ongoing abortion and associating it with Arthur’s unspoken guilt. The abortion – and the scene of the broken window, onto which the tension is transferred – is a narrative climax of Arthur’s pursuit of individualistic pleasure, which ultimately leads to a reavowal of normative patriarchal ideals. In a capitulation to censors, the abortion is shown to be unsuccessful, and Brenda decides to continue her pregnancy, although critics justly point out that ‘what happens after that is anybody’s guess’.54 Brenda’s change of heart does not seem particularly convincing within the context of the rest of the film. However, this outcome is not given a great deal of importance within the narrative. More significant than the survival of the foetus, in fact, is the survival of the (patriarchal) family. As Hill points out, this cycle of films often ends up consolidating

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normative family values, shored up by procreation (and hence, I would add, a patriarchal idea of cultural futurity): ‘In three of these [films], the solution is explicitly linked to procreation: both Joe in Room at the Top and Vic in A Kind of Loving enter marriage because of the pregnancy of their partners, while Brenda returns to her husband in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning when she too becomes pregnant.’55 At the film’s resolution, Brenda disappears from the narrative,56 and her husband, Jack, returns to conclude her storyline, having arranged a beating for Arthur as a masculine punishment for the affair. The traditional family is intact, and Jack warns Arthur off ever seeing Brenda again. In the following scene, we learn that Arthur too has acquiesced to marriage, and is engaged to Doreen. The women in the plot are therefore ultimately absorbed into normative roles as wives and mothers, and the ‘guilty’ man is punished for trying to cheat the patriarchal system. Whether Arthur’s final gesture of throwing a stone through the window of one of the new-build family homes is interpreted as a sign of frustrated impotence or continued virility and rebellion (both arguments can and have been made), marriage and family seem ineluctable. In this case, the film’s representation of abortion can be seen as a counterpoint to the normative family order, a grim and dead-ended outcome of selfish sexuality and disrespect for patriarchal orthodoxy. It is important that women’s experiences of maternity, motherhood and unplanned pregnancy are addressed at all, but questions of their subjectivity and reproductive control are far from central; abortion is constructed as a regrettable part of life for working-class women, for whom motherhood is also a strain, but the experience of the women is somewhat, though not entirely, distanced in favour of a more emotive identification with Arthur, largely reframing the representation of abortion in terms of male punishment. The construction of abortion as male moral punishment for philandering is expressed with still greater clarity in the Swinging London film Alfie (1966). This group of films, which illustrated an image of youth lifestyles in the capital, focused extensively on sexuality and ‘permissive’ culture.57 In contrast to the kitchen sink cycle, greater interest is taken in the representation of women’s sexuality. Moya Luckett,58 for instance, suggests that the Swinging London films – to some extent – may be seen as a ‘feminine’ genre (insofar as its weight of focus is towards female characters and women’s concerns). Brooke, along similar lines, argues: [These] works should also be perceived as foregrounding a new and modern form of female sexuality. … To be sure, traditional stereotypes existed, but what we see pushing through these films are female characters who were not simply asexual wives and mothers. They were more sexual, less dependent

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upon men (whether that independence was forced upon them or not) or at least less attached to men, and more independent of family. This does not mean that women were liberated – far from it. What it did was deepen the already-existing tensions about women’s roles.59

Both Brooke and Luckett60 highlight the fact, however, that these films were generally ambivalent about ‘permissive society’ and the sexual freedom of youth – and women in particular – imagined as offered within London. This culture is in fact represented with a mixture of excitement and disillusionment. As shall be shown below, the ‘modern’ female protagonists of many of these films are often both empowered and victimized by their sexual liberation. Alfie is more unusual in this genre in that it concentrates on a male protagonist, yet it expresses similar ambivalence about the opportunities afforded by ‘permissive society’ and its uneasy relationship with reproductive control. Alfie, a ‘working-class Lothario’,61 is in many ways a similar figure to Arthur Seaton, represented as part suave, sexually active alpha-male, part reprehensible cad, callously reaping personal benefit from the ‘permissive society’ at the expense of others. Even more pronouncedly than Arthur’s intermittent interior monologues, Alfie’s chummy narration and winking addresses to the camera establish clear identification with him and, taken uncritically, encourage initial complicity with his wildly misogynistic attitudes; the fact that these devices are often used to allow the character to discuss his opinions on and relations with women – in a deeply objectifying manner – while the women characters continue acting unaware of the broken fourth wall means that the viewer is addressed in the manner of a male confidante. As in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, male promiscuity and philandering are suggested as a high-stakes game of maximizing self-gratifying sexual pleasure while avoiding marriage, family and responsibility: ‘As with many of the “new wave” films, the representation of husbands in the film is heavily marked by “castration” … Indeed, to the extent that Alfie sets up home with Annie, so he too becomes “poncified” (as his mates in the pub observe) and is forced to subsequently evict her.’62 Unplanned pregnancy and its concomitant responsibilities are therefore the penalties risked in the pursuit of self-indulgent sexual freedoms. As in the previous film, the abortion depicted in Alfie is sought within the context of an extramarital affair, though in this case the characters are explicit about the necessity of the termination in order to protect the husband (whom Alfie has befriended during his stay in a sanatorium). The ‘innocent versus guilty’ man paradigm is therefore once again in operation, as Alfie is responsible for arranging and witnessing the abortion, while the nice-but-steady husband is protected from these unpleasant elements. The representation of abortion here is far more horrifying and explicit than that in Saturday Night and Sunday

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Morning, and all the more so given the otherwise relatively light and comedic tone of the film. It remains, however, largely a matter of male experience. When Lily is taken behind a curtain to have the abortion induced, the film’s viewpoint remains firmly attached to Alfie, focusing on his experience and agitation as the procedure is conducted. In fact, this affords another opportunity for a to-camera monologue in which Alfie explains that his knowledge of women extends to pleasure, but when it comes to pain, ‘I’m like every other bloke … I don’t wanna know’. Though viewers are hardly expected to condone this selfish assertion, the intimate nature of the filming style continues to privilege Alfie’s as the significant experience in confronting the punitive underworld of illegal abortion. The abortion itself is represented as supremely awful and traumatic; short of showing the process and its effects on the woman’s body in explicit detail, the film does all it can to underscore the horror of the experience. We are clearly meant to sympathize with Lily, who is represented as a disempowered victim undergoing intense physical trauma. Simultaneously, however, she is a blunt narrative instrument on which Alfie’s psychological turmoil (as punishment for his rejection of normative patriarchal familial ideologies) is inscribed. When the abortion proper begins, Lily screams and wails horrifically. Alfie hits her and covers her mouth to stifle the noise, frantically explaining why he ‘had to do it’ while literally silencing her. They agree that Alfie should leave, and he goes for a walk, accompanied by the narrative attention. The identification with (a traumatic account of ) women’s experiences of abortion is impactful, but limited. Much like Arthur Seaton’s walk during Brenda’s abortion, the ensuing sequence abounds with guilt imagery directed at the male protagonist. As Alfie emerges from the flat, he walks past a playground full of children (similarly, in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, the scene following Brenda’s description of the attempted abortion shows Arthur in a playground full of young boys playing football), juxtaposing the image of the guilty man with a joyful representation of the Child in a spirit of pointed irony. As he continues the walk, we hear church bells and Alfie chances upon Gilda (a former lover with whom he has a child) and the steady-but-decent man she has married, who are christening a new baby. Alfie’s infant son is also present and is treated with a great deal of paternal affection by his stepfather. Alfie watches the christening from a distance; in a deep shot inside the church, the family and priest are in the background, clustered around the font in a wholesome tableau of conventionally ordered familial harmony while Alfie, standing front of shot and overcast with shadow, is symbolically excluded from this image of satisfaction. This juxtaposition also shifts the narrative focus away from identification with Lily and towards the development of Alfie’s character. On returning to the flat, the foregrounding of Alfie’s viewpoint and experience is further consolidated. He returns to find Lily mentally and physically

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exhausted and curled up on the sofa. She tells him not to look in the kitchen, but he ignores her plea and comes into contact with the remains of the aborted foetus. At this point, the film becomes intimately and intensely focused on emotional identification with Alfie, fixing on dramatically lit chiaroscuro closeups of his reaction and tensely draining the soundtrack of all noise other than his suppressed sobbing. This is the film’s most striking moment of pathos, but it ultimately constitutes a revelatory moment within Alfie’s character development that – in conjunction with the preceding images of familial harmony – lead him to question his lifestyle. Lily is presented as a disempowered victim; the abortion is a matter of necessity rather than choice, in order to protect the self-determining subjectivity of Alfie and her husband, rather than herself. Unlike in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, her own feelings about motherhood, pregnancy and her own body are not even passingly discussed in framing the reasons for the termination. The awfulness of the abortion sequence underscores Alfie’s punishment rather than engaging seriously with maternal experiences. Distraught, Alfie runs from the flat (abandoning Lily, of course) to confide in a male friend. Seeming immediately calmer, he describes the experience of seeing ‘this perfectly formed … being’ and philosophizes about its capacity for life and identity in a dialogue that modestly rehearses or anticipates key contentions from both sides of ideological debates on foetal personhood and viability63 without taking an entirely explicit position. Alfie’s shock and guilt at having, in his words, ‘murdered him’ suggests a characterization of foetal humanity, but, within the moralizing context of the film, can also be read as a meditation on the ideological Child as a figure of possibility, futurity and patriarchal order. The conversation is interesting insofar as it reflects more directly than other films of the period on the foetus-centric discourses that have been of ongoing significance within the social politics of abortion, but it also serves to abstract the narrative from the presence of a maternal body and dissociates the abortion debate from women’s and mothers’ stake in it. Alfie further claims to have been crying not for the foetus (‘he was past it’) but ‘for me bleeding self ’. The representation of abortion, sex and reproductive control in this film is generally interested in exploring dynamics between the figure of the pleasure-seeking male libertine and the imagination of the Child, with women’s bodies as mute collateral, and maternal subjectivities largely absent. The Child and its, or his, metonymic powers as productive cultural futurity are an invisible but meaningful narrative presence, demonstrated through Alfie’s personifying discourse around the foetus as an imaginatively imbued subject – reminiscent of Franklin’s argument that the foetus is constructed as a ‘patriarchal citizen’64 – and the images and symbols of children that surround the abortion sequence. A choice against the Child, the film implies, is not just the destruction of an embryo, but

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the death of man’s own future and culture. In this way, abortion – positioned as an inevitable outcome of intemperate male pursuit of self-gratification – forms part of a critique of the ‘permissive society’ in Alfie and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, which engenders the subversion of the patriarchal family order. As with Arthur, the abortion forms an epiphany point for Alfie, after which he pursues redemption by expecting to ‘settle down’ with one of the women with whom he has involved himself. Unlike Arthur, however, it is too late for Alfie; he is rejected emotionally and sexually and excluded from the possibility of fulfilment through traditional family. The last scene demonstrates his loneliness and the hollowness of his self-indulgent lifestyle; however, he – rather than the women he exploits – is suggested as the main victim of his choices. Most of the major plot points of the film are contrived as eliciting either sympathy or condemnation for Alfie, the archetypal ‘guilty’ (but, it must be acknowledged, probably fairly seductive to some audiences) man of the permissive society. This is particularly significant for the film’s positioning in relation to representation of abortion and reproductive control, as this and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – along with other male-oriented films of the era such as A Kind of Loving and Room at the Top – articulate discourses of unplanned pregnancy and illegal termination primarily in relation to masculine psychologies. Unresolved as they are – Hill rightly points out that no ‘compelling alternative to Alfie’s philandering’ is offered,65 and although the traditional patriarchal family and father figure is reaffirmed, the husband-and-father characters themselves are not particularly inspiring – the discursive tensions are placed between the individualistic male subject and the Child, in the context of productive cultural futurity. Alfie and Arthur become almost renegade Oedipus figures, their virility and potential for productivity unquestioned, but subverted by their lack of recognition of hierarchical family order. Women – decentred from the narrative as independently expressive subjects – are not blamed as aggressors against the Child in these abortion representations, as they were in much anti-choice political rhetoric, but they are presented as victims of abortion and sexual permissiveness, which are shown to corrupt the mother figure and the patriarchal family. As a result, women’s and maternal subjectivities are not a central feature of these discourses; rather, the abortion representations foreground critiques of sexual liberation that tend to reaffirm the hierarchical patriarchal family. Abortion becomes a plot device of male punishment; backstreet abortions are represented as horrific and harmful to women, but abortion is suggested as a sign of the dissolution of the patriarchal family that is necessary for the well-being of the Child, and thereby for cultural and societal futurity. The women who undergo abortions in these films are already married with families and more reminiscent of the ‘vulnerable, weary mothers’66 or ‘tired

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housewives’67 constructions that elicited sympathy in abortion debates rather than avowing subjectivity. They are not typical protagonists of the sexual revolution and new female sexualities in the ‘permissive society’. On the whole, Swinging London is often understood as taking an interest in new forms of sexual expression largely from feminine perspectives. London, in these films, is constructed as a site of opportunity and freedom for young women, but also as posing significant (moral) danger. While acknowledging the frequent underlying pessimism of many of these films towards this lifestyle, Moya Luckett sees London in no uncertain terms as ‘represented as the seat of feminine power’,68 particularly as a reactionary counterpoint to the decidedly masculine-focused ‘kitchen sink’ films generally set in Northern English towns and countryside. She argues: ‘The narratives of these films heralded a new feminine perspective marked by the importance of sexual expression to self-identity; the centrality of individualised forms of glamour to a more female-oriented public life, and London’s structural role in enabling and authorising this glamour and agency.’69 These films engage with women’s often difficult relationships with sexual autonomy, reproductive control and traditional gender roles. While the foregrounding of female protagonists afforded more thorough engagement with women’s maternal experience, however, feminist sympathies were far from guaranteed, and ideologies around motherhood and the Child often persisted in some form. In particular, feminist political arguments that framed abortion rights through a lens of women’s self-determination were rarely presented without significant criticism. Whereas Alfie and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning presented male libertinage in a destructive relationship with the ideologies of family and cultural futurity, the women-oriented films tend to explore the volatile balance of women’s sexual empowerment with the politics of motherhood and the threat of unplanned pregnancy. There are several examples of films in which women’s claiming control over their pregnancies and reproductive capacities is suggested as an active resistance of patriarchal control. Prudence and the Pill (1968), for instance, is a farce based around cultural tensions over reproductive rights, sexual liberation and the hypocritical repression of discussions of sex among the upper-middle classes and older generations, in which competing claims over women’s bodies and reproductive systems create the comedy, while the (relatively recently developed) oral contraceptive pill is the object at the centre of the characters’ comic misunderstandings. Husbands, extramarital male sexual partners and the medical establishment (represented by doctors and pharmacists) are shown to have a role in manipulating women’s reproduction, often in conflict with the women themselves, all of whom use the contraceptive pill in the interest of autonomous sexual freedom. The film uses an ironic engagement with the themes of the medical industry’s stake in women’s reproduction and

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the prevalence of traditionalistic attitudes towards sex and gender to suggest that advances in contraceptive technology did not guarantee women’s straightforward or uncomplicated sexual independence. The theme of the medical establishment as a patriarchal and controlling figure interfering in women’s reproduction is taken up more seriously in The L-Shaped Room (1962). At the beginning of the film, the protagonist, Jane, has made the decision to abort her pregnancy, but changes her mind as the result of a gallingly patronizing interaction with a medical practitioner. This representation is substantially reflective of contemporaneous rhetoric problematizing the figure of the doctor in abortion debates and the capacity of doctors through the legal emphasis on their judgement to ‘impose on to women their own views of when abortion is permissible’.70 In this case, Jane’s decision to continue her pregnancy is portrayed as a gesture of resistance or protest against external (figured as masculine and upper-middle-class) control over her body and reproduction. Similarly, in The Pleasure Girls (1965) the choice against abortion is positioned as indicative of quasi-feminist self-determination and rejection of masculine reproductive coercion. In this film, the ‘guilty man’ narrative manifests differently insofar as the continuation of pregnancy becomes Prinny’s punishment after he fails to provide the means for an abortion, having lost the money for the procedure gambling. Accusing him of ‘putting [her] on that gambling table’, Marion insists that she will keep the baby and that she does not need his input. In both these films, abortion is presented as a masculine convenience, which protects the patriarchal family order by eliminating what this order may experience as awkward or subversive kinship possibilities, such as single-mother families or unmarried parents. However, though these are significant representations of women asserting control over their bodies – critiquing the disproportionate power of men and male-coded institutions to dictate reproductive choices within this cultural climate, and problematizing a simplistic identification of abortion rights with women’s empowerment – none offer entirely satisfying alternatives to traditional patriarchal family narratives. Prudence and the Pill, despite being a film whose narrative is entirely centred around contraception, is bookended by a flourish of children, linking an excessive and tongue-in-cheek barrage of clichéd baby images during the opening credits to the epilogue, in which all of the major characters have produced offspring, having finally settled into their ‘correct’ pairings. In The Pleasure Girls, Marion succeeds in humiliating the ‘guilty’ man and asserting her independence, but the film is ultimately ambivalent about any of the women’s abilities to successfully live their resistances as a long-term alternative to patriarchy, and the final mood of the film is far from triumphant. And in The L-Shaped Room, Jane (whose decision to continue her pregnancy was in any case mainly reactionary) does not remain in the ‘halfway

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house’71 of Others among whom she found acceptance as a single mother, and in fact ends up in a fairly traditional situation, in which the father figure regains narrative control, literally through an act of writing, as he presents her, after the birth of her child, with a book he has written about her, reconstructing her experience under his own author-ity. As discussed in the introduction, Irigaray sees masculinist writing and naming as engaged in efforts to supersede biological genealogy in normative expressions of family.72 For the women in these films, childbirth continues to represent a point of narrative closure, precluding thorough representations of mothering subjectivities. Georgy Girl (1966) and Darling (1965) provide somewhat more sustained considerations of the place of reproductive choice within women’s independence, with nuanced and ambivalent results. Whereas Alfie and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning produced an absent mother insofar as maternal subjectivities were extensively secondary within the narratives, these films interact with the absent mother discourse in a different way, as characters who are emphatically subjective and assertive (Diana, the protagonist of Darling, and Georgy Girl’s Meredith) contend with the absent figure of the ‘good mother’ imposed by normative expectations of maternity when they become pregnant. Darling is the story of Diana, a privileged, ambitious and wilful model, and her search through career, sex, relationships and other pursuits for meaning – not happiness, exactly, but something other than the maw of desperate tedium that seems constantly to shadow her – in the height of upper-middle-class society’s Swinging Sixties, in which an abundance of possibilities has become a lack of purpose. The film is structured through the narrative device of a retrospective biographical interview for a publication entitled (with heavyhanded irony) Ideal Woman; the device is somewhat similar to Arthur and Alfie’s monologues, though mediated by a male interviewer, thus establishing Diana in a position of reduced expressive control. Diana is a fairly typical heroine of the Swinging London genre: confident, sexually independent and ‘affiliated with the media or the profession of creating images’,73 she is a canvas on which women’s liberation is both glamorized and critiqued. This context and the focus on a female protagonist who is in many ways resistant to the traditional family narrative produce several different perspectives on motherhood to those films discussed so far. An immediately significant divergence is that the decision to have an abortion in this film is entirely based on Diana’s own feelings about her subjectivity, body and desires. In a passing mention of the film, Hill remarks that ‘Those abortions which do proceed [in films of this period] are marked in purely negative terms for their refusal of parenthood, as in Alfie and Darling’.74 While it is true that both films are critical of the ‘refusal of parenthood’ (or affirmation of individuality, depending on perspective) and proceed to punish their protagonists for sacrificing the ideated Child

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at the false altar of the self, the circumstances of the abortions divide them. Though Diana’s partner Robert is unhappy with her decision, he is nothing like so viscerally damaged by it as Lily is by Alfie’s. Furthermore, no third parties are taken into account by Diana to the same degree as Lily’s husband is in Alfie. The film is entirely clear that the abortion is Diana’s choice; having discovered her pregnancy, she flirts briefly and superficially with motherhood (or rather, the commodified idea of motherhood) on a shopping trip to buy baby things, during which she buys only a maternity dress (literally ‘trying on the clothes’ of the pregnant woman role). However, she soon decides that the realities of pregnancy and motherhood would too greatly inhibit her career and relationships. The decision to have an abortion, therefore, is in this case – and unlike in The L-Shaped Room or The Pleasure Girls – an avowal of feminine subjectivity, which could be seen as Diana’s resistant confrontation with the figure of the absent mothering subject. Tensions between Diana and her potential infant are already suggested even in the relatively cheerful shopping sequence, as images of Diana enjoying herself are overlaid with and silenced by a cacophonous soundtrack of bawling baby dolls. She further realizes that pregnancy would mean the ‘ruination of [her] career and messing up people’s lives’. In other words, motherhood, for Diana, would entail too great an erosion of self through the cultural expectations of maternal subjective absence. Of the films so far, this decision is the most consonant with the arguments of pro-choice feminist groups, as it foregrounds questions of the pregnant woman’s selfdetermination over other possible factors. Nonetheless, the film is ultimately not encouraging as to the moral and emotional legitimacy of this decision. Darling, like much of the Swinging London genre, courts moralizing censure within the culture of permissiveness and sexual autonomy it represents. The film does not dwell on the decision-making process, nor the build-up to the abortion itself; we are shortly shown a scene of Diana in a hospital bed, having undergone the procedure. Unlike the women whose abortions are represented as far more traumatic and horrific in films such as Alfie (1966), Up the Junction (1968) and, to a lesser extent, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), Diana is an upper-middle-class woman of ample means and connections. Though the film was released prior to the passage of the 1967 Abortion Act and abortion was therefore not freely available, the defence offered through the Bourne judgement meant that in practice abortions were performed by medical professionals prior to the Act. However, given the precariousness of the defence, the risk was generally compensated for through high private fees: ‘Harley Street doctors would take precautions to cover their backs by obtaining a second opinion, normally from a psychiatrist who would testify to the effect of continuing a pregnancy on the woman’s mental health.’75

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Unlike those of the other characters, Diana’s abortion takes place in a comparatively safe and comfortable private clinic, accessible to her because of her socio-economic status. There is therefore little representation of explicit physical trauma, as is common in films that involve illegally procured abortions or that suggest women (and working-class women in particular) as sympathetic victims of abortion, be it through male carelessness or poor provision of safe abortions (as in Up the Junction). Instead of graphically spectacularizing the bodily horrors of abortion, however, Darling represents an emotional aftermath of the experience that – more directly at first, and then subtly throughout the rest of the film – suggests a painful but self-inflicted emptiness in Diana. The abortion, in fact, constitutes a narrative fulcrum, after which her self-destructive bleakness becomes increasingly intense. Her resistance to the discourse of the absent mothering subject is no such escape; though the abortion is rarely explicitly referenced in subsequent scenes, from this point on, Diana’s narrative is haunted by the absent Child. Immediately after the abortion, Diana describes herself, in loaded language, as feeling ‘empty’. She seems generally resentful about the process as she bitterly remarks on how many ‘eager women’ are queuing for her bed, and, furthermore, apparently locates blame for the experience within her lifestyle (‘I never want anything to do with sex again as long as I live’). A potentially feminist discourse of choice is therefore undermined by a self-admonishing regret reminiscent of later anti-choice constructions of ‘post-abortion trauma’, which followed from the logic that even when women independently elected to have abortions they could not really know what they were consenting to, or be prepared for the emotional fallout.76 The abortion also appears to bring out a phantom maternal tenderness in Diana; at the end of Robert’s visit, she bursts into tears and reminds Robert to feed her fish, piteously describing them as ‘poor little things’ in a moment of pathos that transfers her mourning for the figure of (what the ideology of the film perceives to be) her lost child onto another ‘innocent’ and helpless creature. Thereafter, the representation of her lifestyle as a single woman without children involves many images of nihilistic hedonism, sadness and longing absence, while she, ironically, often displays more maternal instinct than ever before. Applying his analysis of reproductive futurity to the 1993 film Philadelphia, Lee Edelman describes how the film’s final shots are replete with images of children and pregnant women more or less as a mediating apology for the dead-end destructiveness of queer sex.77 Images of children in Darling serve as a similar counterpoint of futurism and life, though far more punitively towards the protagonist. As Edelman himself touches upon (albeit briefly), there are, after all, significant similarities between common repressive moralizing discourses against homosexuality and abortion in that both are seen to take

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a symbolically impossible position against the Child. The gay man and the ‘aborted woman’ (or, more generally, I suggest, those whose sexuality marks an explicit and unavoidable separation of sexual pleasure and reproduction) are condemned as on ‘the side … not “fighting for the children,” the side outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism’78 – or otherwise put, as those who take an interest in an experiential present rather than an imagined future. As I have previously raised, however, Edelman’s work is primarily focused on the dissident possibilities of queer masculinities, and leaves relatively untouched the distinct, vital and complex ways in which both mothering and non-mothering feminine subjects engage with reproductive futurity. To develop this, therefore, I argue that the electively non-mothering woman can be seen to occupy a queer position against the logic of futurism. This is not the same as the woman who practises contraception, or who simply does not have children; in this case, the wilful imagination of patriarchal futurity may always append a ‘yet …’, or console itself that her childlessness is at least an unhappy accident. However, the act of abortion, in which the child-free woman chooses to remain so, problematizes these screen fantasies, and catalyses the perception of anti-futurity; prior to this moment, she can be imagined to represent a sort of ‘Schrödinger’s uterus’, in whom the Child both lives and does not, but abortion (unaccompanied by the limited mitigating circumstances acceptable to patriarchal logic) fixes her on the side of No Future. In this inflexible and absolute order of meaning, all fertile women must be mothers. In accordance with this misogynistic mysticism, the film increasingly identifies Diana with symbols of death and destruction. Following the abortion, Diana decides to spend some time away from London and goes to stay with her prim upper-middle-class sister in the countryside. The scene showing Diana weeping in her hospital bed cuts abruptly to a bizarre close-up of a child – Diana’s nephew – in a gorilla mask play-attacking the camera (positioned from Diana’s perspective). The child aggressively pretends to shoot Diana, who correspondingly falls down ‘dead’. The scene is unsettling and even physically jarring – especially after the gentle and melancholic pathos of the immediately preceding sequence – severing Diana from normative narrative lucidity following her rejection of conventional feminine self-realization. The simulated ‘killing’ of Diana symbolizes and prefigures the discursive punishment for her abortion (after all, within the logic of reproductive futurity, the rejection of the figural Child also annihilates the self ), while the imaginary positioning of a (male) child as the one that ‘kills’ her reassures the moraltraditionalist viewer that Diana will be punished, and the symbolizing system of the patriarchal family and the sovereign Child will ultimately remain intact. In less abstract terms, furthermore, Diana’s nephew also serves as a very present reminder of the child she does not and will not have. Having previously shown

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little active interest in children, she plays animatedly with and indulges her nephew, leading her sister to remark (for the exaggerated purposes of melancholic irony within the film) that she is ‘terribly good with children’. However, Diana has exiled herself from the ordered world of life, children and motherhood. She leaves her sister’s house, seems to lose interest in Robert, and the ensuing sequences show her electing for quite the opposite option, as she joins the unsympathetic, hedonistic, amoral and unequivocally ‘guilty’ Miles at ‘debauched’ parties in Paris that burst with orgiastic queerness. At these parties – which represent a death drive opposed in every way to the self-affirming principles of reproductive futurism – conservative social order (which, as Edelman shows, centres itself on the figure of the Child) disintegrates. Gender, race, class, sexuality, kinship and other identity-naming matrices become meaningless outside of this normative framework, as the characters cross-dress, freely swap partners and merge identities as they play a game in which they take on each other’s roles, after watching a live sex show. Though we may identify a potentially rich against-the-grain reading of disruptive potential in this scene, its formal devices encourage identification with Diana, whose expressions intimate discomfort and suppressed repulsion, despite her joining in with the game in order to insult Miles. Reading with the grain of the film (and accounting for the cinematic devices it uses to characterize the sequence as sinister and disturbing, including dramatic lighting, disorienting pacing and camera angles, and denaturalizing double exposure), the implication is that Diana’s rejection of normative familial narratives has led her to position herself here, among other subversive outsiders at the very fringes of meaning and society. Diana’s dissolution deepens when she returns to London and Robert, having become aware of her unfaithfulness, leaves her, fittingly at an art exhibition displaying strikingly violent paintings (further identifying Diana and her tastes with death and destruction). Robert is in some ways a more compelling version of the ‘innocent man’ archetype seen in the other films, as he is associated with family (despite having left his wife for Diana, he continues to care for his children) and intellectual productivity, and is positioned by the film as the wholesome and fulfilling romantic option for Diana, in opposition to Miles’s lascivious decadence, of which Robert is scornful. His major flaw, in fact, is his allowing himself to be tempted by Diana away from his family; thus the ‘innocent man’ becomes a victim of Diana’s subjectivity and unmotherliness. Following her break with Robert, Diana (who, with another dose of heavyhanded irony, has been cast in an advertising campaign as ‘happiness girl’) becomes emotionally dependent on Malcolm, her gay photographer friend. Though portrayed more sympathetically than Miles’s Paris set, Malcolm – and Diana’s life involving him – is still identified with queerness and thus reproductive dead-ends. As is also the case in The L-Shaped Room and A Taste of Honey

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(as I discuss in detail in Chapter 6), women who reject husbands, children or both find some palliative respite in queer kinship structures other than the heterosexual, reproductive couple-and-child; however, such alternatives are never represented as genuine mature possibilities and are already consigned to narrative futurelessness even as they begin. Despite Diana’s hopeful protestations, therefore, we know that this non-reproductive queer (dis)solution will prove unliveable. Presented as increasingly despairing and hollow from her refusal of motherhood onwards, and after finding living with Malcolm ultimately no more fulfilling, Diana attempts to find redemption and meaning as a mother, through half-hearted efforts to inscribe herself into Catholicism or through marrying Cesare and becoming a stepmother to his many children, but these are all secondrate and unfulfilling; non-biological children seem to be only a reminder of loss. The film’s portrayal of Cesare’s offspring sees them more as ghosts than as actual children with whom Diana can have a genuine mothering relation; filmed from Diana’s perspective, they are unnamed and undetailed, often in distant long shots, their disembodied laughter sometimes haunting the soundtrack. A brief image of the children, in a neat file, ceremoniously kissing Diana goodnight before disappearing with their nurse, followed by shots of Diana eating alone in an opulent but silent and lonely dining room, only aim to consolidate her desolate severance from maternal self-realization. Her efforts towards domestic or social motherhood, through Cesare, philanthropic politics and Catholicism, become inverted, only solidifying the outline of a lack where the Child should be, implying that Diana is just as much negative space as the absent mother, though filled with nothing. This is visually underscored in a scene in which Diana returns to England, hoping to run into Robert at the funeral of an author they met together. Dressed in black and wearing an unusual hat that uncannily resembles a halo, she suggests an inverted and funereal Virgin Mary, further connoting her relationship to motherhood as one of death rather than life. The position of this image of her at the funeral of an author of apparently great cultural value (at which, furthermore, Robert the ‘good man’ is not present after all) also further connects a choice for feminine subjectivity and against the absent mothering object with the death of culture and productivity. Though Darling does position questions of abortion and reproductive control in terms of women’s rights and self-determination, women who make this choice come heavily under fire in a critique of sexualities and lifestyles that resist the conventional, reproductive patriarchal family narrative. Diana’s decision to have an abortion can be interpreted as a resistance against the absent mothering subject expected of this normative discourse, but the film ultimately suggests a lack of liveable possibilities outside of that framework. The absent mother, furthermore, becomes a thread around which, once pulled, the wider

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tapestry of discursive social meaning unravels, engendering cultural death. Unlike in several of the other films discussed, Diana is not exactly represented as a victim of abortion, and remains bodily intact, yet the trauma and punishment discourse persists metaphysically. There is no ‘guilty man’ who has coerced the abortion, but she is represented as a self-saboteuse (however unintentional) whose self-affirming behaviour sows her own destruction as well as that of the Child, or the subjects of social order. The discourse of punishment and anti-futurity presented in Darling ultimately, therefore, reaffirms traditional patriarchal assumptions of the absent mothering subject’s place within collective cultural self-narratives. The exploration of the absent mother discourse presented in Georgy Girl forms an interesting point of comparison with its treatment in Darling. Georgy Girl is another film of this genre in which ambivalent responses to ‘swinging’ youth culture and women’s sexual autonomy have been identified; Robert Murphy claims that ‘Georgy Girl, Alfie and Smashing Time all look for thrills in the big city but end up endorsing homely virtues like sincerity, loyalty, friendship’.79 However, I argue that this film is in fact one of the most ambiguous of the genre in its condemnation of liberated sexuality or avowal of traditional family structures. It is difficult to agree with Murphy’s appraisal of ‘sincerity, loyalty and friendship’ as central to the film, as every one of the major characters ends up thoroughly and insurmountably alienated from the others. Furthermore, we are surely not meant to take the film’s conclusion (Georgy’s concessionary marriage to the lecherous and controlling millionaire whose advances she has spent the film avoiding) as a triumphant affirmation of the superiority of traditional family, but as a dismaying and disturbing last resort after all other options for happiness have been exhausted. Unlike in the other films, there is no ‘good man’ or adequate father figure here through whom to offer aspirational (patriarchal) hope, and the film is generally pessimistic about spaces for mothering subjectivities within conventional social structures. Georgy and Meredith jointly represent respective poles of a significant imaginary feminine dichotomy. Meredith, comparably to Diana, encapsulates the best and the worst stereotypes of women’s sexual liberation and ‘permissive society’; she is fun-loving, popular, stylish and beautiful, but also selfish and callous. Georgy, on the other hand, is frumpy and maternal, often overlooked as a sexual option; she is strongly associated with children (particularly through her work as a music teacher, where she and the children mutually relish each other’s company), and takes a mothering role towards Meredith and Jos in the flat. Comparing Georgy Girl and Darling, Luckett argues: ‘In some cases (The Knack, Georgy Girl), London metonymically represents Harold Wilson’s new, updated state, ironically taming its women by allowing them to find sexual pleasure, preparing them for marriage and motherhood. Those who cannot

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be tamed, the resolutely non-conformist girls, are cast into exile (Darling).’80 While this is true of Diana, however, the claim does not neatly apply to either Meredith or Georgy. Georgy is never satisfied by sexual relationships alone, and is plainly more interested in motherhood than men at any given point in the plot, while Meredith is neither ‘tamed’ nor enduringly punished. More accurate is Murphy’s observation that ‘Meredith’s attitude to relationships and babies is displayed as callous and selfish, but her defiance of the conventions of marriage and motherhood gives the film a shocking frisson which is not quite snuffed out by the disapproval with which she is viewed’.81 In this way, Meredith offers an interesting comparison with Diana in terms of resistance of motherhood and precipitating consequences (or lack thereof ), though it is likely that a relatively unscathed Meredith is only possible through a Georgy counterbalancing the narrative scales. Unlike in the other films discussed, there is no visual representation of or around an abortion in Georgy Girl. Rather, discourses around motherhood and motherliness take place within the context of Meredith’s decision to continue an unplanned pregnancy. After the film has amply established her as a carefree ‘good time girl’ who expresses her sexuality freely and disregards normative standards of romantic commitment, Meredith flippantly announces that she is pregnant and suggests that she and Jos should get married because ‘we don’t fight, we like it in bed … and that’s about it really’. Her given reasons for keeping the pregnancy are simply that she is bored and wants a change; beyond this rather unconvincing testimony, however, her motivations for her choice are fairly inscrutable, as nothing in the dialogue or any of the film’s representational mechanics towards Meredith suggests that she is unhappy in her lifestyle, or that she has any desire whatsoever to be a mother. No remote equivalent, for example, is demonstrated to Diana’s passing flirtation with motherhood in the shopping sequence, and there are not even any of the familiar visual clichés that might be used to indicate lack of fulfilment in Meredith’s lifestyle. The explanation (a misogynistic strawman position, to be sure) seems simply to be that Meredith’s unrestricted self-determination leads her to take decisions lightly. Within the same conversation, Meredith further asserts that she could easily terminate the pregnancy, as she has ‘no tender feelings towards it’, and casually reveals previous abortions (‘I’ve destroyed two of yours [ Jos’s] already’). Jos responds to her comment with outrage, personifying the foetuses, which he refers to as ‘my sons and my daughters’, and asserting his paternal rights. The characters’ argument rehearses symbolizing tensions within political discourses of foetal personhood and rights as described by Deborah Lynn Steinberg.82 Though she is one of very few characters throughout this body of films to talk in this way, Meredith’s use of language around pregnancy (‘destroyed’ rather than ‘killed’, refusing to characterize the embryo as a fully imagined person

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and so on) is in fact far more accurately reflective of legal abortion discourse. Steinberg shows83 how, despite foetuses not being categorized as legal persons, personifying rhetoric (such as ‘murder’ and ‘children’) is commonly used around abortion: Homicide, or murder, therefore presupposes the full personhood of the victim. The specific legal precedent in defining a fetus has been that a ‘fetus (or unborn child [sic]) is not a legal person, and so cannot (for example) own property, but has its existence recognised by law in some ways. The fetus becomes a legal person when it is born alive’.84

As Steinberg further suggests, such emotive (if objectively misleading) language positions foetal experience at the centre of the issue, constructing abortion as ‘in the first order, something done to foetuses/“unborn children”, and only secondarily (at most), a procedure women undergo’.85 This eclipsing of an existing person by a figure whose subjectivity is, at this point, purely hypothetical, is a practical demonstration of the perceived ideological prepotency of the Child, which exceeds the (legal or social) right to being of the mother or pregnant subject. Therefore, despite the less severe legal definition of abortion as ‘child destruction’,86 the language of ‘murder’ and personhood makes more immediate sense within the ideology of futurity. Accordingly, this linguistic approach is used within the film to underscore Meredith’s callousness. Jos’s response, on the other hand, is more typical of normative conservative assumptions of familial meaning shaped by patriarchal ideologies of the Child, though it is clear that he is not really prepared for or interested in the realities of fatherhood (his insistence on fun over responsibility, and scenes of him jumping on a roundabout in a playground on the way to his wedding, mark him as distinctly childlike). His protests are more indicative of emasculating insult to the imagination of posterity and the projection of self and subjectivity that it offers. Unborn children become rhetorically subjectified, but at the expense of the subjectivity of the pregnant woman or symbolic mother, whose body and rights become little more than a vessel for the gestation of a far more fully imagined and keenly hoped for cultural future. The symbolic struggle over the maternal body is a significant factor in Meredith’s hostile feelings towards her pregnancy, as she seems to feel her self eroded and disregarded around her newly imposed meaning as the cathected kernel of cultural subjectivity. Scathing towards fetishizing assumptions around motherhood that idealize the experience of pregnancy and sublimate its abject qualities (in the Kristevan usage), Meredith instead complains of morning sickness, her changing relationship to her body and the limitations the experience imposes upon her freedoms. However, this is also a discursive struggle; paying no

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attention to her individuality, the other characters (particularly Georgy and Jos) assume for her a homogenizing maternal identity. The iterations of idealized motherhood that structure this imagined figure (which does not, really, require Meredith’s presence, but becomes inscribed over it) are particularly suggestive of popular contemporaneous discourses within the work of theorists such as D.W. Winnicott. Though Winnicott’s writing on motherhood aimed to create a more empowered space for his ‘goodenough mother’,87 his constructions of motherhood also end up ossifying. His approach tends to cast mothering as a homogenized and universal experience; in much of his writing, he explicitly chooses to focus on the ‘normal mother’ for whom motherhood is a straightforwardly pleasurable experience, and for whom the child is very much reified. During pregnancy and early maternity, it is taken for granted that the mother (unless ‘disordered’) should be entirely devoted to the baby, losing all other interests: The baby has other meanings for the mother in the unconscious fantasy, but the predominant feature may be a willingness as well as an ability on the part of the mother to drain interest from her own self on to the baby. I have referred to this aspect of a mother’s attitude as ‘primary maternal preoccupation’.88

However well-intentioned in its advocacy of consideration and respect for mothering women, this theoretical approach (which was extensively popularized in Britain during this period) largely caters to a homogenized figure of motherhood who remains idealized. Winnicottian approaches, as seemingly adopted by Georgy and Jos, as well as Meredith’s midwives and the maternity literature she encounters, therefore do not accommodate possibilities of maternal ambivalence and construct an inflexible mothering archetype that cannot tolerate or represent difference in mothering subjects. The rigidity of this meticulously policed sociocultural archetype has been analysed in depth in insightful work on maternal ambivalence from a number of feminist psychoanalysts including Roszika Parker,89 Wendy Hollway and Brid Featherstone.90 Describing maternal ambivalence as ‘not a static state but a dynamic experience of conflict with the fluctuations felt by a mother at different times in a child’s development, and varying between different children’,91 Parker advocates for full and frank recognition of emotional complexity within the maternal relation on the side of the mothering subject rather than purely that of the child, which has been the dominant preoccupation of traditional psychoanalysis. However, Parker argues, patriarchal idealism phobically exhausts motherhood of all nuance and texture, allowing only absolutes: ‘Our culture defends itself against the recognition of ambivalence originating in the mother by denigrating or idealizing her. A denigrated mother is simply hateful and has no love for the child to lose. An idealized mother is hate-free, constant and unreal.’92 Parker

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is clear that maternal ambivalence is not only inevitable, but in fact offers ‘hidden’ resources of creativity and enrichment to the experiences and practices of mothering.93 However, the ideological universe that seeks to enclose Meredith – represented here by Georgy, Jos and the popular obstetric literature they devour – does not remotely entertain such possibilities. Meredith is not a formulaic ‘natural mother’ and does not become one, yet this rigid figure is comprehensively imposed on her. She fights against the shroud of the absent mother that is hanging over her; she consistently mocks ideas of the ‘spiritualization’ of motherhood that expects only pleasure in the maternal experience, and is angry and scornful towards Jos and Georgy when she comes across them reading books or watching informational television pieces on childbirth, all of which are heavily characterized by such approaches. Meredith’s resistance to these constructions of motherhood – even, or especially, as all of the other characters are inscribing them onto her maternal body and subjectivity – brings into sharp relief the irony of such approaches that universalize and objectify the ‘natural’ mother for whom they purport to advocate, to the point that they are thoroughly unprepared for the experiences of individual mothering subjects. Jos and Georgy’s joke that Meredith won’t know when labour starts (as she refuses to participate in their reading about childbirth), for instance, becomes quite ironic with images of Meredith, a few scenes later, writing in pain on a hospital bed. Murphy’s comment (above) on the film’s suggestion of ‘disapproval’ towards Meredith is fair; her aggression towards motherhood is extreme and unrelenting, and the spectatorial identification with Georgy marks her in callous contrast. Nonetheless, it is also possible to interpret in her character some interesting narrative subversions. Firstly, her commitment to her own subjectivity resists the absent mother narrative, though this does position her as the misogynistic archetype of the ‘bad mother’. More profoundly, however, her representation un-writes the paradigmatic punishment and trauma narrative that tends to condition abortion discourses in these films. As she openly refers to her own abortions (in a manner, furthermore, that is merely factual rather than confessional or cathartic), Meredith’s lack of apparent physical or emotional trauma rejects the moralizing structure of necessary and fundamental suffering for women who have abortions. She even manages to reject the absent mother discourse as she leaves her daughter with Georgy, who prefers the mothering role. Meredith’s last scene shows her returning to her previous lifestyle, once again glamorous and in control of her own image, and seemingly happy, grinning as she walks in the street by herself before meeting a man. The interpretation of this shot is ambiguous; though the film and its identificatory mechanics have encouraged criticism of rather than sympathy with Meredith, there is little moralization in the final images of Meredith, and if anything, the filming

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style encourages identification with her in this instance. Focusing centrally on Meredith face-on in an unbroken take as she walks down the street, the scene represents men looking at her and finding her attractive, but positions them in the peripheries of the shot, thereby eschewing a Mulvey-esque male gaze and any of its supporting techniques, such as the classically gendered shot-reverseshot.94 Rather than being an object of the gaze, Meredith is in control of it, and she remains here whole and unbroken by the editing. After this point, however, Meredith disappears from the plot. The film is unusual in that it does not guarantee punishment for Meredith, but it also does not – strictly – guarantee no punishment; the ambiguity of her final scene is open to inscription. The possibility of a woman making a choice against the Child and visibly living happily and uncondemned invites too great a subversion of normative ideologies. To return to Edelman’s arguments on the side ‘not “fighting for the children”’, Meredith’s choice of presence over futurity positions her in a queer space, which disrupts the representational logic structured by the Child. She is not writeable after this point; she is ‘exiled’ from the narrative, if not within it, as is Diana. Of course, however, the film transfers the absent ‘good mother’ narrative to Georgy, who is excluded from any possibility of romantic fulfilment or sexual desire, to counteract Meredith’s excess of the same. Ultimately, the film suggests irreconcilable distance between motherhood and desiring subjectivities. Construction as a mother polarizes Meredith’s social identity from her self and exorcizes any realizable desires other than those for the Child from Georgy. There is no middle ground between the two women: there is the mother and the subject, but no mothering subject. Within the homogenizing narrative framework of the absent mother, that is, there is little space to approach motherhood on one’s own terms. Undoubtedly, issues of abortion and reproductive control are key concerns within British social realist and Swinging London cinema in this period. Within broader narrative enquiries into and representations of contemporaneous expressions of sexuality and developments in liberal youth culture, unplanned pregnancies and abortions often figure as climactic plot points and galvanizing moments in which underlying concerns about the state of the traditional family and cultural productivity are condensed and urgently crystallized. However, the reputation that both cycles gained for representing and celebrating a new ‘permissive society’ through more confident female sexualities and prominent discussion of abortion and contraception is largely misleading. Even some of the most apparently ‘permissive’ films of the cycles, such as Alfie and Darling, continue to pay a heavy debt of conservatism in their unequivocal punishment of libertinage. Contraception is also in fact discussed extremely rarely (outside of extremely vague or cryptic allusions to coitus interruptus); the only film of these cycles to explicitly represent the pill is the farcical Prudence and the Pill,

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and condoms and other prophylactics make no appearance outside sex education films. Successful abortions are also far rarer than much criticism of the cycles has implied, and where abortion (whether successful, failed or only considered) is represented, it is generally with a deeply ambivalent tone. In some respects, the films reflect several of the prominent concerns of societal and political discussions around abortion, such as its interaction with working-class communities, the grim hardships of backstreet abortions and unflattering characterizations of an indifferent and exploitative medical establishment. These factors are often presented poignantly and could be construed as soliciting sympathy for women as victims of abortion and of the liberal culture that creates the conditions for it. However, such sympathy is not inherently either proor anti-choice, as it could be equally interpreted as a critique of the conditions under which abortions could be delivered or a critique of abortion per se. This body of films is overall not readily identifiable with any explicit position, but rather offers platforms for ambivalent explorations of abortion and abortion decisions as lived experiences. While parliamentary debates and rhetorical focuses on foetal personhoods could potentially wrest discursive self-possession away from feminine and maternal subjectivities, furthermore, these films by and large do present abortion as an embodied experience for women and represent as significant the stake of maternal bodies within this issue with a viscerality and immediacy that is visually affecting, anchoring potentially abstract concerns in the representation of experience. Where abortions actually take place in the films (as opposed to being only mooted or discussed), this impactful representational capacity is often used to underscore narratives of trauma and guilt. Whether this guilt is placed at the door of a youth culture that encourages careless sexuality (Alfie, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Darling), or, more unusually, of a lack of provision and accessibility that forces young women to risk dangerous situations (Up the Junction), it is often part of a social commentary. In this case, maternal bodies and subjectivities become victimized collateral damage of broader social disorders. That notwithstanding, however, there are several occasions within these series of films in which potential spaces for maternal subjectivities, self-expression and self-determination are suggested, either within communities of women who offer solidarity in moments of unplanned pregnancy, or as individual women’s moments of resistance to patriarchal reproductive norms, through continuing or terminating a pregnancy despite the coercive forces of male partners and paternalistic medical practitioners. The suggestion of such spaces is important, yet there is little suggestion within any of these works of what may fill them; rather, the potential space for maternal self-expression ends up either disastrous or unknowable, meaning that the mothering subject remains more or less absent.

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These representations can be related to broader ideologies of family and motherhood; there is much overlap with Edelman’s work on the Child, queerness and the death drive in that explicitly non-reproductive sex and sexual identities (whether homosexual or heterosexual) are the unliveable queer option, representing cultural death. Despite the general dislocation of child characters within the narratives, the Child figure is present throughout these discourses; normative families are represented as generally wholesome and ordered, and choices against this are often symbolically connected to images of death, figuring the destruction of the Child, and with it – metonymically and symbolically – social order, productivity and meaning. Alongside the ambivalent visual engagements with women’s experiences of abortion, the Child often forms a tacit meta-discourse of cultural futurity. This futurity becomes, implicitly, the only possible logic of representation; any disavowal of this symbolic order is either firmly condemned or inexpressible. Notes 1. See in particular: Linda Clarke, ‘Abortion: A Rights Issue?’ in Birthrights: Law and Ethics at the Beginning of Life, ed. R. Lee and Derek Morgan (London: Routledge, 1989), 155–71; Alvin Cohan, ‘Abortion as a Marginal Issue: The Use of Peripheral Mechanisms in Britain and the United States’, in The New Politics of Abortion, ed. Joni Lovenduski and Joyce Outshoorn (London: Sage, 1986); Keith Hindell and Madeleine Simms, ‘How the Abortion Lobby Worked’, Political Quarterly 39 (1968), 269–82; Kelly Petersen, ‘Abortion Laws: Comparative and Feminist Perspectives on Australia, England and the United States’, Medical Law International 2, 77–105, reprinted in Abortion, ed. Belinda Bennett (Aldershot: Dartmouth, [1996] 2004); and Sally Sheldon, Beyond Control: Medical Power and Abortion Law (London: Pluto, 1997). 2. Clarke, ‘Abortion’, 160. 3. Cohan, ‘Marginal Issue’, 37. 4. Petersen, ‘Abortion Laws’, 318–19. 5. An amendment later reduced this to twenty-four weeks. 6. Brooke, Sexual Politics, 169. 7. Ibid., 170–74. 8. Sheldon, Beyond Control. 9. Ibid., 29, original emphasis. 10. Ibid., 28. 11. Joni Lovenduski, ‘Parliament, Pressure Groups, Networks and the Women’s Movement: The Politics of Abortion Law Reform in Britain (1967–83)’, in The New Politics of Abortion, ed. Joni Lovenduski and Joyce Outshoorn (London: Sage, 1986). 12. Hindell and Sims, ‘Abortion Lobby’. 13. The histories of pro- and anti-choice campaign groups and their continued legacies over the years following the 1967 Act are described in Lovenduski, ‘Parliament, Pressure Groups’. 14. Chapman, ‘Political Implications’, 8–17. 15. Ibid., 13. 16. Ibid., 14.

130 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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For instance, Stetson, ‘Abortion Law Reform in France’ and ‘Women’s Movements’. Brooke, Sexual Politics, 161. Hindell and Simms, ‘Abortion Lobby’, 271. Sheldon, Beyond Control, 41. Hindell and Simms, ‘Abortion Lobby’, 273–75. Cohan, ‘Marginal Issue’, 34. Roberts and Millar, ‘Feminism, Socialism, and Abortion’, 5. Sheldon, Beyond Control, 22. Roberts and Millar, ‘Feminism, Socialism, and Abortion’, 5. Brooke, Sexual Politics, 4. Ibid., 173–76. Roberts and Millar, ‘Feminism, Socialism, and Abortion’, 9. Brooke, Sexual Politics, 4. This is an ongoing theme in Brooke, Sexual Politics. Fran Amery, ‘Solving the “Woman Problem” in British Abortion Politics: A Contextualised Account’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations 17, no. 4 (2015), 555. W. Fyfe, ‘Abortion Acts: 1903 to 1967’, in Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991). Amery, ‘Woman Problem’, 556. Regardless of the gender of specific doctors, the establishment itself is discursively characterized as masculine. Amery, ‘Woman Problem’, 555. Clarke, ‘Abortion’, 166; Petersen, ‘Abortion Laws’, 323; Sheldon, Beyond Control, 24–26. Amery, ‘Woman Problem’, 558. Ibid., 557. Katy McGahan cited in The Birds and the Bees: 60 Years of British Sex Education Films. UK: BFI, 2009. Ibid. Dorothy McBride Stetson’s ‘Women’s Movements’ gives a particularly detailed account of the balance of interests within abortion debates in British politics and the place of gender and feminism therein. Andrew Higson, ‘Space, Place, Spectacle: Landscape and Townscape in the “Kitchen Sink” Film’, in Dissolving Views: Key Writings on British Cinema, ed. Andrew Higson (London: Cassell, 1996), 143–46; Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 138. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 136. Brooke, Sexual Politics, 157. Harper, Mad, Bad, 11 cites several key films of the cycle as ‘focus[ing] exclusively on male burdens’. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 160. Reisz in an interview with Eva Orbanz, Wietz and Wildenham in Eva Orbanz, Journey to a Legend and Back: The British Realistic Film (Berlin: Edition Volker Spiess, 1977), 58. Reisz cited in Alexander Walker, Hollywood England: The British Film Industry in the Sixties (London: Orion, 1974), 85. Higson, ‘Space, Place’. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism. Richards and Aldgate, Best of British, 134–35. Ibid., 135–36. Brooke, Sexual Politics, 157, my emphasis.

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54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90.

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Richards and Aldgate, Best of British, 142. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 160. Ibid., 164. Murphy, Sixties British Cinema, 139–42 argues that the London represented in this film did not reflect the broader reality of people’s experiences of sexuality and culture at this time. Nonetheless, the interests of these films were part of a shift in cultural discourses around such matters. Luckett, ‘Travel and Mobility’, 235. Brooke, Sexual Politics, 157. Luckett, ‘Travel and Mobility’, 233. Brooke, Sexual Politics, 157. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 165–66. See Franklin, ‘Fetal Fascinations’ and Fyfe, ‘Abortion Acts’, 164. Franklin, ‘Fetal Fascinations’, 201. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 165. Amery, ‘Woman Problem’, 557. Sheldon, Beyond Control, 38–42. Luckett, ‘Travel and Mobility’, 235. Ibid., 233. Clarke, ‘Abortion’, 166. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 167. Irigaray, ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’, 39. This point is also made in Julia Kristeva, ‘Place Names’, October 6 (1978): 93–111. Luckett, ‘Travel and Mobility’, 239. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 160. Sheldon, Beyond Control, 18. Maureen McNeil, ‘Putting the Alton Bill in Context’, in Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin, Celia Lury and Jackie Stacey (London: Unwin Hyman, 1991), 158. Edelman, No Future, 19. Ibid., 3. Murphy, Sixties British Cinema, 146. Luckett, ‘Travel and Mobility’, 243. Murphy, Sixties British Cinema, 143. Steinberg, ‘Adversarial Politics’. She refers mainly to the Alton Bill but works with precedents set throughout British parliamentary abortion debates. William, cited in ibid., 178. Ibid., 180. Ibid., 184. The good-enough mother is an ongoing construction within Winnicott’s work, explained, for example, in Winnicott’s The Family and Individual Development (London: Tavistock, 1965), 17–18. Ibid., 15. Parker, Torn in Two. Wendy Hollway and Brid Featherstone’s edited collection Mothering and Ambivalence is a relatively early volume to bring together a number of fascinating essays dedicated to the topic of maternal ambivalence.

132 91. 92. 93. 94.

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Parker, Torn in Two, 7. Ibid., 24. Ibid., 1. Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror, 27–28.

CHAPTER 4

Scene and Unscene Reimagining Abortion in La Génération Pepsi  

Similarly to the situation in Britain, the story of reproductive rights in France is many-layered, tying into a long and complex intellectual history of citizenship, rights discourses and perceptions of women and mothers in French society since the pre-revolution era.1 Several of the issues at stake in French abortion debates are familiar from the journey towards reproductive rights in Britain and other European nations, but there are also important distinctions in how these demands were articulated and in what was achieved. France’s history of women’s rights is unusual insofar as it has been characterized by particularly robust feminist political and cultural activity, yet only managed to achieve formal legal gains (in particular, women’s suffrage and legalized abortion) relatively late in comparison to many other Western European states. Throughout the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, motherhood and reproduction consistently appeared as matters of public concern in France, largely in relation to ongoing anxieties around depopulation and a corresponding climate of pronatalism. Though many Western European nations experienced depopulation issues during the twentieth century, the situation in France was particularly acute. While it is difficult to attribute a singular specific cause to France’s endemically low birth rate, critics have identified relatively long-standing trends of conscious birth limitation and neo-Malthusian practices among the French public.2 This private activity, however, was in tension with a political master narrative that connected depopulation to national decline, and even to a series of humiliating military defeats from the FrancoPrussian to the Second World War.3 Karen Offen illustrates how the ‘population question’ had been a current issue and crucial aspect of French gender politics since the mid-nineteenth century, becoming increasingly contentious in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, when feminists ‘became concerned when some physicians denounced French women as socially, and even patriotically, irresponsible for neglecting their infants and for avoiding pregnancy’.4 Discourses of motherhood in France have therefore been subject to long-standing tensions between individual desires for reproductive control and

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institutional ideologies and policymaking fuelled by birth rate anxieties, which characterize motherhood as an issue of national good and state jurisdiction. The World Wars served only to consolidate further depopulation concerns, compounding anxieties through an actual demographic toll on two generations of young men, and through the imaginative emasculating damage done to the national self-image and its attribution to demographic weakness. This decades-long trend of panic precipitated political moves that sought to stimulate population growth and to reinforce domestic ideals of the French family.5 The ‘enhancement and protection of the family, the returning of the wartime army of female labour to hearth and home, and the promotion of the famille nombreuse was for some two decades to be the epitome of domestic success, rewarded by financial assistance and state approval’.6 Such political manoeuvring of reproduction involved both incentivization of abundant motherhood and suppression of contraceptive practices, including abortion. Beyond simple promotion of reproduction, motherhood became framed as women’s patriotic duty. Claire Duchen even suggests that ‘After the armistice in June 1940, population decline was cited as a major factor contributing to the defeat of France’,7 suggesting women’s mothering and reproduction quite directly as a matter of cultural integrity and nationalistic futurity. Such political formulations contributed to the continued imagination of a ‘mother-of-the-nation’ figure, who was responsible for carrying culture forward valiantly and selflessly, reproducing not just a single family, but the entire Republic. As well as continuing to suppress abortion practically and ideologically, along with severe penalties for any involvement with illegal terminations, such policymaking tendencies also took for granted women’s reproduction as the legitimate and vital jurisdiction of the state. In the post-war period, responsibility for the nation’s future and identity lay on the shoulders of its men and in the uteruses of its women. This intensely punitive culture of state-sanctioned pronatalism provides important context for the timbre of public discussion of abortion in France, and in turn informs how abortion, contraception and pregnancy were represented in film in the mid-twentieth century. Equally significant was the fact that this state-sanctioned doctrine of nationalistic procreation was so clearly dissonant with the practices and lived experiences of large segments of the population. With sexual freedoms as a key tenet of the revolutionary social movements of the 1960s, robust feminist reproductive rights campaigns emerged, reaching particular prominence in the late 1960s and well into the 1970s. Some of the rhetorical trends around abortion legislation were common to the French and British cases. As has tended to be the case throughout most histories of reproductive rights, proponents of legalized abortion in France found that trepidatious or opposing parties, and particularly those whose opposition rested on nationalistic concerns, were most receptive to polemics that were couched in

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terms of soft-line eugenics and ‘last resort’ scenarios, where the life or health of the pregnant woman or foetus was in clear jeopardy, though feminists heavily criticized these approaches for ignoring ‘welfare’ cases.8 Sympathy for these types of situations and enduring suspicion towards arguments that were led by feminist rights ideologies suggests an assumed narrative dividing women seeking abortions into deserving (otherwise virtuous women who were victims of circumstance) and undeserving (criminals whose demands for abortions resulted from careless egoism). A further relevant area of overlap between abortion debates in Britain and France is the presence of class discourses. Class difference featured in significant ways in abortion discourses, most urgently becoming a question of accessibility and the increased degree of physical risk faced by working-class women. Not only were working-class women less likely to have the resources to cope with an unplanned pregnancy, but, whereas France’s relatively late progress with abortion debates relative to other Western European states meant that better-off women had the option of travelling to countries such as England, Switzerland and the Netherlands9 for safer abortions, women without such means were often forced into riskier alternatives. Particularly notorious in this regard were the faiseuses d’anges (angel-makers), women who provided cheap and often highly dangerous backstreet abortions. Dorothy M. Stetson underpins differences in the accessibility and safety of abortion for women of varying social classes, showing that the increased danger posed to working-class women became an important part of leftist groups’ arguments in favour of abortion law reform.10 Moral panic around abortion and contraception also carried with it an added stigma for women who could not afford such means privately, as ‘women were warned that they should not expect society to pay for their sexual activities’,11 again suggesting the sexuality and reproductive capacities of women as a matter of public interest. There are, however, important differences in the nature of strategies and expression used by reproductive rights proponents in France; as many commentators evince, French feminist campaign groups generally made a concerted effort to anchor the debate first and foremost in terms of rights, self-determination and justice for women.12 Though there was strong sentiment both for and against, it remained clear that it was women’s rights and bodies that were at stake. This forms a relevant counterpoint to Britain, where major feminist groups tended to favour a path of least resistance, focusing on the more easily winnable arguments (such as ableist points based around foetal deformity) but compromising a degree of discursive control of the matter as a question of women’s autonomy and subjectivity. Some of the gains made, therefore, were not particularly in step with improvements of women’s situations. Conversely, in France, advocacy for reproductive rights tended to be understood as primarily part of a committed

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feminist project. The process of abortion law reform in France and the impact of the feminist campaigns have been well analysed critically. Jean C. Robinson concludes that, despite a cohesive feminist campaign beginning in the late 1960s, the legal outcomes in the 1970s were not satisfying – an ‘incomplete victory at best’.13 The Veil law of 1975 permitted abortions widely, but only within the first ten weeks of pregnancy, at the discretion of a doctor and at the patient’s own expense. The Pelletier law, which came after review in 1979, was similarly restrictive and, worse yet, parliamentary debate surrounding it reflected sympathy towards the concerns of anti-feminist counterarguments,14 leaving the feminist campaign in the disappointing position of having established the terms of a debate that in many ways it did not win. With regard to my interest in cultural representation, however, it is nonetheless of considerable significance that outspokenly feminist voices, narratives and discourses of resistance were conspicuous throughout the mid-twentieth century. Commentators have cited abundant instances in which feminist discourses and actions helped shape cultural and social narratives of reproductive rights, even if they did not achieve all of their parliamentary aims. Several feminist campaigning and activist organizations were established in France during the 1960s and 1970s, many foregrounding reproductive rights as a key priority.15 These groups participated in abortion debates in a variety of ways, sometimes through civic institutions, such as the founder of Choisir, Gisèle Halimi, acting as the defence lawyer in the high-profile and landmark Bobigny abortion case,16 described by Allison as ‘probably the single most influential phenomenon in the struggle for the legislation of abortion in recent times’.17 Other groups tactically favoured civil disobedience and attention-arresting stunts. The MLAC (Mouvement pour la Libération de l’Avortement et de la Contraception), for instance, openly facilitated illegal abortions, organizing trips to Amsterdam and London to help women obtain safer abortions,18 and the MLF (Mouvement de Libération des Femmes) spearheaded the renowned manifeste des 343,19 a declaration signed by 343 public figures – including Simone de Beauvoir and several figures from the film industry, such as Agnès Varda, Jeanne Moreau and Catherine Deneuve – stating that they had personally undergone illegal abortions, and posed as a direct challenge to the government on the injustice and impracticality of existing abortion legislation. Such events were culturally impactful, and despite their legislative disappointments, the historical memorialization they achieved is indicative of their contribution to shaping the master narrative of reproductive rights in France with a discourse that was broadly bolder and less compromising than in Britain. Another feature of French feminism that has been particularly prominent is the comparatively extensive use of art and literature in the service of political expression. Simone de Beauvoir’s work, and in particular her bold polemic on

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abortion in The Second Sex, is pertinent to the conceptualization of reproductive rights in (and beyond) France. Beauvoir was a high-profile and outspoken advocate of legal abortion, who directly implicated herself in her politics through her actions and writing while bluntly exposing clandestine abortion as a commonplace experience among women: The ‘immorality’ of women, favourite theme of misogynists, is not to be wondered at; how could they fail to feel an inner mistrust of the presumptuous principles that men publicly proclaim and secretly disregard? They learn to believe no longer in what men say when they exalt woman or when they exalt man: the one thing they are sure of is this rifled and bleeding womb, these shreds of crimson life, this child that is not there. It is at her first abortion that woman begins to ‘know.’20

Her controversial chapter on abortion works at unapologetically deconstructing many underlying myths, presumptions and hypocrisies of popular contemporaneous narratives of motherhood and abortion. As the quote above suggests, publicly professed patriarchal moral standards imposed upon the maternal body in abstraction may well be covertly disregarded in private matters, not due to an arousal of sympathy for and understanding of the humanity of that body, but in the interest of the patriarchal self ’s own convenience. She further points out that those women who embrace the ready cultural images of motherliness and fertility are also not mindless, asocial or mechanized reproductive objects. Fitting the idealized maternal image and opting for abortion, for material or emotional reasons, are not mutually exclusive: ‘It would seem that most often the couple decides to limit births after two maternities; and so it is that the repulsive aborted woman is also the splendid mother cradling two blond angels in her arms: one and the same person.’21 What these emphases demonstrate, I suggest, is an Edelman-esque cathecting of the ideology of the Child at the expense of the existent citizen. The preservation of the idea, the fantasy, that one is ‘fighting for the children’ (and thereby the immortality of the unblemished cultural self ) becomes an enterprise more keenly felt and highly prioritized than the lived experience of justice. Beauvoir’s argument shows how disastrous this is for the subjectivity of women as (potentially) reproductive beings and signifiers of futurity, through defining a series of ideological and experiential contradictions in the social construction of motherhood, abortion and pregnancy that seem to make women’s coherence impossible. Patriarchal discourse can (fraudulently) resolve these to its own – and only its own – satisfaction, but the woman ‘feels these contradictions in her wounded flesh’.22 Reproductive rights, abortion and their interactions with figures and ideologies of motherhood are interesting, important and dynamic issues in France

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during this period. Many of the familiar concerns and rhetoric of anti-abortion, child-centred or nationalistic pronatalist mentalities are also present here, creating similar issues with the subjective absence of the mother and reducing her to an ideological function. As was reflected in the disappointing limitations of the Veil law, women’s reproductive rights were a contentious project, meeting with considerable resistance. On the other hand, arguments in favour of legalized abortion that clearly presented it as a matter of women’s citizenship and autonomy rather than capitulating to other (often problematic) discourses were prominent and well organized. To this end, artists and intellectuals such as Varda and Beauvoir mobilized cultural expression to explore women’s situations and argue for justice. This chapter looks at how abortion is represented in a variety of French films. To begin with, I look backwards to the immediate post-war period, eventually leading into the 1960s, to consider significant and often explicit representation of abortion as a major plot point in French melodramas, looking at how they portray women who undergo abortions prior to decriminalization. Compared to the English films, there is relatively less implicit demonization of women opting for abortion in these representations; they are more typically sympathetic victims of circumstance, and sometimes used as part of a critique of gendered social injustices. I then look at instances of abortion and contraception references within discourses on sexuality in New Wave film-making; here, the New Wave resistance to the film-à-thèse23 style introduces new interpretative possibilities through representations of abortion that are far less dramatic or strategic. In this and the preceding section, I refute – to an extent – claims that abortion was a topic rarely touched upon by French film in this period and, indeed, within the New Wave.24 There are in fact certain New Wave directors for whom questions of abortion and contraception mark a significant or even repeated theme in the 1960s and beyond. To this end, I focus in particular on films by Truffaut, Godard and Paula Delsol that feature meaningful allusions to abortion, exploring how the style and philosophies of the New Wave opened up new and interesting discursive frames that resist the melodramatic contents of abortion in pre-New Wave cinema. Despite its thematic frequency, and existing critical interest in abortion in French politics and literature, there is very little critical work available currently on abortion in French cinema, nor is it a strong focal point within literature on New Wave films. Even in the case of Agnès Varda – whose artistic and personal politics were passionately involved in the fight for reproductive rights – those of her films (largely in the late 1970s) that deal primarily with reproductive politics are among the most maligned of her oeuvre. Indeed, critical consensus at present would seem to suggest that, despite a shared predominance of interest in issues of sex, sexuality and youth throughout much of the New Wave, representational interest

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in abortion and unplanned pregnancy is sparse in this period and does not constitute a significant collective theme. In this chapter, I refute this by mapping filmic representations onto a cultural dialogue on reproductive rights in France, and in so doing, explore its interactions with ideas on motherhood and feminine subjectivities. Abortion debates and the project of reproductive rights reached a high point of public consciousness and momentum in the late 1960s and early 1970s in France, with many seeing May 1968 as a pivotal moment for this movement and for the beginning of widespread expression of contraception as a feminist issue.25 Prior to this discursive explosion, however, the issue of abortion is visible, if not as prominent. Indeed, given the severe terms of institutional treatment of abortion, the candour and sympathy with which some melodramas in the 1950s and even the early post-war period address this topic is remarkable. Representation of abortion in pre-New Wave films and melodramas in France, in which abortion appears within the context of its legal and social recognition as a crime, also forms some interesting comparisons with New Wave representations and the English films. In the previous chapter, many of the English films I examined demonstrated at least some underlying investment in a guilt or punishment narrative around abortion, whether on the part of women or male partners. This type of moralistic construct seems somewhat less prominent in the French melodramas. Despite – or perhaps as a result of – the fiercely pronatalist rhetoric of post-war French politics, abortion is often presented as a tragic reality of women’s lives rather than a moral crime. At the same time that the law and governmental rhetoric were denouncing them as perpetrators, several melodramas made women undergoing or seeking abortions into unequivocal victims. As emphasized above, there had been strong efforts from voices of authority to shape public understandings of motherhood and reproduction towards a nationalistic image of fecund domesticity in the inter- and post-war period. Such a narrative may have been very visible and imaginatively active, but commentators have argued that actual behavioural trends among the French public did not reflect anything like a wholehearted embrace of these ideologies; Duchen describes widespread public approval of increased family planning following the baby boom, suggesting that this demonstrates unhappiness with pronatalist policy,26 and Stetson, along similar lines, argues that the French public ‘by their antinatalist behavior had shown that they wanted to have abortion available’.27 Their analyses suggest that pronatalist projects inspired among many women a sense of coercion rather than the desired patriotism, or passive acceptance of the degree to which such policies identified their bodies with the nation state. The flaws of pronatalist policymaking are also taken up by Beauvoir, who insists that ‘the law – which dooms many young women to death, sterility, invalidism – is quite powerless to assure an increase in the number of births’.28

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After the Second World War, there was in fact a short-lived ‘baby boom’ in France, potentially undermining this assertion. However, Beauvoir’s argument does not hinge on the ineffectiveness of the policies. She further argues that ‘illegitimate motherhood is still so frightful a fate that many prefer suicide or infanticide to the status of unmarried mother: which means that no penalty could prevent them from “getting rid” of the unborn baby’;29 the core point is surely the unacceptable cost on the lives of women, regardless of the growth outcome on a population that does not seem to recognize them as subjects. In this light, the mother expressed in pronatalist nationalism is a fantasy, a wishful grand narrative, rather than a body of thinking women existing in differentiated social realities. A simplistic narrative of motherhood in which demand or need for abortion diminishes in line with its accessibility also turns a wilfully blind eye to the level of risk women are willing to accept to avoid undesired pregnancy or further stigma. Alternatively, it makes sense of women seeking abortions through a fire-and-brimstone retributionist ideology; in Beauvoir’s argument, ‘the hospitals are obliged to receive a woman whose miscarriage has begun, but she is punished sadistically by the withholding of all sedatives during her pains and during the final operation of curetting’.30 In this case, anti-choice advocates may prefer to imagine the horrendousness of dangerous abortions as a reflection of the inherent badness of the woman who suffers them, rather than accept that their beliefs may inflict such rude ‘justice’ on an individual as complex, as contextual, as guilty and as innocent as themselves. As totalizing as the oppressive pronatalist narrative aimed to be, post-war France was hardly without its vigorously dissenting voices, of which Beauvoir is the best known but not the sole example. Though pre-1960s films featuring abortion as a central topic were certainly few, it is both striking and significant that the terms in which they did so were non-euphemistic, deeply sympathetic and frank about the social conditions of women’s suffering. In several respects, films such as Le corbeau (1943), Les mauvaises rencontres (1955), Des gens sans importance (1956) and later the Femme en blanc films (1965–66) substantially reflect the rhetorical tone of Beauvoir’s abortion tract in The Second Sex and that of other reproductive rights polemicists. In all of these films except Astruc’s Les mauvaises rencontres, the women undergoing abortion are unequivocally sympathetic: young, beautiful, charming and innocent (in all but the eyes of the law). As I have discussed elsewhere,31 abortion and its universal consequences of death or disgrace within these melodramas constitute the films’ raw innards of pathos. The women suffer abundantly (and often aesthetically) as compassionately drawn victims of a cruel and hypocritical society that leaves them no option but to seek an abortion and then punishes them viciously for doing so. Several of these films also echo the concerns of feminist groups in their highlighting cases of abortion based on welfare and social circumstances over

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medical necessity. As Gisèle Halimi points out, ‘according to the statistics, most abortions are carried out on women who already have children and cannot bring up any more. The “welfare case” is the most frequent type of abortion.’32 The terms of anti-choice rhetoric in general, which tend towards ideology, potentially distance the issue from such material contexts. Where this rhetoric does deal most firmly in phenomena is in questions of foetal viability, which also fail to address the ongoing practical (material and emotional) well-being of the mother and child, a hypocrisy highlighted by Beauvoir: It must be pointed out that our society, so concerned to defend the rights of the embryo, shows no interest in the children once they are born; it prosecutes the abortionist instead of undertaking to reform that scandalous institution known as ‘public assistance’; those responsible for entrusting the children to their torturers are allowed to go free; society closes its eyes to the frightful tyranny of brutes in children’s asylums and private foster homes.33

In Des gens sans importance, Journal d’une femme en blanc and Une femme en blanc se révolte, women choose abortion because they cannot practically or financially support a child. None of these films, furthermore, propose an absolute antithesis between abortion and motherliness. In Journal d’une femme en blanc in particular, the film takes pains to show that Mariette wants to be a mother but only in the circumstances she chooses and when she is financially able. Such representations in film are important as they anchor a potentially over-abstracted issue in character and context. On the other hand, these narrative justifications continue to suggest that women must be in some way victimized to be ‘worthy’ of an abortion. A feature of abortion narratives in the English films was the thematic connection of abortion with death. In these cases, the ideological tragedy of the ‘death’ or loss of the imagined Child was often displaced more tangibly onto other characters or symbols. In these French melodramas, there is also a clear thematic marriage between abortion and death; all of these films end with a death, of the woman who had the abortion or the (male) abortionist, except Une femme en blanc se révolte, which ends in an arrest. All of the deaths can be symbolically connected to guilt; they are, however, differentiated by their location of guilt. Whereas films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Alfie and Darling frame personal immorality or intemperate sexuality (male or female) as leading to death, the positioning of abortion within social contexts in the French melodramas suggests other sites of responsibility. Representations of death, in these cases, do less to mourn the imagined Child, and more to express the unliveability of the woman’s situation. Maternal and feminine subjectivities are an interesting question in these films. Women who have abortions are often depicted compassionately, and

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their backgrounds and circumstances explored, but they can also be disempoweringly hyper-victimized. This can be productively considered in light of generic particularities. All of the films discussed so far demonstrate significant melodramatic characteristics (I have in mind in particular the qualities of emotional excess, primarily domestic or interior settings, moral dilemmas and the thematization of suffering).34 Of particular relevance is melodrama’s typical foregrounding of the experience of victimhood, as noted by Thomas Elsaesser.35 In this light, despite the potential productiveness of sensitive and detailed explorations of women’s experiences, such depictions of tragically beautiful young women suffering (physically or emotionally) may be more cynically understood as using abortion as another catalytic device to narrativize the spectacle of female victimhood. As Jacqueline Rose has argued, ‘suffering motherhood, a mother bereft of her child, is also a staple of maternal imagos – Niobe lamenting the murder of her fourteen children, killed by jealous gods; and the Pietà, the Virgin Mary grieving the dead Christ, are two of the most well-known examples. But the mother must be noble and her agony redemptive.’36 That said, it is also possible to understand these films more generously through feminist theories of melodrama, which, despite acknowledging the problems of the genre, such as its dismissal as lowbrow37 or excess of feminine masochism,38 see it as one of the few traditional popular genres readily equipped to interpret female experience and to approach the viewer with a ‘specifically female address’.39 As E. Ann Kaplan argues in her theorization of melodrama, this mode offers opportunities to be both ‘“subversive” in presenting positive female-female bonding (particularly in the Mother-child relationship), or harmonious male-female mutual love’ and oppressive in its capacity to reaffirm ossifying expectations of femininity.40 I argue that in these cases, the melodramatic conventions do help to facilitate a greater identification with women’s experiences of abortion, sex and pregnancy, which usefully runs counter to the moralizing patriarchal discourses of anti-abortion politics or films focused on male sexuality. Significantly, whatever the outcome, the decision of whether to terminate or continue a pregnancy (in non-life-threatening conditions) is consistently represented as women’s choice; male partners, in these films, are barely involved in such processes, and are certainly not their emotional subjects. As Molly Haskell argues, the term ‘women’s film’ is often used pejoratively to dismiss women’s feelings as frivolous.41 However, this space can also be occupied subversively to focus on women’s psychologies and female relationships independently of patriarchal commentaries or focalization. This is most clearly present in Journal d’une femme en blanc. Whereas identificatory mechanisms in the British realist films left us peering through a misty kitchen window with Arthur Seaton, this film invites us inside the conspiratorial feminine space through Claude and Mariette’s growing inti-

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macy and mutual affection, Mariette’s candid confiding in Claude and Claude’s emotional intertwining in Mariette’s private life, including her visit to the site of the abortion to dispose of incriminating paraphernalia. Claude and Mariette’s relationship is essentially the film’s central romance, with Claude’s involvement with her colleague Pascal acting as a displacement of her emotional and sexual attraction to Mariette. The heterosexual relationship is only consummated at the emotional zenith of Claude’s concern for Mariette, and cools after the latter’s death. Before moving on to the rewriting of abortion representation in the New Wave, a few points are worth highlighting here. Firstly, the existence of even a few mainstream French films as early as the 1940s that feature abortion as their central plot theme is itself significant, especially in light of the vehemence of nationalist pronatalism within governmental rhetoric and policymaking. Even more striking is the depth of sympathy that these films seem quite openly to express for women undergoing or seeking abortions. Furthermore, the films take clear aim at the social structures responsible for the suffering and death that inevitably shadow criminalized abortion. In Des gens sans importance, this is poverty and class. In Le corbeau and Les mauvaises rencontres, however, the films make abortion the subject or key element of a police investigation that centrally structures the plot, allowing them to deliver a fairly open condemnation of the law itself. Both films begin by positioning an abortionist and his patient(s) as the subjects of investigation and persecution; the narrative then progresses by revealing more and more about these characters’ backgrounds and the circumstances under which their ‘crimes’ were committed. However, the conventional narrative structure of the detective plot, which has as its resolution the establishment of guilt around the central crime, is subverted: as the detective learns more about those who committed the central crimes, it is their moral innocence rather than their guilt that the films confirm. The guilt, meanwhile, is ultimately displaced onto the forces of the law, underscoring a moral reversal of the central figure from the stigmatized criminal of legal and political discourse to a heroic and wronged victim. Moving into the mid-1960s and the context of increasingly public campaigning for accessible contraception, Journal d’une femme en blanc and its sequel are particularly bold and unambiguous; through the protagonist’s interest in and discussion of feminist reproductive politics, the film is situated directly within the context of these contemporaneously active debates. However, while the boldness of these films is impressive, the terms of representation must be carefully considered. As suggested above, the aesthetic and in some cases political strategies of all of these films revolve around pathos. In making sure that their heroines who seek abortions are as irreproachably sympathetic as possible, the films shape them into extraordinary victims. By and large, therefore, the films empty reproductive femininity of any

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agency or prospect of empowerment and also ensure that these women are wholly defined (and often doomed) by the experience of abortion. While these films – unlike many of the British examples – resolutely locate the discourses of abortion as a matter of women’s bodies and subjectivities, these are discourses over which the women themselves have little apparent control. The treatment of abortion and contraception in the films of the French New Wave is vastly different to that of the melodramatic imagination. Whereas abortion in the French melodramas was always richly tragic, usually dramatically central and often politicized, references to abortion in the New Wave tend to be allusive rather than direct, and are typically incidental to rather than constitutive of the women’s characters. Elsewhere, I have linked this comparatively cool-headed and undramatic approach to an intensely polemical topic to the Cahiers group’s criticism of the film-à-thèse.42 This rejection of clear political didacticism and conventional dramatic structures means both that women’s emotional and physical suffering around abortion is not viscerally depicted – and therefore not spectacularized – and that abortion is to an extent removed from the realm of politics both conservative and feminist. As with the young British cinemas of the 1960s (the British New Wave and social realist and Swinging London cycles), it may be assumed that the French New Wave’s preoccupations with youth, sexuality and the everyday would eventually put it in the path of questions of contraception and unplanned pregnancy. However, while depictions of abortion in the British films became for some reviewers a tiresome trope and formulaic certificate of realist grit, these issues are rarely commented on in the French New Wave. Geneviève Sellier – one of the foremost feminist critics on the movement – argues that ‘allusions in the French films of this period to this taboo subject’ are rare.43 However, as I shall show, while references to abortion in the young French cinema of the 1960s are generally subtle and usually depoliticized, the subject actually appears more frequently here than in the cinemas of previous decades or in non-New Wave films of the same period, and occurs significantly within some of the major early films of the New Wave. It is interesting that the example Sellier uses here of a rare exception is a scene from Claude Chabrol’s Les cousins (1959). The film’s protagonist, Charles, is a naïve, provincial young man who moves to Paris, where he stays with his cousin and fellow law student, Paul, whose dissolute and hedonistic lifestyle – characterized by abundant and irresponsible sex and a fascination with violence – ultimately leads to the former’s death. The reference to an abortion occurs early on as the film is establishing the opposing characters of the two men. In this scene, as the infantilized Charles sits in his bedroom writing long letters to his mother, Paul is visited by Geneviève, a young woman whom he has recently slept with. She has discovered that she is pregnant and appears distraught. Rather than comforting her, Paul and his friend and pimp, Clovis, immediately

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set about coercing her into an abortion. The scene ends – in film noir-esque low-key lighting – with Paul asking Geneviève what choice she has and handing her money for the procedure despite her protestations. The term abortion is never mentioned, euphemized only by Clovis as a ‘mauvais moment’, but the reference is nonetheless made clear. However, the tone of this representation is in fact atypical among New Wave approaches to politically controversial issues. As I have discussed elsewhere,44 the main function of this scene is to concretely establish Paul’s irresponsible hedonism and interpersonal callousness. Chabrol therefore mobilizes abortion to concisely establish a moral universe in which Paul and Charles represent contrasting poles of cynical nihilism and hopeful innocence, and to prefigure Charles’s ultimate death as ‘le sacrifice de l’innocent’.45 As with films like Alfie, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, A Kind of Loving and Room at the Top, therefore, abortion and unplanned pregnancy are clearly represented, but are mainly invoked to construct an ethical framework in which the male protagonists operate. It is perhaps one of the least ambiguous allusions to abortion among the early films of the New Wave group, but this instance from Les cousins is also unusual for the movement in its moralizing overtones. Though less explicitly, there are also interesting discourses on abortion to be found in key New Wave films by Truffaut and Godard, as well as the first film by (the sadly lesser-known) Paula Delsol, which remove the issue from a conventionally moralized spectrum. I argue that while this depoliticizing approach is in some ways problematic for feminists (an issue later redressed in some of Varda’s films, particularly L’une chante, l’autre pas [1977]), it also offers potential ethical opportunities in its movement outside of the adversarial parameters of the contemporaneous legal debate over contraception and abortion in France, and in its lack of investment in the cinematic spectacle of the suffering maternal-feminine body. Though it is retrospective and not depicted, abortion is referenced directly in Truffaut’s debut feature, Les 400 coups. The first of what was to be a fivefilm cycle spanning Truffaut’s career, Les 400 coups introduces Antoine Doinel (the first appearance of a young Jean-Pierre Léaud, who would reprise the role in the subsequent four films and become one of the most familiar stars of the New Wave) as an alter ego for the director. The first film explores Antoine’s troubled but creative childhood in Paris. As is to be expected given the semi-autobiographical nature of the material and more generally the Cahiers group’s artistic and theoretical interests in ‘cinema in the first person’,46 the film maintains throughout an intense and intimate identification with Antoine. Presented as a bright and sensitive but misunderstood youth on the cusp of adolescence, Antoine runs into trouble with a number of institutions (parental authority, the school and finally the law). At the heart of all of this, however, are the frustrations, confusions and uncannily Oedipal complexities of the film’s

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central relationship between Antoine and his mother, Gilberte. For Antoine the suppressed but potentially very capable artist, his mother is simultaneously love object, subject matter and stumbling block. Antoine’s desire for her as both a function of motherliness and (disturbingly) a sexual object is profound, and Gilberte’s persistent rejection of him on both counts structures the film’s emotional drive. With the relationship between Antoine and Gilberte established as a fragmented series of conflicts and asymmetrical desires, the topic of abortion is raised late in the film. In the observation centre to which Antoine is sent for stealing a typewriter from his father’s office, he speaks with a (disembodied, female) psychologist to whom he readily offers up a series of ‘confessions’. One of these is that he has known for some time that his mother wanted an abortion while she was pregnant with him but was stopped by her own mother. The scenario of the son’s knowledge of his mother’s thwarted abortion recurs in Truffaut’s later film, L’homme qui amait les femmes (1977), which features another protagonist who bears uncanny similarities to Truffaut and a strikingly analogous Oedipal mother–son relationship. Before examining the instance in Les 400 coups in relation to New Wave stylistics and reproductive political discourses, it is worth outlining briefly a certain tendency in Truffaut’s attitudes to mothers and the maternal in this film and throughout his work. Though the narrative attention of Les 400 coups is clearly and pronouncedly centred on Antoine, the figure of the mother is at the psychological heart of the film. It bears emphasizing, however, that the mothering subject is not: Gilberte Doinel is present only as a term of filial meaning and self-narrativization. In this sense, the film’s maternal representations fall into a typical pattern of the ‘good’ or ‘bad’ mother representational binary; spectres of both poles are present in this film. Les 400 coups conforms to the archetypal cultural paradigm of the ‘split’ mother, a fantasy of maternalism as either ideal or terrible, with little complexity in between. Gilberte Doinel is, furthermore, the originating prototype for the gallery of dangerous and desirable maternal figures that were to populate a great many of Truffaut’s films. These portraits are perpetually drawn at a distance, inscrutable Jocastas profoundly incorporated into the psychological depths of the male protagonists, but made into objectified functions by these filial perspectives. In Les 400 coups, Gilberte is an almost purely relative figure, a proposition that is in this case supported amply by the mechanics of the film, as acknowledged by Diane Holmes and Robert Ingram: ‘In Truffaut’s first full-length film, the mother is seen only through the eyes of her son – as intensely desirable, emotionally and sexually, and as cruelly unattainable.’47 The fantasies of goodness and evil that underlie this maternal representation, mediated through the subjectivity of the son, both engender an absent mother. Antoine’s idealized mother image is without substance, existing (intellectually and physically) entirely in accordance with his desires. His ‘bad’ mother is too

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distant and is denigrated in absentia as cruel, vain and heinously neglectful, yet she does not seem to exist meaningfully outside of his gaze. As one of the foundational films of the New Wave, Les 400 coups has enjoyed a wealth of critical attention from a variety of perspectives, and, unsurprisingly, Truffaut’s representations of women and, to an only slightly lesser extent, the mother figure are prominent topics of debate therein. Many are what we might call ‘with the grain’ readings with regard to gender, taking him on his own terms to uncritically gloss themes such as the search for a maternal lover, or the man-as-artist versus woman-as-art formula that recurs frequently in his films, including in the Doinel cycle; for instance, Don Allen48 and Annette Insdorf 49 see women as numinous mother figures and potential sex objects as a central mystery to be consumed and explored in the director’s work. In keeping with the privileging of the filial perspective, many readings of Les 400 coups are markedly sympathetic to Antoine,50 thereby conspiring with the film’s dual movements of horror of and desire for the mother. Other commentators have turned towards criticism of Truffaut’s imbalanced representations of women and mothers (and women as mothers); Susan Hayward accuses him of scripting films that seek to ‘punish the (m)other for the absence of the father’,51 and Françoise Audé goes as far as to claim that ‘François Truffaut est devenu le cinéaste de la haine de la mère. De sa mère.’52 However, even some interpretations of Les 400 coups that explicitly focus on gender often end up speaking in collusion with the son. In Anne Gillain’s53 application of Winnicottian theory on childhood and delinquency to the film, for instance – though this is an interesting and novel approach – she ends up speaking in a fairly traditional psychoanalytic voice, suggesting the mother as little more than a function in the development of her child’s psyche. Similarly, Geneviève Sellier,54 despite using a feminist methodological structure that draws on Kristeva, Derrida and Irigaray, among others, agrees with Gillain that the ‘unloving mother’ is at the centre of Truffaut’s work and psychology, but does not much challenge the ‘bad mother’ construction. There has been markedly scant critical interest in the character of Gilberte as anything other than a catalytic function of Antoine’s/Truffaut’s narratives. It is telling, for instance, that Gilberte is referred to almost universally by critics only in possessive terms as ‘Antoine’s mother’ or ‘Madame Doinel’. The denigration of Gilberte and the invocation to identify with it are ossified by the fact that the film’s identification with Antoine is almost airtight; he is a psychologically rich character with clear depths of desire, frustrations, anxieties and inner experiences offered up for exploration over a five-film cycle, whereas Gilberte, by and large, is a function within this detailed characterization of Antoine, an emotionally opaque body onto which the film and its protagonist can project a complex but clearly one-sided symbolic discourse of motherhood. The film, therefore, orbits around a desire for the maternal, but not of it. This

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considered, we may expect the discussion of Gilberte’s attempted abortion to be substantially more dramatic and condemnatory than it in fact is. Of course, given the generally cathecting-reviling tone that the film – and Truffaut’s work generally – takes towards mothers, the possibility of reading this scene as an appalled accusation towards Gilberte cannot be discounted. This is certainly the interpretation taken by many critics, who furthermore collude with the film in reading this as a key gesture of callous maternal aggression directed towards Antoine; Holmes and Ingram even go so far as to connect this with a more generalized feminine appetite for the murder of men, arguing that the ‘thwarted desires of Madame Doinel, Madame Morane [of L’homme qui aimait les femmes] (and possibly Madame Truffaut?) to abort their sons are realized on screen through the repeated murders of men by women’.55 I argue against these perspectives firstly that such insistence on viewing abortion solely through the perspective of the male child overlooks an important subtext of women’s experiences, and secondly that the attribution of wilful murderous violence through the symbolic contents of abortion goes much too far. These views in fact import vestiges of anti-choice ideological rhetoric familiar from political debates, but not actually presented by the film itself. The scene in which Antoine reveals his knowledge of his mother’s attempted abortion in his interview with the female psychologist can potentially be read (somewhat against the grain) as one of the few moments in which a little of Gilberte’s subjectivity slips out through the usually tight grip of filial objectification. The other such moment within the film is Gilberte and Antoine’s chance encounter in the street. This scene occurs at the end of a sequence in which Antoine and his friend René are truanting and enjoying themselves at a fairground – which features the film’s famous rotor sequence – and roaming the streets of Paris. As they reach Place de Clichy, the carefree, childishly gleeful sequence and airy filming style composed of wide, open shots and long takes are jarringly interrupted with a series of hard cuts between Antoine and Gilberte as he catches sight of her, dressed in glamorous furs and kissing another man in the street. Possible sympathetic interpretations of her affair may or may not exist (after all, we are shown the Doinels’ marriage only through Antoine’s perspective), but are seemingly of no interest. Jean Collet describes this scene: la trahison de la mère enferme Antoine dans sa propre trahison. La mère s’évade avec son amant, Antoine doit trouver lui aussi une évasion, il doit quitter le cercle familial qui vient d’éclater. Il est condamné à fuir dans un mouvement centrifuge qui s’emballe. Comme si la paroi du rotor venait de céder, projetant l’enfant dans l’espace et dans le vide, très loin.56

Collet convincingly emphasizes the symmetry of this encounter between mother and son. In this respect, this could be read as a rare moment in which we come to

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Gilberte’s interiority; after all, the aesthetic parallel between the two, both startled and caught off guard in an illicit activity of rebellion or escape in the shot/ reverse shot, is clear and pointed. The cinematographic mirroring might suggest a deeper psychological comparison; we have been readily offered insight into the emotional significance of rebellion and escape for Antoine, and we might at this stage interpret Gilberte’s experience through his. Anne Gillain, in fact, (briefly) does just this, suggesting that she might be understood as ‘like her son, an imprisoned child who longs to roam the streets of Paris with her lover’.57 This is the first time that the film’s (Antoine’s film’s) perspective collides with the mother’s, and the sudden shift in cinematography and editing style mean that the collision is abrupt and jarring. By contrast, the filmic language of the sequence in which Antoine talks to the psychologist about his mother and her desire for an abortion is soft. The interview is composed of long, static takes of Antoine, edited together with occasional cross-fades. The mention of abortion occurs mid-sequence, and the understated stylistics do not change: there is no sense of rupture as there is in the scene in the street. Abortion is therefore not framed here as a dramatic or deeply politicized revelation, but as simply one of a number of factors and fragments that characterize Antoine and Gilberte’s relationship. Pushing further, it may even be seen as a second moment in which the film offers some tentative insight into Gilberte’s complex relationship to Antoine, alongside the film’s preoccupation with the reverse. The film also passes no moral judgement on abortion itself; women who have or attempt abortions are not monstrous, heroic or tragic, and they are also not remarkable – the unwanted child and the imperfect mother are existential facts of Truffaut’s apolitical everyday. It must be emphasized, of course, that this scene is at best a moment of slippage in a film that is overall inescapably mother-hating. However, this allusion does mark a significant turn in representing abortion as high tragedy. This morally defused and undramatic approach can be identified more broadly in Godard’s early- to mid-1960s films. In this first period of his film-making before his explicitly Marxist turn in the late 1960s, sex, relationships, youth and sexualized duels between men and women are pre-eminent themes within Godard’s work. His concerns with relationality and reproduction within this context are distinctly sexual rather than intergenerational. In contrast to Truffaut’s ubiquitous maternal spectres or the protagonists of the British kitchen sink cycle who rebel against but are nonetheless rooted within their home lives, Godard’s young protagonists are often a-familial: independent modern youths who prowl around Paris with no superficial material or emotional parental baggage. Abortion and pregnancy occur in these early films not as historical issues or intergenerational warfare, but as matter within the fullness of the contemporary moment – not an issue of public morality or commentary on nationhood, but bound up in the everyday practices and expressions of youth heterosexualities.

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As I discussed in Chapter 2, Godard’s relationship to representations of women is a complex one. His films are emphatically well versed in the semiotics of women’s (erotic) objectification, but the lines between critique and complicity are always extremely tangled. Godard’s is, as Mulvey aptly puts it, ‘a deepseated, but interesting, misogyny’.58 Discourses of pregnancy, contraception and (potential) motherhood in his early films tend towards representing these themes as significant subtexts of youth sexualities, but also as belonging to a half-hidden sphere of feminine knowledge that remains numinous, unspoken and perhaps unspeakable. On the other hand, for all of these films’ patriarchal voyeurism, it is important and interesting that they do not eroticize the suffering female body in relation to abortion or pregnancy as do the melodramas discussed above. Discourses of motherhood are buried deeper under the surface in Godard’s early films than they are in the melodramas, yet they can emerge in interesting ways. Of particular significance here are such discourses within Godard’s first two features, À bout de souffle (1960) and Une femme est une femme (1961), and the mid-decade Masculin féminin (1966). The undramatic allusions to contraception, pregnancy and abortion in these films opened up fresh and potentially productive space in which these issues could be represented outside of formulaic polemicism and – more importantly – away from the moralizing narrative of the woman’s inevitable death or disgrace. As I have argued in the introduction to this book and elsewhere,59 the two alternative titles for Masculin féminin (or The Children of Marx and Coca-Cola) situate the film’s interests squarely within sex and gender relations within the commercial and political tides of contemporary French youth culture. The film, and Godard’s work in this period generally, have been appositely described as ‘anti-narrative’,60 collage61 or ‘décollage’,62 and certainly, Masculin féminin takes the form of an irreverent and fragmentary palette of images, ideas and concerns rather than a conventionally motivated narrative. The film satirizes such formulaic and epistemologically sealed film-making by promising and then persistently failing to deliver a controlled and tidily numbered ethnography of the apparently sexually and politically active Parisian youth. Much like the ambling surveys Paul conducts on various women, the film produces no clear, stable knowledge on either sex or politics; objective meaning is always tantalizingly escaping from the frame of representation. Paul, for his part, wanders haphazardly through the film colliding with disparate narrative morsels, and remains as clueless about diaphragms as he is about demonstrations. As described by Joel Haycock, the film is ‘conscientiously unspectacular in subject matter and presentation’.63 In step with this playful formal anarchism and shrugging off of the moral didacticism of the film-à-thèse, the allusion to abortion in Masculin féminin disrupts conventional discourses. Madeleine’s pregnancy is not mentioned until the final scene; prior to this, pregnancy is

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only alluded to by her friend as a possibility Madeleine fears in her relationship with Paul – a suggestion that he, with a blunt lack of gendered empathy, finds absurd. In the last scene, Madeleine’s possible pregnancy is raised almost conterminously with her possible abortion, and the structural and aesthetic choices made here work against morally charged and teleological abortion narratives. The scene takes place after Paul’s death (a bizarre fall from a tower block, the provenance of which as meaningless accident or unexplained suicide is left ambiguous), subverting the moral logic by which death or demise ineluctably follow the representation of abortion. Its positioning at the end of the film also leaves the outcome open-ended, resisting any discourses of finality. The aesthetics of the scene are similarly undramatic: reminiscent of Antoine’s interview in which he mentions his mother’s desired abortion, a static shot puts Madeleine face-on with the camera as she is interviewed by an unseen policeman. Within a series of questions to Madeleine and Catherine, in which we learn of Paul’s death, the officer relays that he has been told that Madeleine is pregnant, and asks her what she will do next. She replies: ‘I’m not sure. I don’t know … Elisabeth mentioned curtain rods … I’m not sure.’ As Phillip John Usher points out, ‘La question du fonctionnaire aurait pu s’interpréter comme “Comment allez-vous vous en sortir, comment pourrez-vous continuer votre carrière?” mais Madeleine pense tout de suite au choix avorter/garder l’enfant’.64 However, this is not entirely accurate: the question for Madeleine is not that of whether to abort the foetus, but of how she might achieve this. The ambivalence of this scene in terms of style, structure and scripting, as well as the indeterminacy of the last lines, means that it emerges as a possible counter-discourse to the tight polemicism of abortion narratives in the melodramatic films and political debates. The legal discourse familiar from earlier films and political framings of the issue is also playfully dismissed, as Madeleine openly muses on abortion methods in conversation with a police officer, with only a sense of practical rather than ethical or jurisprudential conundrum. Madeleine is, significantly, not defined and not doomed by this scene within the constantly fluid terms of the film. Madeleine’s pregnancy and abortion are both also literally de-spectacularized in that neither is shown. These are in fact two further instances of conventionally dramatic or titillating plot points that the film refuses to make visible. Others include Paul’s death, the Vietnam War protester who borrows Paul’s cigarette lighter and sets fire to himself off-screen, any images of the war itself, the strikes and industrial actions the men read about, the implied lesbian relationship between Madeleine and Elisabeth,65 and any clear sexual contact between Paul and Madeleine. All of these are alluded to within the film, but not made into spectacular visual matter. Also ‘unseen’ within the film is the paraphernalia of contraception, which is referred to as a somewhat mystical

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sphere of feminine practices and knowledge beyond the understanding of men like Paul and Robert. Even the language around contraception is foreign and impenetrable: in her conversation with Paul about his sex life, Catherine refers to her own usage of a ‘scoobydoo’, which Elisabeth was brought by ‘an Air France guy’ – it may or may not be of subtle intertextual relevance that Michel Poiccard, the chauvinistic protagonist of À bout de souffle, is referred to as a ‘former steward on Air France’.66 Although Madeleine is scared of the device, the suggestion is that reproductive and contraceptive knowledge is shared between women in off-screen homosocial space. In Godard’s earlier film Une femme est une femme, the implied space of women’s shared reproductive discourses and intimacies is represented as a literal backstage. In a striking stylistic departure from his debut, Godard’s second feature is a parodic musical comedy, shot in colour and based around a satirical take on reproductive attitudes between a young heterosexual Parisian couple. The film centres on Angela (Anna Karina), a striptease artist who is determined to have a baby. After measuring her fertility with a device given to her by her female colleagues, she determines that she must become pregnant within the next twenty-four hours, and when her live-in partner, Émile ( Jean-Claude Brialy, who also played Paul in Les cousins), proves less than enthusiastic, she goes about seducing his best friend, Alfred ( Jean-Paul Belmondo, famously the male lead of À bout de souffle). The two main locations of action within the film are the couple’s flat and the Zodiac, the strip club at which Angela works. The scenes at the Zodiac are divided into two distinct sets and spheres of activity: the front stage area is organized intently around the erotic male gaze, in which men sit at dimly lit tables watching the women vocally and physically perform campy striptease fantasies. Backstage, however, is represented as an almost exclusively female space (aside from one conspicuously graceless manager who, perhaps, draws attention to the intrusive aspect of Godard’s camera), and it is within this space that the women share experiences of, advice on and physical instruments to help control conception. Of course, there is an obvious dissonance here between the film’s content and its contemporary moment, as Angela and all of her female colleagues are keenly sharing tips on how to become pregnant, when – as shown at the beginning of this chapter – a great many young French women were keenly pursuing ways to avoid pregnancy. Geneviève Sellier criticizes the film on this point: ‘The problem of the women in [Une femme est une femme] is having a baby, whereas for the majority of women in France the problem was how to avoid having babies at a time when both contraception and abortion were against the law. In this respect as well, a male viewpoint prevails.’67 However, I suggest that the film’s representation of reproductive desire is perhaps not this straightforward, nor this pronatalist. Firstly, it should certainly

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be emphasized that the film’s treatment of romantic and sexual relationships is thoroughly steeped in parody, and all stereotypically gendered attitudes to reproduction are clearly satirized; this satire is in fact only further animated by the discord between the ongoing governmental climate of pronatalism and the widely anti-natalist behaviours of the French youth in this period. For Godard to make a musical comedy about abortion or even contraception for his second feature film within the legal climate of the early 1960s in France would have been extraordinary; but in making a film whose farcical plot is based around fertility, he is still representing women’s reproductive self-determination. As modelled in the duality between the ‘showroom’ of the staging area in the Zodiac club and its ‘hidden’ backstage, play between the seen and the unseen is thematically and stylistically central to Une femme est une femme. The issue of superficial images and their undersides in Godard’s work has been explored in some depth by Laura Mulvey. She sees the form of a pleasant and/or illusory surface containing a turbulent and complex interior as a structural motif in Godard’s films, deployed at different points to comment on such ‘questions’ as women, commodity forms and cinema itself. She argues: I have tried to show how a common topographical structure facilitates the construction of analogies which, although changing in content, are central to the structure of Godard’s ideas. It is, perhaps, as though analogy were enabled by homology. The image of an exterior casing protecting an interior space or contents from view usually carries with it the implication that if the exterior cracks, the interior contents may disgust and possibly harm. From a psychoanalytic point of view, the protective surface is a defence constructed by the ego along the lines of a fetish. It denies the interior but because it knows the exterior is an exterior it thus acknowledges the interior.68

Mulvey’s theory on this point has been developed in an interesting direction by Caroline Rupprecht, who takes these ideas to identify ‘womb imagery’ in Godard’s films, specifically in relation to their representations of pregnant women. Rupprecht argues that ‘Godard uses womb imagery … to test the limits of representation in his medium, posing the question of what can or cannot be represented, and by focusing his camera on what appears to be an impenetrable surface’.69 As is often the case in Godard’s work, the equation of the female body with the occult, the deceptive or the inscrutable identified by both Mulvey and Rupprecht could certainly be read as reanimating familiar misogynistic tropes. Equally, however, there are grounds on which we could read this use of unseeing and unsaying – at least insofar as it relates to discourses of motherhood, pregnancy and contraception – along Irigarayan lines as indicating a space of productive privacy, attentive to the specificity of the experiences of women and pregnant subjects. Rupprecht argues that Godard’s anti-representation of preg-

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nancy ‘could either be a deliberate move or an in-ability to come to terms with the fact that pregnancy may represent the last frontier of privacy for the female subject’.70 She therefore suggests a tone of bewilderment within these representational choices; we may, however, also identify this distance from the pregnant, mothering or reproductive female subject as a gesture of self-awareness on the part of Godard and the film. To understand this potential self-awareness further, we must look to a further, intertextual ‘unseen’ or partly seen in Une femme est une femme: the references to Agnès Varda’s 1958 short film L’opéra-mouffe. This experimental short was made by Varda during her first pregnancy, and it is preoccupied with the abundant and diverse experiences of pregnancy, and the disjunction between the subjectivities of pregnancy and motherhood and the various cultural discourses that attempt to contrive and contain it as objective knowledge. L’opéramouffe uses the body and sense experience – undermining the primacy of visual comprehension, the reliability of which the film calls playfully into question – as central devices in its counter-discursive representation of mothering subjectivity. Made while Varda was pregnant and interested in exploring that experience in art, the short film uses stimuli from the local area (the rue Mouffetard in Paris) and fantastical images to produce a subjective account of pregnancy, motherhood and their formation in everyday society. Flitterman-Lewis describes Varda’s filming process around the rue Mouffetard: ‘In the course of this she became an ordinary fixture of the Mouffetard quarter, as common as the vegetable and shellfish hawkers, the Baudelairean flaneur absorbing and observing Parisian street life.’71 Varda’s physical presence as the ‘unseen, pregnant filmmaker’ is important in establishing an embodied viewpoint to which the filmed subjects react,72 and the filmed bodies, including the pregnant actor (who is not Varda), significantly create a corporeal consciousness in the film, but it is also an intersubjective viewing experience that implicates the bodies of the audience as well as those on the screen. The images offered tend to invite perceptual rather than narrative comprehension, foregrounding the viewer’s subjective reaction to the film as much as Varda’s subjective account of her pregnancy. There are many affects suggested in Varda’s various portrayals of maternity and motherhood, and no ‘right’ way to respond to them; her film-making is highly personal, but not jealously so – it invites participation and can change with each reception. Varda often makes films at an ironic distance from the images of pregnancy and motherhood that she and her actors are performing, though this irreverent attitude is not always recognized. In making critical use of the gaze and the body, L’opéra-mouffe does not attempt to replace one essentialist discourse with another, but – quite conversely – light-heartedly dismantles the idea that it is at all possible to encapsulate the idea of motherhoods as a single experience. L’opéra-mouffe uses highly subjective and perceptual expres-

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sions of mothering experiences alongside images that are more or less drag performances of pregnancy and motherhood, accentuating the stereotyping and reductive qualities of the narratives that are inscribed onto that same subjective body, with a knowing wink. The intertext with this mercurial, counter-discursive and richly personal film therefore suggests that Une femme est une femme points beyond its own borders of representation to questions of mothering subjectivities and irreducibly diverse experiences of pregnancy. The way in which the intertext is produced is also significant, as Varda’s film is in several senses both seen and unseen. It also first appears fairly precisely at the centre of the film (forty-two minutes into a feature of one hour and twenty-four minutes), becoming a playfully frustrating thematic fulcrum that obscures as much or more than it reveals. At this point in the plot, Émile and Alfred have stormed out of the flat in a moment of misogynistic camaraderie. In their absence, Angela mimes pregnancy by stuffing a pillow under her shirt and posing in front of a mirror. The men, meanwhile, meet with two of Angela’s colleagues from the Zodiac club at a café, though Émile soon gets up and leaves. In a reverse shot, the sound briefly cuts out and Alfred and the two women are shown through a window from the outside; Alfred pulls back the curtain and the three characters crane to look at something (unseen) out of the window. This shot is followed by an image with no narrative integration: a television set is shown in what appears to be an electronics shop, surrounded by televisions and radios. The foregrounded set is the only one that is on, and its screen shows a tableau from early in L’opéramouffe in which a naked woman lies on a bed admiring herself in a mirror. An argument between Émile and Angela is heard on the soundtrack; the sound of their voices continues as the film cuts between a synchronized scene of the couple arguing outside a Lancôme cosmetics store, back to the television set – now showing a clip from near the end of L’opéra-mouffe in which an exhausted middle-aged woman walks along the street dragging bags of shopping – and back to the couple once more. The sequence is then symmetrically concluded by returning to the shot from outside the café, showing Alfred and the two women still craning to see behind the curtain. We are now, however, even more uncertain of exactly what the three characters are straining (and failing) to see: perhaps Varda’s short film, on the television set that may or may not be diegetic? The public argument between their friends? The presence or non-presence of pregnancy? Or something else, falling entirely outside of the frame of the film’s representation? L’opéra-mouffe itself – much like Varda’s own pregnant body within this work – constitutes a further ‘unseen’: two clips are shown from disparate, non-consecutive points in the short film, but they are neither narratively integrated nor introduced. Identifying the film at all requires pre-existing knowledge; Godard also chooses

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to draw on two fairly abstract clips rather than any of the film’s several clear depictions of pregnant bodies, meaning that the central thematic of pregnancy is further obscured to the suggestive rather than the explicit. This irreverently elusive play between the seen and the unseen, as well as the performance of straining and unsatisfied looking led by Belmondo, articulate central structural and thematic discourses of the film. Rupprecht argues that Godard’s depictions of pregnant women draw attention to the paradoxical nature of pregnancy as an invisible ‘presence’ beyond the surface. The pregnant belly … functions like a screen; and Godard’s depictions of it turn the female body, literally, into a camera – drawing attention to his own control as a director rather than the ‘mystery’ of the female body he seems to emphasize.73

The (ocular-)epistemological ambiguity initiated here by the sign of the pregnant body – or, as is the case with regard to both Angela and the unseen pregnancies in the Varda citation, the possibly pregnant body – also recalls, to some extent, Melanie Klein’s work developing Freud’s ‘femininity phase’. Freud initially conceptualized the ‘femininity phase’ in boys as a pre-Oedipal moment in which they identify strongly with their mother, yet this idea remained somewhat minor and peculiar in his work, and was greatly overshadowed by the attention given to the genital instantiation of the Oedipus conflict. Klein returns to this phase as the male equivalent of the castration complex in girls. Rather than both sexes experiencing anxiety or envy over the supposedly superior male organ, Klein argues that boys experience an equally powerful epistemophilic impulse and drive towards the womb and its creative capacity to generate children; ‘on account of his wish for a child he feels himself at a disadvantage and inferior to the mother.’74 Against Freud’s ‘penis envy’, then, it may be reasonable to conceptualize ‘womb envy’ in boys. The girl still experiences ‘penis envy’, yet since both sexes, in Klein’s argument, are in a position of having and lacking, of envying and being envied, this does not automatically place her at such a disadvantage as Freud might have imagined. There is, however, an important difference that does create a potential (but imaginary) hierarchy between the genders in the fact that while boys actually do ‘possess’ the special organ, girls’ special object in the creative and mothering womb is as yet only imminent. We might understand this as being further emphasized in relation to genital castration anxiety; boys fear castration by the father for desiring the mother, and girls fear the internal destruction of their womb and capacity for motherhood. Therefore, whereas the boy can prove to himself physically that he has not yet been castrated, the girl can in her childhood not be entirely certain that she has not already been irreparably damaged. Klein further suggests that this different access to validation precipitates a generalized overvaluation of the penis

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and ocularcentrism.75 The sign of feminine power, meanwhile, is relegated to a space of uncertainty. This ambivalence can be leveraged to shore up misogynistic dismissals of women’s subjectivities, but cannot entirely dispel a lingering anxiety, reflected here in the characters’ straining – and failing – to see, to know and thereby to contain the imminently reproductive body. The partly seen therefore becomes a symbolic structure for representing both cultural discourses and lived experiences of (women’s) fertility. As well as Rupprecht’s suggestion of pregnancy, this duality works well for exploring discourses of contraception within the context of early-1960s France, in which a pronatalist public discourse disguises covert private practices of actively avoiding or terminating pregnancy. Building on the ideas of Rupprecht and Mulvey, I suggest that not only are Godard’s representations of pregnancy and reproductivity structured around seeing and unseeing, but that the ‘scene’ of reproductive discourse conceals an ‘unscene’: a set of events or ideas that are not depicted, but whose non-depiction impresses their imminence. Rupprecht describes the modelling of gendered seen and unseen structures in the front- and backstage spaces in Une femme est une femme: ‘Angéla’s public performances seduce the audience, not only in the club but also as part of the film itself. Maternity, in contrast, is allowed to take place only as a private fantasy, or backstage, behind the scene.’76 She argues that this spatial dynamic and the use Godard makes of it ‘juxtaposes the sexualized workplace to a more normal, everyday life as a mother, where men are not part of the equation’,77 but also suggests that within this binarism, ‘Godard does not truly question gender roles, he only pokes fun at them to reinforce, not challenge, preexisting stereotypes’.78 However, the frontstage versus backstage movement is not the only tension at work here; though these spaces are constituted as gender-coded seens and unseens within the film, Godard’s camera and the full diversity of the film’s audiences are invited equally inside both. Front- and backstage are synthesized as ‘stage’, suggesting that pregnancy and motherhood as they are represented within this film are just as highly performed as the eroticism of the stripteases. Both spaces, therefore, constitute the film’s ‘seen/scene’. I argue, however, that this collective ‘scene’ – which is characterized by excessive performances of femininity, and which taken alone, as Rupprecht rightly suggests, reduces femininity to a limited set of unreal options – masks an ‘unscene’ of liberal reproductive discourse. The women’s homosocial space in which reproductive expression is located is hidden from the scene of sexuality within Une femme est une femme, but can still be denoted in film, so long as that reproductive discussion falls ostensibly within the fantasized realm of simplified maternal desires with which patriarchal politics are broadly comfortable (that is, the pronatalist, misogynistic fantasy that all women desire children). Yet in this subversive and playful comedy of ambivalence, it is certainly plau-

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sible that the ‘scene’ in which the women discuss how to achieve conception masks an ‘unscene’ of how to avoid it. The focus on conception is marked so excessively that the negative space around it becomes useful: if the knowledge of one’s own fertility cycles afforded by the device Angela’s friends give her can be used to maximize the chances of pregnancy, then of course the opposite is equally true. The exaggerated and self-conscious ‘scene’ of desired conception therefore makes imminent a far more radical ‘unscene’ of contraceptive practices shared between women, which, as Sellier emphasizes, was far more likely to have occupied a space such as this. Both Rupprecht and Mulvey also discuss the importance of seen and unseen structures and gender dynamics within À bout de souffle. Though the film is ostensibly an homage to the Hollywood gangster movie, it is famously unusual in its inclusion of a substantial central segment that dwells entirely within a lackadaisical interaction between Poiccard (Belmondo) and Patricia ( Jean Seberg) as Poiccard hides out from the police in Patricia’s apartment. Douglas Morrey argues that the tendency established here ‘to balance his generic action narratives with extraordinarily long sequences representing the domestic life of a couple is one that … characterizes the whole of the first period of Godard’s career’.79 Rupprecht is interested in this lengthy scene, in which the couple hide (unseen) from the paternal discipline of the law, for its references to motherhood and pregnancy, which are both explicit and implied. In the most straightforward sense, this scene is the only point in the film at which Patricia’s (possible) pregnancy is referred to directly. On a symbolic level, however, Rupprecht also identifies Patricia’s room as itself a uterine space: While Godard does not show the actual interior of the womb, he creates a sense of confinement in this scene – it is the scene where the actors discuss their relationship based on Patricia’s revelation that she is pregnant. The scene seems to go on endlessly, as if they were stuck in time as well as in space. While not relevant to the plot, it constitutes the central part of the film and overshadows most other parts of the story.80

The environmental imagery therefore comes to connote a discourse of unseen pregnancy and a motherhood that may or may not materialize. Rupprecht’s inside versus outside duality is located between the womblike interior of Patricia’s flat and the public exterior of the Parisian streets. However, this binary is problematized by a further spatial division within the flat; further to Rupprecht’s argument, I suggest that the bedroom and bathroom constitute distinct spheres of action, and are tangibly gender-coded. The bedroom is the space in which Michel appears to feel most comfortable: in this area he is able to drive his own stories forward, make decisions and talk about himself. Through the telephone the room also offers a connection to the outside and the external, patriarchal

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world of the gangster film; from the bed, Michel is able to make contact with his associates and progress his individual narrative. This story also belongs within a hypermasculine genre; Michel makes it clear that Patricia has no active part in this world when he sneeringly explains that his mention on a phone call of ‘une americaine’ refers not to her but to the stolen car he is trying to offload, also clearly identifying women with attractive and possibly dangerous commodity objects. By contrast, the bathroom is a space that Michel enters only briefly and uneasily. Here, Patricia and her concerns tend to be foregrounded. It is also the only location in which her pregnancy is mentioned overtly. Throughout the lengthy central sequence within Patricia’s flat, the bathroom is entered twice, and both moments are significantly connected to pregnancy. In keeping with the thematization of translucence (the ambiguous space between the seen and the unseen) associated with Godard’s representations of pregnancy, the staging of the scene uses Michel’s billowing cigarette smoke and the reflections in the bathroom mirror to trouble any sense of clear vision (also playing literally on the idiom ‘smoke and mirrors’). On the first of the two occasions, Patricia tells Michel that she is pregnant. His reaction is sexist and cavalier: after a brief pause, he responds that she should have been more careful. Compounding the relegation of pregnancy and contraception to the ambit of women’s sole problem and responsibility, Michel then almost immediately retreats to the bedroom, in which Patricia’s pregnancy is squashed back down to subtext. When Patricia follows him there, the action and conversation has changed entirely and Michel is making his phone call, his masculine narrative clearly unmoved by her revelation. Three minutes later (in both film time and real time, which coincide throughout this sequence), he follows her back into the bathroom. It is only here that the conversation returns to the question of pregnancy. Michel is aggressively dismissive, stating simply that having a child is a stupid idea; she responds that it is not yet certain and that she only wanted to see what he would say, after which he asks her to take off her clothes, makes some generalizing comments about Americans and then returns to the bedroom to make another phone call. The pregnancy is therefore verbally discussed only within the space of the bathroom, which is in turn depicted only in a mirror image, and Michel’s hasty retreats to the bedroom reconfigure the dialogue, focus and cinematography, which then centre on his own interests of sex, crime and death. The bathroom is therefore the space in which the ‘unscene’ of Patricia’s pregnancy and reproductive choices emerge briefly from subtext. Following Michel’s second and final departure from the bathroom, the camera remains with Patricia (or at least her reflection in the bathroom mirror), although we hear Michel’s voice on the soundtrack, discussing ‘une americaine’ with an associate on the telephone. Patricia’s actions in the mirror in this shot are ambiguous and interesting. Overlaid by Michel’s disembodied voice, her

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reflection is filmed surrounded by cigarette smoke on the left side of the screen; she brushes her hair and preens in the mirror, then counts uncertainly to ten on her fingers, and makes an expression of apparent distress. She then covers her face with her hands, with ten fingers showing; she hides and uncovers her face twice, and then – as Michel speaks the words ‘une americaine’ – smiles, performs a playful military salute and says ‘dis-missed!’. There is no clear explanation for these gestures. However, considering the association of the space with pregnancy, Patricia’s counting on her fingers and subsequent worried expression can be read as tracking her menstrual cycle, determining how far into her term she is, or the number of weeks since she last slept with Michel. The hiding and revealing of her face also identifies this scene with indeterminacy of vision and knowledge. While she does not analyse this scene in detail, Rupprecht also locates Patricia’s pregnancy as symbolically central to the film: ‘Patricia’s pregnancy, while featured repeatedly (in the hotel, she tells Michel that she is pregnant) does not figure as part of the film’s overall story … . Far from extraneous, however, I believe that the pregnancy exemplifies the condition of indeterminacy Godard seeks to investigate throughout the film.’81 I argue that Patricia’s gestures in this shot can also be read as implying an ‘unscene’ of reproductive subjectivity, and specifically, as her decision-taking over the outcome of her pregnancy. As I suggested above, pregnancy – and unplanned pregnancy in particular – is a moment of ambivalence, a gestative moment not only literally, but existentially, in which the pregnant subject may or may not consider herself a mother or becoming-a-mother. Patricia’s action here marks the ambivalence of that moment, and also suggests her consideration of whether to continue or abort the pregnancy, ending with the decisiveness of her final salute and utterance, ‘dismissed!’ Rupprecht suggests that ‘Patricia is pregnant by Michel and contemplates having an abortion, but the viewer never learns what she decides to do’.82 This contemplation and the possibility of Patricia’s abortion are not made explicit; Richard Neupert even implies that the topic all but vanishes as motivational content, claiming that Patricia ‘tells Michel she is pregnant, curious to see his reaction, but she never uses the pregnancy, or his reaction, as a motive for any of her subsequent actions’83 – a point contested by Rupprecht. However, along with Patricia’s gestures in the mirror, there are moments in the film that can be taken to further speak to an ‘unscene’ of reproductive subjectivity. The first of these is the film’s only explicit allusion to abortion, which occurs several scenes prior to Patricia’s mention of her pregnancy. Patricia meets a friend, Van Doude, who like her is an American journalist, though older and far better established. He foists on her a book he has recommended and cryptically intimates that he hopes she will not end up like the heroine. When she asks why, he replies, ‘Well, she doesn’t want a child, but the operation is unsuccessful and she dies’, before lowering his sunglasses and – returning to French – adding, ‘C’est très triste si

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ça vous arriver’.84 Patricia replies with a non-committal ‘On verra’85 and changes the subject to the topic of her more general malaise. The conversation is rich in layers of subtext and unspoken transaction. Van Doude’s demeanour and the power dynamics between the pair imply the possibility of sexual favours exchanged for professional opportunities. Moreover, Van Doude’s reference to the tragedy of unsafe abortion operations (reminiscent of those depicted in the earlier melodramas) both reminds Patricia of the potential vulnerability of her position and may even suggest that he has the means to arrange an equally illegal but more expensive and somewhat safer option. This exchange, therefore, functions to raise the spectre of abortion in anticipation of Patricia’s subsequent mention of her pregnancy. However, the ‘tragedy’ of abortion and the drama of the suffering female body are displaced to a work of unseen fiction; the suggestions made by Van Doude in fact position abortion not as a uniquely melodramatic moment, but as commonplace. It is represented as an expected concern of young, sexually active women, which also, disturbingly, becomes yet another device by which men exercise control over women through evoking the visceral horrors of backstreet abortions. Though this is the film’s only (relatively) direct allusion to abortion, and Patricia’s pregnancy is never mentioned outside of the two scenes in her bathroom mirror, critics have identified this implied, undepicted series of events as possible motivation for Patricia’s unexplained betrayal of Michel to the police. David Sterritt touches on this idea when he writes that ‘Later she caves in with surprising speed (or maybe not so surprising, after the pregnancy scene) when a cop confronts her and demands her cooperation’.86 Fiona Handyside develops this inference more fully to connect it with a gesture towards feminist and reproductive politics in which Michel has no interest or understanding, and which Godard’s films of the early 1960s (perhaps self-consciously) do not penetrate. Her reading is worth citing at length: Patricia thus slips beyond the masks of cinematic illusion that Michel enjoys. She moves into socio-political reality first with her T-shirt, and then into feminist reality with her pregnancy, which Michel dismisses with a callous ‘you should have been more careful’. It is after Michel has dismissed his role in her pregnancy that Patricia declares: ‘I don’t want to be in love with you’. At the moment when representation begins to fracture in the play of smoke and mirrors, so too does Patricia’s belief in the relationship between men and women. She forces Michel to leave by betraying him to the police. She wants to leave the romantic, idealized cinematic boy-girl, Bogart-Bacall relationship, the reality of which is her pregnancy and her dependence, and Michel’s insouciance and irresponsibility. Patricia thus operates as a subject in the public sphere of (nascent) feminist and political knowledge as well as a spectacle.87

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Handyside therefore identifies an incipient feminist politics in the subtleties and silences of Patricia’s representation in À bout de souffle. Working against the surface depiction of her – which focuses on her numinous sexuality and treachery, and is often essentializing – I argue that an ‘unscene’ of reproductive subjectivity can be mapped through Patricia and, as Handyside suggests, claimed for feminist interest. However, although reproductive rights were already high on the agenda of feminist philosophers and activists like Beauvoir at this point, the campaign had yet to grow to the full-blown mass movement it would become in France. In 1960, Patricia is still a decade away from significant legal change and the activist landmarks of the early 1970s. She thus remains isolated in her reproductive counter-discourse; as Handyside argues, ‘Seberg’s [and Patricia’s] modernity had come too soon’.88 Godard’s observance during this period of the New Wave’s broad aesthetic stance against the film-à-thèse and his predominantly masculine-identified focalization mean that his pre-1968 films contain no direct engagement with the politics of abortion, contraception and motherhood. However, the coded and fragmentary ways in which these ideas emerge (or perhaps more accurately, submerge) as that which I have called the ‘unscene’ meaningfully speak to a calmed and perhaps proto-liberal approach to representing abortion that diverges substantially from the intensities of political discourse and melodramatic viscera. While films like Le corbeau and Une femme en blanc made direct connections with abortion law and ethical polemics, they did so through an invocation of the spectacle of suffering, inscribing rhetoric onto an eroticized female body in pain. The high cathartic drama of these narratives also perhaps served to suggest them as extraordinary. In Godard’s 1960s films, however, sex, pregnancy (both planned and unplanned), contraception and abortion become ordinary. Moreover, they become survivable. Whereas the political abortion debates largely operated within a binary of absolute purity (best symbolized in the character of Mariette) or absolute evil (the unpatriotic Malthusian mothers of pronatalist imaginaries), Godard’s representations fall outside of an oppositional moral framework. Though this matter is not overtly mobilized within a feminist politics – as Varda managed to do some years later in L’une chante, l’autre pas89 – the possibility that this approach invites of diverse and complex reproductive subjectivities beyond the reductive language of moral didacticism is significant. Far less well known than the work of Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol, yet just as fascinating in its innovation of undramatic, allusive and even counterdiscursive ways of representing abortion and women’s contraceptive experiences, is Paula Delsol’s90 La dérive. In one of the few articles to date to give Delsol’s film sustained consideration, Tim Palmer describes La dérive thus:

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Scandalously omitted from the historical record to date, La Dérive not only warrants renewed attention for its own merits, artistic and otherwise, but also for its status as a nonconformist outlier text within, and without, the French New Wave. As we will discover, La Dérive is a textual missing link that offers many riches.91

As well as the New Wave aesthetics and youthful energy on which Palmer focuses, I suggest that La dérive may make an interesting ‘textual missing link’ within the reconceptualization of contraception discourse in young French cinema, between Godard’s de-dramatizing submergence of these topics as ‘unscene’ (a significant shift away from paternalistic moralization, but one that runs the risk of responding to the injustices of 1960s abortion policies with a shrug of acceptance rather than political galvanization) and Agnès Varda’s still stylized but overtly political film-making on abortion and contraception in the late 1970s, including L’une chante, l’autre pas and Réponse de femmes (1975). While Delsol shares the youthful coolness and rejection of overt moral didacticism with other filmmakers of the Cahiers circle, the shift to a feminine perspective has significant implications for the timbre and richness of the representation. Jacqueline’s complex subjectivity and relationship to motherhood, pregnancy and contraception are more vital in this film than in the other New Wave works discussed so far. In order to appreciate the significance and reception of Delsol’s interesting allusions to women’s reproductive subjectivities, it is worth considering her relationship to the New Wave as it was framed both in the early 1960s and retrospectively. As detailed by Palmer, Delsol and Truffaut were good friends and corresponded often. Delsol also wrote for and was favourably reviewed by Cahiers du Cinéma. However, numerous problems with censorship, financing and distribution meant that her output was ultimately limited. Sadly, the work that she did produce has rarely been valued in critical reflections on the New Wave. Some commentators refer to Delsol via the notorious 1962 ‘New Wave issue’ of Cahiers du Cinéma, which included a list of ‘162 New French Film-makers’ that would become a critical touchstone for discussion of the movement. In a critique of this list, for instance, Richard Neupert laments that ‘this encyclopedic tally includes only three women, Agnès Varda, Paula Delsol (La dérive [The Drift], 1962), and television writer Francine Premysler, herself a codirector (La mémoire courte [Short Memory], 1962)’.92 He is not alone in marking this bias, yet it is curious that few critics take the opportunity to tackle this exclusion by considering Delsol’s work in greater depth. This is often the only mention Delsol receives in such accounts, consolidating her rather unfair position as only a symbol for the forgotten woman of the New Wave. If Varda was (oddly, given her youth at the time) considered the grand-mère of the New Wave, then Delsol may be, in a way, its absent mother.

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Geneviève Sellier is among the most forceful and detailed writers on the misogynistic tendencies of the New Wave both within the work it produced and the ‘boys’ club’ atmosphere of the interpersonal networks that sustained it.93 For the most part, this appraisal holds undeniably (and dispiritingly) true; for this reason, however, it is perhaps all the more important to remember and reflect on how Delsol bucked this trend, as does Palmer when he plays on the title of Sellier’s well-known monograph to suggest that ‘Delsol conjugates La Dérive in the first-person feminine’.94 Far from being dismissed by the group, La dérive was consistently championed by Cahiers, as well as by other left-wing publications.95 The many substantial obstacles faced by the film instead emanated primarily from the biases of more traditional institutions of the French film industry. The excessive harshness with which Delsol’s work was treated in comparison to that of her male contemporaries, furthermore, is in no small part linked to its frankness in representing women’s sexual subjectivities. As Palmer summarizes: When asked point-blank in 1963 about what dérive represented, Delsol rendered the maxim utterly female centred: ‘I wanted to make a portrait of a young girl who wanted to escape from her environment … I wanted to show that women were looking to be the equal of men in terms of their sexual freedom, and that in playing that game they would always be beaten’ […]. In early 1960s France, a pledge like this meant trouble.96

Plagued by numerous problems and censorial outrage, the release of the film was delayed by two years,97 and even then, it received a prohibitively high age rating and severely limited distribution, and was generally derided in the mainstream press. Though responsibility lay more acutely with mainstream institutions than with the male pantheon of the Cahiers film-makers and critics, the story of Delsol’s debut feature, unfortunately, appears to validate abundantly Sellier’s decrial that ‘The few brave filmmakers who tried to offer more complex female figures were often rewarded with humiliating commercial failure’.98 Delsol remains a significant and sadly unsung casualty of industry sexism in the 1960s. However, though it is scantly recognized across critical histories of the New Wave, La dérive is a rich and interesting film, swathing a crackling feminist energy in the aesthetic cool and offbeat rhythms of New Wave style. Many of the key themes and interests of La dérive are typical of the wider New Wave canon: it is an intimate and psychologically rich story driven by a single central character, and focuses in particular on youth, sex and animating tensions between movement and freedom, stasis and entrapment. In her often aimless but creative ‘drift’, her youth, and her modern, liberal attitude to sex, Jacqueline is in many senses an archetypal New Wave protagonist. However, the positioning of a young woman rather than a young man at its centre introduces

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a darkness into this otherwise familiar story. For the male protagonists in the majority of the New Wave canon, roaming the streets, playful flirtation with strangers, and free and easy sex are liberating activities. Sellier describes this trend as ‘“male libertinage,” in which love relationships are considered as a game, wherein the object of desire is also an adversary who must be defeated at the same time as the reader/audience is made to laugh’.99 For Jacqueline, this invigorating freedom is tempered with dangers, the most palpable of which are the risks of unplanned pregnancy, sexual exploitation and assault. Through clever shifts in perspective (both narrative and aesthetic), Delsol is able to reflect the generally ludic New Wave discourse of youthful sexuality, while subtly exposing the everyday misogynies faced by its ‘new figure of the woman’.100 While she still maintains a frank, easy style far from the melodramatic scene of abortion and the moral universe it inscribes onto the suffering female body, women’s reproductive and sexual subjectivities are retrieved from the numinous; while still ‘unscene’, these subjectivities become politically tangible. Jacqueline is also one of the few adult New Wave protagonists to have a (visible) mother. The urban wanderings and peripatetic sexual encounters with which Jacqueline begins the film take a surprising turn as she decides to return home to a rural fishing town to visit her mother, sister and an indeterminate brood of nephews and nieces she refers to as ‘les gosses’.101 The journey home is fraught with a series of physical and existential dangers that Jacqueline faces as a single woman; narrowly escaping sexual assault by a truck driver with whom she has hitched a lift, she encounters a wealthy older man, Maurice, who persistently propositions her throughout the film and ultimately sets her up in her own villa as his mistress. Though younger than him, Maurice’s wife is now a faded beauty, introduced as an embittered, vitriolic alcoholic, and lingering as a grim shadow of Jacqueline’s potential future as an independent modern woman ‘à la dérive’. Soon after, however, Jacqueline’s mother and sister in the nearby town come to symbolize the opposite: firmly entrenched within the environment and symbolism of familial domesticity, they become a collective spectre of the unfree woman, their subjectivity and independent identities weighed down by innumerable children and heavy housecoats. Though it is remarkable that they appear at all within the film, they seem constantly in danger of fading away at any point into a lump of unappealing pronatalist discourse. Palmer points out that: Oftentimes La Dérive exudes fear, even horror, of procreation (which would lead to censorship trouble, as we will see later). Delsol repeatedly manipulates her sound mix so that faltering adult conversation, like when the returning Jacqueline is greeted by her mother, is (non-realistically) drowned out by the children’s background babbles and cacophonous yells; or during shots of Jacqueline wandering neutrally down Palavas streets, when angry shrill shrieks of unseen babies disproportionately attack the town’s tranquil vistas.102

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The horror of motherhood and its erasures of the mothering subject cling particularly to the figures of the mother and sister and the rural space they occupy. Similarly to the scene in Darling in which images of Diana browsing in mother and baby shops are overlaid with an aggressive and dissonant clamour of bawling baby dolls, Delsol here creates a counter-discourse between serene maternal imagery and the frightening Otherness of motherhood. The mass of children is visually and aurally chaotic, and constantly threatens to overwhelm Jacqueline’s mother and sister. Through the various intergenerational figures that Jacqueline encounters, Delsol is thus able to present a critical view on the limited options available to women in the young cinema of the 1960s; the ‘traditional’ maternal figure fades away into objectified domestic functions, yet her film also does not overly romanticize the ‘modern’ New Wave woman, who is always in greater physical and economic danger than her male contemporaries. This passionate interest in women’s complex sexual subjectivities and relationships to (potential) motherhood led Delsol to take an explicit interest in unplanned pregnancy and contraception in a way that the male directors of the Cahiers group did not. Though allusions to the topic within the film are still more or less coded, Delsol overtly expressed her commitment in interviews. Furthermore, an important source of inspiration for Le dérive was Delsol’s beauty salon, through which she developed friendships with many driven young women ‘à la dérive’, and gained an acute and sensitive understanding of their experiences. As Palmer suggests, ‘La Dérive, in total, distilled years of Delsol’s exposure to young women’s frustrations: the social disenfranchisement they felt in the French hinterlands; their realisation that independence, fiscal and domestic, would never come easily, if at all.’103 It was also through the intimate homosocial space of the salon that Delsol cultivated her creative relationship with Jacqueline Vandal, who played Jacqueline in the film, and for whom the character was named. However, Vandal was not the only direct source for the Jacqueline character. Delsol described another of her regulars as ‘une très belle fille, avec un corps splendide et d’une grande classe. Mais elle avait comme défaut de beaucoup boire et de monter les gens les uns contre les autres. … elle avait pratiqué un trop grand nombre d’avortements et avait dû se faire stériliser, comme mon héroïne.’104 Delsol’s directness in interviews and her feminist dedication in centring a film in the 1960s on a character who (by implication or otherwise) had had multiple abortions were admirable. In light of stringent censorship parameters, however, discussion of these topics in the film itself was by necessity more ambiguous. Two scenes in the film make particularly heavy allusion to abortion – while still just about ‘unseen’, the subject here is only barely under the surface. The first instance occurs the morning after Jacqueline sleeps with a medical

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intern she has met in a bar. In the morning, they demonstrate only mild interest in each other, and he responds curtly to her casual questioning. After asking about his job, she asks what would happen if she had ‘un gosse’, to which he asks what that has to do with anything. Jacqueline shrugs and remarks that in any case, she is infertile. The focus of the scene is clearly Jacqueline, who remains strikingly centred in the frame throughout the exchange, while the man – who introduces himself only in ghoulishly misogynistic terms as Jack the Ripper – is fragmented at the peripheries of the screen. This conversation goes no further, but the topic returns later when Jacqueline is visited by her friend, Agathe. A brief montage shows them chatting intimately together about men, sex and relationships in the female-coded spaces of the kitchen and garden. In one scene, the women discuss pregnancy, as Jacqueline arranges her hair and Agathe practises a posture exercise. They comment on the pressure from their mothers to have children, and at this point, Agathe enquires into Jacqueline’s sterility. Far from judgemental or pitying, she claims to be envious that Jacqueline need not worry about pregnancy. Jacqueline’s explanation is that she had ‘une grossesse difficile, alors on m’a opérée’.105 Adopting a wilfully conservative reading, this could be taken as indicating the tragic loss of a desired pregnancy, resulting in infertility, and thereby within the bounds of censorial acceptance. However, within the context of Agathe’s expression of infertility as an enviable state, and Jacqueline’s laughing dismissal of any desire for children, the phrasing is strongly euphemistic. Within the space of feminine intimacy that La dérive both represents and creates (and which Godard’s 1960s films only suggest), the scene becomes a frank and indeed, feminist movement towards a filmic discourse of reproductive rights and women’s sexual autonomy. However, the censors were far from satisfied with even this level of euphemism. La dérive became deeply entangled in censorial conflict – an embattled beginning that, sadly, stunted Delsol’s promising film-making career. Palmer sets out the nature of the censors’ complaints: The first rumblings were institutional. After lengthy review, the Commission de contrôle des films cinématographiques withheld La Dérive’s visa d’exploitation, holding the film in violation of its principles. Besides the ‘immoral conduct’ of its heroine, the censors protested certain scenes that candidly addressed the taboo issues of contraception, women’s control of their bodies and their fertility.106

Delsol’s steadfast refusal to capitulate to the demands of the censors resulted in a much delayed and severely limited public release, and a punishingly high age rating. The stringent and almost vindictive terms that Delsol received are particularly galling when viewed alongside the comparable references to abortion

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and representations of sexuality in the other debut and early-career features discussed in this chapter, none of which received quite this damaging a degree of censorial pushback, and all of which heralded long and illustrious careers for their directors. The references to abortion in Les 400 coups, Les cousins and Les mauvaises rencontres are in fact much more explicit than those in Delsol’s film, and in the case of Les mauvaises rencontres, markedly sympathetic towards both the female protagonist and her abortionist. The denouncement of Jacqueline’s ‘immoral conduct’ is also particularly hypocritical when compared to the actions of Michel in À bout de souffle, who murders a policeman, seduces a series of women, shirks any responsibility for fatherhood and in one particularly egregious scene even – despite being on the run from the law – stops a taxi so that he can run across the street to sexually harass a young woman. What appears to distinguish La dérive from these contemporary or earlier films is not the nature or extremity of its references to contraception and abortion, but the fact that they are connected much more directly to women’s autonomy, subjectivities and desires. Godard’s references, while radical in their way, are still heavily codified, and Truffaut’s and Chabrol’s explicit allusions are framed within male interests; the subtext of female subjectivity is read against the grain, and therefore possible to ignore. With Les cousins, Les mauvaises rencontres and other earlier melodramas, furthermore, the women who undergo abortions are shown to suffer desperately for their decision. Jacqueline, on the other hand, is never depicted as a disempowered victim. She refers to conventional motherhood with a distanced wariness that is shared by the film’s unappealing representations of the domestic mother and ‘les gosses’. Moreover, the film represents contraception, both short- and long-term, and childlessness as a choice rather than a tragedy. The outrage of La dérive was perhaps not so much that it alluded to or acknowledged abortion (still within a somewhat coded manner), but that it suggested that the experience was survivable for women, and – worse – that the child-free woman could even be scandalously happy with her lot. The censorial institutions here shared with the government a reproductive conservatism that was woefully out of step with the practices of much of the populace, yet much as with the suppression of contraceptive information and the continued criminalization of abortion, pronatalist authorities succeeded in minimizing Delsol’s film. A heroine such as Jacqueline, who practised contraception, had undergone abortions and yet continued to be resilient, healthy and happy in her childlessness – along with the director who created her, and the women who inspired her – had perhaps yet to become collectively expressible in the early 1960s.

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Notes 1. Reineke, Beauvoir and Her Sisters includes an analysis of women’s rights and momentous political campaigns in French culture, which she contextualizes within the intellectual history of the Revolution itself and the intellectual histories that led to it, developing these through the major feminist campaigns for suffrage, reproductive rights and parity. 2. Ibid., 11–12; Stetson, ‘Abortion Law Reform in France’, 280. 3. Reineke, Beauvoir and Her Sisters, 11–12; Karen Offen, ‘Women, Citizenship and Suffrage with a French Twist, 1789–1993’, in Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, ed. Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1994), 651–52; Duchen, Women’s Rights, 96. 4. Offen, ‘Women, Citizenship, and Suffrage’, 652. 5. Allison, ‘Right to Choose’, 222–36; Duchen, Women’s Rights; and Robinson, ‘Gendering the Abortion Debate’. 6. Allison, ‘Right to Choose’, 223. 7. Duchen, Women’s Rights, 96. 8. Stetson, ‘Abortion Law Reform in France’, 282. 9. Abortion was not, in fact, formally legalized in all of these countries at this point, but in practice safer abortions were generally known to be more accessible in them. 10. Stetson, ‘Abortion Law Reform in France’, 279. 11. Robinson, ‘Gendering the Abortion Debate’, 92. 12. See, for instance, ibid. 13. Ibid., 93. 14. Ibid. 15. Thorough historical analysis of feminist movements within France during the 1960s and 1970s will not be synthesized here, but such context can be found in Reineke, Beauvoir and Her Sisters, Stetson, ‘Abortion Law Reform in France’ and Robinson, ‘Gendering the Abortion Debate’. 16. Halimi provides a revealing reflection on her role in this trial and in the French feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s in her book The Right to Choose (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 1973). 17. Allison, ‘Right to Choose’, 226. 18. Stetson, ‘Abortion Law Reform in France’, 282. 19. Allison, ‘Right to Choose’, 226. 20. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 517. 21. Ibid., 512–13. 22. Ibid., 517. 23. Loosely, ‘thesis-film’; this is a conventional film-making style in which a film purports to ‘say something about’ a certain topic, a practice that was widely rejected by nouvelle vague film-makers in favour of a more fluid and less narratively didactic approach. 24. Sellier, Masculine Singular, 154. 25. Allison, ‘Right to Choose’, 226. 26. Duchen, Women’s Rights, 119. 27. Stetson, ‘Abortion Law Reform in France’, 280. 28. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 512. 29. Ibid., 513. 30. Ibid., 515, original emphasis.

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31. Melissa Oliver-Powell, ‘The Daughters of Pepsi and the Pill: De-Dramatising Abortion in the French New Wave’, Modern and Contemporary France 27, no. 3 (2019): 365–79. 32. Halimi, Right to Choose, 89. 33. Beauvoir, Second Sex, 510. 34. My understanding of the melodramatic mode and its presentation in cinema is informed by Thomas Elsaesser, ‘Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama’, in Home Is Where the Heart Is, ed. Christine Gledhill (London: British Film Institute, 1990) and E. Ann Kaplan, ‘Theories of Melodrama: A Feminist Perspective’, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 1, no. 1 (1983), 40–48. 35. Elsaesser, ‘Sound and Fury’, 64. 36. Rose, Mothers, 12. 37. Molly Haskell, ‘The Woman’s Film’, in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 20–30; E. Ann Kaplan, Women and Film: Both Sides of the Camera (London: Routledge, 1983). 38. Mary Ann Doane, ‘Caught and Rebecca: The Inscription of Femininity as Absence’, in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 70–82; Kaplan, ‘Theories of Melodrama’; and Annette Kuhn, ‘Women’s Genres: Melodrama, Soap Opera and Theory’, in Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, ed. Sue Thornham (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 251–66. 39. Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation, 66. 40. Ibid., 46. 41. Haskell, ‘Woman’s Film’, 20. 42. Oliver-Powell, ‘De-Dramatising Abortion’. 43. Sellier, Masculine Singular, 154. 44. Oliver-Powell, ‘De-Dramatising Abortion’, 369–71. 45. ‘The sacrifice of the innocent’. Françoise Audé, Ciné-modèles cinéma d’elles: Situation de femmes dans le cinema français 1956–1979 (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1981), 47. 46. Emma Wilson, French Cinema since 1950: Personal Histories (London: Duckworth, 1999), 13. 47. Diane Holmes and Robert Ingram, François Truffaut (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 118. 48. Don Allen, Finally Truffaut (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985), 8. 49. Annette Insdorf, François Truffaut (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 105–15. 50. For instance, Dominique Fanne, L’Univers de François Truffaut (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf, 1972); Jean Collet, Le Cinéma de François Truffaut (Paris: Pierre Lherminier, 1977); and Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut. 51. Susan Hayward cited in Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, 115. 52. ‘François Truffaut has become the cineaste of hatred for the mother. For his mother.’ Audé, Ciné-modèles, 49, original emphasis. 53. Anne Gillain, François Truffaut: The Lost Secret, trans. Alistair Fox (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013). 54. Sellier, Masculine Singular. 55. Holmes and Ingram, François Truffaut, 123. 56. ‘[T]he mother’s betrayal immures Antoine in his own betrayal. The mother escapes from him with her lover, Antoine must also find an escape for himself, he must leave the family circle which is about to shatter. He is condemned to flee in a centrifugal motion which carries him away. As if the wall of the rotor has given way, launching the child into space and into the void, very far away.’ Collet, Cinéma de François Truffaut, 48.

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57. Anne Gillain, ‘The Script of Delinquency: François Truffaut’s Les 400 coups (1959)’, in French Film: Texts and Contexts, ed. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (London: Routledge, 2000), 153. 58. Laura Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity: Cinema and the Mind’s Eye, 2nd ed., (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 128. 59. Oliver-Powell, ‘De-Dramatising Abortion’. 60. Brown, ‘One Plus One’, 11. 61. Ropars-Wuilleumier, ‘Form and Substance’, 103. 62. Smith, ‘(Dé)collage’. 63. Joel Haycock, ‘The Sign of the Sociologist: Show and Anti-Show in Godard’s Masculin Féminin’, Cinema Journal 29, no. 4 (1990): 51. 64. ‘The officer’s question could equally be taken to mean “How will you get by, how will you continue your career?” but Madeleine immediately focuses on the choice to abort or keep the child.’ Phillip John Usher, ‘De sexe incertain: Masculin Féminin de Godard’, French Forum 34, no. 2 (2009): 98. 65. Discussed in ibid., 108–9. 66. Michel Marie, ‘“It Really Makes You Sick!”: Jean-Luc Godard’s À bout de souffle (1959)’, in French Film: Texts and Contexts, ed. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau (London: Routledge, 2000), 160. 67. Geneviève Sellier, ‘Male Libertinage’, 156. 68. Mulvey, Fetishism and Curiosity, 126–27, original emphasis. 69. Caroline Rupprecht, ‘Womb Envy: Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, A Woman is a Woman and Hail Mary’, in Womb Fantasies: Subjective Architectures in Postmodern Cinema, Literature and Art (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 77. 70. Ibid., 79. 71. Flitterman-Lewis, To Desire Differently, 226. 72. Kate Ince, ‘Feminist Phenomenology and the Film World of Agnès Varda’, Hypatia 28, no. 3 (2013): 612. 73. Rupprecht, ‘Womb Envy’, 79. 74. Melanie Klein, ‘Early Stages of the Oedipus Conflict’, in The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: Free Press, 1986), 75. 75. Ibid. 76. Rupprecht, ‘Womb Envy’, 84–85. 77. Ibid., 86. 78. Ibid. 79. Douglas Morrey, Jean-Luc Godard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 10. 80. Rupprecht, ‘Womb Envy’, 81. 81. Ibid., 81. 82. Ibid., 80. 83. Neupert, History of the French New Wave, 214. 84. ‘It would be very sad if that happened to you.’ 85. ‘We’ll see.’ 86. David Sterritt, The Films of Jean-Luc Godard: Seeing the Invisible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 42. 87. Fiona Handyside, ‘Stardom and Nationality: The Strange Case of Jean Seberg’, Studies in French Cinema 2, no. 3 (2002): 174. 88. Ibid., 175.

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89. Melissa Oliver-Powell, ‘Beyond the Spectacle of Suffering: Agnès Varda’s L’Une Chante, l’autre pas and Rewriting the Subject of Abortion in France’, Feminist Studies 46, no. 1 (2020): 14–42. 90. Paula Delsol is also sometimes known as Paule Delsol. 91. Tim Palmer, ‘Drift: Paule Delsol Inside and Outside the French New Wave’, Studies in French Cinema 17, no. 2 (2017): 145. 92. Neupert, History of the French New Wave, xxi. 93. Sellier, Masculine Singular. 94. Palmer, ‘Drift’, 150. 95. Ibid., 157. 96. Ibid., 156–57, my emphasis. 97. Ibid. 98. Sellier, ‘Male Libertinage’, 153. 99. Ibid. 100. Sellier, Masculine Singular, 145. 101. ‘The kids’. 102. Palmer, ‘Drift’, 155. 103. Ibid., 148. 104. ‘A very beautiful girl, with a splendid figure and a lot of class. But she habitually drank too much, and played people off against one another. … she had had too many abortions, and had to have herself sterilized, like my heroine.’ Bernard Bastide and Jacques Olivier Durand, Dictionnaire du Cinéma dans le Gard (Montpellier: Les Presses du Languedoc, 1999), 92. 105. ‘A difficult pregnancy, so they operated on me.’ 106. Palmer, ‘Drift’, 157.

PART III

Delivery  

The explorations in the previous part of representations and discourses of reproductive autonomy and abortion in French and British film during and around the 1960s offer instructive ways of thinking about motherhood. The films presented an ambivalent and nuanced mixture of attitudes to women undergoing abortion, variously comprising sympathy, pathos, denigration and empowerment. The breadth and richness of responses to reproductive discourses, and in many cases the lack of overt partisanship, is testament to the complexities and ambiguities of representing these issues, particularly as the films interweave them with wider narratives and well developed characters in a way that more clear-cut, polarized rhetorical invectives do not. Nonetheless, these representations are all reacting, with various degrees of criticism or complicity, to a central master narrative of motherhood that makes certain that abortion is a challenging issue because it is rooted in the consecration of the Child as the sovereign and uniquely protected figure of culture and futurity. This ideal Child has, in turn, an ideal Mother, who is a numinous object of this discourse, the raw material for subjectivity rather than subjectivity itself. Most representations of abortion are to some degree affected by this symbolic construction of the Child. The exposure of these formative ideologies and the critiques of how they construct a limiting idea of motherhood are important work. However, these particular interactions do not exhaust expressions of motherhood. The mummifying fantasy of the relation between mother-as-object and child-as-subject, as manifested in Western European cultures, presupposes a certain kind of mothering body that reflects the imagined national body, a protectionist and narcissistic image of the future authorized by voices in power. What this means is that these ideologies are directed at certain types and groups of women who are perceived as potential ‘ideal’ mothers to fit and perpetuate this selfreproducing narrative. The hubristic mirror of cultural futurity is certainly patriarchal (it is built into the flesh of the ‘ideal’ mothering object, who is the bland medium of the cultural subject’s self-reproduction), but it is also racist, classist, cissexist and homophobic. While women who benefit from the achievement of reproductive and contraceptive choice (the ‘desirable’ mothers

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of hegemonic fantasy) fight their expressive and subjective absence from dominant culture as incumbent captives of the reigning maternal discourses that indenture them as ‘ideal’ mothers and demand too much control over their reproduction and identity, a discourse of reproductive justice is more needful for those mothers who are absent because their images are scarcely even allowed entry into the polis. Feminist theorists and legal thinkers in the later decades of the twentieth century began to point out that the major reproductive rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s across Europe and North America had addressed the need of women to control their reproduction through accessibility of contraceptives and abortion services, which tended to reflect the needs of otherwise privileged groups; in Britain and France, reproductive rights movements have tended to be led by white women. Thinking on reproductive justice largely originates from North American women of colour, and addresses the need of women whose ability to ‘choose’ is already limited by the state (because of race, class, sexuality, disability or other reasons) for support (material and otherwise) to allow them to control their mothering activities and identities. In answer to the limits of who is addressed by reproductive ‘choice’, such feminist thinkers have looked at mothering and family policy through a lens of reproductive justice. Though the movement originates from North American intersectional thought, the principles can be productively applied more broadly as a way of thinking about the suppressions and limitations of motherhood in Western societies and cultures. Zakiya Luna and Kristin Luker give an informative overview of reproductive justice and its intellectual and jurisprudential history as ‘simultaneously demand[ing] a negative right of freedom from undue government interference and a positive right to government action in creating conditions of social justice and human flourishing for all’.1 The central proposition of this perspective is that the right to not mother, and to limit one’s own reproduction, must be matched by the fair provision to all women of appropriate resources that allow them to mother the children they do have and do desire in comfort and dignity. While those women whom the white neoimperialist nation addresses as its ideal mothers have been compelled towards maternity through restrictions on contraceptives and pronatalist incentivizing policies, women who do not reflect this fantasy (particularly women of colour and women from low-income backgrounds) have often found their ability to mother obstructed, whether by absent, inadequate or inappropriate state support for their children or, in extreme cases, through coercive sterilization initiatives.2 Because they are more likely to be in contact with governmental institutions, low-income women’s pregnancies and mothering practices are also more likely to come under surveillance from the state.3 Because of such difficulties, healthcare professionals may assume that less privileged women who become pregnant want abortions, unlike their privileged counterparts who, it

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is presumed, should want children. The oppressions of patriarchal mothering ideologies are therefore many-edged, necessitating fluidity and breadth in their counter-discourses. Raced and classed hierarchies are subtextual to the discourse of ideal motherhood. Patricia Hill-Collins shows that ‘in periods of profound social change eugenics philosophies implicitly shape public policy. Some women emerge as more worthy “mothers of the nation” than others.’4 She demonstrates how the behaviour and policymaking attitudes of states can organize to coerce some types of motherhood and simultaneously penalize others, and how middleand working-class white women, Black women and undocumented migrant women are all affected differently by this scale of ‘desirability’.5 Though the sovereignty of the discourse and principle of ‘choice’ has been an important platform for white feminists targeted by pronatalist duress, it is frequently ineffective for or at worst actively damaging to women whose social relationship to choice is already affected by factors other than gender; as Rosalind Petchesky6 suggests in her early critique of reproductive choice politics, which negotiates both liberal and Marxist approaches to feminism and maternity, one’s decisions about whether to mother, to continue a pregnancy, to attempt pregnancy or not do not occur in a vacuum, but are rather mediated by a complicated and multifarious network of social positionings, restrictions and contexts, which produce the conditions of that choice. Andrea Smith has also instructively shown how the pro-choice and pro-life categories that tend to structure white and middleclass feminisms do not meaningfully communicate the diversity of feeling about abortion in other communities, explaining that ‘while the pro-choice and pro-life camps on the abortion debate are often articulated as polar opposites, both depend on similar operating assumptions that do nothing to support either life or real choice for women of color’.7 Beyond discursive incoherency, furthermore, it has been well documented that the contraceptives that facilitate this highly prized ‘choice’ for certain women have at times been engineered through the subjugation of the less privileged women on whom they are tested, often without informed consent.8 Such factors are made even more pernicious by the racist, eugenic potential of abortion and contraception, as discussed in the previous part in relation to this and to foetal disability. Thinking through the lens of reproductive justice as well as reproductive rights is abundantly useful and illuminating in considering the many complexities and tensions in how British and French societies have constructed and continue to construct motherhood, and how such perspectives are politically, legally and culturally exigent. The salient principle for this part, however, is reproductive justice’s attention to the representation of heterogeneous experiences of mothering that exist within a given culture, both in the margins of and within that culture’s dominant narratives of motherhood and femininity.

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Such narratives are, of course, particularized between cultures, but there are undoubtedly comparable ways in which French and British pronatalist policies and child-centric ideologies present exclusionary practices and narratives towards certain groups of women, in particular women of colour and low-income and queer or lesbian women. Applying both reproductive justice and choice sensibilities to maternal narratives therefore helps us to explore the following questions: who is the ‘desirable’ mother, who is excluded and why? Who is held in place and who has no place? And how do mothering subjects speak back from these various positions of alienation? A fluid approach is needed in addressing the expressive possibilities of mothering subjects and deconstructing the hegemonic patriarchal fantasies and ideologies that imaginatively constrict mothering identities. There are various ways in which the insights offered by reproductive justice and choice can help to deconstruct representations of motherhood in film. In the first instance, they are instrumental in producing critiques of the various subordinations, ideologies and expectations to which women are subjected in cultural identity narratives and constructions of motherhood. Filmic and cultural representations, moreover, have an important place within the process of asserting heterogeneous mothering subjectivities and experiences. It is important to deconstruct the underlying prejudices that are perpetuated within media narratives of motherhood, but film is also a medium through which artists have resisted such narratives and represented untold stories of mothers who have been silenced, invisible or disguised in dominant cultural constructions. This final part, therefore, looks at mothering in the margins, focusing in particular on counter-discursive representations of mothers that exceed the typifying frame of the (white) patriarchal child-as-subject’s idealized mothering imago. Unlike in my previous chapters, I consider British and French films alongside each other, as well as a small number of Francophone African films produced or set in France, and apply broader corpus parameters, including films that are not associated with the cinematic movements on which I have focused so far. While I shall make reference to national cultural specificities where relevant, it is in the spirit of multiplicity that it seems appropriate to adopt a more fluid approach to ‘borders’ for this part. Many of the films on which I concentrate below also thematize diasporic identities or explore spaces outside normative cultural centres – spaces that can be described or at times productively reappropriated to shape dissenting expression. The films described here are therefore more meaningfully defined by cultural difference than belonging. The two chapters in this part explore how films and film-makers approach mothering subjectivities from these margins. A range of marginalized mothering experiences will be engaged with, including the intersection of race, motherhood and family in the context of British and French imperialism (including

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films that deal with both migrant kinships and interracial parenthood) in Chapter 5, and the presence of queer subjectivities and non-biological kinship structures within familial discourse in Chapter 6. There are clearly myriad specificities at work here that should not be dismissed, and it is not my intention in these analyses to impress reductive commonalities between these films or suggest a homogeneous ‘Otherness’ from which a single discourse gelatinously emerges. Rather, I aim to explore some of the very different strategies, expressions, narratives and styles used by different film-makers and from different subject positions to speak back to the same homogeneous centre against its maternal fantasy. After all, the absent mothers who have been held at bay by this patriarchal imagination must inevitably embody themselves endlessly differently in dismantling the vapid construct in its entirety. I also do not mean to suggest, however, that any one of these films constitutes a complete antidote to a cultural master narrative of mothering; rather, these representations are interesting because they are always in excess of themselves. It is this space of excess, the margins of cultural self-narrations in which the imaginations of motherhood spill over, to which we should look for subjective possibilities. Notes 1. Zakiya Luna and Kristin Luker, ‘Reproductive Justice’, Annual Review of Law and Social Science 9 (2013): 328. 2. Details of such cases are given in Patricia Hill-Collins, ‘Producing the Mothers of the Nation: Race, Class and Contemporary US Population Policies’, in Women, Citizenship and Difference, ed. Nira Yuval-Davis and Pnina Werbner (London: Zed Books, 1999), 126; Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, ‘Reproductive Freedom: Beyond “A Woman’s Right to Choose”’, Signs 5, no. 4 (1980): 667–68; Lealle P. Ruhl, ‘Disarticulating Liberal Subjectivities: Abortion and Fetal Protection’, Feminist Studies 28, no. 1 (2002): 37; and Andrea Smith, ‘Beyond Pro-Choice versus Pro-Life: Women of Color and Reproductive Justice’, NWSA Journal 17, no. 1 (2005): 126–30. 3. Smith, ‘Beyond Pro-Choice’, 125. 4. Hill-Collins, ‘Mothers of the Nation’, 119. 5. Ibid. 6. Petchesky, ‘Reproductive Freedom’. 7. Smith, ‘Beyond Pro-Choice’, 120. 8. Hill-Collins, ‘Mothers of the Nation’, 126; Petchesky, ‘Reproductive Freedom’, 670–76; and Smith, ‘Beyond Pro-Choice’, 130.

CHAPTER 5

Whose Lineage is it Anyway? Migration and Racist Futurities  

At the same time that they rigidly governed and prescribed the mothering identities of white French and British women, dominant pronatalist ideologies of family and futurity in the post-war decades in these countries tended also to be radically unaccommodating towards racial difference in the face of changing national demographics in the 1960s. The disintegration of empire over the course of the mid-twentieth century precipitated waves of cultural change across Britain and France as migration flowed increasingly back towards the metropoles. Erik Bleich1 has written an interesting comparative analysis characterizing the policymaking attitudes of Britain and France in issues of racism and migration from the 1960s onwards. Though pointing out several similarities in the problems that both countries continue to face with racism, he supports the well-established view that the former has tended towards a multiculturalist model, while the latter favours universalism: ‘While France maintains a strict color-blind code, Britain has accepted a number of race-conscious policies.’2 He summarizes the respective positions as follows: British policymakers have largely accepted the categories of race and ethnicity; they have conceived of racism primarily in ‘color’ terms and have devoted the majority of their energy to fighting access racism; and they have strongly identified their problems of racism with the North American context. By contrast, prevailing French frames have downplayed or denied the categories of race and ethnicity, they have focused more on expressive racism and on anti-Semitism, and they have rejected the North American analogy because of its perceived irrelevance to understanding France’s domestic context of racism.3

The multiculturalist and universalist models are of course more governmental statements of intent than representations of consistent attitudes among British and French publics. Nonetheless, such models contribute to relevant context on how race is and has been discursively formulated within these cultures. The French principle of universalism in particular has been well documented. Briefly put, this ideology promotes the claim that anyone may be ‘assimilated’ into French society, providing they integrate fully into its cultural

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institutions and adopt its popular values and ways of thinking. This approach has been widely critiqued in practice. Elisa Camiscioli, in her fascinating analysis of intimacy and immigration in early twentieth-century France, dissects the ‘curious interplay of universalism and particularism in French Republicanism’4 to show how extra-European migration and racial difference tested and often exposed the limits of these universalist ideologies. As she describes it, Republicanism would hold that Frenchness was an ideal rather than an essence, and that through its cultural ambassadors and instructors, ‘the power of the French language, the Republican school system, the soil, and French women [ought to be enough] to render immigrants culturally similar to the French’.5 The practical application of this principle was hardly so egalitarian; it is well evidenced that European and white-passing migrants were preferred for entry into the Republic. Herrick Chapman and Laura Levine Frader also address the relationship between universalism and racial (in)equality in France, explaining how the idea of French universalism was to separate religion, race and ethnicity from citizenship.6 Though such Republican discourse hardly eliminated the visibility of these categories in practice and in social attitudes, it ended up – intentionally or not – providing a script that contained responsibility for racism within the failure of the migrant to ‘integrate’ rather than the failure of the state to include. Needless to say, neither the universalist nor the race-conscious approach has produced satisfying results in execution, and racial inequality and cultural prejudice has persisted throughout both societies. Despite their different models, both the French and British states during the post-war period of mass decolonization tended to see non-European migrants and people of colour as a passive ‘problem’ or an exploitable and temporary labour solution rather than as subjects of their own experiences with whom to productively consult and cooperate. Racial difference within French and British society is of course a complex, multivalent and mobile subject. Specifically relevant for the present chapter, however, is the intersection of race and family life in both countries. My focus is especially on Black mothering and family identities, since such identities are subject to particular extremes of visibility and invisibility in French and British cinema during this period. As is suggested by Edelman’s theory of the Child, it is common in political discourse and cultural representation for the private family to be linked metonymically with the state; this symbolizing microcosm is also styled after the image in which the state ideally desires to reproduce itself. In historical moments in which anxieties over low birth rates, population decline and productivity are current within a given nation, an obvious and logical solution would seem to be relaxing attitudes towards immigration. However, in contemporary society as much as in the period at hand for this book, the paradoxical coexistence of pronatalist attitudes and policymaking in

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(generally high-GDP) countries with stagnating populations alongside refugee crises, border protection, national separatism, increasingly stringent immigration controls, and hostile social and institutional attitudes towards migrants and citizens of colour demonstrates how such anxieties were never really about birth rates. It is demographic panic that announces itself behind the blander euphemism of ‘population’. The professed nobility and needfulness of the ideology of futurity that insists upon the suppression of the mothering subject precisely in the interests of the Child wears ever thinner as it becomes increasingly clear that only certain children qualify for such protection and esteem, and it is for the sake of these particularized images alone that all women’s mothering and non-mothering are so tightly policed. The idea of legacy is little more than an immortality fantasy that necessarily carries with it the terms of its own impossibility (the imagined future is always in excess of experience), but it is apparently enough to exclude the radical Other and suppress the freedoms of all mothering subjects in the present. Camiscioli’s book links the question of migration to that of reproduction within France, focusing on the end of the Third Republic in the early to mid-twentieth century. She describes how migrant bodies were sought by the state to fill two national needs: labour power and what might be thought of as ‘birth power’. On the other hand, she gives abundant evidence of a racialized hierarchy of reproductive ‘desirability’ determining which groups of people were considered suitable for each function. White migrants from European countries with high birth rates were positioned firmly at the top of this fantasy of acceptable self-reproduction, which furthermore proved the theory of universal citizenship within its own narrow parameters. Camiscioli describes: [T]he surplus population of Africa and Asia – and the potential labor source of the colonies – first had to be dismissed as a possible solution to demographic decline in the metropole. Pronatalists therefore employed the language of contemporary demography to imagine buffer populations of white Europeans untouched by both the benefits and the dangers of civilization. The Italians, Spaniards, and Poles formed a pool of potential immigrants with ‘traditional’ values that promoted high birthrates, but whose whiteness did not threaten the racial integrity of the French household.7

She argues that Black migrants, on the other hand, were politically perceived as a temporary palliative solution to lacking labour power, which would eventually be alleviated by stimulating the domestic birth rate.8 Félix F. Germain9 has explored in detail the continuation of such attitudes in the context of migration to the French metropolis during the trente glorieuses (a roughly thirty-year period of economic growth in France between 1946 and 1974). Despite the acceleration of decolonization in the post-war decades, the French economy

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prospered, and continued to reap benefits from neocolonial labour relations with newly independent West African countries, in particular Senegal, Ivory Coast, Mauritania and Mali. Germain paints a picture of French attitudes towards migration as complex and contradictory; he describes how, despite experiencing a period of near-full employment, with more jobs than could be filled by French citizens alone, ‘for reasons related to colonial understanding of Africans, the French did not welcome the black labor migrants’.10 The French government therefore deployed discriminatory border policing and stratified immigration targets to encourage demographic bias towards white Europeans as permanent settlers.11 However, this came into conflict with the private sector’s preference for temporary sub-Saharan labour, which was by comparison affordable and highly mobile, capable of filling workforce deficits efficiently and smoothly.12 Despite this exploitative convenience afforded to private business, however, public attitudes remained significantly hostile. Germain concludes that In sum, the French welcomed Africans ambivalently. They viewed Africans as a problem for France and therefore attempted to keep them outside the boundaries of the nation. For the French, former African colonial subjects – healthy people who French employers utilized as disposable objects – became the gangrene of postcolonial Parisian society. Simultaneously, they believed the new African migration represented an opportunity to continue ‘civilizing’ African subjects.13

Interestingly, Germain also claims that ‘Many French officials from the Ministry of the Interior misunderstood the nature of the African migration. They merely viewed sub-Saharan African migrants as permanent settlers’,14 when in fact most sub-Saharan African migrants intended to spend only a short period earning in France before returning to their families. It is significant, nonetheless, that questions of settlement, family and domestic imagination seemed particularly instrumental in galvanizing racist anxiety and its supportive policies. Germain also points out that the number of African women seeking work in France in the trente glorieuses was smaller than that of men.15 Nonetheless, not just individualized racism but racist futurity and anxiety over the shifting imagination of the national ‘family’ profoundly informed cultural and demographic panic, often coalescing around the figure of the mother. Motherhood, after all, fulfils a particularly important gatekeeping function for the ethnonationalist supremacist, as illustrated in Adrienne Rich’s claim that ‘the mother serves the interests of patriarchy: she exemplifies in one person religion, social conscience, and nationalism. Institutional motherhood revives and renews all other institutions.’16 In her fantasized position as symbol rather than subject, the institutionalized Mother is the blank – and white – space onto which

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the patriarchal Narcissus projects his image. But this mother-as-reproductiveobject is also considered a potential structural weak point, which must be jealously guarded so as not to admit difference. Catherine Raissiguier, in her work on gender and migration in France, shows how this articulation of maternalfamilial racism was particularly stolid, as colonial imaginations of Black African women lingered well after decolonization, arguing in particular that ‘the image of an overly fecund African mother haunts current discussions of the French “immigration problem”’.17 The image of France in the mid-twentieth century that takes shape among the works of these commentators is one of a political culture that seemed to some degree content to continue to encourage neocolonial migration channels to fulfil industrial needs, but which keenly policed the borders of its imagined national family. The idealized image of the white French mother-as-object acted as a keystone to the architecture of this racist patriarchal ideology, and was mobilized symbolically and materially to marginalize the lived subjectivities of white and Black mothers alike. Similarly, in Britain, Black workers from the British colonies were actively solicited to fulfil certain labouring roles in post-war Britain, yet they too were exploited as a ‘temporary’ population by the state. As such, Black family lives were not materially well supported or incorporated into the national imagination. Wendy Webster has written an excellent analysis of experiences of race, home and identity in post-war Britain that deals intimately with these issues. Within her account, she details how British society’s organization of work and home among migrant communities militated towards the erasure of autonomous family life, arguing that ‘Post-war concerns about rebuilding family life did not extend to migrants, whose families were split up in various ways’.18 She describes how the types of work most widely offered to Black migrants tended to be gender-segregated.19 Migration policies themselves also scarcely accounted for the mobility of family units, and young migrants were predominantly perceived in terms of individual labour capacity, rather than as social and contextual subjects positioned within a network of kinship dependencies. Black men’s social and sexual lives were somewhat visible, though most often through the extremely aggressive lens of white men’s territorial possessiveness over white women,20 but, Webster demonstrates, the intimate and family lives of Black women, and the subjectivities of Black mothering women, were all but erased from a homogenizing national imagination.21 This obstruction of family life was further compounded by the organization of housing. Webster describes how the accommodation of young Black workers in Britain would often be defined by work (extending gender segregation), and that they frequently faced open expressive and access racism from white landlords, making it far more difficult to establish secure and fulfilling private lives within Britain.22 These attitudes reaffirm a strongly raced subtext to the ideology of futurity and

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the Child; the politics that claims to be ‘fighting for the children’ (at the inevitable and ideologically necessary expense of mothers) is not in fact interested in fighting for all of the children, but only those that fit a certain self-image: the cultural futurity prized in the image of the Child is white. Migrant labour – including Black migrant women’s paid care work – is incidental to supporting this future, but it is not included in it. That is, the labour is desired without the labourer. Within twentieth-century periods of high migration, families of colour were frequently disintegrated through social and cultural organization to isolate futurity and legitimize reproduction within white European cultures. I return here to a consideration of some of the limitations of Edelman’s particular emphases in his theorization of reproductive futurity, which can be usefully prised apart through engagement with intersectional feminist perspectives. While Edelman’s work foregrounds the rigid heteronormativity of the universal politics of the Child and the potentially radical non-reproductivity of queer male sex, he does not substantially interrogate the other vital ways in which that Child is socially coded and made to stand for a certain kind of future (one that is also white, patriarchal and capitalist) and nothing else. The extent to which kinships and biological reproduction are regulated through social and legal institutions to organize race and perpetuate white supremacy is understood by Judith Butler in their work on kinship and the state, where they argue (from a North American context) that ‘it is not possible to separate questions of kinship from property relations (and conceiving persons as property) and from the fictions of “bloodline,” as well as the national and racial interests by which these lines are sustained’.23 The aggressive logics of reproductive futurity are, in other words, deeply raced, and I argue that the imagined figures of both Black and white mothers bear particularly acute burdens of meaning-making within this ideology. Edelman suggests that ‘futurism always anticipates, in the image of an Imaginary past, a realization of meaning that will suture identity by closing the gap’;24 drained of all subjectivity, racially coded and organized images of mothers are reduced to ideological functions that are imagined as uniquely capable of either guaranteeing or imperilling that suture, according to their degree of perceived ‘sameness’ and subservience to the dominant nationalistic order. This chapter demonstrates how these ideologies, and their material manifestation in policymaking that has historically marginalized Black mothering women and disrupted Black family lives, feed into and are explored from various angles and with various degrees of critique or complicity in representations of motherhood and family within films of the 1960s. It is an enduring effect of this racially hierarchical homogenization of the national family within the cultural imagination that the experiences of Black characters, and Black motherhood in particular, were largely marginalized within British and French

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cinemas well into the twentieth century. It is certainly possible to conceive of a ‘white gaze’ that is operational throughout a great deal of French and British cinema’s constructions of race and society during the 1960s. Within the groups of films that I have discussed in this book so far, Black characters are largely incidental, often unnamed and rarely, if ever, protagonists. This gaze is generally Othering and exoticizing, locating Black characters and families at and as the limits of white space. Within the most canonical films of the French New Wave throughout the 1960s, the presence of Black subjects in Paris is all but erased, and the films explore what is depicted as a mostly white capital. However, an interesting instance occurs – briefly – in Godard’s Masculin féminin. As discussed in the previous chapter, Paul’s narrative is frequently girded by interloping episodes that seem almost to lurch out of intense filmic narratives of their own and collide briefly with Paul’s. Several of these, such as Godard’s cameo in a marital row-turned-murder vignette in a café, are morbidly comical references to Godard’s previous films. In one notable episode, however, as Paul and Robert ride the Paris metro, the camera drifts away from them and towards a group of two Black men and one white woman. The conversation and imagery are provocative and inflected with murderous desire; the men’s invective on the subversive power of Bessie Smith’s music culminates in the assertion that Charlie Parker would happily kill whites instead of playing his saxophone, and, more tangibly, the woman – who viciously racially abuses the men, despite their apparent familiarity – carries a pistol under her coat. The scene ends on two shots: an exterior long shot of the metro and the sound of a gunshot. It is highly significant that one of these men is played by radical Mauritanian-born film-maker Med Hondo (uncredited in the film), whose own fascinating debut feature is discussed at the end of this chapter. Much like his film-making and his dissident revolutionary politics, Hondo’s brief performance here is acerbic and challenging, and the discourses of race relations, violence and disruption it produces are strikingly complex. However, the episode is a startling but brief flash. More than any other in the film, furthermore, this vignette, taking place among the speed and clamour of the metro, is characterized by transience and instability. This example may at first blush seem to be disconnected from the issues of motherhood, mothering subjectivities and reproductive futurity that are centrally at stake in this book. I begin with it here, however, because I want to suggest that such representations of mobile Black masculinities in British and French cinemas of the 1960s are in fact profoundly symptomatic of the erasures of Black mothering women and the kinship networks with which they were identified by the migration and housing policies and practices of both countries. As discussed above, these neo-imperial contexts tended to perceive Black subjects in terms of labour relations rather than intimate and familial

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relations, and certain types of bodies (largely young and male) were favoured for this purpose, becoming more visible in public space. Within these films, therefore, the single, ‘rootless’ male worker becomes himself the sign of Blackness, further marginalizing the politically and culturally invisibilized mothering subjectivities of Black women. Hondo’s confrontational performance, and the intertexts with his own film-making and activism invited by his presence, inject the scene in Masculin féminin with a self-aware critical edge; elsewhere in both British and French 1960s cinema, however, representations of transient Black men often suggest a greater degree of ideological complicity with dominant constructions of white supremacist imaginations. The thematization of mobility and non-fixedness is significant. As Webster writes, the social construction of young Black men in Britain often portrayed them as nomadic drifters moving through white society without connection to a stable sense of ‘home’. She describes how ‘images where white women were rendered either as black men’s whores, or as victims of their incapacity for familial and domestic life – pregnant and then abandoned’ were common, as was ‘portrayal of black men as rootless and adrift’.25 Though, as Webster further points out, the interactions between culture, migration and home are in reality part of a very complex and nuanced matrix of identities and social contingencies, the white gaze tended to perceive this idea of transience as something more essential. Transient Black men move incidentally and fleetingly through white narratives and images within British 1960s social realist films. Even the more sympathetically and well-realized Black male characters are largely defined by impermanence in the lives of others. In A Taste of Honey and The L-Shaped Room, for instance, despite the likeability of Johnny and Jimmy as characters and their catalytic importance for the films’ protagonists (both white women), it seems taken for granted by the teleological force of the plots that they can neither be nor participate in narrative endpoints. Though they form close bonds with the female protagonists, the possibility of these various intimacies being incorporated into Jo and Jane’s mothering identities and practices on a long-term basis is foreclosed. In fact, Webster cites Jimmy in A Taste of Honey as archetypal of the racist cliché of the Black male drifter: ‘In A Taste of Honey the black man depicted is a sailor, his presence in the film always foreshadowing his departure as he wanders from place to place.’26 She links this with the white cultural prejudices prevalent at the time that identified Black men with incapacity for family life. It is worth noting, however, that the film does not portray Jimmy’s departure as his own free decision, a fact overlooked by Webster; if anything, he seems far more emotionally invested in the relationship than Jo, and it is the demands of work and financial precarity that compel him to leave, rather than any peripatetic inclinations. It is therefore possible to produce a more contextually aware reading of this film than Webster suggests. However,

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the resultant symbolic associations with instability and rootlessness still persist; and following Jimmy’s preordained departure, the signs of racial difference are then transferred onto Jo’s pregnancy, positioning her maternal body at the contested centre of the repressive discourses of reproductive futurity. Unless coming to the film already inured in the desire to have certain racial preconceptions affirmed, a reasonable viewer should be able to read Jimmy as a sympathetic character subject to circumstance (although whether or not the specific social factors that preclude him from home and family life with Jo are recognized is a different matter). In most cases, however, this symbolic tension is far more pernicious and hostile, as in films such as Joanna (1968), the Parisian party in Darling (1965) or even Jane’s first meeting with Johnny in The L-Shaped Room (1962), where the racist imagination locates the obscuringly caricatured figure of the Black man at the boundary of the comfortable, the familiar and the homely, indicating that the protagonist (more often than not, a young white European woman initially characterized as vulnerable and impressionable) has crossed to an ‘outside’ of normative society and its familial structuring logic. As will be discussed in the following chapter, The L-Shaped Room and Darling also position these figures at the opening of queer-coded spaces, in which clearly ordered identities and structures of biological and social relationality become disturbed. The editing techniques used to introduce these figures rely on abruptness, creating an effect of shock from the identificatory perspective of the white heroine. Edelman’s description of queerness as ‘the site where the radical threat posed by irony, which heteronormative culture displaces onto the figure of the queer, is uncannily returned by queers who no longer disown but assume their figural identity as embodiments of the figuralization, and hence of the disfiguration, of identity itself ’27 becomes instructive here. The ideological subtext of these sequences is that the Blackness and queerness of these spaces – ‘outside’ normative society and its rules as they are – contain the potential to distort (to queer, to un-whiten) the young white woman as potential mother, and thereby the Child and future for which she is ideologically compelled to act as a neutral vector. Through this filmic aesthetics of identification and alienation, therefore, the ‘white gaze’ consolidates itself at the centre of culture, to the exclusion of the Other it oppresses, by ensuring access to an intelligible discourse of motherhood for itself only. Black characters are in this way often constructed at a distance by the white gaze as ‘outside’ and isolated from familial relationships, looking both forward and back – they are given no futures and no pasts in these narratives. In this way, motherhood becomes jealously protected as a purely white institution, and the diversity and complexity of mothering subjectivities are suppressed altogether. In the very few examples in which images of Black family life do occur in films associated with the Swinging London and kitchen sink cycles, the viewpoint is markedly

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exoticizing. Webster describes a plainly racist image of Black families’ lifestyles apparently current among white social commentators in England in the postwar period: ‘Huxley’s portrayal of black life as “hugger-mugger” marks a particular moment in race discourse in the post-war period, when in the early 1960s attention began to turn to black reproduction and black family life, which was represented as domestic barbarism in opposition to Englishness.’28 This same stereotype is visible in metropolitan English fiction films, in fleeting images of large families cohabiting closely in small London flats, usually identified with moods of festivity, noise and music. For instance, in Joan Littlewood’s Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963) – a comedy about a man supposedly lost at sea for several years who returns to find his wife has remarried – during Charlie’s jubilant return to the East End, he walks into one such crowded flat and joins in with the dancing and music-playing which is apparently perpetual. In Georgy Girl, Meredith and Jos’s makeshift wedding at the town hall is preceded by another ceremony attended by a Black family, similarly large and identified with celebration (which the three protagonists proceed jokingly to mimic in order to express their own irreverence). There is no room whatsoever for any sense of mothering subjectivities here; within these films, Black mothers appear only as binding terms within these fleeting families, which are in turn made meaningful solely through what they signify to the white characters, but are otherwise opaque. The facile image of the large first-generation Black migrant family, identified with joy despite a lack of material comfort and privilege, becomes a cipher through which white protagonists passingly express such characteristics within themselves and flirt with uninhibited ‘Otherness’. Leora Auslander and Thomas C. Holt, in their examination of the legacies of minstrelsy in European cultures, demonstrate how such ‘love and theft’ images from the white gaze reduce Black identities to a narcissistic binary: In the case of minstrelsy, a displacement function clearly existed wherein desired but repressed, imagined but distorted aspects of black life and character were symbolically, indeed sometimes literally, put on – on stage, in street parades, and even enacted during riots. In the process, the whole of black life and character was colonized, that is, blacks became only song, dance, and sexuality – in a word, ‘joy’.29

The reverse of this simplistic identification as ‘joy’ is, they argue, a polar symbolization of white fears; ‘At the same time, blacks took on those aspects whites feared – the flip side of what they desired – the dangerous, the lustful, the bestial. Like the two sides of a coin, the contrary images of the Janus-faced black were mutually constituting.’30 Within the film images, accordingly, other examples of incidental Black characters position them as figures of the ‘underside’ of society, associated with poverty or crime, as evidenced in films

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such as The Pleasure Girls (1965), Joanna (1968) and Sapphire (1959), which focus on criminality, and Up the Junction (1968) and the television play Cathy Come Home (1966), in which dispossessed Black families are used to express the hardship of the white protagonists’ current situations, but suggest no access to Black subjectivities. In several of these cases – although in very different ways – the spaces occupied by single Black men and Black families are used to represent respectively moral and socio-economic danger to the body of the young white mother or potential mother. Particularly in Up the Junction and Cathy Come Home, both of which foreground the socio-economic geographies of London as central concerns, Black and Asian families are not subjectively present, but mobilized only as ‘backdrops’ to authenticate the squalor of the housing conditions into which the protagonist enters. The racism of housing policies is touched on in a tokenistic way in Up the Junction, but in both cases, the critique of housing poverty extends mostly to the risk that it might pose to young, white mothers. Insecure and unsafe material conditions for mothering become unacceptable only really when they are imagined to threaten this idealized type of mother, and the reproduction of white patriarchal culture she is made to represent. These few simplistic images in the generally white cycles of metropolitan social realism and the New Wave, therefore, have everything to do with the exoticizing and narcissistic taxonomies of the fantasies of dominant white patriarchal imaginations, and very little, if anything, to do with the experiences and self-representation of Black family lives, intimacies and kinship subjectivities in Europe. In all cases, furthermore, mothers are radically absent. Whether the images are of the rootless outsider or the incomprehensible family, there are few substantial images at all, let alone positive, nuanced or subjective ones, of Black motherhood to be found in domestic French or English cinema during this period. Instead, most traces of the mother are replaced by the figure of the solitary male labourer. This type of maternal absence is, however, not the same as the white patriarchal subject’s inattention to the subjectivity of his own mother, as we have seen, for instance, in the mechanized ‘mam’ of the British kitchen sink cycle, the Truffauldian Jocasta of the French New Wave or the marginalized remainder of reproductive futurity in anti-choice rhetoric. Here, rather, we see white patriarchy’s policing of its own idea of private and national families along a series of axes that refuse to admit difference within this familial fantasy that is formed in the patriarch’s own image. Much of the superficial engagement with race of the cinemas discussed thus far is conducted through a myth-making white lens. It is therefore important at this point to consider theorizations of how racial difference produces heterogeneous specificities of experiencing nation and culture and, vitally, of how these experiences of difference can be communicated aesthetically and affectively in film through alternative paradigms of visuality and looking (or of presentation and perception).

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Writing on film from the perspective of the ‘diaspora experience’,31 Stuart Hall argues that Black identities and discourses of self-articulation in film are negotiated through different ‘presences’: ‘Présence Africaine, Présence Européanne, and the third, most ambiguous, presence of all – the sliding term, “Présence Américaine”’.32 He describes the complex effects of each of these diasporic presences, and asks what it means to express oneself from this position; ‘What recent theories of enunciation suggest is that, though we speak, so to say “in our own name”, of ourselves and from our own experience, nevertheless who speaks, and the subject who is spoken of, are never exactly in the same place.’33 Particularly interesting for the discussion at hand, moreover, is the presence of the mother within Hall’s theory. He draws a psychoanalytic analogy between the imagined African past and the relation to the mother as the point of origin that cannot be returned to, strongly reminiscent of the nostalgic ‘wholeness’ of a Lacanian imaginary; ‘The past continues to speak to us. But this is no longer a simple, factual “past”, since our relation to it is, like the child’s relation to the mother, always-already “after the break”. It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth.’34 The gendered imagery of the analogy is somewhat uncomfortable, bringing the figure of the individual African mother rather close to ‘Mother Africa’, and hence threatening to replicate reductive symbolic slippage (familiar from ideological traditions symptomatic of the conventional misogynies of reproductive futurity) of motherhood into nationhood and – more perniciously – mothering subject into cultural fantasy. Certainly, a key criticism of much now-classic theory of race and cinema levelled by bell hooks35 is that it has tended to sideline questions of gender. The complex symbolic matrices of home, displacement, family and plurality at work in filmic representations of postcolonial migration and maternal kinships should therefore be approached with care. As Wendy Webster emphasizes, the family and figure of the mother can carry different connotations according to one’s race and relation to dominant culture. Considering, for instance, discursive and political treatments of home within feminist activism, she reflects that white European feminists have typically ‘emphasize[d] patriarchy and see[n] the family as a main site of women’s oppression’, whereas Black feminists have at different points ‘emphasize[d] colonialism and racism and see[n] the family as a main source of support in resistance to it’.36 These symbolic inflections should be taken into consideration in approaching filmic representations of motherhood, race and migration in 1960s Britain and France while, at the same time, remaining critically alert to the potential of the transnational mother figure to slip into pure metaphor under certain conditions of racism and sexism. Issues of displacement, visibility and maternal connections to home are present in French film-maker François Reichenbach’s Un cœur gros comme ça (1961), a semi-documentary-style film37 about a gifted young Senegalese

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boxer, Abdoulaye Faye, living in Paris to pursue his career. I intend ultimately to argue that Abdoulaye’s relation to his mother, and her physical and vocal absence from representation, are vital components of the film’s meanings. Before coming to this point, however, it is worth spending some time outlining the identificatory mechanisms of the film and its exploration of the Black male migrant figure in white European space in a more general sense. The film foregrounds an intimate identification with Abdoulaye’s experience, psychologizing public and private spaces from his perspective (the streets, the boxing gym and Abdoulaye’s bedroom appear and reappear to map his subjective Parisian geography), and using intermittent voiceovers in which he meditates on his passion for boxing, his feelings about the city, his desire to find a partner and other emotionally driven topics. The film’s close identification with Abdoulaye highlights and denaturalizes the socially alienating structures at work on him. This alienation is further articulated through his particularized relationship to space and cultural objects and the way that this positions him in relation to generalized ideas of Frenchness and his access to the images that construct and bolster the imagined community of Paris, in the process contesting the self-proclaimed ‘colour-blindness’ of French society. The editing and cinematographic techniques of the film create perspectives, collisions and juxtapositions that offer critical counter-discourses on the institutions (the family, the military, school systems and so on) to which universalism suggests that all subjects may assimilate, suggesting that none of these are ideologically neutral and undermining their easy liberalism. Arriving in Paris, Abdoulaye is keen to explore its culture. The sequence depicting his first encounters with Paris reverses and parodies colonial travel film, involving clichéd shots of central Paris and ‘indigenous’ (chanson-style) music, but Abdoulaye’s train only passes through the centre and does not stop there, travelling beyond to the less salubrious outskirts in which he will stay. Mamadou Diouf describes such outskirts (banlieues) as a continuation of colonizing space, its ‘lost territories’ of cultural conflict: These blighted spaces of questioned and qualified belonging emerge as extensions of France’s colonial mission (indeed, the failure of this mission) in its compromises and revisions, its violence and paternalism, and its selective and limited economy of knowledge where absence legitimates the smooth and fluid narrative of the Republic’s fraternal universalism, its nationhood, its citizenship, and its moral and socio-cultural codes.38

Such episodes show how the city space is differently constructed by race; despite the rising tide of successful independence campaigns across Africa and Asia in the post-war period, French space remains colonized, and its geographies promote the political, cultural and spatial centralization of the white

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French family. In her work on mobilities in cinematic Paris and London, Malini Guha makes a relevant comparison between the flâneur, who becomes the invisible ‘man of the crowd’ in the city – and who fits into metropolitan culture so well that he is able to move about its urban spaces with unrestrained freedom and no accountability – and the migrant, who is defined by visibility and who crystallizes the city’s globalizing currents and tensions, ‘the often uncomfortable affinities, continuities and frictions between imperial past and global present that come to surface through the depiction of a number of migrant mobilities’.39 The differences of visualization and exposure are further articulated in other images within the sequence depicting Abdoulaye’s explorations of Paris. The sequence offers a cheery stream of visual and aural clichés and popular images of Paris, continuing the motif of the ironically inverted travelogue film, and shows Abdoulaye engaging with the city as a tourist, visiting parks and the Arc de Triomphe, climbing the Eiffel Tower and having novelty photos taken. However, in the middle of these touristic cultural clichés, Abdoulaye visits a museum containing a collection of objects and images documenting France’s colonial histories. The soundtrack mutates from the airy chanson to something more sinister as the camera focuses on colonial figurines and racializing imagery. This demonstrates at work both Guha’s connection of migrant mobilities to the visibility of globalization and Auslander and Holt’s account of difference of perception according to lenses of racial identity, in which they argue that one’s global, local and cultural positioning affect not only responses to racialized objects, but also determine which objects and images become visible or go unnoticed.40 The identification with Abdoulaye foregrounds the nature of these objects as residue of imperial violence and alienation. These symbols cannot then be disconnected from the images of the Parisian everyday that surround them, or from the shot of the French flag flying over the Arc de Triomphe. These episodes mark Abdoulaye’s experience as one of liminality and doubleness, both participating in and standing apart from the dominant cultural flows of Paris. The liberal myths of French universalism fracture along the cuts of the montage scenes as the exclusions, contradictions, erasures and violences of its imperial genealogy are made clearer. Abdoulaye is, moreover, particularly exposed to racializing constructions in public spaces. It is here that the scenes of him at home, in his small one-room apartment, become significant points of intimate subjectivity. The private room is the primary location of Abdoulaye’s interior voice within the film; most of his voiceovers, which act as key expressions of his subjectivity and desires, are visually grounded in this space, accompanied by shots of Abdoulaye on his bed or interacting with his possessions. The mise en scène of Abdoulaye’s room is also meaningful, and the pictures he keeps on his walls and in photo albums are richly connected to his personal and familial identities, fantasies, imaginative life and desires. The

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pictures are recurring motifs in the film; they comprise glamorous magazine images of white women, publicity shots from Abdoulaye’s boxing career and two personal shots one of which appears to be of him as a child and the other of his mother. The variety of images indicates the complexity of Abdoulaye’s subjectivities, variously European, Senegalese and personal, and his desire for both relational belonging and individual recognition. This is further consolidated by his letter-writing to his mother. He writes to her twice; both scenes are visually juxtaposed with the photo collections, and both letters describe the strangeness of Paris as a city (the noise and the cold). These letters are another location of voice and intimate identification. Though he is often alone in the Parisian streets, the maternal figure places him within a storied relational nexus. Nonetheless, the mother is materially absent from the film other than in the photograph, and never writes back. As well as placing Abdoulaye within a familial context, therefore, the absence of the mothering subject serves to underscore his own relative isolation within French culture. To some extent, this is not the same maternal absence that exists for the archetypal white protagonist, who ‘gets beyond’ his mother by tethering her within a certain narrow locus of the ego; this is an absence altogether more melancholy that echoes the sadness of displacement within a culture that obfuscates self-determination of Black family identities and sees little use for its mothers. On the other hand, however, the film does in some ways rehearse various psychoanalytic objectifications of the mother as mediated primarily through the viewpoints and desires of her son. Abdoulaye’s mother is, after all, symbolized only as an absent image, and one onto which his feelings about origins, identity and emotional security are projected largely on his own terms. As in Stuart Hall’s formulation, the maternal body becomes troublingly identified with a ‘motherland’, and it is difficult to square this with creative possibilities for mothering subjects. Though the contexts of migration, racism and material neo-imperial social and legal forces inform the complex conditions of this maternal silence, it is still a silence that is not explored other than through narratives of filial desire. While somewhat differently inflected than the other films discussed in this chapter so far, therefore, Un cœur gros still leaves us with the representational problem of the absent mother. The film offers some critical and at times sensitive reflection on alienation, migration and intergenerational kinship, in which the maternal relationship becomes keenly meaningful. However, these meanings are explored exclusively through the subjectivity of the young male migrant; the mother remains ultimately a voiceless image. The relation, therefore, belongs principally to him rather than her. Similar themes of migration, diasporic identities and coercive estrangement of Black migrant subjects from mothers and cultures in France are critiqued more thoroughly in Ousmane Sembène’s La noire de … (1966).41 Like Reichenbach’s film, Sembène’s also

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focuses on postcolonial cultural and political questions of migration between Senegal and France specifically. Sembène adapted the film from his earlier short story of the same name, though the film, unlike the story, is set after Senegalese independence. La noire de … is a landmark of Senegalese cinema, and is hence distinct from the majority of films under discussion in this book; it is, however, important to include it here because of its detailed reflection on experiences of race, migration, maternal labour, intimacy and family in France from a postcolonial perspective. Unlike in Un cœur gros, the central protagonist of La noire de … is a young woman – Diouana – who is depicted in the contexts of both domestic labour in France and familial and communal subjectivity in Senegal. Questions of gender and motherhood are therefore brought to bear far more keenly within this film. Set between Dakar and the French Riviera,42 Sembène’s film is intimately focused on Diouana’s experience of migration as one that mutates rapidly from the promise of mobility and adventure to neocolonial exploitation and domestic-maternal slavery. Through the close narrative identification with Diouana and the use of voiceover, the film marks Diouana’s subjectivity and inner life as being in stark contrast with the objectifying, alienating and externalizing treatment she receives from her employers turned enslavers, Madame and Monsieur.43 I have discussed this film and its representation of motherhood in depth elsewhere;44 as I outlined in that article, the prevailing critical tendency has been to regard La noire de …, and more specifically its representation of the relationship between Diouana and Madame, as by and large a postcolonial allegory for the relationship between Senegal and France in the era of Senegal’s newly won independence.45 However, I argued that while the allegorical dimension of the film is undoubtedly significant, it should not come at the expense of understanding its specificity as a representation of a gendered experience of migration and racism, which, furthermore, is bound up in crucial ways with discourses of mothering, family and nationalistic reproductive futurity. I argued in particular that the film’s gendered reflections on race, intimacy and relational subjectivities should be considered in light of three key maternal discourses in the film. The first of these is the way in which the figure of Madame operates in relation to the idealized ‘mother of the nation’ imagery that forms the ideological bedrock of French post-war pronatalist rhetoric, and which has been extensively at stake here and in the previous part of this book in relation to its repressive effects on the representation of the women it addresses. Madame is a young, attractive and affluent white French woman connoting in several respects aspirational ‘modern’ and even ‘New Wave’ femininity; however, the fact that she is a mother to three small children also places her safely away from the spectre of the neo-Malthusian couple often associated with this lifestyle,46 meaning that she is able to enjoy the cultural, social and

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economic benefits of mobility and modernity while simultaneously appearing to fulfil to some degree de Gaulle’s post-war invocation to ‘young couples to provide him with “millions of beautiful babies”’.47 It should be emphasized that Sembène’s characterization of Madame is anything but simplistic; while subject to intense critique for her clamour to elevate herself and her social status through neocolonial exploitation, and for her failure to recognize or respect Diouana’s subjectivity, Madame is suggested as in some regards oppressed as well as oppressing. As Lyell Davies argues, she ‘holds only lowly status within the family and she too is unable to articulate or properly analyse her oppression’.48 The film makes the point more subtly than this phrasing suggests, but the representation of Madame’s anger towards and contempt for her husband, and her lack of any meaningful engagement with her own children, suggest that the maternal and feminine image and social capital to which she aspires act oppressively on her too. However, it is significant that despite the complex and contradictory nature of idealized feminine images of modernity and maternity, Madame is able to sustain them on at least a cosmetic level, through which she aims to leverage a degree of social power and privilege. What the film makes clear, however, is that her access to both the maternal ideal image and some sense of her own subjective mobility is structurally reliant on Diouana’s maternal-domestic enslavement.49 While she is allowed no relational subjectivity of her own (Madame dismisses Monsieur’s feeble suggestion that Diouana be allowed out to explore Antibes by insisting that she ‘knows nobody’, and implicitly, has no possibility of personal relationships), Diouana is forced into the position of domestic object, made into a function of Madame’s mothering rather than a subject of her own familial network. La noire de … is unusual within this period of Francophone film for its close and sensitive representation of labour migration focalized by a Black woman, and it offers in this sense a valuable alternative perspective to the discourses of race and masculinity in films such as Un cœur gros, which locate tensions largely within public spaces and suggest private, domestic space as a productive environment in which identity can be consolidated. In La noire de …, while the scenes in Dakar are largely shot in the open, Diouana’s experience of France becomes oppressively bounded within the limited domestic setting. After a brief sequence of the drive from the port to the flat, which, like the arrival scene in Reichenbach’s film, parodies ‘colonial travelogue and memoir paradigms’,50 Diouana never again leaves the French household other than through non-chronological flashbacks to her life in Senegal. She becomes trapped within a nationalistic image of the French family that is both materially and ideologically violent; through its close focus on a specifically gendered question of neocolonial labour relations, the film suggests Diouana’s objectification and maternal-domestic labour as a structural component invisibilized

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within the discourse of racialized reproductive futurity. It is worth returning here to Edelman’s conception of the Child: this figure does not just circulate as an idea, but is reliant on a series of structuring oppressions. In order for the ideal Child to function as an effective political resource, he (it is almost always he) depends on the subjugation of an ideal mothering object; the cathected white middle-class mothering object of European nationalist discourse is in turn maintained by the unseen labour of migrant and working-class women. The film, and Diouana’s actions within it, disrupt the smooth functioning of these ideologies by viscerally de-repressing the violences and contradictions that the figure of the Child-as-reproductive-future seeks to cover over. In addition to this conflict between mothering imaginaries and maternal labour, the film contains a third significant representation of motherhood that has been under-analysed in its critical consideration: this is the relationship between Diouana and her own mother. I have, again, discussed this relationship elsewhere.51 Within the present discussion, however, there are particularly interesting comparisons to be made between the representations of letter-writing and transnational communication with mothers in this film and Un cœur gros. In Abdoulaye’s letters to his mother, the maternal bond was constructed as a relatively straightforward connection to home, which allowed the protagonist access to a nostalgic identity discourse and underscored a sense of potential displacement, but which also problematically silenced the maternal figure. Within La noire de …, the communication becomes a much more fraught and contested space. As Diouana’s abuse within the French family worsens, she receives a letter purportedly from her mother in Dakar, which appears to criticize Diouana for not sending home enough of her wages. Monsieur, who reads the letter aloud, does not question its authenticity, nor recognize his and Madame’s complicity in their failure to pay Diouana any wages at all. Diouana, however, recognizes that the voice is not her mother’s, as both women are illiterate, and that it was in fact composed by the village’s public letter-writer (played, self-consciously, by Sembène himself ). When she refuses to participate in fabricating a response, Monsieur takes the task entirely upon himself, accepting guilt in Diouana’s guise and composing careless platitudes wholly inadequate to the reflection of a nuanced intersubjective maternal relation. What is represented in this scene, therefore, is a comprehensive forgery of both women’s voices, and therefore a violent appropriation of the maternal bond and its specificity, alienated as Irigaray describes in ‘The Bodily Encounter with the Mother’ by ‘putting the matrix of his language [langue] in its place’,52 in this case the language of the specifically imperialist patriarch. La noire de … therefore troubles the emotional security and recourse to expression suggested in the maternal relation by Un cœur gros. This form of communication is particularly vulnerable to distortion by neocolonial power relations.

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However, it is important to point out that the mothering relation is not represented as only a location of fragility in La noire de …. The letter-writing scene is of key structural importance in the film, galvanizing in Diouana not despair, but resistance. Understanding resolutely through this act of intellectual violation that her neocolonial situation erases her identity as a relational subject in France, she accelerates her disruptive action against Madame and Monsieur. Here and beyond, the mother–daughter relationship is presented as a site of potential power and creativity. While critics have commonly concentrated on the film’s final shot of the uncertain face of the young Senegalese boy (who chases Monsieur out of the village wearing Diouana’s mask) as the image in which the film invests its ambivalent hope and trepidation for the future of independent Senegal,53 I have argued that the significance of the maternal dialogue created in the final brief but meaningful appearance of Diouana’s mother (her second of only two appearances in the film) should not be underestimated.54 Diouana’s death presents a deeply pessimistic prospect for possibilities of anticolonial action, yet the series of resistant gestures that she enacts against Madame and Monsieur (including occupying the bathroom, withholding labour and refusing Monsieur’s money and Madame’s apron) are continued through her mother. Like her daughter, the mother rejects the money Monsieur offers (too late and with no understanding of its absolute incommensurability with a human life) and silently walks away from him. I have argued that this series of shots completes a hooksian ‘oppositional gaze’ against the colonizing couple initiated by Diouana.55 There is – quite justly – no narrative or political closure to this film, but, I argue, the mother’s rejection of Monsieur and return to her own private space is as significant a site of potentiality as the face of the young boy. La noire de …, in this way, stands apart from more or less all other films under discussion here. Throughout much Francophone cinema of the 1960s, Black mothering women become subject to multiple erasures, which, as I have argued, are conditioned by a complex multitude of ideological, economic and material political factors. In the mother’s disengagement from Monsieur (a gesture that deeply unsettles him), La noire de … suggests the subjective space into which she enters as an unrepresented (perhaps in some senses unrepresentable, at least under these conditions) but imminently powerful elsewhere that falls outside of the racist and patriarchal discourses that Monsieur represents. Despite this uncertain suggestion of spaces of creation, however, within these filmic narratives of migration and displacement, Black subjects within France are often depicted as isolated, Othered and excluded from kinship. The distortion of these characters as familial subjects is consolidated through a taxonomizing white gaze that does not incorporate them within the imagined national family, and which is given self-aware and highly critical treatment in films such as Un cœur gros and La noire de …, which position Black migrant fo-

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calizers at the centre of their political and aesthetic projects. Within these representations of estrangement, mothers are depicted as in various ways offering and, in La noire de …, participating in affirmative identities capable of deconstructing and opposing racist alienation. While there may be apparent discursive similarities here in some cases with the invisibilizing Oedipal fantasies of mothers as origin stories in the self-narration of white patriarchal subjects, it would be a mistake to assume that the Eurocentric ideology of the Child and reproductive futurity as it is presented by Edelman can necessarily be projected universally in the same way. While this ideology’s immobilizing cathexis of the mother is an exercise in narcissism that reproduces heterosexuality, patriarchy and whiteness in its own image, the interweaving symbolizations of mothers and origins within diasporic imaginations should be understood within their specific sociohistorical positionings. Of course, it is important to remain critical of the persistent capacity for abstraction of mothering subjects inherent in any metaphorizing discourses of motherhood. However, in these cases, mothers, sons and daughters are all objects of absenting practices, compounding the cultural and political barriers to the representation of mothering subjects. European patriarchal culture deliberately elects the white child over his mother, but its ideology of narcissistic cultural futurity has little regard for Black kinships at all, and therefore either passively or actively suppresses possibilities for specificity, participation or self-expression. Such racist futurity has a long and appalling history within Western Europe, and is significant in the treatment of both Black and mixed-race subjects within majority-white societies, as well as in how such subjects are represented within the British and French films of this period. Claude Blanckaert56 has produced a sobering summary of the brutal history of various pseudoscientific ideas that shaped perceptions of ‘miscegenation’ or ‘métissage’ in twentieth-century France, showing how the ‘viability’ of mixed-race children was questioned and mapping a pervasive climate of white supremacy within questions of marriage, reproduction, maternity and their institutionalization within law and society. Herrick Chapman and Laura Levine Frader argue that after the Second World War, the most explicit forms of biological racism were widely condemned, but were substituted by more insidious forms; ‘Post-war racism has therefore commonly taken a more cultural form, as reflected in the conviction of Jean-Marie Le Pen and many of his National Front supporters that beliefs and mores of non-European immigrants are too entrenched and incompatible with Frenchness to qualify them for the privileges of full citizenship.’57 Such expressions of racism cloy to the ideals of Republicanism by insisting upon the paradox that the impossibility for certain races of acquiring enough ‘Frenchness’ does not undermine the universal accessibility of citizenship to those who can prove themselves ‘French’ enough. This spurious apologia can scarcely disguise its

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hand-wringing anxiety over the collapse of an imagined cultural immortality fantasy, symbolizing both a collective and a personal death. The Child and the culture that he or she (but almost always he) embodies herein are timeless; according to the racist patriarch, the national future is ‘myself, but more’ rather than a restlessly adapting body of infinite difference. If the imagination of the Child is the narcissistic image of immortality, then difference means death. To militate against such ideologically intolerable fluidness, the mothering object, in her role as function of futurity, must be made to remain as neutral, white space, with as little subjectivity, desire and difference as possible. In Britain, too, hostility towards interracial couples in end-of-empire culture seems to speak to misplaced feelings of threat and self-preservation. Bill Schwarz, for instance, describes a trend of white men in England becoming increasingly possessive over white women: At this moment, an underlying socio-sexual dynamic to the situation becomes clear. Very crudely, the language of white masculinity embodied all the attributes of activity, control and (when confronted with the black presence) refusal. The invocation of the fantasised figure of the white man in itself speaks, by its very terms, this refusal. But it is driven by the (equally fantasised) conception of white womanhood, victimised, prey to the rapacious and uncontrolled appetites of black men. In this period, the debate on race became locked into such assumptions at a profound level. … In popular life, all the evidence suggests that relations between blacks and indigenous whites were harmonious until the moment when black men started dating, or appearing to date, white women – a shift which triggered the full gamut of reaction, from official sanctions to beatings.58

Intimate relationships between Black men and white women therefore seem to be understood as an injury to white British identity itself. The sexist hierarchy of men as agents and women as passive and vulnerable is also projected onto this imagined conflict, leading to an excess of hostility against Black men, who are seen as aggressors (and rivals to the tacitly prized aggressive powers of white British men). Webster also frames British racism and the resulting social segregation and separation of Black families during the post-war period within the context of a perceived ‘threat to home’.59 She also describes how ‘Government policies made distinctions between all white immigrants as “suitable immigrants” and black migrants as “the colour problem”’,60 echoing the racist hierarchies of French pronatalism. In a period of political thought and policymaking that prioritized the child and the rebuilding of the national family home, therefore, it was clear who could or could not be part of that family. Once again, the institution of motherhood – as always at the expense of the rights, desires and expressive access of mothering subjects – is structurally central to this project. The particularly misogynistic forms of European racism that perceived Black

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men as ‘invading’ white women’s bodies (and thereby their capacities for biological and symbolic reproduction) are expressions of the same familiar maternal misogynies that objectify mothering women and fertile female bodies as instruments of white patriarchal cultural power. What is profoundly at stake in these racist invectives against ‘miscegenation’ is the continued sole ownership of the mother-as-object as a medium of self-reproduction. In a cinematic tradition that continued to broadly under- or misrepresent Black characters, the portrayal of interracial couples and romances in metropolitan English and French films at this time is notably sparse. While meaningful reflections on this topic are markedly rare within the central canons of French and British New Wave film-making, it is more commonly addressed (though often clumsily) in Britain through the ‘social problem’ subgenre of film and television, which has traditionally been less popular in French cinema and was actively decried by the Cahiers critics and film-makers. The few films that do foreground romantic relationships between white and Black characters in both countries in the 1960s often focus on representing and critiquing hostile social attitudes faced by interracial couples. These narratives also tend to include a pregnancy as a dramatic plot point, supporting the idea that it is ‘miscegenation’ anxieties over the figure of the Child that are the driving force of such aggression. Claude Bernard-Aubert’s melodramatic Les lâches vivent d’espoir (1961) (the title of which is awkwardly anglicized as My Baby is Black!) is one such film, featuring as its protagonists a Black man, Daniel, and a white woman, Françoise, as they fall in love and negotiate the racism and prejudice of French society. The film, which was also marketed to an English-speaking audience and dubbed clumsily by actors with American accents, was received poorly and compared unfavourably to the French New Wave, with one contemporaneous review declaring that ‘the film’s pretentious approach sums up all the least likeable aspects of the younger French cinema, coming perilously near at times to unconscious parody’.61 The film’s artistic failings notwithstanding, however, it is clearly intended to be politically conscious and critical of pervasive social racism. Furthermore, it is pertinent to the central argument of this chapter – that issues of reproductive futurity and the objectified mothering body are intimately bound up with popular expressions of racism in 1960s Britain and France – that this overt exploration of end-of-empire racism in France hinges structurally and symbolically on the representation of a pregnancy and imminent motherhood. The protagonists, Daniel and Françoise, meet as students in Paris. Much of the film concentrates on the passionate romance between them, described in long sequences of the couple walking around the city and spending time together in Daniel’s apartment. These scenes are overlaid with voiceover exchanges between the couple, representing real or imagined conversations,

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in which they express their love for each other, but also relate concerns over whether their relationship can withstand the racism of the society in which they live. This racism is portrayed consistently throughout the film in a variety of situations, from people who stare at them in public spaces, to racial slurs and other expressive racism, to institutional racism among the police, to the representation of a violent attack by a group of young white men against the Black male partner of another interracial couple. Of particular note here, however, is the reaction to Françoise’s pregnancy. When she tells her parents that she is pregnant with Daniel’s child, they react with blunt racist outrage and insist that she ‘get rid of it’. Françoise responds in shock that abortion is a sin, but her parents hypocritically defend their position and continue to exert pressure on her, which Françoise resists, focusing only on the love and affection of her relationship with Daniel. Through the representation of the parents’ anger and effort to exercise control over their daughter’s reproductive identity, the film expresses the hypocrisies of abortion discourses described by theorists of reproductive justice: the same ideology that considers a white woman’s termination of a pregnancy by a white partner morally unthinkable offers no protection at all to any other child or couple. This episode, therefore, though lacking any subtlety of representation, critiques the very narrow and barbed limits of the narrative of ‘fighting for the children’; not only are the needs and existence of many children and families ignored by this narrative, they are actively assaulted. Reproductive futurity is not, as it declares itself, a demonstration of active compassion for the vulnerable (children), but a project, full of design and eugenic purpose, that seeks to fulfil itself by any means, any coercion and any violence necessary. Central to the unambiguous moral argument of the film, therefore, is the female protagonist’s staking of a clear claim to her own mothering subjectivity, which resists the ideological pressures at work on her to become an objective medium for reproduction-as-cultural-repetition. Whatever else may be said of the film, it is significant that it recognizes maternal bodies as a vital terrain on which contestations over racial difference and patriarchal power are played out, and sees the assertive presence of mothering subjects over and above motherhood as a hegemonic institution as a key site of resistance to multiple forms of social injustice. In Lâches, the final shot is triumphant. The couple, reconciled over the differences that have previously divided them and now wearing wedding rings, kiss and walk in the street together, pushing their baby in a pram. The film’s conclusion is simplistic and naïvely optimistic in its suggestion that familial and romantic love can rather easily overcome the oppressions and violences of neocolonial metropolitan culture, yet it does interestingly frame motherhood and reproductive autonomy as forms of political action against these pressures. In other films, social anxieties over race and ‘miscegenation’ and the violence

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they produce are imagined to run much deeper. One such example is Basil Dearden’s Sapphire (1959), an example of the ‘social problem film’ subgenre of British realism. The plot of the film is shaped around an investigation into the death of Sapphire, a university student living in London. Sapphire is a young and attractive woman, and the investigating officers immediately identify her with the stock figure of the innocent and sympathetic female victim. However, once the arrival of Sapphire’s much darker-skinned brother, Dr Robbins, reveals that Sapphire was in fact a mixed-race woman ‘passing’ as white, the attitudes and presumptions of the officers change entirely. Through the representations of Sapphire and the family of her white boyfriend, David, the film engages with issues of racial tension and prejudice in English society, though its efforts in this vein are girded by an excess of cautious middle-class apologia. The film suggests that the revelation seems to split Sapphire into two separate identities, in fact representing two opposing stock figures of the Swinging London film cycle (in some senses a sister genre to the social problem film) – the ‘innocent’ young white woman and the fetishized Black woman – showing how perception of colour entails a huge baggage of constructions and stereotypes and again suggests different experiential models of vision. Several of these stereotypes involve prejudiced ideas about Black women’s sexuality. Webster discusses the construction of Black sexualities in 1950s and 1960s England, arguing that while miscegenation fears tended to focus on relationships between Black men, imagined as ‘only wanting one thing’,62 and white women, seen as either ‘victims’ or ‘whores’,63 Black women’s sexuality was often invisibilized. This lack of attention has, in part, to do with the social understanding and valuation of the white mother as the reproductive vessel of cultural futurity. White women’s sexual relationships with Black men were, in this light, seen as obstructing their predestined roles as mothers of the nation; ‘While maternity was generally seen as a woman’s main biological drive and a sign of her maturity, completion and fulfilment, it was regarded very differently when it was associated with miscegenation.’64 The disregard that this ideology showed for Black mothers and their children, however, meant that the sexuality of Black women was not as prevalent an issue. Where it did appear, Webster argues that it was either seen as a ‘solution’ to Black men’s sexuality, ‘to ensure that black men kept away from white women’,65 or else was ‘constructed as entertainment and titillation for white voyeurs’.66 This racialization of perception is represented unsubtly in the film; having learned of Sapphire’s parentage, the investigating officers begin to ‘rediscover’ various facts and belongings that appeared initially incoherent, but are now recontextualized to confirm their impressions of Black femininity. In their first sweep of Sapphire’s room, they find a locked drawer containing lingerie, a red petticoat and a photograph of Sapphire dancing. Initially presented as a mystery incongruous with their identification of Sapphire as ‘inno-

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cent’, after meeting Dr Robbins, one of the inspectors picks up the same skirt and comments, ‘red taffeta under a tweed skirt … the black under the white alright’. Within this context, the issue of Sapphire’s passing becomes a particularly troubling location for racist reproductive anxieties and desires. Sapphire’s racial ambiguity is especially unsettling to the racist characters in the film and the institutions they represent (respectively the family and the police: the informal and formal arbiters of patriarchal law), as her maternity symbolizes the introduction of difference into nationalistic imaginations of reproductive futurity in a way that the ideology cannot control, anticipate or name. Disappointingly, however, the film’s rather stiff and apologetic progressivism and its formal conventionality with regard to the detective genre’s narrative of ‘discovery’ mean that the film itself is sympathetic to conservative desires for taxonomic clarity. It is a simplified idea of Sapphire’s Blackness that the film repeatedly ‘reveals’ rather than her complexity as a raced and gendered subject. Sapphire does not meaningfully explore the much more radical potential of ‘passing’ as a political appropriation of discursive instability that might usefully disrupt systems of symbolic power by exposing the fictional nature of all hegemonic discourses of raced, gendered and sexual identity, and of the patriarchal institution of motherhood that ‘revives and renews all other institutions’67 and provides the ideological medium by which such fantasies of clear and coherent identities are reproduced. Sapphire acts as an earnest, if often clumsy and unnuanced, depiction of a climate in which prejudice is rife and race is seen as strongly essentializing. As with Lâches, however, it is significant to note that it is specifically Sapphire’s pregnancy, and her reproductive subjectivity, that is ultimately revealed to have catalysed murderous racist violence, and which the film thereby places at the centre of its polemic. In the final scene, the murder case is solved as David’s sister, Mildred, reveals herself as the killer. Having harboured a great deal of racial hatred throughout David’s relationship with Sapphire (whom the family knew to be mixed-race), Mildred had stabbed Sapphire in a moment of racist panic after the latter, who seemed keen to befriend her partner’s sister, intimated to her that she was pregnant. Mildred becomes an embodiment of the aggressive cultural futurity that imagines itself as ‘fighting for the children’ (that is, for her own children and the fantasized self-image she subscribes to as ideal white mother-of-the-nation). During the investigation, Mildred’s children are rejected by a friend’s parents and realize that it has something to do with the perception of Sapphire, at which point Mildred rejects their association with her. The specific phrase that triggers Mildred’s murderous violence, furthermore, is Sapphire’s invocation of her children: ‘give the twins my love and tell them they’ll have a new little cousin soon.’ Finally, her confession is pro-

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voked by a similar incident, as Dr Robbins absent-mindedly handles a toy doll belonging to Mildred’s daughters; following an intense series of shot/reverse shots between Mildred and Dr Robbins holding the doll, Mildred snatches the toy from him, screaming, ‘get him out! I don’t want his hands on my kids’ toys. I don’t want him near my kids. I don’t want his dirty hands on my children. Tearing up my family, they’re mine.’ In this film, therefore, racial violence against Black women, and mothering women in particular, is represented as specifically shaped by ideological constructions of motherhood and the figure of the child that presuppose and reify whiteness. Maintaining her family as ‘hers’ means destroying the Other who does not present a desired mirror of narcissistic cultural reproduction. Mildred also experiences the idea of Sapphire’s motherhood as a threat to or devaluation of her own, particularly in her status as a figure of ‘suitable’ national motherhood. The white mother here is portrayed as a foot soldier rather than a conscious victim of patriarchy. Though Sapphire is nowhere near as sophisticated as La noire de … in exploring the complex positionings of the white middle-class mother as both oppressed and oppressive, Mildred like Madame is deployed as a figure whose uncritical efforts to self-assimilate to the dictates of nationalistic ideologies of motherhood engender violence against other women and other mothering subjects, particularly those who challenge and reveal the impossibility of this fantasy. The film is uneven and at times caricaturing; as pointed out by Amanda Bidnall, furthermore, it ‘retain[s] a basically white focus’,68 and manages rather acrobatically to sidestep any direct critical engagement with questions of imperialism, partly by depicting all of its most sympathetic Black characters as reassuringly elite, upper-middle-class and with southern English accents.69 Nonetheless, Bidnall demonstrates that Basil Dearden, Michael Relph and Janet Green (the film’s director, producer and screenwriter respectively) were sincere in their commitment to producing a cinematic critique of increasing racial tensions and violence in Britain.70 It is certainly worth noting that this is a relatively early example from this stream of British social realist film-making to grapple with questions of race and racism in Britain from a sympathetic perspective, and does take some daring steps, even if these are considerably undermined by its equivocation and uncritical perpetuation of certain stereotypes. It is significant, furthermore, that the film positions its progressive discourse with such a pronounced leading focus on issues of motherhood and reproduction. However, despite this interesting gesturing towards underlying currents of nationalistic futurity within racist imaginations, Sapphire is often reductively Manichean in its political discourse. It is clear – even selfcongratulatory71 – about its progressive agenda, and its representations of racial violence and anxieties over the preservation of the white family are carefully positioned for critique. However, the presentation of racism in various areas of

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British society is equivocated by the counterbalancing of prejudice with white liberalism. The racism of the younger investigating officer, Learoyd, is offset by the broadminded wisdom of Superintendent Hazard, whose seniority and position within the film as focalizer takes the teeth out of any critique of the institutionalization of racism within the British police force. The racist brutality of a gang of Teddy boys is likewise counterweighted by the egalitarian liberalism of their generational contemporaries in the arts university. And, of course, the final expression of murderous hatred that congeals in the figure of Mildred, the racist white mother, is set against the life-giving love of her brother and Sapphire. Though Hazard, at the close of the narrative, claims not to have ‘solved’ anything, the didactic structure of the film shares none of his ambiguity. Learoyd, Mildred’s family and – ideally – the audience should have learned a transformative lesson: that their relatively more minor, expressive everyday acts of prejudice have as their ultimate destination murderous violence. It is Mildred, not Sapphire, who is positioned as the threat to the family, the Child and the institution of motherhood. However, following the tendency of the social problem film to individualize collective issues, the fraught denouement of Sapphire potentially works towards positioning Mildred as an aberration, and the symmetrical portrayal of xenophobic conservatism against multicultural liberalism tends towards the imagination of racism as a matter of individual choices and actions rather than powerful and complex structural forces that are profoundly intertwined with the institutions of the British state, including the police, the media and the family. There is diminished capacity here for reflection on genealogical racism at a structural, cultural level. Taking a radical leap away from the didactic generic conventions of the ‘message picture’ or social problem film, Med Hondo’s Soleil O (1967) also takes aim at the racism of the communal imagination of the national family and reproductive futurity, but does so within a dissident and stylistically revolutionary context that asserts such futurity as firmly embedded within various overt and covert ethno-imperialist discursive currents of European colonial cultures. In the remainder of this chapter, I will discuss how Hondo’s formally complex Fanonian critique of European neo-imperialism in Soleil O embeds a subtle but vital examination of the racialization of pronatalism and reproductive futurity in France. Though motherhood is not overtly centred among the film’s foremost themes, I mean to argue that Soleil O nonetheless offers a nuanced reflection on the political objectification of white, French (proto-)maternal bodies-asnation, which at times constricts and is at times exploited by white women as mothering and reproductive subjects. The film explores in particular how these issues become intensely visible and subject to a range of political violences in white women’s intimate relationships with Black men. Before coming to this discussion of the film’s reflections on race, motherhood and cultural futurity,

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however, it is worth taking a moment to contextualize Hondo’s dissident style and his counter-discursive approach to film-making. Hondo’s astonishing debut feature is a complex work of anticolonial polemic and disruptive virtuosity. The movement in this film from individual to collective concerns – in politics and aesthetics – is suggested by Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike’s apposite description of the work as ‘a tapestry of history fashioned as an avant-garde essay on racism and the intense sense of estrangement and alienation to which Med Hondo and entire black immigrant communities in France are subjected’.72 Hondo’s very interesting biography, its influence on his film-making, and the complicated background of Soleil O’s production and relation to European and African film industries have been discussed extensively elsewhere by Ukadike,73 Madeleine Cottenet-Hage,74 and David Murphy and Patrick Williams,75 and will not be rehearsed in detail here. However, it is difficult not to recognize the profundity with which Soleil O is informed by Hondo’s own revolutionary decolonial politics. Mauritanian by birth, Hondo described himself as an ‘acculturated African who, as such, shares the plight of millions of Third World migrants displaced and dispossessed by neo-colonial economic necessities’,76 and spent much of his life in self-imposed exile (including in France). As expressed in his writing and in Soleil O, Hondo’s thinking promotes a collectivist, diasporic revolutionary consciousness that nevertheless maintains respect for difference.77 This commitment to recognition of difference – while operating within an internationalist political framework – extends to his approach to film style and semiotics. In his polemical essay on the ‘cinema of exile’, he insists: ‘Let us keep our diversity; let us be suspicious of the concept of universalism, which is a dangerous thing. I think we do not have to copy one another, whether amongst Africans or by continent. Above all, let us avoid copying the European and American cinema. We all have our specificity.’78 As suggested by Ukadike, the film has been misunderstood when it is read too holistically as adopting similar languages of dissidence to European avant-gardes.79 Unlike films discussed in previous chapters, therefore, Soleil O represents viewpoints on French society while locating itself within a disruptive outside, and produces constructive frictions in its deployment of stylistic unorthodoxy. Interesting and significant critical work has been done on Soleil O’s disruptive historicism,80 revolutionary aesthetics81 and Fanonian discourse of disalienation.82 In the present discussion – and by way of conclusion to the current chapter – I take a more particular interest in the often subtle ways in which the film meditates on the pernicious seams of racism that run indelibly through the ideology of reproductive futurity, and the ways in which these represented discourses of empire are importantly bound up with the figure of the ‘national’ family, the maternal body and the Child-as-future, firmly rooted – as always –

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within the political and psychological subjugation of the mother-as-object. I am, here, especially interested in Hondo’s critical thematization of ‘Black invasion’ throughout the film. Paranoid complaints of ‘invasion’ by former or current colonial powers (whose economies, moreover, generally continue to be bolstered by neocolonial flows of global labour) are grinding hypocrisies; so much is succinctly argued within the film’s short animated sequence depicting arrows on a map opposing the imagined ‘Black invasion’ of Western Europe to the earlier, more forceful and formally militarized actual ‘white invasion’ of the African continent. I suggest that Soleil O’s representations of ‘Black invasion’ and its anxieties can also be seen in several interesting ways as what Paul Gilroy has termed ‘the new racism’.83 Gilroy describes ‘the new racism’ as ‘generated in part by the move towards a political discourse which aligned “race” closely with the idea of national belonging and which stressed complex cultural difference rather than simple biological hierarchy’.84 The concept is nuanced, but the salient idea for the discussion at hand is that the increased presence and visibility of Blackness in European cultural life in the second half of the twentieth century shifted the mainstream of racist discourse away from biological essentialism and towards questions of ‘nation and national belonging’.85 This ‘new’ racism is therefore not shaped by a contemptuous horror of the Other – who remains, nevertheless, basically discrete – but by a fear of amalgamation.86 Finding increasing difficulty in recognizing or constructing neat racial and national distinctions, this form of racism expresses itself in particularly acute anxieties over the maintenance of clear borders: of the nation, of the self and, I add, of the reproductive future, by way of the ‘racially pure’ mother. Racism, therefore, becomes a process of abjection as an act of producing simplified borders that operate as safeguards against the pluralistic fragility of the individual and communal body. Anterior biological racism fears its outside as a space of danger (the object); the language of ‘invasion’ fears the becoming-unsafe of the inside (the abject). The idea of the discursive and legal construction of ‘national abjects’ within particularly British and French forms of nationalism has been developed in fascinating detail by Imogen Tyler, who argues that ‘disgust functions to affirm the boundaries of the social body (the body politic) through the (actual or symbolic) expulsion of what are collectively agreed to be polluting objects, practices or persons’.87 Tyler suggests that the sovereign state maintains its narcissistic coherence through the discursive construction of clear and absolute boundaries between its ‘insides’ and its ‘outsides’. Stabilizing this nationalistic selfimage requires the ideological and practical abjection of certain actual individuals and social groups, similar to the way in which Kristevan abjection casts off as ‘dirt’ and ‘filth’ the (in Kristeva’s formulation, excessively maternal) matter that threatens to trouble the clean borders between self and Other. Tyler sees these

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discursive processes of social abjection as a form of oppressive bio-ideological cleansing; ‘All political ideologies – but perhaps particularly those preoccupied with social hygiene, such as racism, xenophobia, eugenics, homophobia and misogyny – are mediated through revolting aesthetics.’88 Though Tyler builds explicitly on Kristeva’s work, she offers important and convincing critiques of Kristeva’s sympathies with French ‘liberal’ nationalism, and makes very persuasive arguments on some of the problems of positioning a universalized maternal relation too essentially at the centre of these processes.89 However, a strictly descriptive rather than prescriptive reading of maternal abjection and its function within patriarchal and Eurocentric systems of reproductive futurity offers valuable insight into the objectification of mothering bodies that is indispensable to racist imaginaries. The ideologically cherished ‘inside’ of the nation and its culture constructed by social abjection has no more sovereign representation than the Child-as-future. The mother-as-object, as the medium of biological and cultural reproduction, is then perceived as a protective kernel around this Child, but, as in Kristeva’s system of maternal abjection, an uncertain one if not properly managed. As shall be discussed below, Hondo’s protagonist and other figures of Black and migrant masculinities in the film are denigrated and Othered as ‘invading’; but in ways that are represented as objectifying and invisibilizing, the bodies of white French women as actual or imagined mothers are perceived by the same racist patriarchal anxieties to be pathologically open to being ‘invaded’. Soleil O plays on these ideas not only through narrative theme and structure, but also in its formal strategies. What Cottenet-Hage describes as ‘a collage of scenes whose sudden shifts in tone and style create a sense of constant ruptures, [which is] a fitting mode for a film concerned with exile and alienation’,90 is also of distinct relevance to this ironic commentary on inverted racist narratives of invasion. The film itself is frequently ‘invaded’ by stylistic jolts, narrative disjunctions and disruptions of genre and medium. The familiar cinematic space – like the familiar nation space of racist discourse – is made ‘unsafe’, and the clarity of boundaries is abjected: categories of genre, medium, figure, narrative, fictionality, documentary, art, essay and innumerably more are explosively destabilized. Even the actors merge ambiguously and uncontainably across roles and figural positions. Aboubakar Sanogo comments on the disruptive effect of this device: Indeed, eschewing the classical forward moving narrative that is sure of itself, Soleil O instead chooses to open parentheses, to look outside the frame, to interrogate figures outside the narrative, to include direct camera addresses of ‘intruders’ into the narrative, to abruptly pause the narrative and explore other issues before returning to it. This playful approach to the medium undermines critiques of auteurist African cinema always having been in the

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mantle of sobriety, for Soleil O is anything but a formally sober film. In fact, it might be argued that it explodes with excess, and this in turns explodes the telling of history with excess, and foregrounds the notion of untamability of history itself, calling for the break-up of form.91

What Sanogo falls just short of suggesting here is that this movement of the actors and characters across the classically delineated cinematic boundaries of narrative and diegesis is not quite an ‘intrusion’ – which implies timidity and the internalization of unbelonging – but an invasion, as a purposeful reclamation of subjectivity and (in this context) subversive disobedience. The disruptive representational mechanics of the film mark as open and ‘unsafe’ not only the genealogies of ethnonationalist futurities, but the perceived intellectual genealogies of cinematic expression. This act of rupture, however, is in both instances a space of creative abundance as well as danger. The destabilization of normative styles, narratives and temporalities is shown to be frightening only to the beneficiaries of nationalism who hold those norms dear; for the Black, migrant and mothering subjects who reject these hegemonic imaginaries, these formal disturbances can instead be occupied as spaces of agency and release. Within this context, in Soleil O’s complex picture of (post)colonial racism in France, a number of key sequences raising questions of interracial love, sex and kinships become particularly interesting in view of the film’s formal and thematic commentary on racist futurities. There are two episodes within Soleil O that are particularly rich in meaning with regard to these topics. The first is a series of scenes culminating in the unnamed protagonist meeting and sleeping with a white French woman. The woman approaches the protagonist as he stands reading a newspaper at a bus stop. All that is heard on the soundtrack is street noise as the camera cuts between close and long shots from across the road; the woman walks seductively back and forth across the protagonist’s eyeline and flirts with him before leading him across the street. This is followed by a montage of the couple embracing, holding hands and walking together in a busy Parisian street. Cottenet-Hage remarks on Soleil O’s use of public space as zones of alienation and Othering for Black migrants: ‘Underscoring his message that these are people who have no place in the White society, Hondo has chosen to film them in public rather than private spaces: in cafés, restaurants, a classroom, and, of course, the streets.’92 This sense of alienation is produced here through Hondo’s ‘invasive’ techniques of disrupting form and mode. Imagination and documentary collide and blur as the scene is only partly staged. The two actors, portraying fictional characters, are placed ‘on the Champs Elysées, in a racially homogeneous context highlighting not only a failure on the part of passers-by to read the fictionality of the scene, but also openly bringing out repressed racism through the gaze’.93

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As the actors play out their flirtation in the street, the montage shows an eclectic range of passers-by of various ages and genders (though all white) gawking unashamedly at them, in what Sanogo calls a ‘homofilmically reflexive unfolding of history’.94 Documentary and fictive forms ‘invade’ one another, mingling and politicizing social space. The sequence is further unsettled through a striking disjunction between image and sound, as apparently diegetic, naturalized street noise is replaced by a cacophony of grunts, clucks and brays of farmyard animals in what Sanogo sees as ‘Eisensteinian intellectual montage’.95 We may also read this sequence in terms of Cottenet-Hage’s attention to the film’s identificatory movement as ‘a sort of dialectical seesaw in which [the viewer] is constantly having to shift positions and gazes, alternately reading from a White and a Black point of view, a Western and an African position’.96 Though the animal noises immediately wrench into view too-familiar racist tropes of dehumanization of the Black Other surely at work in the strangers’ gawking, it becomes increasingly visually apparent that it is the onlookers, not the interracial couple, who are the subjects of the shots, suggesting a relocation of the bestial onto the racist gaze itself rather than its object. The entire sequence takes place under the sign of ‘mixing’; the stylistic invasion and sonic, visual and generic uncertainty speak here to the foundational anxiety of racism and misogyny over ‘miscegenation’ and the uncertainty of progeny and cultural futurity. This is the repressed that returns through the jarring form and content of the scene. A few scenes later, we see the protagonist and the woman in bed in her apartment the morning after sleeping together. With an expression of scorn and frustration, she communicates curtly that he has not lived up to her fantasied desire for Black men as superhumanly endowed or mythically talented in bed. Her interest in him, based on this objectifying mythology alone, is thereby entirely extinguished as it collides with the abundance of his subjectivity. As Murphy and Williams neatly put it, ‘There, in the manner outlined by Fanon, she experiences the gap between the man’s ordinary human reality and the erotic racist fantasy, and is profoundly dissatisfied’.97 Reflecting this incommensurability, in the film, the woman’s predatory fantasy dissolves upon even the lightest contact with the subject it seeks to obscure; not only this, but that subjectivity is then rejected wholesale. The private space, therefore, becomes just as alienating as the public. The tensions between the Black subject and the racist gaze within the white French household enacted here are similar to those represented in La noire de … : the Black objectified body is invited insofar as it can be exploited (whether for adjunct maternal labour or sexual gratification), but the Black subject is regarded as an invading agent. The romantic episode therefore ends disturbingly. In ways that are also similar to the representations of Madame in La noire de …, the white French

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woman in these scenes is complexly depicted as both exposed to objectification and ideological violence (particularly, I emphasize, in the street scene, in which this oppression is acutely intertwined with her identification as potential ‘mother-of-the-nation’), and as complicit within the neo-imperialistic power structures over which her whiteness, if not her gender, allows her some purchase. Somewhat curiously, however, the interpretations offered by Sanogo and by Murphy and Williams both see in the earlier sequence of the couple embracing in the street a potential utopianism. They disagree on the representational relationship to the gawking crowds. Sanogo laments that ‘the possibility of interracial love is undermined by the exteriority of an economy of the gaze that frames its impossibility’.98 Meanwhile, Murphy and Williams argue: Fleetingly, this looks like the most optimistic of the ‘positive’ moments, as the couple stroll around, seemingly happy and oblivious to the stares of the white population (not to mention the animal noises on the soundtrack). The latent possibilities here – healing the hurt of racist insults suffered, overcoming the alienation of diaspora – founder in the face of the white woman’s fantasy-driven desire.99

Both, however, are mistaken in their location of disillusionment either during or subsequent to this scene. Notwithstanding an act of wilful denial, we must, after all, place this sequence within the epistemological context of the preceding scene, which ensures that the sexual encounter is already introduced to us in terms of its own intersubjective impossibility. We are initially introduced to the woman in the preceding scenes, and the context in which we encounter this character both informs the following segment and positions it within the context of racist cultural futurities. In this sequence, she and a white female friend visit a third woman (also white) who has recently had a baby. They are shown getting ready for the visit with an air of reluctance and condescension. In the third friend’s house, we see that the baby is Black; this fact is cause for voyeuristic amusement for the visiting women, as the baby’s father is a white-skinned Antillean man (the same actor plays a number of roles as a white-skinned African migrant throughout the film). The father carries the baby and shows him photographs of his grandfather and cousin, both of whom are Black-skinned. The apparent racial ambiguity of the baby and plurality of the family recall, again, Gilroy’s ‘new racism’ and anxiety over the collapse of neat racial and cultural boundaries, placing it here within the space of the family (both actual and imaginary), in a way that is more symbolically subtle and politically complex than the treatment of similar issues around racial ambiguity, ‘passing’ and biological and national reproduction in Sapphire. ‘Invasion’ can occur suddenly and unexpectedly, even within apparent genealogical homogeneity. If there is optimism to be found anywhere in the film’s representation

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at this point, it is perhaps in the loving relations between the Antillean man, the French woman and their child, and, through the presence of the photos, the possibility of internationalist kinship and connectivity; however, this is only fleeting and the image is very quickly overwhelmed by the narrative of racial objectification and genealogical protectionism. The two visiting women, furthermore, act as uncritical enforcers of the same patriarchal cultural futurity that might (and later does) proscribe their own sexual and mothering subjectivities, by abjecting and Othering the motherhood of their friend. The two women treat the family make-up and the baby himself as both scandal and spectacle, barely concealing their racist expressions of mockery and smirking as the father shows his son the family photographs, leveraging their own cultural capital as ‘desirable’ white potential mothers-of-the-nation to Other and denigrate symbols of genealogical subjectivities and kinship forms that do not conform to these same patterns. They present the mother with a Black baby doll and hurry away. However, once they are alone again, this encounter directly motivates a fetishizing discussion about interracial sex. They speculate about what it would be like to sleep with ‘un noir’ and share objectifying whispers about the rumoured sexual prowess of Black men. It is a significant detail that both the room in which this conversation takes place and the bedroom of the woman who seduces the protagonist are decorated with an Orientalized rug and wall art. The protagonist (as an undifferentiated figure for Black masculinity in general) is openly viewed by the women as another exotic object to ‘collect’ and consume. Pertinently, moreover, the inspiration of this exchange by the encounter with the racially plural family means that questions of sexual pleasure and reproductive futurity become intertwined. This collocation is also alluded to – though passingly – by Fanon when he models parodically this racist fetishism: ‘As for the Negroes, they have tremendous sexual powers. What do you expect, with all the freedom they have in their jungles! They copulate at all times and in all places. They are really genital. They have so many children that they cannot even count them. Be careful, or they will flood us with little mulattoes.’100 The imagined hypersexuality of Black men is therefore intractably linked with reproductive anxiety over the non-white child. This indistinguishability is even communicated at the film’s formal level, as the sounds of the women’s sexually objectifying laughter and racist stereotyping bridge extensively into the following scene, lingering across the cut to the protagonist at the bus stop. This amalgamation of issues is further explored in the short sequence that intervenes between the protagonist’s meeting and waking up with the white woman. As the couple enter the woman’s apartment building, they encounter and give a brief neighbourly greeting to two men. Both actors have appeared in previous scenes: one is the same actor who played the white-skinned Antillean

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father, and the other an older, bourgeois white French man who has given a tocamera address expressing various views suggestive of middle-class cultural racism. (Whether or not we read them as reprising any of their previous roles is relatively immaterial; continuity is in any case disrupted through the fact that we see night-time through the door of the apartment building, yet the characters emerge in daylight). Presuming he is now in the sympathetic confidence of a fellow white bourgeois racist, the older man intimates – prefaced by blustering assurances that he has ‘nothing against them’ and in fact admires ‘negro spirituals’ – that he dislikes seeing ‘that’. The Antillean man replies that he is in fact Black, to the other’s incredulity. This short scene is subject to two formal and ideological ‘invasions’. First, when the older man mentions his discomfort, a non-diegetic baby’s cry is played on the soundtrack. Second, having announced his Blackness, the actor playing the younger man walks off-screen and is replaced by the actor who plays the protagonist, who assertively occupies the screen space opposite the white Frenchman. The formal ‘invasions’ deconstruct the normative and naturalizing flows of diegesis and ideology. Through the disjunction of sound and image and the ‘invasive’ replacement of the apparently white body with the explicitly Black body, the anxious and fetishizing positions of racist imagination and imagery of ‘Black invasion’ are both located within a discourse of racist reproductive futurity. It is vitally significant, furthermore, that these sequences are motivated originally by the image of the white mother and Black child. Within the racist imagination, motherhood becomes an all too porous membrane around the racialized patriarchal fantasy of cultural futurity. The racially ambiguous mother and child stand as a sign or cipher for the fragility of identity boundaries. The latent racism of this type of ‘national family’ or nation-as-family ideology is further symbolized in the film’s final scenes, in which Hondo creates a disturbing pastoral family idyll. As the protagonist runs away from urban Paris into the surrounding landscape, he encounters a white family with three young children in the forest, who lead him to join them for a meal in the garden of their cottage. The scene exploits the visual language of rural European Arcadianism: the cherubic child who takes the protagonist’s hand carries and wears wild flowers, the adults smile serenely and welcomingly, and the forest cottage is picturesque. By this point, however, the audience should be educated enough in the film’s sceptical approach to treat such iconography with deep suspicion, as the stylistic and narrative distortions of the film have consistently called upon us to question the superficial symbol and disinter their ideological contents. Any optimism in the reading of this scene is itself overinvested in the symbolic national family and Child-as-future. Such reinterpretation of iconographic and cinematic language – the refusal of slippage of signs back into an ideological tradition always already steeped in imperialism – is part of Hondo’s

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disruptive formal politics: ‘Let us say more simply that a committed cinema can struggle courageously and stubbornly, and also with a constant wish by the filmmakers to control their own discourse. You can say everything through film. But it is appropriate to know well to whom you can speak, and to whom you want to speak.’101 The scene of the family in the forest can be seen in parenthetical relation with the film’s striking first scenes. Hondo’s disturbing, surreal mixed-media opening sequence shows subjects of myriad diverse African cultures being deceptively welcomed into the European institutions of the military and the church, a process through which they are at first flattered, then instrumentalized for the perpetuation of empire and cultural colonization and forced in the process to renounce names and languages, in a sequence reflecting a Fanonian discourse of colonial subjects’ estrangement from their languages as a process of cultural alienation: ‘To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.’102 The film’s final sequence presents a similar narrative of dubious welcome into and then rejection within the institution of the family, on personal and national levels. Like the opening sequence, the closing scenes – including the escape back into the forest and the screaming scene, which Hondo calls ‘vomiting’103 – summarize the argumentative narrative of the film; the key difference is that the opening scene depicts this narrative from a colonial viewpoint, and the ending moves it into a postcolonial context, in which ‘new’ racism is more insidious, but in which a revolutionary diasporic consciousness is possible. With disturbing similarity to La noire de …’s Madame in her early approaches to Diouana, the family in the final scene represents the idealized nationalistic French family: white, smiling, highly reproductive and apparently liberal, welcoming the protagonist to their table in the spirit of good Republican universalism. However, the meal soon ‘turns into a nightmare’.104 The children climb on the table, wasting and trampling food, with apparent doting encouragement from the parents. As Cottenet-Hage puts it: ‘[The scene] makes abundantly clear that the refusal of food is scandalous in a world in which so many are starving. It also suggests that in Hondo’s view the Western family as an institution symbolized in the ritual togetherness around the table, its values, and its traditions has crumbled.’105 More than this, however, it is not the empirical young family but the nationalistically cherished image of the Child in the Edelmanian ideological sense that is here depicted as violent. After an abrupt cut, the parents have left, and the children continue to crowd around the protagonist, covering him in wasted food. Throughout the entire episode, the protagonist remains in dazed silence, recalling again Fanon’s ideas on linguistic alienation. He rises suddenly from the table and runs back into

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the forest. It is at this moment, Murphy and Williams suggest, that he has moved to the final stage of Fanon’s ‘famous three-stage development of the colonised intellectual’,106 from ‘unqualified assimilation’, to ‘worried consciousness’ and finally, fighting: The central character’s transition to the third and final ‘fighting’ stage comes via a series of rejections or departures: he smashes up his room and leaves; he leaves the city; he is welcomed and then revolted by the ‘liberal’ French family; he flees from them into the forest amid frantic drumming, apocalyptic images and savage screams with which he eventually joins in.107

He joins in with the increasingly urgent ‘grand cri Noir’108 on the soundtrack and eventually settles, tired but smiling, among burning images of international Black revolutionaries including Malcolm X, Che Guevara and Patrice Lumumba. It is extremely important that the seductive welcoming family is the last image that must be rejected in order to reach the edge of this revolutionary consciousness. One of the many radical offerings of Hondo’s complex film, ultimately, is a powerful and moving critique of the violent racial organization of reproductive futurity. It bears emphasizing, however, that within this closing sequence, the emergence into mature political consciousness and radical action is located within a distinctly and exclusively masculine experience. The protagonist removes himself from the liberal hypocrisies and exploitations of the white French family and enters into a new lineage of Black male revolutionaries and thinkers. As I have argued, the complex subjectivities of white French mothering women are to be found in interesting and important ways just under the surface of the film’s meditations on the intersections of racism with pronatalism and reproductive futurity, but Black mothering subjects are altogether absented from representation. As with the majority of films discussed in this chapter, these subjectivities are repressed as an unrepresentable ‘elsewhere’; only La noire de … stands apart by expressly positioning this elsewhere as a powerful and vital site of anticolonial resistance. However, Soleil O does do extremely valuable intellectual and formal work in deconstructing the ideological systems of raced and gendered reproductive futurity that enforce this radical absence, and which must be disrupted to create space for the political emergence of mothering subjects. As has been demonstrated throughout this chapter, questions of race intersect in complex and often fractious ways with imaginaries of motherhood and family in British and French cinema of the 1960s. Despite the prevalence of immigration and race in political debates following the independence of many former French colonies in West Africa at the beginning of the decade, the New Wave canon in this period presents a France that is largely white, and in contrast to the intense focus on psychologies of family, sex and interpersonal re-

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lations elsewhere in the movement, the relatively few representations of Black characters that do exist tend to isolate them from such relationality. In an interesting echo of the contrasting politics of multiculturalism adopted by British policymakers, racial difference and migrant characters are more prevalent in the British social realist and Swinging London cycles, yet these presences are largely dismissive, exoticizing or peripheral. Black migrant families here are presented to an extremely limited degree and largely in terms of the emotional possibilities they offer to the white protagonists (anxiety or joy) rather than as distinct subjective communities. With only a few exceptions, the representations of race, motherhood and family in these cycles of films therefore tend to communicate more about white, patriarchal reproductive imaginaries than they do about Black familial subjectivities in British and French societies of this period. On the other hand, this decade of decolonization also marked the early film-making careers of challenging transnational directors such as Hondo and Sembène. La noire de … and Soleil O allow migrant, familial and – to some degree, especially in Sembène’s work – mothering subjectivities to be explored with far greater depth and nuance. Significant here is their attention to intimacy and interiority, representing discourses of family and race as complex and pluralistic experiences from postcolonial perspectives. They also offer detailed and intricate deconstructions of nationalistic ideologies of the family within (neo)-imperialistic European cultures, exposing the often covert ways in which these ideologies are racialized. The cultural operations of reproductive futurity therefore become increasingly pernicious as these films demonstrate how they are not only repressive towards the subjectivities of white British and French women (addressed as always-imminent mothers), but violently erasing towards expressions of family outside of this limited fantasy. Notes 1. Erik Bleich, Race Politics in Britain and France: Ideas and Policymaking Since the 1960s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 2. Ibid., 7–8. 3. Ibid., 14. 4. Elisa Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race: Immigration, Intimacy, and Embodiment in the Early Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 4. 5. Ibid., 17. 6. Herrick Chapman and Laura Levine Frader, ‘Introduction’, in Race in France: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Politics of Difference, ed. Herrick Chapman and Laura Levine Frader (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 2. 7. Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race, 16. 8. Ibid., 47–49. 9. Félix F. Germain, Decolonizing the Republic: African and Caribbean Migrants in Postwar Paris, 1946–1974 (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2016).

216 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39. 40. 41.

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Ibid., 24–25. Ibid., 21–22. Ibid., 23. Ibid. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 24. Rich, Of Woman Born, 45. Catherine Raissiguier, Reinventing the Republic: Gender, Migration, and Citizenship in France (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), 73. Webster, Imagining Home, 36. Ibid., 33–40. Schwarz, ‘Only White Man’, 73–74. Webster, Imagining Home, 59–65. Ibid., 37–40. Judith Butler, ‘Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (2002): 15. Edelman, No Future, 24. Webster, Imagining Home, 48–49. Ibid., 49. Edelman, No Future, 24. Webster, Imagining Home, 45. Leora Auslander and Thomas C. Holt, ‘Sambo in Paris: Race and Racism in the Iconography of the Everyday’, in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (Durham: Durham University Press, 2003), 163, original emphasis. Ibid. Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation’, Framework 36 (1989): 69. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 68. Ibid., 72. bell hooks, ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’, in Movies and Mass Culture, ed. John Belton (London: Athlone, 1996), 247–64. Webster, Imagining Home, x–xi. The filming style is explained thus within the film: ‘Nous avons tourné ce film avec une camera clandestine et des micros cachés. Les interprètes complices ou occasionnels de cette entreprise ne savaient souvent pas quand, où, comment ils étaient filmés.’ [‘We shot this film using a hidden camera and microphones. The actors and extras often did not know when, where or how they were being filmed.’] Mamadou Diouf, ‘The Lost Territories of the Republic: Historical Narratives and the Recomposition of French Citizenship’, in Black France/France Noire: The History and Politics of Blackness, ed. Trica Danielle Keaton, T. Deanan Sharpley-Whiting and Tyler Edward Stovall (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 32–33. Malini Guha, From Empire to the World: Migrant London and Paris in the Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 10. Auslander and Holt, ‘Sambo in Paris’. La Noire de … is generally critically recognized as the first feature-length African film directed by an African film-maker. For instance, Manthia Diawara, African Cinema: Politics and Culture (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 22 and Nancy Virtue, ‘Le film de … : Self-Adaptation in the Film Version of Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de …’,

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42.

43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

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Literature/Film Quarterly 42, no. 3 (2014): 557. As has been argued in depth by Manthia Diawara, the lateness of this emergence can be substantially attributed to policymaking agendas in Europe that sought actively to suppress African film-making during the colonial period. Of particular relevance to the French situation is Diawara’s documenting of the Laval Decree’s effects on the development of film industries in French-controlled West Africa; Diawara, African Cinema, 21–26. The complicated production history of the film is itself embroiled in fractious neocolonial cultural and industrial power relations, of which Sembène was a prominent critic. The background to Sembène’s difficult relationships with the French film industry and Ministry of Cooperation are explored extensively in Diawara, African Cinema; James E. Genova, Cinema and Development in West Africa: Film as a Vehicle for Liberation (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2013); and David Murphy and Patrick Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema: Ten Directors (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). Rachel Langford, ‘Black and White in Black and White: Identity and Cinematography in Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de … / Black Girl’, Studies in French Cinema 1, no. 1 (2001): 15; Murphy and Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema, 59; and Virtue, ‘Le film de …’, 560. Melissa Oliver-Powell, ‘La Mère de … : Gendered Migration and Displaced Mothering in Ousmane Sembène’s La Noire de …’, French Screen Studies 21, no. 2 (2019): 85-103. For instance, Lyell Davies, ‘Why Does Diouana Die? Facing History, Migration, and Trauma in Black Girl’, in Ousmane Sembène and the Politics of Culture, ed. Lifongo Vetinde and Amadou T. Fofana (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 97–115; Langford, ‘Black and White’; Dayna Oscherwitz, ‘A Twice-Told Tale: The Postcolonial Allegory of La Noire de … and Faat Kiné’, in Ousmane Sembène and the Politics of Culture, ed. Lifongo Vetinde and Amadou T. Fofana (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 51–66; and Moussa Sow, ‘Women in Sembène’s Films: Spatial Reconfigurations and Cultural Meanings’, in Ousmane Sembène and the Politics of Culture, ed. Lifongo Vetinde and Amadou T. Fofana (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 85–96. Camiscioli, Reproducing the French Race, 21–30 and Reineke, Beauvoir and Her Sisters, 11. Allison, ‘Right to Choose’, 224. Davies, ‘Why Does Diouana Die?’, 103. Oliver-Powell, ‘La mère de …’. Langford, ‘Black and White’, 15. Oliver-Powell, ‘La mère de …’. Irigaray, ‘Bodily Encounter’, 39. Virtue, ‘Le film de …’, 565 and Vlad Dima, ‘Ousmane Sembène’s “La Noire de …”: Melancholia in Photo, Text, and Film’, Journal of African Cultural Studies 26, no. 1, (2014): 66. Oliver-Powell, ‘La mère de …’. Ibid., 100–1, with reference to hooks, ‘The Oppositional Gaze’. Claude Blanckaert, ‘Of Monstrous Métis? Hybridity, Fear of Miscegenation, and Patriotism from Buffon to Paul Broca’, in The Color of Liberty: Histories of Race in France, ed. Sue Peabody and Tyler Stovall (Durham: Durham University Press, 2003), 42–70. Chapman and Frader, ‘Introduction’, 5. Schwarz, ‘Only White Man’, 73–74, original emphasis. Webster, Imagining Home, xii. Ibid., xiii. Review of Les Lâches Vivent d’Espoir, Monthly Film Bulletin 28(324) (1961), 44. Webster, Imagining Home, 49. Ibid., 50.

218 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

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Ibid., 52. Ibid., 60. Ibid. Rich, Of Woman Born, 45. Amanda Bidnall, The West Indian Generation: Remaking British Culture in London, 1945– 1965 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2017), 190. Ibid., 191. Ibid., 180–81. Ibid., 191–92. Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), 80. Ibid. Madeleine Cottenet-Hage, ‘Decolonizing Images: Soleil O and the Cinema of Med Hondo’, in Cinema, Colonialism, Postcolonialism: Perspectives from the French and Francophone Worlds, ed. Dina Sherzer (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1996), 173–87. Murphy and Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema. Cottenet-Hage, ‘Decolonizing Images’, 173, original emphasis. Abid Med Hondo, ‘The Cinema of Exile’, in Film and Politics in the Third World, ed. John D.H. Downing (New York: Autonomedia, 1987), 71. Ibid. Ukadike, Black African Cinema, 81. Aboubakar Sanogo, ‘The Indocile Image: Cinema and History in Med Hondo’s Soleil O and Les Biscots-Nègres, Vos Voisins’, Rethinking History 19, no. 4 (2015): 548–68. Genova, Cinema and Development and Ukadike, Black African Cinema. Murphy and Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema. Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (London: Hutchinson, 1987); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993). Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 10. Gilroy, Ain’t No Black, 13. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 10. Tyler, Revolting Subjects, 23. Ibid., 25. Ibid., 29–33. Cottenet-Hage, ‘Decolonizing Images’, 176–77. Sanogo, ‘Indocile Image’, 555. Cottenet-Hage, ‘Decolonizing Images’, 179. Sanogo, ‘Indocile Image’, 554. Ibid. Ibid. Cottenet-Hage, ‘Decolonizing Images’, 177. Murphy and Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema, 86. Sanogo, ‘Indocile Image’, 554. Murphy and Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema, 86. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markman (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1968), 157. Hondo, ‘Cinema of Exile’, 72. Fanon, Black Skin, 17–18.

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103. Sheila Petty, ‘The Archaeology of Origin: Transnational Visions of Africa in a Borderless Cinema’, African Studies Review 42, no. 2 (1999): 79. 104. Cottenet-Hage, ‘Decolonizing Images’, 181. 105. Ibid. 106. Murphy and Williams, Postcolonial African Cinema, 82. 107. Ibid., 86. 108. Ibid., 87.

CHAPTER 6

Queer Communities and Queer Failures in British Film  

The films discussed in Chapter 5 were representations of migration and interracial relationships that explored the hostilities of dominant French and British cultures towards racial diversity, driven, as I have argued, by protectionist and homogenizing anxieties over a fantasy of the national family and the (white, patriarchal) self as imagined within it. Mothering subjects, within this formulation, are necessarily reduced to symbolizing instruments. Within this racist fantasy, motherhood is fixed as an objectified medium for biological and social reproduction that must bear the symptoms of cultural panic or cultural idealism. The decisions, feelings and experiences of mothering subjects themselves are given little oxygen within these ideological discourses. Though films by radical young African film-makers such as Hondo and Sembène offered spaces for forceful critique of the white ‘national families’ of European metropoles, Black mothering subjects are extensively invisibilized within British and French cinemas of this period. Within these films, the narratives take place at the point of collision between the dominant culture and its designated Other, critiquing or demonstrating racialized anxieties over the capacity of the imagined white French or British family to be changed from within by the presence of migration or interracial intimacies. The films in this final chapter seek to represent spaces outside of normative biological family narratives, in both the figures they contain and the structural possibilities of family and relationality they offer. In a small number of canonical British social realist and Swinging London films, what I will consider as ‘queer kinship spaces’ are suggested, in which women whose mothering or reproductive choices do not meet the ideologically desirable mould of futurity can find community and solidarity. Such cinematic spaces queer conceptions of family in their amassing of figures from the various borders and outsides of normative nationalistic reproductive society, often including unmarried pregnant women, solitary male first-generation Black migrants, lesbians, sex workers and, in the most straightforward Edelmanian sense, gay men, who are positioned in direct opposition to the fantasy of reproductive futurity as its negative reflection. The queer collectives in these films forge their own

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communities and kinship models, but are not recognized by or welcomed into the reproductive centre. As Webster argues, there were many ways in which mothering bodies and reproductive individuals were pathologized in this era: Many British writers and professionals remained immune to the influence of Freudianism and continued to frame their accounts in a medico-moral language with a much longer history, focusing on bodily rather than mental health. Within this white female bodies were pathologized in a variety of ways according to class, race, age, disability, sexuality and marital status. … Black bodies were pathologized as primitive, animal and dirty in ways which made no distinctions of sex, class, age, disability, sexuality or marital status.1

All such pathologizations operate in the interest of protecting the fantasized integrity of the national family, the cultural future and the homogenized and cathected figure of the mother that ensures the coherence of all of it. My core argument within this chapter, then, is that the often ludic exploration of queer kinship spaces in film can offer fresh and creative ways to imagine family and mothering subjectivities outside of the repressive primacy of biological determinism and the misogynistic legal fictions of patriarchal reproduction. Cut loose from their prescribed position as the ‘good’ mothering objects of reproductive futurity, a small number of women in the British kitchen sink and Swinging London cycles find an almost jouissant respite within ‘outsider’ communities in which intimacies, desires and caring relations find creative ways to express themselves outside of normative genealogy and its enshrinement in the taxonomizing laws of marriage, patronymy and inheritance. Queered familial spaces in films of this era potentially offer, therefore, productive opportunities to think through alternative discourses to the stricture of cultural futurity and its absent mothering subject. This offers valuable expressive opportunities to biological and non-biological mothers, to men and women and to heterosexual and queer intimacies. Such creative flexibility and queer explorations have the capacity not only to reshape ideas of motherhood to include difference, but also to create breathing space for those women already inside the gilded cage of mainstream motherhood discourse, in which they might express themselves in more subjective and heterogeneous forms. However, such queer kinship alternatives in this body of cinema are not destined to last; as we saw in the fleeting happy cohabitation between Diana and Malcolm in Darling, these are passing utopic moments that offer a palliative happiness in retreat from the ‘real world’ and always stalked by the spectre of its return. On the other hand, while the ‘inevitability’ of the return to the normative family is generally assumed, films such as Darling, A Taste of Honey and The L-Shaped Room are perhaps capable of prompting a questioning of why this should be the case. In all of these films, spaces of queer retreat constitute the

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most optimistic points in the narratives. The persistent sense of predestined brevity around these situations seems compelled more or less entirely by the abiding ideologies of the Child, motherhood and the family. Narrative justifications for their collapse or abandonment tend to be flimsy and unsatisfying, from which position we are able to ask why they could not in fact have continued. Despite – and, I shall go on to argue, perhaps in some conditions because of – their ultimate and rather shabby capitulation to normative moral and practical constructions of motherhood, therefore, alternative and queer expressions of family often seem far more inviting, and the return to the ‘straight’ world of normativity is in contrast often marked by defeat and disappointment. Though they all ultimately capitulate to the linear teleology of the father and reproductive futurity, therefore, these films do light an interesting spark, lifting the veil teasingly on potential sites of resistant kinships for mothering subjects (in all their heterogeneity) that fall outside of the ‘straight’ time of the films’ narratives. The ideology of the Edelmanian Child represents a sociocultural ‘straight and narrow’ that, as I have argued throughout this book, does not and – if it is to keep its fantasies – in fact must not accommodate the mother’s fullness as a person; there is a great deal of feminist opportunity in exploring a ‘bent’ path of ideological criminality outside of this narrative. By way of contextualization, this chapter begins with a consideration of the 1961 social problem film Victim, which makes an overt comment on British law in favour of decriminalizing sex acts between men. However, the terms of its positioning lead the film to carefully foreclose any possibility of queer kinship as rich or satisfying; as I will argue, instrumental within its ‘de-queering’ of homosexual rights discourse is a rigid ideology of motherhood and reproductive futurity. I then build from queer critical responses to this film towards the main argument of the chapter, which looks at what I will suggest is the emergence of queer kinship possibilities in two British films associated with the kitchen sink and Swinging London cycles that have already been touched on in Chapters 3 and 5: A Taste of Honey and The L-Shaped Room. While representation of homosexuality in commercial British and French cinema was (perhaps inevitably, due to conditions of legal and commercial censorship) limited in the 1960s, the depiction of gay relationships and sexualities in a holistic sense is nonetheless certainly wider than this small sample may suggest, as demonstrated by the robust array of critical literature on the history of British queer cinema. What gives these two films their special interest here, however, is their treatment of queerness and homosexuality as a central part of a story about unplanned pregnancy and the social negotiation of imminent motherhood. The British situation also marks a particularly relevant case for the interests of this book. The 1960s was a lively decade for public discussion and legal progression of gay rights in Great Britain, and saw a number of cultural and

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political watersheds. Shortly before the advent of the decade, in 1957, following a series of high-profile convictions,2 a committee examining homosexual offences and prostitution – better known as the Wolfenden Committee – published a report recommending the partial decriminalization of homosexual acts between men. While subsequently criticized by gay rights activists for being too trepidatious, the report nonetheless marked something of a cultural shift in British policymaking, although it took a further ten years for the report’s recommendations to be enshrined in law, with the passage of the Sexual Offences Act in 1967. While empirical legal change was thus disappointingly sluggish, however, the intervening years saw some interesting shifts in cultural representation of homosexuality, in which film played an important role. As discussed by Alan Burton, the British film industry had shown more willingness to approach the topic of homosexuality following the publication of the Wolfenden Report; in the late 1950s, ‘a few films had shown some courage and introduced the theme obliquely as in Serious Charge (1959), or displaced the incendiary material into the relative safety of historical distance and celebrity, as in Oscar Wilde (1960) and The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960)’.3 However, it was not until Victim that a commercial British feature film ‘made homosexuality the unambiguous focus of its narrative’.4 Like Sapphire, Victim was a collaboration between director Basil Dearden, producer Michael Relph and writer Janet Green that combined the formats of the social problem film and detective thriller to give sympathetic and liberally minded treatment to a contemporary controversy. As Sapphire had been produced in the wake of rising racial tensions and riots in areas such as Notting Hill,5 Victim closely echoed the timbre and concerns of Wolfenden and the major trials that precipitated it. The film has become a sociological artefact in itself, widely discussed and contextualized outside of film criticism, and sometimes even credited with doing much to bring about the passage of the 1967 Act.6 However, the progressive achievements of Victim are highly qualified. In their book on the films of Dearden and Relph, Alan Burton and Tim O’Sullivan have produced a thorough summary of the critical responses to and legacy of the film that reflects its uneven reception; their survey suggests that the immediate response to Victim focused predominantly on its political content over its form and was generally very favourable, largely ‘plac[ing] the film in the context of the Wolfenden Report and [finding] its message and performance, especially Bogarde’s, brave and worthwhile’.7 On the other hand, major writings on the film from various theory-energized academic standpoints of the mid-1970s and 1980s took a less forgiving view reflective of the rise of the Gay Liberation Movement.8 The key critical appraisals by Richard Dyer9 and Andy Medhurst10 are exemplary of this strain of critique. Medhurst finds the film too conservative and largely un-queer in its discourse of sexuality, accusing it of ‘timid Wolfendenism’.11

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Dyer’s article similarly concludes by highlighting the modesty of the film’s critique: ‘My final suggestion then – but it is only a suggestion – is that Victim’s chief social significance is that it helped gays to continue thinking of themselves in self-oppressive ways, although perhaps less harshly self-oppressive than in previous times.’12 This drive towards more radical representation of queerness generally judged the film to echo disappointingly what had come to be seen as the Wolfenden Report’s relative timorousness and pandering to conservative distaste for camp and for certain gay men who refused to do straight society the courtesy of performing shame. Medhurst and Dyer are justified in their critiques of this type of equivocating apologism. Both Wolfenden and Victim took what must be recognized as a conciliatory approach to homosexuality and British law, which did not directly challenge civic and public distaste for queerness and queers, but put their energies into shifting collective reactions from revulsion to pity, framing straight-acting, elite gay men like Melville Farr as victims of their own sexualities, deserving of sympathy so long as they displayed adequate contrition and fully recognized the apparent superiority of reproductive heterosexuality.13 In Medhurst’s judgement, ‘By its mobilisation of concepts of compassion and tolerance, Wolfenden (and Victim) attempted the balancing act of advocating legal change without being seen to “approve of homosexuality”’.14 It is important to note that more recent critical views on the film, including Burton’s, have again re-evaluated the film’s legacy, and have largely looked to empirical audience-based evidence to point out that the film was nonetheless progressive within its cultural, social and industrial contexts, and – more significantly – was a meaningful and encouraging cultural landmark for many gay men who saw it in the cinema.15 The central focus of critical debates around Victim has expectedly and often justifiably been the film’s representation of male homosexuality and the law. However, an aspect of the film that is less frequently discussed but of substantial interest for queer and feminist readings is its representation of children, reproductivity and the character of Laura Farr. Though Burton’s reclamation of the film for what it offered to gay male viewers is highly valuable, the deconstructive approaches of Dyer and Medhurst in this case are more instructive for understanding the film’s entrenched conservatism towards femininity and motherhood as part of its cautiously liberal gay rights project. Dyer’s article is notable and somewhat unusual in that it dedicates substantial space to a reading of the Farrs’ non-reproductivity as a central symptom of the film’s self-contradictory grappling between its progressive surface message and the conservatism of its covert ideologies.16 In an argument that in many ways anticipates Edelman’s work on the Child, Dyer identifies children as a ‘structuring absence’ in Victim.17 The narrative conceit of the Farrs’ childless marriage is al-

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most irrelevant to the film’s main plot line and legal argument, but instrumental to its commitment to keeping its own queerness in check. Heterosexual women are thus presented as ‘victims’ of male homosexuality through foreclosure of (ideological) motherhood. Laura’s childlessness is never addressed directly, but the children she does not have haunt the film. The ‘structuring absence’ and its ideological tragedy is mapped through emphases on Laura’s intensely maternal qualities and her frequent visual association with children. We are first introduced to Laura, via a conversation between Melville and her brother, in terms of her work for a child psychology clinic. The nature of her work is never explained (she later appears to be working at a school) and Melville condescendingly dismisses the job as trivial because it is financially unnecessary, a point later underscored by Laura’s willingness to work unpaid hours due to her dedication to a particular child. The ambiguous but distinctly maternal nature of her work and its lack of economic motivation conspire to position Laura as an un-childed mother, and her work with children as a tragic second-best to heterosexual reproductivity. Laura is nearly constantly surrounded by children, except for when she is too close to Melville (who not only stands in the film for the non-futurity of the queer, but in terms of staging acts almost as a child-repellent). However, she is always at some small but deeply symbolic distance. When Melville meets her during their separation to discuss his response to the blackmail, she is initially filmed from Melville’s point of view in a long shot, surrounded by children in a school playground. The mise en scène of the shot is bright, open and full of movement and vivacity, in marked contrast to the ‘unfussy, streamlined “good taste” of [the Farrs’] home’,18 with its ever-closing doors and oppressively low lighting. As he approaches her, she ushers away the child she is comforting and the couple retreat into a pointedly empty classroom. The visibility of the children playing outside the window, with Melville standing literally between them and Laura, re-emphasizes her isolation from dominant forms of mothering. As Melville leaves, the classroom is suddenly flooded with children, enveloping Laura in what can only be one of the film’s assertions of the tragic irony of her situation. Perhaps most explicit is the brief scene that shows her at the clinic, in which she stands watching a young boy paint quietly and happily. A doctor enters to congratulate her on how greatly the boy has improved under her care; Laura, the film ardently wants to impress upon us, is not only instinctively maternal in disposition, but a natural expert, apparently capable of such ideal motherly nurture that even the most difficult children will flourish towards normativity. Yet she is also separated from the child by a pane of glass, reaffirming the symbolic distance. The causal link between this distance and Melville’s homosexuality is then established even more explicitly by the film. Still behind the glass, Laura

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begins reading the paper and is confronted with the news of Boy Barratt’s suicide. The camera zooms slowly in on her face, severing the child from the shot. It then cuts violently to a very quick, sweeping zoom in on the boy, who is aggressively striking out the smiling female face he has painted, which, despite its childish execution, bears a not-insignificant likeness to Laura. Not only is this maternally contextualized image of Laura therefore effaced, the good maternal work she has performed towards the child’s well-being is also apparently wiped out, as if undone by some magical semi-telepathic force of orderly reproductive futurity as the ‘good mother’ comes into contact with queerness. Medhurst’s reading is particularly clear on the film’s regard for male effeminacy as repugnant; ‘Since Victim’s project depends on securing heterosexual audience sympathy (and nothing more), it must take pains to ensure all its homosexual characters are impeccably non-ostentatious.’19 From a feminist standpoint, Victim is scarcely less dismissive and certainly as objectifying towards women’s femininity. In contrast to the film’s construction of a vast male community, rich in subplots and intrigues, there are extremely few women in the film, and most are unsympathetic. Sylvie (a very minor character) is disgusted by Boy Barrett and contemptuous of her compassionate husband’s offer of help, and the blackmailer Miss Benham is surely the film’s vilest character. Farr himself – despite the film’s insistence upon his heroism in most other areas – is a condescending misogynist, whose first words both about and with his wife are dedicated to belittling her work, intelligence, judgement and ‘feminine logic’. In the characterization of Laura, the film creates an archetypal maternalfeminine numen to complete and enforce the objectifying polarity of ideal versus evil femininity; though apparently laudatory, this imagination of absolute feminine virtuousness is, as I have argued throughout this book, every bit as oppressive as denigration. Dyer makes an interesting intervention into this argument, suggesting that the couple’s childlessness may mark Laura – as well as Melville – as queer: ‘Recurrent images of childhood together with the implications of childlessness for women all suggest that not only Melville but also Laura is deviant.’20 He bases this argument around the idea that: We could perhaps accept Laura’s suppression of her own sexuality for the sake of her husband – such sacrifices are so much part and parcel of the cinema’s, and the culture’s, view of women, even in 1961. Indeed, women not like that constitute a ‘social problem’ category, as the social conscience feature cycle makes clear. What we would be less likely to accept was that she should accept being childless.21

These points are justified in their recognition of the terms of heteropatriarchal discourses on the ‘good’, motherly woman. However, conversely to what is suggested here, dominant motherhood ideologies can comfortably accommodate

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child-free but otherwise maternal women insofar as they explicitly acknowledge themselves as unfulfilled. In fact, the affect of tragedy that accompanies the child-free feminine woman (represented here by Laura) in dominant discourse is one highly effective method by which the cultural prepotence of biological motherhood and reproductive futurity is stabilized. Laura therefore remains within the dominant patriarchal order in that the motifs of the film emphasize her childlessness as a profound disappointment. This is further reaffirmed by her absolute adherence to many of the qualities of the ‘good mother’ figure within patriarchy in her ultimate choice to remain married to and support Melville, including self-sacrifice, obedience to patriarchal law and a willingness to act as a nurturing object over and above a desiring subject; despite her earlier insistence that she is a woman rather than a ‘lifebelt’ and wants to be loved for herself, she ultimately decides that it is nobler and more emotionally fulfilling to be ‘needed’. Thus, by keeping her bound so tightly to the ideology of motherhood, the film militates against the possibility of what Dyer calls Laura’s ‘deviance’ being in any way reappropriated in an act of creative subversion. Medhurst’s work on the film deals with this issue of reappropriation and the possibilities that Victim may (as he suggests, perhaps unwittingly) offer for queer audiences with regard to its representation of male homosexuality. While demonstrating the careful conservatism of the film’s overall ‘ideological project’, his approach aims to ‘snatch moments of radicalism from the text, moments which could still be of particular use to gay spectators’.22 According to Medhurst, these are moments of ‘excess’ or transgression within the textual system in which the radicalism of passion prevails over the reassurance of dignity, with the capacity to be read against the grain as ‘refut[ing] sobriety and expos[ing] sympathy as oppressive condescension’.23 Medhurst’s readings of these moments are interesting and generally persuasive. However, in relation to women, motherhood and the possibility of intergenerational kinship, the film’s ideological project is even more tightly sealed. The film capitulates to a dominant, patriarchal discourse of futurity that opposes the child-as-future to the queer, and suggests little space for heterogeneous mothering subjectivities outside of the conventional patriarchal family. The remaining part of this chapter adopts a similar approach to Medhurst’s reading of Victim, aiming to identify moments of ideological strain in A Taste of Honey and The L-Shaped Room. Both of these films, as I shall show, ultimately appear to reaffirm the dominant logic by which the patriarchal family is consolidated as the sovereign expression of kinship, and the queer ostracized to the borderlands of the liveable. What I will show is that the terms of these affirmations can be read in a way that raises productive questions about the ideologies at work and suggests itself to the imaginability of queer kinship spaces. As J. Jack Halberstam writes on the ‘queer art’ of failure, ‘Under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting,

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unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world’.24 As in Darling, the queer familial spaces of respite in these films ultimately fail – and indeed, within the films’ social and ideological contexts, they must. Yet these failures (dissatisfying, thinly motivated) can be usefully appropriated to ask why, and to question the inevitability of the return of the normative. Tony Richardson’s A Taste of Honey, adapted from a play by Shelagh Delaney, deals centrally with issues of marginal mothering, which come to be expressed in queer domestic space. The film’s protagonist is Jo, a teenage woman who becomes pregnant after a brief love affair with a young Black sailor. Though certainly present, the issue of racism is less formally centralized than in Sapphire or Lâches, and is most obvious in Jo’s mother’s shocked reaction to learning that the father of Jo’s baby is Black, as well as in Jo’s childish fetishization of Jimmy. Jo’s encounters with maternal institutions, furthermore, also show how her mothering identity is neither represented nor anticipated by dominant culture. The fact that the baby dolls offered by a maternity nurse Geoff visits (on which expectant mothers are meant to practise holding) seem all to represent white children is one of many small invisibilizing gestures represented by the film that erase and homogenize motherhood. As in several of the other films discussed in previous chapters that deal with forms of mothering outside of strict normative ideologies, furthermore, it is assumed that abortion may be an appealing option for Jo as an unmarried woman. After finding out that she is pregnant, Geoff tells her, ‘you can get rid of babies before they’re born, don’t you know’, assuming that it is lack of knowledge rather than lack of desire that has been the preventative factor. Jo is aware of the possibility, but has rejected it; in this case, therefore, the choice to mother rather than the choice to terminate a pregnancy becomes the expression of affirmative identity and resistance of normative cultural narratives of mothering. Refusal of abortion can be understood productively as an intersectional feminist act (in some circumstances) through the reproductive justice approaches discussed in the previous chapter. Zakiya Luna and Kristin Luker explain that: From its inception, the RJ movement called for recognition of the limitations of emphasizing choice, which had largely come to mean the choice to have an abortion (Luna 2009, Price 2010, Smith 2005). RJ encompassed the right to not have a child but also moved beyond that to include the right to have a child and the right to parent any children one has (Ross 2006).25

Working from a US-based perspective, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky also stresses the importance of context and the ways in which factors such as race and class, as well as gender, condition the circumstances in which reproductive decisions are made. She argues, for instance, that ‘[f ]or a Native American

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woman on welfare, who every time she appears in the clinic for prenatal care is asked whether she would not like an abortion, “the right to choose an abortion” may appear dubious if not offensive’.26 These nuanced critiques of the ‘right to choose’ (abortion) are also relevant to the Western European context of the 1960s; as I have argued, pronatalist dogmatists are not really ‘fighting’ for all of the children, but a particular, ideologically coded type of child (patriarchal, white, heterosexual and non-disabled). Whereas white, middle-class and in particular married women may be pressured into having children regardless of their personal feelings, women whose mothering and reproductive identities might trouble this mould face diverse oppressions. As a single, working-class teenage mother of a mixed-race child, Jo’s expression of her desire to mother here is an ideologically resistant act. Jo is in many ways an ‘outsider’ of dominant familial discourse, and her family background also presents complexities. In a prefiguration of Jo’s own situation, her mother, Helen, also became pregnant with her after a brief romance with a man during her teenage years. Though she has raised Jo as a single parent, Helen is presented as a frustrated and neglectful woman resenting Jo for the youth that she now lacks. Unreliable and unmotherly, moving with Jo between small and dingy flats and constantly escaping bailiffs and landlords who demand rent and chastise Helen’s promiscuity, it is easy to see how Helen could be constructed as an easy archetype of the ‘bad mother’, displaying all of that figure’s formulaic traits of selfishness and emotional distance with over-pronounced vigour. Terry Lovell describes how Jo compensates for her un-motheredness by locating the maternal qualities Helen lacks in other characters, and specifically in Jimmy and Geoff (a gay art student who becomes her confidant), both of whom are domestically skilled.27 In Lovell’s view, the mise en scène of domestic spaces and the metonymic properties of food as nurture and care become expressive of mothering identities and practices; ‘[ Jimmy’s] well-ordered galley produces substantial meals, whereas nothing except coffee comes out of Jo and Helen’s squalid kitchen.’28 Shots of Geoff cooking, ironing, cleaning and decorating the flat that he and Jo share during her pregnancy are even more strongly representative of this dynamic. However, Helen is not as straightforward a ‘bad mother’ figure as those that tend to appear throughout the rest of the kitchen sink cycle. While she can hardly be called sympathetic, the film’s identification between Helen and Jo does invite possibilities for nuance and compassion in its representations of the ‘bad mother’. Lovell, for instance, suggests that the ‘temporalities of the film are rhythmic and cyclical, and it is not perhaps too fanciful to invoke here Julia Kristeva’s concept of “woman’s time”’.29 The possibility of reading maternal narrative structures, of the kind suggested by Kristeva, Irigaray and Chodorow in their theories on the culturalization of mothering as a self-reproducing cycle

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across generations, is an attractive one. While most of the masculine-focused films of this canon present a progressive Oedipal journey towards maturity and understanding that moves away from the mother, A Taste of Honey ends where it began, with mother and daughter, only tensely and uneasily reconciled, alone together in an unstable domestic situation. Not to mention the fact that Jo has, with a certain sense of inevitability, repeated the pattern of her mother’s youth in her unintended pregnancy. As in the work of these feminist theorists, this cyclic structure is a critical and condemnatory expression of ossifying cultural constructions of motherhood, in which mother and daughter cannot escape each other as reflections of their own entrapment. Neither can they actually enjoy each other, since this imposition of a specific maternal identity precludes their autonomous subjectivities, meaning that they are unable to relate to each other as anything more than the maternal ideals they both fail to be. In her insightful and passionate accounts of mother- and daughterhood, Adrienne Rich describes the typical situation of this feminine relation within Western patriarchal cultures as characterized by an enraging mixture of overidentification and fierce repulsion; the mother ‘stands for the victim in ourselves, the unfree woman, the martyr’,30 but at the same time, ‘where a mother is hated to the point of matrophobia there may also be a deep underlying pull toward her, a dread that if one relaxes one’s guard one will identify with her completely’.31 Of course, this horror of repetition (or, literally, reproduction) can easily go both ways, and it should be no surprise that mothers may experience difficult feelings in watching their daughters as the latter become women and encounter the same systems of denigration and objectification that they themselves know all too well.32 Through the close identification with Jo in A Taste of Honey, however, this maternal mirroring might be repurposed to build a more nuanced understanding of both women’s situations (as different points on the same circle), reading Helen’s ‘bad mothering’ as a product of the rigid discourse that constructs and denigrates her, and of societal organizations that designate women’s motherhood with no regard for their subjectivities. However, regardless of the possible routes that the film offers to understanding and ‘see[ing] beyond her [the mother – in this case both Helen and Jo] to the forces acting upon her’,33 within the plot, the relationship between Jo and Helen becomes unliveable. Subsequently, in further retreat from the exhausting pressures of normative reproductive society, Jo establishes an unconventional domesticity with Geoff. Given that the relationship is platonic, that the biological father of the baby is absent and that Geoff ’s sexuality in any case precludes him from reproductive futurity according to the rigidity of dominant conventional imaginations of family as institution, their domestic and familial situation lies on a queer social fringe. This queer space, however, is presented as liberating and emotionally nurturing for both characters. Within it, they are

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free to creatively define their kinship, naming each other variously as friends, sisters, mothers or partners, or indeed leaving aside altogether existing relational models to allow the familial pattern to express itself. Both have experienced rejection by mainstream culture and society, and as a result have become literally, as well as symbolically, homeless (while Jo and her mother flit insecurely from one dishevelled bedsit to another, Geoff has been evicted because of his sexuality). Within the shared house, therefore, both discover and cocreate a space of mutual acceptance and affection, which becomes the only set in the film to really resemble a ‘home’. Notwithstanding a few (quite healthily resolved) arguments, the relationship between Jo and Geoff is the film’s strongest expression of familial reciprocity, love and, indeed, enjoyment. The encouragingly creative queerness of the kinship they establish, in which both intend to help raise and care for Jo’s child, suggests the transformation of the space ‘outside’ normative imaginations of family into a productive critique of oppressive ideologies of motherhood. In the first instance, such queer networks of caring, which take fluid shapes different to those prescribed by patriarchal institutionalizations of family, offer rich material and emotional supports that are neither provided nor legitimized elsewhere. Politically, too, the caring kinship developed between them, which can include the single mother and gay man, offers opportunities to unthink oppressive discourses limiting acceptable expressions of motherhood to a few idealized and misogynistic forms. Mothering outside of a normative patriarchal family, therefore, Jo and Geoff can open up spaces in which to imagine intergenerational and non-biologically deterministic kinship that moves beyond ‘the patriarchal institution of motherhood that is male-defined and controlled and is deeply oppressive to women’34 and towards creative mothering subjectivities that renegotiate ideas of what a mother can be, and who can be a mother or engage in and support mothering practices. In the harmonious aesthetics and rhythms of Jo and Geoff ’s queer companionship, these spaces are, furthermore, suggested as joyful and nurturing for both characters. This is all the more reason to wonder, therefore, why the film seems committed to Jo and Geoff ’s lack of a viable future. Despite the evidence of adaptability and fluidity in their relationship, its ultimate dissolution seems preordained. It is unclear exactly why the film ends with Jo returning to her mother and Geoff leaving, or whether we are encouraged to feel that this is in some way a positive reconciliation, but there is something tragically inevitable about Geoff ’s departure. John Hill sees the film’s ending as an ambivalent return to business as usual: Accordingly, [Geoff ] must be exiled once more by the film’s close while Helena [sic] assumes her ‘proper role’ as a mother. … This does, of course, avoid a conventional resolution in terms of a submission by the female characters

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to the male, or a re-imposition of the ‘normality’ of the patriarchal family. But what also undercuts this as a positive resolution is its association with compromise and a fatalistic acceptance. For what reunites mother and daughter is the repetitive cycle whereby Jo has, in effect, lived through the errors of the parent.35

While Jo and Helen’s situation does not incorporate them into the centre of patriarchal culture (in their lack of father figures), their mire of mutual disappointment and unhappiness in their location on its outside still supports the reification of traditional family by presenting alternatives (and in particular the female-focused family) as non-satisfactory. Mothers who have not submitted adequately to patriarchal organizations of family are, in other words, punished by the foreclosure of any possibilities of fulfilment. However, the paranoid compulsion to expel the figure of Geoff suggests that it is not the queerness of Geoff and Jo’s relationship in itself that threatens the conventions of the patriarchal family hierarchy, but rather the fact that it is experienced as so rewarding. The suggestion most intolerable to patriarchal ideologies of motherhood is not the absence of a father per se (as long as fatherless mothers and their children are shown to be unhappy, it is fine), but that the ‘outside’ of dominant expressions may not be such a bad place to be after all. Geoff ’s melancholy choice to leave, however, seems motivated by an internalized and self-annihilating indenture to this same ideology of futurity that erases him and his desire from reproductive society; it is a defeat not forced upon him, but implicitly accepted as inevitable. In removing himself from the equation, Geoff also nudges Jo back towards an ideological centre that demands her denigration and forecloses the more fluid possibilities for subjective mothering that their ‘queer failure’ to recognize patriarchal injunctions might have offered. It is no accident, furthermore, that Geoff ’s departure is framed by an excessive presence and symbolization of children. The pervasiveness of children throughout the film has been commented upon by Andrew Higson, who reads them as a sort of Bacchanalian chorus, representing ‘hope [and] the future’,36 and by Lovell, who contests this view: Higson’s claim that the children ‘represent the future’ is therefore misleading. They may be linked to the child which Jo, emotionally still a child herself, is carrying. But also in a stronger sense they represent the past: the childhood, as well as the childishness, of the young people of the story, and an earlier, more ‘authentic’ way of life which has been lost. This link, clearly drawn in the play, is obscured in the film.37

In a way, this is true, since, as I have previously argued, ideal images of the future tend to be based in utopic fantasies of lost ‘golden ages’ of the past, and the ideological figure of the Child represents the timeless self, perfected but

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not precisely ‘changed’. However, as far as Lovell intends the final scene with Geoff, and the endless children playing around the bonfire, as an expression of his own lost childhood and a distant anterior of innocence and ‘authenticity’, this is less convincing; after all, British society in the 1960s had never provided a home for the queerness of children. As Edelman puts it, ‘the cult of the Child permits no shrines to the queerness of boys and girls, since queerness … is understood as bringing children and childhood to an end’.38 As a queer subject, Geoff cannot return to an originating ‘authenticity’ that never existed, or was never symbolized, within the ‘straight’ national family. Geoff is therefore cut off from familial self-expression from above and below. The children who frame and obscure his exit, erasing him from shot and symbolization, are a leaden pronouncement of his disconnection from reproductive futurity, and hence from participation in normative culture’s discourse and performance of family. Despite Helen and Jo’s clear mutual dissatisfaction with each other’s mothering identities, and the productive harmony achieved between him and Jo, Geoff leaves out of a vain commitment to the assumed primacy of genealogical integrity, to the benefit of no one. After all, the dominant order of reproductive futurity to which the collapse of queer kinship possibilities and queered domestic space returns them all is hostile to the subjectivities of Jo and Helen as (single) mothers, to Geoff as queer, and to Jimmy and Jo’s prospective child as racial Other. The myth-making force of the figural Child as constructed within the patriarchal imagination becomes a non-substantial but powerful and all-pervasive agent that compels the dissolution of queer fantasy and its political resources. Despite the absence of an actual father, for whom this figure is built and maintained, Geoff seems to erase himself on behalf of an abstract paternal superego that holds him as Other. We are left to ask why a space of queer kinship that could potentially include these characters as autonomous mothering or familial subjects, albeit outside of a (damaging) cultural centre, should be so hopeless a project after all. Similarly, a space of queer respite is presented and subsequently dissolved (for equally obscure purpose) in Bryan Forbes’s The L-Shaped Room. In this film, the protagonist, Jane, also relies on the material and emotional support of a temporary queer community of outsiders before reintegrating into a somewhat more mainstream situation. The tissue of separation between the inside and outside of cultural inclusion seems more porous for Jane than it is for most of the other residents of the house in which she rents the eponymous l-shaped room, as their Otherness is more permanently embodied. The title of the film itself and the marginal space it denotes signify ‘bentness’, an existential condition that also designates most of the occupants of the boarding house. Mavis’s lesbianism and the question mark over Johnny’s queerness (especially interpreted through the adaptive intertext) mark their sexual identities as ‘bent’; the

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two female sex workers, meanwhile, occupy another meaning of ‘bent’ as criminal in their professional operation outside the ‘straight and narrow’ of the law. It is worth noting, furthermore, that the purpose of the Wolfenden Committee was to examine both ‘homosexual offences’ (largely concerned with gay or bisexual men) and prostitution (largely concerned with women sex workers),39 pointing to an interesting moralistic identification between these historically criminalized sexual practices in British law. As ‘L-shaped’, the room inhabited by Jane is both straight and bent, signalling her liminal position between normative society and its queer surpluses. After all, Jane’s situation as a pregnant and single woman newly places her in tension with mainstream patriarchal culture, but everything else about her (she is a young, attractive, well-spoken, middle-class white European woman) suggests social privilege. Though she arrives in London as a migrant, her white Frenchness glamorizes rather than estranges her. As the film’s focalizer, Jane brings the cultural centre along with her; she is initially overwhelmed, intimidated and disoriented by her surroundings, the house, its occupants and her own unplanned pregnancy, and it is clear that this is an area of being that is outside of Jane rather than she outside of it. Within the ‘halfway house’, a queer symbolic homophony seeps through as Jane encounters the boarders of the house as the borders of her known social world. We are formally encouraged to identify with her perspective throughout the film as her feeling of being lost among the ‘outsiders’ becomes one of solidarity and mutual understanding, before she ultimately leaves the bent and bending rooms of the boarding house. Most of the other tenants, however, are not able to leave, even if they should want to. The boarders (/borders) include two female sex workers, Sonia and another Jane; Johnny, a migrant from the West Indies (there is some implication that he might be gay, as he is in the book on which the film is based, though this is never addressed explicitly in the film); Mavis, an older lesbian and retired music hall performer; and Toby, an unsuccessful writer (whose Jewishness is invisibilized between the book and the film) and more mainstream character who provides a traditionally palatable romantic interest for Jane. Aside from the heterosexual couple, the tenants, ‘whose dominant characteristics are rootlessness and sexual “abnormality”’,40 are tied to the house in its symbolic capacity as a queer fringe of dominant discourses of family, legitimacy and reproductive futurity, and as a material sanctuary. The relegation of these characters as an unmanageable ‘queer surplus’ to mainstream society has concrete as well as symbolic resonances, since aggressively prejudiced accommodation practices prevalent in this era of British society would likely have excluded them from many housing options.41 As much as Jane comes to enjoy the queer kinship and solidarity of the home and its transitional family, and as much as she needs these after her resis-

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tant decision to have and mother her child alone, she and Toby retain through their budding heterosexual romance an access to the centre, a traditional narrative progression, that the others do not. As in Darling and A Taste of Honey, the single mother’s freefall through the ludic pleasures and communal comforts of queer subjectivities can only last so long before she is anxiously and abruptly tugged back by conservative patriarchal apologia. Despite the flashes of joyful resistance that these films offer in queer collectives and the intellectual resources they supply for unravelling the ideologies that simultaneously stigmatize queers and objectify mothering women, the ‘surface texts’ of the films’ resolutions make sombre returns to the logic of reproductive futurity and its insistence that the patriarchal nuclear family is the only viable location of motherhood and the child-as-future. The foreclosure of any other possible mothering identities or practices becomes particularly interesting in the comparative representations of Jane and Mavis. Mavis is presented as a strongly maternal figure, whose qualities of care and affection towards Jane and the other younger characters position her as the de facto mother of the queer household. Mavis ‘outs’ herself to Jane in a conversation between the two women that takes place in the former’s room. When Jane asks about Mavis’s family, she replies that she hasn’t got any family, but refers to a ‘friend’ with whom she had ‘a real love match’. Jane assumes a male pronoun for the ‘friend’, but her surprised reaction to the picture to which Mavis directs her, and Mavis’s rather shy and worried utterance that ‘it takes all sorts, dear’, indicate that the partner is a woman. As with the incriminating photograph of Farr and Boy Barratt in Victim, we do not see the image itself, but are left to infer it through Jane’s startled expression. Lesbian desire is left unseeable and (unlike Farr’s passionate pronouncement of wanting Barratt) unsayable. We also do not learn what has happened to Mavis’s partner (the well-established inexpressibility of same-sex romances perhaps requires no narrative justification as far as the script is concerned), but Mavis is portrayed as alone and lonely. In this scene, she is pictured writing Christmas cards to distant figures, reminiscing about the ‘good old days’ and offering to take Jane to an English pantomime (an invitation inevitably not taken up), as well as remembering her absent lover; she is, in other words, surrounded by immaterial and ghostly symbols of affection, whose invocation marks her solitude all the more strongly. It is here that the film marks queer ‘unbelonging’ to established discourses of reproductive futurity differently to the other British films. Whereas A Taste of Honey, Darling and Victim drew attention to the exclusion of the queer man (and, in Diana, the heterosexual woman who has chosen actively against motherhood) through an excessive and accusatory presence of children, Mavis is differentiated by the absence of children. The vigour with which women are culturally symbolized as mothers and women’s sexuality as primarily repro-

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ductive means that Mavis’s apparent loneliness suggests her, like Laura Farr, as a mother of absent children, and sets limits on her maternal relation to Jane. John Hill argues that the film makes clear that Mavis cannot be a long-term prospect as a maternal surrogate: ‘Although it is possibly the film’s intention to imply the virtues which the house can provide … it is clear that it can function as no more than a halfway house. For both the “role models” of female independence which it supplies are explicitly marked as unsatisfactory.’42 Despite the attractiveness of the welcoming and affectionate community of the house – a queer alternative pushing at the seams of a homogeneous mainstream – an unspoken discursive dogmatism of the patriarchal family ensures its ephemerality. Within this dogmatism, the lesbian must be a failed mother. This scene presents Mavis as a woman haunted by unfulfilled desires both romantic and maternal. The possibility of satisfying lesbian intimacies, after all, causes problems for the patriarchal narratives of reproductive futurity. These problems do not purely correspond to the types of threats of queer non-reproductivity outlined by Edelman; the ideologies of reproductive futurity close down all but the narrowest possibility for mothering women – that of the objectified function of masculinist, patronymic posterity. More troubling than the lonely lesbian as unrealized mother (an image that can in fact sit quite comfortably within patriarchal prescriptions of femininity) is the idea that forms of desire not structured by the father and the phallus might be embedded within satisfying kinship networks. The scene of Mavis’s loneliness in The L-Shaped Room is an ideological overcorrection acting as a failsafe against the psychic and social risks posed by the joys of the queer house and the lucid possibilities it offers for mothering subjectivities, which foreground actual caring practices, emotional intimacy, collectivity and feminine autonomy over biology and its inscription within patronymic inheritance. However, in true teleological fashion, the structure of the film is ultimately resigned to the re-establishment of the sovereignty of the latter patriarchal values of reproductive futurity as superior. The narrative endpoint of The L-Shaped Room resolves in straightness, with the consolidation of the traditional family – as Jane returns to her parents in France – and possibly of the heterosexual couple. Toby and Jane are not together at the end of the film, but the final shot of a note left by Jane on Toby’s typewriter, suggesting that the story in which he has literally ‘authorized’ the events of the film ‘would be marvellous with an ending’, implies hope for the heterosexual future, accompanied by the possibility of masculine intellectual fertility and financial success that could establish the couple even more firmly within a normative social centre, shortly after the birth of Jane’s child. Whether Jane simply returns to her parents or manages to build a lasting relationship with Toby, she is returning the child to the rule of the father in one way or another.

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The romantic suggestions of Jane’s note align the conclusion of the film with what Sarah Harwood calls the ‘Final Romance’ as the prevalent teleology of dominant Hollywood cinema, or the achievement of narrative satisfactions through ‘the conventional Hollywood coda of the heterosexual romance to indicate a potential generative unit’.43 The moralistic legitimacy of this ending as the only legible possibility can be instructively considered in light of Judith Butler’s work on queer kinships, state recognition and ‘thinkability’; mainstream society’s debarring of certain forms of kinship and (sexual) identity from self-imagination and expression at a symbolizing level can also make lived experience painful or in some respects impossible. Butler asserts that ‘[i]f you’re not real, it can be hard to sustain yourselves over time; the sense of delegitimation can make it harder to sustain a bond, a bond that is not real anyway, a bond that does not “exist”’.44 Butler puts forward nuanced and fascinating critical views on the shapes that may be taken by state recognition for nonheterosexual, non-biological or non-legally enshrined kinships and the potential intellectual and material value of such ‘legitimated’ recognition. However, they also emphasise the philosophical urgency of maintaining spaces and practices of kinship that do not require this form of recognition; they argue convincingly that ‘[f ]or a progressive sexual movement … the proposition that marriage should become the only way to sanction or legitimate sexuality is unacceptably conservative’.45 This is, they suggest, in no small part an issue of naming: The struggle is in part one over words, over where and how they apply, about their plasticity and their equivocity. But it is more specifically a struggle over whether certain practices of nomination keep the presuppositions about the limits of what is humanly recognizable in place. The argument rests on a certain paradox, however, that would be hard to deny since if one does not want to recognize certain human relations as part of the humanly recognizable, then one has already recognized them, and one seeks to deny what it is one has already, in one way or another, understood.46

The three key films under discussion in this chapter all enter into ambiguous spaces with regard to how the queer relationships (both sexual and familial) they deal with are or can be signified. Under the queering shadow of commercial censorship practices of the time, the same-sex romances and physical intimacies of Geoff, Mavis and all of the gay men in Victim cannot be overtly depicted. In Victim and The L-Shaped Room, the photographic images that act as indices to these desires are pointedly never revealed to the camera. In a more playful way, the words and phrases by which Jo and Geoff relate to each other in their domestic and maternal intimacy in A Taste of Honey are creatively unfixed as sisterhoods, motherhoods, partners and friends. In conjunction with the films’ teleological return to various committed forms of heteropatriarchal

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reproductive futurity, queer kinships and the autonomous and anti-sexist mothering subjectivities they might support are relegated to a negative space of the impossible, the unliveable and the inexpressible. Like A Taste of Honey and Darling, The L-Shaped Room ultimately seems to conform to this notion of the implicit and inevitable unviability of not-already-symbolized kinships. Yet, as Butler suggests, censorship cannot take place without an act of recognition; the creative opportunities of mothering outside of heterosexist idealizations of femininity are deferred by the films’ narrative foreclosures, but they are not altogether erased. While Jane returns to something resembling the centre of culture, however, Johnny, Mavis, Sonia and the other Jane (always lingering as an uncanny double, a haunting possibility of failure, for the focalizing Jane) remain outside of it, in their queer space, without validation for their kinship structures – there can be no question of a ‘marvellous ending’ for them. Like Geoff ’s retreat to the shadows and away from the children playing around the light of the bonfire in A Taste of Honey, the assorted Others of the boarding house make a spectral exit that seems more mythically preordained than rationally motivated. Hill underpins the overt traditionalist moralism of this ending: The speeches of both lesbian and prostitutes are linked to an abandonment of God, so it then becomes appropriate that Jane should secure a ‘redemption’ by giving birth to her child on Christmas Day. … The ‘holy family’ so secured, she is now able to return to her home in a submission to the law of the ‘father’ (he has sent her the ticket) and abandon the social and sexual irregularity which characterises the house.47

Despite the film’s relative contemporaneous progressiveness in its sympathetic representations of characters belonging to this ‘social and sexual irregularity’, and its enlivening portrayal of a queer familial space (while it lasts), Hill is justified in pointing out how this is ultimately overcompensated for in such an abrupt return to the centre, which even draws directly on the Mariological imagery of ideal motherhood, of the type described by Julia Kristeva in ‘Stabat Mater’. For Kristeva, the ‘Maternal in general, and […] the Christian or virginal representation in particular’ perform an ideological function that is particularly soothing to patriarchal fantasies of reproductive futurity and can ‘calm social anxiety and supply what the male lacks’.48 The hasty retreat from a queer network of caring and kinships, and the erection in its place of not just a more socially normative form of motherhood, but the radically objectified figure of the Madonna and all she means for patriarchal institutionalizations of motherhood, mark an effort to contain the film’s impending sympathies towards more subjective and fluid ways of being a mother. Even this excessive apologia, however, was insufficient placation for the currents of contempora-

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neous critical scorn towards the film’s representation of heterogeneous social identities. One reviewer, writing in the New Statesman, expressed his mocking umbrage as follows: ‘Takes all sorts, dear,’ says the wrinkled old lesbian trouper to the pregnant young French girl in what must be the understatement of the week. In the basement of a seedy Notting Hill boarding-house, two tarts entertain; a penniless would-be author taps away somewhere in the house’s belly; through a thin partition at attic level a Negro trumpeter hears every spasm of Leslie Caron’s morning sickness. … I was just able in the early, establishing stages to hope that some egregiously ordinary lodger might show his face and paces, say something straight, dull and – within the terms of the piece – devastating.49

The sentiment is echoed by Francis Wyndham, who similarly summarizes: ‘The bed has bugs in it and the house is inhabited by an avaricious landlady, an unsuccessful writer (in the book he was Jewish), a homosexual Negro, two prostitutes and an old Lesbian actress (Cicely Courtneidge – whatever next?).’50 Such critics seemed flatly annoyed and unconvinced by the excess of Otherness presented in the film, as if there were so few lesbians, Black men, sex workers and unmarried mothers in 1960s England that it was utterly implausible that any of them might have known each other (or that the various punitive housing policies and practices in place at this time, which exercised a sort of conservative retributionist access exclusion against non-white and queer subjects and unmarried mothers alike, might have created conditions for fruitful forms of solidarity in and among these groups). The reviewers’ appeal to the ‘ordinary’ further presupposes the universal heterosexuality and whiteness of the audience itself, assuming that figures of Otherness should always and for everybody be points of spectacle rather than identification, and complaining of feeling taxed by a two-hour encounter with a supporting cast of sometimes ambiguously queer characters, with little imagination of the excessive burden of identificatory heterosexuality thrust almost constantly upon the queer viewing subjects of mainstream cinema. However, such normative responses to the film do not universalize its reception, and its directorial intentions in the ending (whether or not it is meant as ‘restorative’ or left deliberately loose) are no more sovereign. Much as Alan Burton’s revisionist reading of Victim emphasized the value that gay male viewers found in the film’s almost self-contradictory eruptions of homosexual passion, it is encouraging to recognize that the radical joys of queer desires and queer relationalities cannot be fully suppressed by the moralizing teleologies of these films. The ideological project of reproductive futurity is not airtight, and its cracks can be prised open into avenues of hopeful counter-discourse. It is certainly possible to see in the resolution of The L-Shaped Room (as well as A Taste

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of Honey) not a victorious or fulfilling reaffirmation of the patriarchal family but an obstruction of creative and self-expressive alternatives by this very discourse. The countercultural community in which Jane finds herself is, after all, much brighter, much kinder, much less oppressive and much more supportive towards her mothering subjectivity (as opposed to maternal objectification) than the staid and dreary society of the father from which she emerges and to which she returns via this queer interlude. The subversive joy of the house’s creative space is demonstrated in one of the film’s most resonant scenes – whose subversive potential was later recognized in the sampling of its soundtrack in countercultural British band The Smiths’ 1986 release ‘The Queen is Dead’. As the characters cheerfully socialize on Christmas Day, Mavis, on the encouragement of the others, appears dressed in drag as a (male) officer of the British army and performs a rousing musical hall song, ‘Take Me Back to Dear Old Blighty’, as the other characters laugh and sing along. The image is a joyfully queer parody of British masculinity and the values and images of nationalism that challenges such ideological narratives through deconstructive irreverence and play with gender and class identities. It is at this apex of jubilant critique and queering of ideas of family and patriarchal mainstays, however, that the ideological presence of the Child cuts back through, as Mavis’s subversive song is literally interrupted by her realization that Jane has gone into labour. After this point, the ‘holy family’ of masculinist imagination is reinstated to its customary station of supremacy with a vengeance, and there is no question of Jane’s returning substantially to this ‘bent’ home. After all, within the presiding logic of reproductive futurity, children cannot exist within this space. These spaces of queer domesticity that the female protagonists of The L-Shaped Room, A Taste of Honey and Darling inhabit in their rejections of normative patriarchal society and its reductive objectifications of mothering women are utopic moments of respite. They also unfold in queer time; these spaces represent almost a break in the normative linear temporalities of ‘straight’ plot, ineluctably delimited by the spectral persistence of the hanging clauses from which they have found brief escape (the conclusion of the pregnancies, the return of Jo’s mother, Jane’s return to France and Diana’s unresolved heterosexual romance with Robert). Like Jane and Jo’s pregnant bodies, the ‘queer houses’ falling outside of the places and times of normative society are gestational; the women are nurtured by the amniotic fluid of the queer caring and kinship relations they encounter, and develop emotionally and intellectually as they explore their own subjective relationships to motherhood, gender and sexuality. However, in all cases, it is only the biological pregnancy that will come to term, delivering a physical child and rebirthing the ideological Child. Jane’s pregnancy in The L-Shaped Room acts as a tangible ‘time limit’ on the lifespan of the queer community within the house, at the end

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of which Jane will be returned to linear (‘straight’) patriarchal and heterosexual time. This space and what it represents is, after all - as the ideological tides of the film continually impress upon us - not a liveable possibility for actual or imagined children. However, we should ask, why not? Why should these demonstrably caring and existentially liberating spaces be so disastrous a site for mothers and their children to exist within? For films such as The L-Shaped Room and A Taste of Honey, it seems impossible to take the representation of queer kinships – including the figure of the single mother, who is in her own way a sexual Other according to the norms of patriarchal dogma – beyond fleeting suggestion. However, alternative possibilities of mothering and familial connection are presented only as obstructed (by patriarchal ideologies of reproductive futurity) rather than as inherently flawed, and both films begin to indicate the potential pleasures and opportunities for creative models of self-expression of mothering subjects offered by such spaces. Halberstam’s theory of the ‘queer art of failure’ may in this case help us to rethink the apparently heterosexist endings of both films that appear to banish the queer and reinscribe the single mother into the phallocentrism of patriarchal linearity. According to this dominant (heteronormative, capitalist) ideology in which ‘success … equates too easily to specific forms of reproductive maturity combined with wealth accumulation’,51 queers and (heterosexual) single mothers are failures. The creative kinship structures that Jane, Jo and Diana form in the margins of reproductive society fail. In terms of narrative and artistic satisfactions, we may also feel that the films themselves fail: the ‘final romance’ of The L-Shaped Room is trite and predictable, and A Taste of Honey lacks clear character motivations in its closing scenes. Yet all of these failures are eloquent. As Halberstam argues, ‘failure allows us to escape the punishing norms that discipline behavior and manage human development with the goal of delivering us from unruly childhoods to orderly and predictable adulthoods’.52 Geoff, Mavis and the queer spaces of kinship potentiality they inhabit are both queer and query: question marks over the patriarchal dictates of reproductive futurity and its prescriptive forms of mothering. The teleological reinstatement of the patriarchal order cannot scrub out the films’ earlier pleasures in its failed margins. These pleasures may be appropriated radically as opportunities for challenging the patriarchal institutionalization of the family, and to imagine creative forms of kinship in which Jo, Jane, Geoff and Mavis may all be included as mothering subjects. These spaces raise important feminist questions about what a mother is and who can mother, challenging institutionalized legal and social discourses of motherhood and sexuality that have been ‘channeled to serve male interests’, in which ‘behavior which threatens the institutions, such as illegitimacy, abortion, [and] lesbianism, is considered deviant or criminal’.53 In the queer domestic spaces of The L-Shaped Room, A

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Taste of Honey and Darling, solidarity is found between all of these ‘deviant’ experiences (along with various relational intimacies and potentially co-maternal subjectivities of queer men), foregrounding the creative lived practices of mothering within intersubjective kinship relationships over the performance of prescribed ideologies of patriarchally authorized motherhood. The films discussed in this part all approach representations of mothering relations and subjects that are for one reason or another located at the margins of dominant expressions of ideological Mother and Child discourses in British and French culture. As described by theorists of reproductive justice, such marginalized identities constantly collide with a multitude of practical, institutional and expressive social barriers that inhibit their mothering practices and ability to self-articulate as autonomous familial and reproductive subjects. The representation of heterogeneity introduces new axes to the binaries of presence versus absence and ideal versus denigrated mothering along which white heterosexual women’s reproductive choices are often catalogued. While the latter group’s identities as mothers are exactingly prescribed to the point that the desired imago forms a shroud over their autonomous subjectivities, other groups are prescribed only into non-existence. The films addressing these spaces of representational absence in motherhood discourse illustrate many of the forms that these social barriers take. On the other hand, however, film also offers a productive opportunity for explorations of and identification with counter-discourses of motherhood and family. The symbolization of characters whose mothering identities are rarely recognized by dominant cultural imaginations can confirm both their exclusion and their presence. Such representations make the margins an embodied and affectively ‘real’ place, rather than the vague and shaded anti-regions that set the limits of the expressible. The films tend to resolve in fury or in dejected resignation, which could suggest the shoring up of social borders and boundaries. On the other hand, a nonteleological approach invites the incipient interpretation of counter-discursive representations as expressive spaces capable of creation as well as protest, therefore offering opportunities for mothering subjectivities beyond the determinations of dominant ideology. Notes 1. Webster, Imagining Home, 100–2. 2. One of these was that of Peter Wildeblood, whose 1955 autobiography, which included a strikingly direct declaration of his homosexuality, is thoughtfully evaluated in Andy Medhurst, ‘Victim: Text as Context’, Screen 25, nos. 4–5 (1984): 22–35. 3. Alan Burton, ‘Victim (1961): Text and Context’, AAA – Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik 35, no. 1 (2010): 76. 4. Ibid.

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5. Bidnall, West Indian Generation, 178–79. 6. See Burton, ‘Text and Context’, 97 and Medhurst, ‘Text as Context’, 25. 7. Alan Burton and Tim O’Sullivan, The Cinemas of Basil Dearden and Michael Relph (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), 238. 8. Ibid., 240. 9. Richard Dyer, ‘Victim: Hermeneutic Project’, in The Matter of Images: Essays on Representation (London: Routledge, 1993). 10. Medhurst, ‘Text as Context’. 11. Ibid., 33. 12. Dyer, ‘Hermeneutic Project’, 87. 13. Medhurst, ‘Text as Context’, 26–27. 14. Ibid., 30. 15. Burton, ‘Text and Context’, 96–98 and Stephen Bourne, Brief Encounters: Lesbians and Gays in British Cinema 1930–1971 (London: Cassell, 1996), 155. 16. Dyer, ‘Hermeneutic Project’, 79–84. 17. Ibid., 83. 18. Ibid., 81. 19. Medhurst, ‘Text as Context’, 34. 20. Dyer, ‘Hermeneutic Project’, 84. 21. Ibid., 83. 22. Medhurst, ‘Text as Context’, 34. 23. Ibid., 30. 24. J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 2–3. 25. Luna and Luker, ‘Reproductive Justice’, 328. They draw on a number of key sources in this paragraph, including Zakiya Luna, ‘From Rights to Justice: Women of Color Changing the Face of US Reproductive Rights Organizing’, Society without Borders 4 (2009), 343–64; Kimala Price, ‘What is Reproductive Justice? How Women of Color Activists are Redefining the Pro-Choice Paradigm’, Meridians 10 (2010), 42–65; Andrea Smith, ‘Beyond ProChoice versus Pro-Life: Women of Color and Reproductive Justice’, NWSA Journal 17, no. 1 (2005): 119–40; and Loretta J. Ross, Understanding Reproductive Justice (Atlanta, GA: SisterSong, 2006). 26. Petchesky, ‘Reproductive Freedom’, 670. 27. Lovell, ‘Landscapes’, 173. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 176. 30. Rich, Of Woman Born, 236. 31. Ibid., 235. 32. This is a point also made by Rich when she argues that ‘it is no wonder if a mother dreaded giving birth to a female like herself. While the father might see himself as “twice-born” in his son, such a “second birth” was denied the mothers of daughters.’ Ibid., 227. 33. Ibid., 235. 34. O’Reilly, ‘Introduction’, 2. 35. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 166. 36. Higson, ‘Space, Place’, 146. 37. Lovell, ‘Landscapes’, 173–74. 38. Edelman, No Future, 19. 39. Burton, ‘Text and Context’, 75.

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40. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 167. 41. The discrimination against Black tenants by landlords in post-war Britain is notorious. Taking place within the same decade as the film’s release, high-profile and infamous examples such as Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech (Powell was himself a former housing minister), the appallingly racist 1964 Conservative electoral campaign in Smethwick and the contexts of prejudice that enabled it are clear articulations of racist attitudes underlying British culture during this period, and how closely they were linked to home and housing, drawing on the imagery of domesticity, invasion and neighbourhood. The events are discussed in Clayton Goodwin, ‘If You Want a Nigger for a Neighbour, Vote Liberal or Labour’, New African 433 (2004), 40–42 and Andrew Crines, Tim Heppell and Michael Hill, ‘Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” Speech: A Rhetorical Political Analysis’, British Politics 11, no. 1 (2016): 72–94. The L-Shaped Room was also released several years prior to the decriminalization of homosexuality in Great Britain, and the Sexual Offences Act in 1956 and Street Offences Act in 1959 included sections aimed at criminalizing and suppressing sex workers, meaning that the sexual practices of almost all of the characters in the house would have been socially and (to some extent) jurisprudentially illegitimate. 42. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 167. 43. Sarah Harwood, Family Fictions: Representations of the Family in 1980s Hollywood Cinema (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), 61. 44. Butler, ‘Is Kinship Always Already Heterosexual?’, 25. 45. Ibid., 21. 46. Ibid., 24. First emphasis mine, subsequent emphases in original. 47. Hill, Sex, Class, and Realism, 167. 48. Kristeva, ‘Stabat Mater’, 135. 49. John Coleman, ‘All Sorts’, New Statesman 64, 6 July 1962, 752. 50. Francis Wyndham, Film Reviews: The L-Shaped Room, Monthly Film Bulletin 32, no. 1 (1963), 40. 51. Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure, 2. 52. Ibid., 88. 53. Rich, Of Woman Born, 42.

Conclusion Reproducing the Future  

This study has moved, in its examination of the politics and poetics of motherhood in 1960s cinema, through the stages of conception, gestation and delivery, exploring the development and dissolution of maternal ideals. As with any such journey, we arrive at the inevitable question: what next? The project of this book has been to think about the future by way of the past. I have argued – along with Lee Edelman – a core theoretical point that the figure of the Child is an expression of political power insinuated into everyday social discourses. This Child is, at first blush, deeply imaginatively connected to a social future, standing as the sovereign symbol of futurities both reproductive and cultural. However, more often than not, the rhetorical image of the Child is deployed to promote the most conservative of futures, or a present-as-future. Such an articulation of societies’ going forward would only replicate and amplify flows of power and oppression along their existing trajectories. The politically triumphant Child is made in the image of the social order’s most comfortable beneficiaries. I have further argued, beyond Edelman’s thesis, however, that the ideal Child of dominant political discourse has in turn an ideal Mother, who acts as an anonymous guarantor of this entire system of futurity. The question then becomes how to fail productively at this system so that the future that is reproduced is not one of ideological business as usual, but one capable of intersubjective understanding and ethical change. This includes a representational shift from mother-as-object to mothering subjects, and from motherhood as a function of stasis and anxiety to mothering as a creative instrument of hope. The same ideologies that celebrate and reify the Child-as-future (often over the lived interests of any and all actual children who do not fit their particularized image) also – inevitably – carefully close off the Mother within the ineffability of the private domestic sphere. In this way, idealized motherhood is constructed as a spiritual rather than a social undertaking. Irigaray argues that the hierarchical structure of the patriarchal family privatizes motherhood and fences it off from overt political participation: ‘Once deflowered, woman is relegated to the status of use value, to her entrapment in private property.’1 As a first step, then, mothering and motherhood must both be returned to the pub-

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lic sphere of political thought and action, disposing of the myth that cultural imaginations of motherhood have ever been apolitical or disinterested. Initially, exploring in greater detail the many and complex ways in which cultural images of mothers in film reflect, react, critique or resist will improve understanding of how the dual images of the Mother, as either an ideal but unreal, numinous saint or an abject, cannibalistic monster, are profoundly motivated by political ideologies. Furthermore, though these image-making processes are conditioned by what E. Ann Kaplan has called a ‘“Master” Motherhood Discourse’,2 its expressions mutate according to its particular social and cultural contexts. The better this is understood, the quicker mothering and mothering relations can increasingly be recognized as a resource of genuine political and ethical creativity. The 1960s, and the prolific and exciting young cinemas they produced in Britain and France, were extensively defined by both ‘transformation and tradition’.3 Motherhood as a discourse is extensively at stake on both of these fronts. On the one hand, mothers in domestic settings are constructed as the keepers and caretakers of ‘traditional’ culture and values (however the film-makers may interpret these vagaries) and thus treated either with nostalgic desire or condescending scorn. On the other hand, mothers and – to an extent – any young, sexually active women become the repositories of anxieties (and even, occasionally, hopes) about cultural change and social shifts. However, writing on major film movements in this period in Britain and France has generally been very quiet on the topic of motherhood and mothering subjectivities. This rehearses, then, the annexation of mothers outside of a world of political and social complexity. Yet purchase on the ideological capital of motherhood is fundamental to many of the key sociopolitical questions that vitalize the era. In Chapters 1 and 2, I argued that the figure of the mother in the home was particularly central to gendered responses to the changing landscapes of global capital, commodity forms and mass culture from the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s in the New Wave and young cinemas in France and Britain. The ‘angry young men’ films of the British kitchen sink cycle tended to adopt masculine and often misogynistic articulations, in which the future and virility of young working-class men were at stake, and the domestic became an urgent site of gendered and intergenerational cultural conflict. These films were among the most prescriptive in their approach to ideologies of motherhood, and a division was clearly drawn between ‘good mother’ figures who nurture and minister to a ‘traditional’ community and ‘shallow dupes’ who overvalue modern commodities and are suggested as posing the greatest danger to the integrity of the family (and therefore the future). The young French directors were frequently both wary of and excited by the influx of new mass-produced

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commodities, globalization and Americanized cultural forms in this period. The films I discussed by Varda and Godard both took a far more critical and self-reflexive approach to these topics, experimenting with form and content to produce complex reflections on biological and mechanical reproduction and their ideological intersections. In all cases, mothers stand as signs for (mass) reproduction itself, and are used to reflect on issues of consumerism, labour and cultural identity. The British films, however, explore these issues only from the outside, identifying implicitly with the perspective of the young man or son, while Varda and Godard produce more nuanced discourses that leave open the possibility, at least to some degree, of identification with a mothering subject contending with these social forms. Chapters 3 and 4 underscored the profound importance of discourses of unplanned pregnancy and reproductive rights throughout the young cinemas of the 1960s. Although these topics appear frequently throughout all of the major film movements of the decade (a fact not lost on contemporaneous reviewers), there is remarkably scant critical work on this area. Where it is touched on briefly, this has led to a mistaken tendency to assume that a largely polarized, moralizing and adversarial discourse of pro- and anti-choice tensions familiar from political campaigning can be extended to film representation. What this study found, however, was that the New Wave and Swinging London cinemas, as well as earlier French melodramas, tended to offer very different representations of abortion, contraception and unplanned pregnancy as experience rather than as a Manichean moral question. Though ideological lines of thinking can still certainly be found, all of these films are in fact difficult to map onto established reproductive rights frameworks, which in this period tended either to roundly condemn women who terminate pregnancies or to lionize choice per se. Instead, important issues of absence and agency arise relating to the depiction of female suffering around abortion in these films. However, it is interesting and important that during a key period for reproductive politics in both countries, representations in young cinemas relayed imaginations of abortion, unplanned pregnancy and (through these) motherhood that were subtler and more nuanced than suggested by broader political invectives. These films also offer a vital and as yet overlooked insight into cultural and political discourses of motherhood and reproductive rights in this era in general, adding further layers of complexity and nuance to more conventional political and historical sources. The final part turned to ‘mothering in the margins’, drawing attention to the sometimes subtle ways in which figurations of the Mother and the Child are interwoven into political discourses and film representations in the first instance of race, nation(alism) and migration, and in the second of homosexuality and

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queer kinships. I argued here, overall, on the radical exclusivity of the ideology of the Child, which not only constructs an oppressive situation for mothering subjects, but also builds into it a punishing hierarchy. The 1960s cinemas I discussed here were often uncritical of these discourses; British social realist and Swinging London cinema tended to perpetuate reductive images, while the New Wave did not typically demonstrate much awareness of racial difference within France at all. The rare exceptions that did so, including Les lâches vivent d’espoir, were much less critically and commercially successful than the ‘canonical’ New Wave output. However, Sembène and Hondo’s incisive 1960s films offer far more complex representations of migration between West Africa and France, deconstructing issues of transnational and interracial kinship and the exploitation of migrant labour to support the institution of the French family. These films go beyond postcolonial critique to create possibilities of radical disruptions to these genealogical ideologies in form and content. Chapter 6 similarly finished by looking for spaces of critical disruption of ideological discourses of motherhood, deploying queer and feminist readings of ‘mainstream’ film-making that created space for the expression of a heterogeneous range of mothering subjectivities. Imaginaries of motherhood have never ceased to be mobilized in screen media. In the twenty-first century, as Jacqueline Rose has argued, motherhood has remained ‘the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for everything that is wrong with the world, which it becomes the task – unrealisable, of course – of mothers to repair’,4 and images of mothers or the Mother are deployed in film, television and digital media to shore up emotive heft behind representations of myriad urgent sociopolitical issues, including migrant crises, the welfare state and – again – reproductive rights and women’s sexuality.5 As we once more enter a period of seismic collision between tradition and radicalism in Europe and beyond, it is useful to think again about the young cinemas of the 1960s, the ways in which they used and represented motherhood and the overt and covert ways in which these representations were informed by and at times informed their sociopolitical contexts. This is not purely an exercise in examination and critique. Within all of the issues I have discussed and the groups of films I have analysed, there is potential for radical expression too; taking a wide view of film movements in the 1960s and considering their frequently surprising dialogues with their social, cultural and political environments tells a story not only of suppression, but of articulation and action. This book has sought not only to deconstruct the ways in which motherhood images and discourses have worked towards the creation of an absent imago that has little if anything to do with mothering subjects, but also to explore how more complex and subjective discourses might be created.

Conclusion

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Irigaray, ‘Women on the Market’, 186. Kaplan, Motherhood and Representation, 8. Petrie and Williams, Transformation and Tradition. Rose, Mothers, 1. Ibid., 7–37.

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Filmography   2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her). 1967. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. France: Argos Films, Anouchka Films and Les Films du Carrosse. Les 400 coups (The 400 Blows). 1959. Dir. François Truffaut. France: Les Films du Carrosse and Sédif Productions. Alfie. 1966. Dir. Lewis Gilbert. UK: Lewis Gilbert and Sheldrake Films. ’Ave You Got a Male Assistant, Please Miss? 1973. UK: Oxford Polytechnic. À bout de souffle (Breathless). 1960. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. France: Les Films Impéria, Les Productions Georges de Beauregard and Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie. The Birds and the Bees: 60 Years of British Sex Education Films. 2009. UK: BFI. Le bonheur (Happiness). 1965. Dir. Agnès Varda. France: Parc Film. Cathy Come Home [television film]. 1966. Dir. Ken Loach. UK: BBC. Le corbeau (The Crow). 1943. Dir. Henri-Georges Clouzot. France: Continental Films. Les cousins (The Cousins). 1959. Dir. Claude Chabrol. France: Ajym Films and Société Française du Cinéma pour la Jeunesse. Un cœur gros comme ça (The Winner). 1961. Dir. François Reichenbach. France: Les Films de la Pléaide. Daguerrotypes. 1976. Dir. Agnès Varda. France: Ciné Tamaris, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel and Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen. Darling. 1965. Dir. John Schlesinger. UK: Joseph Janni Production, Vic Films Productions and Appia Films Ltd. Don’t Be Like Brenda. 1973. Dir. W. Hugh Baddeley. UK: Hugh Baddeley Productions. La dérive (Drift). 1962. Dir. Paula (/Paule) Delsol. France: Productions Cinématographiques du Languedoc. Une femme en blanc se révolte (A Woman in White Revolts). 1966. Dir. Claude Autant-Lara. France: Arco Film, S.O.P.A.C and Société Nouvelle des Établissements Gaumont. Une femme mariée (A Married Woman). 1964. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. France: Anouchka Films and Orsay Films. Georgy Girl. 1966. Dir. Silvio Narizzano. UK: Columbia Pictures Corporation and Everglades Productions. Growing Up: A New Approach to Sex Education, No. 1. 1971. Dir. Arnold L. Miller. UK: Institute for Sex Education and Research. L’homme qui aimait les femmes (The Man Who Loved Women). 1977. Dir. François Truffaut. France: Les Films du Carrosse. Journal d’une femme en blanc (Diary of a Woman in White). 1965. Dir. Claude Autant-Lara. France: S.O.P.A.C and Société Nouvelle des Établissements Gaumont. Jules et Jim. 1962. Dir. François Truffaut. France: Les Films du Carrosse and Sédif Productions. A Kind of Loving. 1962. Dir. John Schlesinger. UK: Vic Films Productions. The Knack … and How to Get It. 1965. Dir. Richard Lester. UK: Woodfall Film Productions.

Filmography

263

Learning to Live. 1964. Dir. Guy Fergusson and Phillip Sattin. UK: Eothen Films and London Foundation for Marriage Education (sponsor). Funded by the London Rubber Company. The L-Shaped Room. 1962. Dir. Bryan Forbes. UK: British Lion Film Corporation and Romulus Films. Lola. 1961. Dir. Jacques Demy. France: Rome Paris Films. The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. 1962. Dir. Tony Richardson. UK: Woodfall Film Productions. Look Back in Anger. 1959. Dir. Tony Richardson. UK: Woodfall Film Productions. Les lâches vivent d’espoir (My Baby is Black!). 1961. Dir. Claude Bernard-Aubert. France: Athos Films, Groupement des Editeurs de Film and Lodice. Marnie. 1964. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. USA: Universal Pictures, Alfred J. Hitchcock Productions and Geoffrey Stanley. Masculin féminin. 1966. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. France/Sweden: Anouchka Films, Argos Films and Sandrews. Les mauvaises rencontres (Bad Liaisons). 1955. Dir. Alexandre Astruc. France: Les Films Marceau. Mildred Pierce. 1945. Dir. Michael Curtiz. USA: Warner Bros. The Miracle of Birth. 1970. UK: Hugh Baddeley Productions. La noire de … (Black Girl). 1966. Dir. Ousmane Sembène. Senegal/France: Filmi Domirev and Les Actualités Française. Now, Voyager. 1942. Dir. Irving Rapper. USA: Warner Bros. L’opéra-mouffe (Diary of a Pregnant Woman). 1962. Dir. Agnès Varda. France: Ciné Tamaris. Oscar Wilde. 1959. Dir. Gregory Ratoff. UK: Vantage Films. The Other Side of the Underneath. 1972. Dir. Jane Arden. UK: Bond. Le petit soldat (The Little Soldier). 1963. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. France: Les Productions Georges de Beauregard and Société Nouvelle de Cinématographie. Philadelphia. 1993. Dir. Jonathan Demme. USA: TriStar Pictures and Clinica Estetico. The Pleasure Girls. 1965. Dir. Gerry O’Hara. UK: Compton Films and Tekli British Productions. Prudence and the Pill. 1968. Dir. Fielder Cook. UK: Twentieth Century Fox Productions. Rapunzel Let Down Your Hair. 1978. Dir. Esther Ronay, Susan Shapiro and Francine Winham. UK: British Film Institute. Riddles of the Sphinx. 1977. Dir. Laura Mulvey and Peter Wollen. UK: British Film Institute. Room at the Top. 1959. Dir. Jack Clayton. UK: Romulus Films and Remus. Réponse de femmes: notre corps, notre sexe (Women Reply). 1975. Dir. Agnès Varda. France: Ciné Tamaris and France 2. Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. 1960. Dir. Karel Reisz. UK: Woodfall Film Productions. Sapphire. 1959. Dir. Basil Dearden. UK: Artna Films Ltd. and the Rank Organisation. Serious Charge. 1959. Dir. Terence Young. UK: Alva Films. The Simpsons. 1989– . Created by James L. Brooks, Matt Groening and Sam Simon. USA: Gracie Films, 20th Television Animation and Fox Television Animation. Smashing Time. 1967. Dir. Desmond Davis. UK: Partisan Productions and Selmur Productions. Soleil O (Oh, Sun). 1967. Dir. Med Hondo. France/Mauritania: Grey Films and Shango Films. Sparrows Can’t Sing. 1963. Dir. Joan Littlewood. UK: Carthage Films and Associated British Picture Corporation. A Taste of Honey. 1961. Dir. Tony Richardson. UK: Woodfall Film Productions. This Sporting Life. 1963. Dir. Lindsay Anderson. UK: Independent Artists and Julian Wintle/ Leslie Parkyn Productions.

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The Trials of Oscar Wilde. 1960. Dir. Ken Hughes. UK: Warwick Film Productions in association with Viceroy Films. L’une chante, l’autre pas (One Sings, the Other Doesn’t). 1977. Dir. Agnès Varda. France: Ciné Tamaris, INLC, Institut National de l’Audiovisuel, Paradise, Population and Société Française de Production. Up the Junction. 1968. Dir. Peter Collinson. UK: BHE Films and Crasto. Victim. 1961. Dir. Basil Dearden. UK: Allied Filmmakers. Vivre sa vie. 1962. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. France: Les Films de la Pléiade and Pathé Consortium Cinéma.

Index   Index of Film Titles 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (1967; dir. Godard), 65, 77–78; household commodities and 65, 77; motherhood and 78 À bout de souffle (1960; dir. Godard), 73, 77, 150, 152, 158–62, 168; abortion and 161; motherhood and 150; pregnancy and 158–60; seen/unseen structures and 158–60, 162 A Kind of Loving (1962; dir. Schlesinger), 39, 45, 47–48, 53–58, 105, 109; abortion and 145; consumerism and 45, 55; daughters and 57; fatherhood and 56; masculinity and 45, 48, 53–55, 105, 113; motherhood and 45, 54–56, 58; unplanned pregnancy and 109, 113, 145 A Taste of Honey (1961; dir. Richardson), 23–24, 104, 120–21, 185–86, 221, 227–32, 235, 238, 240–42; abortion and 104, 228; Black characters and 185–86, 228; interracial relationships and 228; kinships and 238; motherhood and 23; pregnancy and 229–30; queerness and 120–21, 221–22, 227–28, 230–33, 235, 237, 240–42 Alfie (1966; dir. Gilbert), 109–10, 116, 122, 127, 141; abortion and 109–13, 116–17, 145; motherhood and 116; permissive society and 109–10, 113–14, 128; promiscuity, male and 110–11; unplanned pregnancy and 145 ’Ave You Got a Male Assistant, Please Miss? (1973; dir. Jones and Astley), 101, 103 Billy Liar (1963; dir. Schlesinger), 22 Cathy Come Home (1966; dir. Loach), 188; Black families and 188

Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962; dir. Varda), 73 Coca-Cola. See Masculin féminin Darling (1965; dir. Schlesinger), 116–18, 120–23, 127, 141, 186, 221, 235, 238; abortion and 116–21; kinships and 238; motherhood and 120–23, 166; permissive society and 117, 128; queerness and 221, 228, 235, 240, 242; reproductive control and 121 Des gens sans importance (1956; dir. Vemeuil), 140–41; abortion and 141, 143 Don’t Be Like Brenda (1973; dir. Baddeley), 102–3; pregnancy and 102 Georgy Girl (1966; dir. Narizzano), 116, 122–27, 187; abortion and 123, 126; Black families and 187; motherhood and 122–27; sexual liberation and 122 Growing Up (1971; dir. Cole), 101, 103 Histoire d’A (1974; dir. Belmont and Issartel), 92; abortion and 92 Joanna (1968; dir. Sarne), 186; Black characters and 188 Journal d’une femme en blanc (1965; dir. Autant-Lara), 140–43; abortion and 141, 162 Jules et Jim (1962; dir. Truffaut), 73 L’homme qui aimait les femmes (1977; dir. Truffaut), 146, 148 L’opéra-mouffe (1958; dir. Varda), 154–56; pregnancy and 154–55 L’une chante, l’autre pas (1977; dir. Varda), 145, 162–63 La dérive (1964; dir. Delsol), 73, 162–68; abortion and 166–68; autonomy, women and 168; censorship and

266

Index

164–65, 167–68; contraception and 163, 167–68; delayed release of 164; feminism and 164–65, 168; motherhood and 165–66, 168 La mémoire courte (1962; dir. Premylser), 163 La noire de … (1966; dir. Sembène), 192–96, 209, 213–14; Black characters and 193–94; domestic labour and 193–95; family and 215; gender and 193; migration and 193–94, 196–97, 215; motherhood and 193, 195–97, 203 Le bonheur (1965; dir. Varda), 28, 39, 65, 70–72, 79, 81–83; mass reproduction and 79, 82–83 Le corbeau (1943; dir. Clouzot), 140; abortion and 143, 162 Le petit soldat (1960/1963; dir. Godard), 37 Learning to Live (1964; dir. Fergusson and Sattin), 101 Les 400 coups (1959; dir. Truffaut), 24, 73, 145–49; abortion and 145–49, 168; motherhood and 24, 146–49 Les cousins (1959; dir. Chabrol), 144–45, 152; abortion and 144–45, 168 Les lâches vivent d’espoir (1961; dir. Bernard-Aubert), 199, 202, 248; interracial relationships and 199–200; racism and 200, 228 Les mauvaises rencontres (1955; dir. Astruc), 140; abortion and 143, 167 Lola (1961; dir. Demy), 67 Look Back in Anger (1959; dir. Richardson), 24, 45; masculinity and 105; motherhood and 45 Marnie (1964; dir. Hitchcock), 11 Masculin féminin (1966; dir. Godard), 1–2, 73, 150; abortion and 150–51; Black characters and 184–85; contraception and 151–52; motherhood and 150 Now, Voyager (1942; dir. Rapper), 11 Oscar Wilde (1960; dir. Ratoff ), 223 Philadelphia (1993; dir. Demme), 118 Prudence and the Pill (1968; dir. Cook), 114–15, 127–28; contraception and 114, 127–28; children and 115 Réponse de femmes (1975; dir. Varda), 163 Room at the Top (1959; dir. Clayton), 45, 47, 105, 109; abortion and 145; consum-

erism and 47; motherhood and 45; unplanned pregnancy and 109, 113, 145 Sapphire (1959; dir. Dearden), 188, 201–4, 210, 223; ambiguity, racial and 202; Black characters and 188, 201; interracial relationships and 201; motherhood and 203; pregnancy and 202; racism and 228; subjectivity, reproductive and 202; white passing and 201–2 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960; dir. Reisz), 28, 45, 47–48, 54–56, 116, 141; abortion and 28, 104–13, 117, 145; ‘angry young men’ and 47–48, 104; consumerism and 45, 48; masculinity and 47–48, 56, 104–5, 110; motherhood and 112, 116; permissive society and 113–14, 128; promiscuity, male and 110, 114; unplanned pregnancy and 145 Serious Charge (1959; dir. Young), 223 Smashing Time (1967; dir. Davis), 122 Soleil O (1967; dir. Hondo), 204–10; ‘Black invasion’ and 206–7, 209–12; disruptive nature of 207–9, 212–13; family and 204, 215; family, Western and 213–14; futurity and 204, 214; masculinity, Black and 207, 214; racism and 205–6 Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963; dir. Littlewood), 187 Stella Dallas (1937; dir. Vidor), 11 The Children of Marx. See Masculin féminin The Knack (1965; dir. Lester), 122 The L-Shaped Room (1962; dir. Forbes), 115– 16, 120–21, 185–86, 221, 227, 233–41, 244n41; abortion and 117; Black characters and 185–86; kinships and 233–38; Otherness and 233, 238–39; pregnancy and 234, 240–41; queerness and 221–22, 227–28, 233–38, 240–42 The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1962; dir. Richardson), 52, 54–56, 105; fatherhood and 56; masculinity and 105; motherhood and 52; television and 54–55 The Miracle of Birth (1970; dir. Baddeley), 102–3 The Pleasure Girls (1965; dir. O’Hara), 115; abortion and 117; Black characters and 188

267

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The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960; dir. Hughes), 223 This Sporting Life (1963; dir. Anderson), 105 Un cœur gros comme ça (1961; dir. Reichenbach), 189–90, 193–94, 196; absent mother and 192; migration and 190–92, 196–97; mothers and 195, 197; Frenchness and 190 Une femme en blanc se révolte (1966; dir. Autant-Lara), 140–41, 143; abortion and 141, 143, 162 Une femme est une femme (1961; dir. Godard), 150, 152–55, 157–58; motherhood and 150, 155; pregnancy and 152, 155, 157; reproductive self-determination

and 153; seen/unseen structures and 157–58; Varda and 154–56 Une femme mariée (1964; dir. Godard), 28, 39, 66–70, 77–78, 82; consumerism/ mass reproduction and 65, 77–78, 82; motherhood and 65–69; role playing and 67–69 Up The Junction (1968; dir. Collinson), 117–18, 128; Black families and 188 Victim (1961; dir. Dearden), 222, 224, 235, 239; children and 224–27; feminism and 226; femininity and 224–26; homosexuality/homosexual rights and 222–24, 227; motherhood and 224, 226; queerness and 235, 237; reproductivity and 224

General Index abject, the see mothers, motherhood abjection. See Kristeva, J. and Tyler, I. abortion: Abortion Act (Britain, 1967), 96–99, 117; Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA) 97–99; accessibility and 140, 174; affairs, extramarital and 106, 110, 114; anti-abortionists 87, 89, 91, 100, 138, 142; backstreet/illegal 96, 99, 104–6, 111–13, 128, 134–37, 161; Bobigny case (France) 136; Bourne case (Britain) 96–97, 117; Britain and 91–92, 96–103, 135, 141; Child (construct) and 113, 118–19, 173; class politics and 91–92, 99, 135; communism and 92; death, theme of and 108, 140–41; debates and 91–92, 99, 112, 114–15, 133, 135–36, 139, 145, 175; decriminalization of 2, 28, 96, 101–2; discourse and 88, 98–100, 104, 124, 135, 200; doctors and 96–97, 99–100, 115, 118, 128; emptiness, feeling of and 118; eugenics and 91–92, 98, 135, 175; experience, female and 108, 111, 118, 128–29, 137, 142, 144, 148–49, 168, 247; experience, male and 107–8, 111,

247; faiseuses d’anges and 135; female knowledge and 105, 108; feminism and 88, 91–93, 97, 100, 118, 140–41, 228; France and 91–92, 133–68, 162; homicide/murder and 88, 123–24, 148; kitchen sink film cycle and 28, 92, 144; legislation/legality and 89, 96–98, 100, 124, 134–38, 145, 152, 168; manifeste des 343 (France) 136; Marxism and 92; melodramas, France and 139–41, 144, 150, 161, 168, 247; moral panic and 106, 135; mother/foetus and 88; Mouvement pour la Libération de l’Avortement et de la Contraception (MLAC; France) 136; Netherlands and 135; New Wave (Britain) and 29, 144–45, 173, 247; New Wave (France) and 29, 133–68, 173, 247; paternalism and 100–101; patriarchy and 109, 113–15, 137; Pelletier law (France, 1979); personhood and 124; pre-New Wave (France) and 139–40; privilege and 174–75; punishment, female and 119, 126, 139–40; punishment, male and 106, 109, 111–13, 115, 139; racism and 175, 200;

268

Index

reform and 89, 91–92, 97–99, 135–36; rights and 91, 114–15; safety and 135; self-determination and 106, 114; social realism and 92, 127; Swinging London films and 28–29, 104, 127, 144, 247; Switzerland and 135; trauma and 111, 118, 126, 247; Veil law (France, 1975) 136, 138; victims/victimisation and 29, 107, 111–13, 118, 122, 128, 142–44; welfare and 140–41; working-class and 92, 99, 104, 109, 128; see also Beauvoir, S. de and children and Godard, J.-L. and mothers, motherhood and Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) and Varda, A. and women; see also Index of Film Titles adoption, 102 Aldgate, A., 48, 105 Allen, A.T., 90 Allen, D., 147 Allison, M., 90, 92, 136 America. See United States of America Americanization, 2, 28, 61, 63, 247 Amery, F., 100 Amsterdam, 136 Anderson, L., 20 Arctic Monkeys, 105 Armes, R., 48 Arnold, S., 12 Associated British, 23 Astruc, A., 20, 22 Atack, M., 25 Audé, F., 147 Auslander, L., 187, 191 auteurism, 20, 22, 24, 43, 207 authenticity, 35, 38, 46–48, 63, 105, 195, 233; cultural 51; patriarchal 46; see also culture, working-class autonomy, reproductive, 2, 173, 200 Bacall, L., 161 Baddeley, W.H., 102 Barthes, R., 38, 62, 77; Mythologies 62 Bazin, A., 20, 22, 52–53; editing and 53; realism and 52 Beauvoir, S. de, 7, 14–16, 64, 66, 136–38, 162; abortion and 136–41, 162; consumerism and 64, 66; Les belles images

64; motherhood and 14–16; The Second Sex 14, 64, 66, 71, 137, 140 Bell, M., 25 Belmondo, J.-P., 152, 156, 158 Benjamin, W., 78 Bernard-Aubert, C., 199 Bevan, A., 43 Bidnall, A., 203 birth control. See contraception Black, L., 43 Blackness, 185–86, 202, 206, 212 Blanckaert, C., 197 Bleich, E., 178 bodies, Black, 221 bodies, female, 3, 18, 69, 77, 153, 156, 199, 221; as consumer object 64; pregnancy and 89; marketing and 69; punishment and 106; reproductive 90; suffering and 150, 161–62, 165; white 221; see also women bodies, maternal, 11, 13–14, 18, 82, 101, 103, 112, 124, 126, 128, 137, 173, 186, 192, 199–200, 205, 207, 221; racism and 199–200, 204 bodies, mothering. See bodies, maternal Bogarde, D., 223 Bogart, H., 161 boys, 10, 24, 43–44, 102, 111, 156, 164, 196, 225–26; castration, fear of 156; ‘femininity phase’ and 156; ‘womb envy’ 156; see also femininity and girls and mothers, motherhood Bratby, J., 23 Brecht, B., 72, 78 Britain, 2, 19–21, 23, 26, 28, 36–37, 87, 91, 174; Abortion Act (1967) 96–98; affluence and 42, 56; classlessness and 42; decolonization and 36–37, 182; empire, collapse of 37, 178; feminism and 2, 91, 135; gay rights and 222–23; housewives and 43; identity, white British 198; imperialism and 36, 176–77; Infant Life Preservation Act (1929) 96; London Foundation for Marriage Education (LFME) 101; migration, Black and 178–79, 182, 185, 189, 198; modernity and 37, 61; motherhood and 91, 175, 178, 242, 246; multiculturalism

Index

and 178, 204, 215; Offences Against the Person Act (1861) 96; possessive behaviour, men and 198; pronatalism and 176, 178; race, racism and 29, 178, 198–204, 220, 244n41; sex education and 101; Sexual Offences Act (1967) 223; Wolfenden Committee 223, 234; Wolfenden Report 92, 223–24; see also abortion and New Wave cinema (Britain) and rights, reproductive; see also Index of Film Titles Brooke, S., 91–92, 97–99, 104, 108–10 Brunette, P., 63 Burton, A., 223–24, 239 Butler, J., 183, 237–38 Byars, J., 11 Cahiers du Cinéma, 19, 22, 24, 144–45, 163–64, 166, 199; ‘New Wave issue’ (1962) 163 Camiscioli, E., 179–80 capitalism, 36–37, 45, 49, 53, 66 Centre national de la cinématographie (CNC), 23 Cerisuelo, M., 78–79 Chabrol, C., 144–45, 162, 168 Chance, J., 98 Chaperon, S., 25–26 Chapman, H., 179, 197 Chapman, J., 98 characters, Black. See cinema (general) and cinema, West Africa (Francophone) and New Wave cinema (France) and realism, social; see also Index of Film Titles Che Guevara, 214 Child (construct), 4, 6–8, 11, 13–15, 18, 87, 111–13, 116–24, 127–29, 141, 173, 180, 204, 245, 247; absence of 118; as citizen 19, 112–13; cultural futurity and 129, 173, 183, 198; Edelman and 6–8, 87, 120, 129, 137, 179, 183, 195, 197, 224, 233, 245; as future 205, 207, 212, 227, 232, 235, 245; ideal and 173, 245; ideology and 19, 114, 137, 197, 222, 232–33, 240, 242, 248; masculinity and 7; miscegenation (métissage) and 199; patriarchal family and 113; patriarchal ideology and 14, 124, 176,

269

229, 233; politics and 183, 195, 245; reification of 11, 14; reproductive futurity and 195, 197; ‘Schrödinger’s uterus’ 119; social futurity and 87, 112, 183, 186; as subject 11, 27, 35; utopia and 8; whiteness and 182–83, 203; women and 15, 127; see also abortion and Mother (construct) child-free (term), 4, 17, 119, 168, 226–27 childless (term), 17, 224, 226 children, 2, 4, 6–8, 14–15, 65, 72, 76, 79–80, 83, 87, 90, 92, 98, 101–3, 105, 111–12, 115, 118–22, 125, 127, 137, 141–42, 156–57, 165–7, 174–75, 180, 183, 193–94, 200, 202–3, 213, 224–25, 232–33, 235, 238, 240–41, 245; abortion and 88–89, 124; absence of 235–36; Black 201, 211–12; citizenship and 6; ‘fighting for the children’ 7, 119, 127, 137, 183, 200, 202, 229; future and 15; law of the father and 9; masculinity and 7–8, 14; mixed-race 197; non-white 211; patriarchy and 7, 14–15; political discourse and 6; privilege and 7; queerness and 233; reification and 7; rights and 28; as subject 3–4, 7, 124, 173, 176; white 176, 228; see also mothers, motherhood; see also Index of Film Titles Chodorow, N., 38, 50, 69, 229; The Reproduction of Mothering 50 choice, reproductive, 93, 115–16, 159, 173–75, 220, 242 Choisir, 136 Christianity, 13, 102, 238; see also Madonna, the cinema (general), 19–22, 199, 246–47; Black characters and 183–85, 187–88, 197; Black motherhood and 188; interracial characters and 199; see also kitchen sink film cycle and New Wave cinema (Britain) and New Wave cinema (France) and realism, social and Swinging London films cinema, West Africa (Francophone), 22, 176; Senegalese 193 cissexism, 173 Cixous, H., 7, 11 Coca-Cola, 1–3

270

Index

Cole, M., 101 Collet, J., 148–49 colonialism, 181–82, 189–91, 194, 204, 206, 213; see also neocolonialism and postcolonialism Comolli, J.-L., 22 commercialism, 2, 64 Commission de contrôle des films cinématographiques, 167 commodities, domestic. See commodities, household commodities, household, 27, 35–38, 40n1, 42, 44–45, 47–49, 52, 55, 61, 65–66, 72, 76–77, 80, 246–47; castration and 56; corruption and 47–48; dehumanization and 63, 65; emasculation and 45, 49; gender and 38, 61, 65; mistrust and 37; morality and 49, 64; personalities and 42; see also mothers, motherhood and reproduction and white goods and women; see also Index of Film Titles condoms, 101, 128 Cone, M., 62–63 conservatism, 7, 19, 103, 127, 168, 204, 224, 227 consumerism, 26–28, 36, 38–40, 42–43, 45–47, 49, 52, 61, 64–66, 247; corruption and 56; femininity and 45; gender and 39; narcissism and 49; phallocentric 67; toxicity and 55; see also Beauvoir, S. de and kitchen sink film cycle and mothers, motherhood and New Wave cinema, post- (France); see also Index of Film Titles consumption, 10, 22, 43, 46, 49, 52, 55, 68, 79; see also commodities, household and consumerism contraception, 16, 26, 28, 87–88, 91–93, 101–4, 114–15, 119, 127, 134, 138, 143–45, 150–52, 157–59, 162–63, 166–68, 247; accessibility and 174; choice and 173; feminism and 139; moral panic and 135; racism and 175; see also abortion and condoms and control, reproductive and New Wave cinema (France) and pill, the and women; see also Index of Film Titles

control, reproductive, 87, 93, 98, 103–6, 109–10, 112–14, 121, 127, 133; see also Swinging London films; see also Index of Film Titles Cooper, D.E., 44 Côte d’Ivoire. See Ivory Coast Cottenet-Hage, M., 205, 207–9, 213 Creed, B., 12 criticism, Marxist, 22 culture, consumer. See consumerism culture, mass, 2, 27, 36–40, 43, 53–54, 61, 63–64, 246; emasculation and 53, 55; matriarchal 46; morality and 64; women and 43–44, 56, 64; see also kitchen sink film cycle and New Wave cinema, post- (France) culture, working class, 43, 45–46, 52, 54, 103–4, 128; authenticity of 48; identity and 52, 65; patriarchy and 47; pride and 47; values 46–47 Curran, C., 43 Dadaism, 62 Dakar, 193–95 daughters, 8, 10, 67, 81, 123, 197, 203, 230; see also mothers, motherhood; see also Index of Film Titles Davies, L., 194 Dearden, B., 201, 203, 223 Debord, G., 38, 63; Society of the Spectacle 63 decolonization, see Britain and France Delaney, S., 228 Delsol, P., 138, 145, 162–68; motherhood and 166; reproductive subjectivities and 163–66; Truffaut and 163 Demeter, 57–58 Demy, J., 67 Deneuve, C., 136 DeRoo, R.J., 70–71, 73–74, 79, 81–83 Derrida, J., 147 Dien Bien Phu, battle of (1954), 21 Diouf, M., 190 Doane, M.-A., 49, 76 Duchamp, M., 62 Duchen, C., 90–91, 134, 139 Dyer, R., 223–27 Eaton, M., 66

Index

Edelman, L., 6–8, 11, 13–14, 19, 29, 87, 118–19, 127, 129, 137, 179, 183, 195, 245; No Future 6, 19; queer theory and 8, 11, 29, 35, 119, 129, 183, 186, 220, 236; see also Child (construct) and futurity, reproductive Elle, 71, 77, 79 Elsaesser, T., 142 embryo. See foetus Engels, F., 44 England. See Britain essentialism, biological, 206 L’Express, 21 Family, Asian, 188; broken 108; gender and 46; happiness and 80–81, 83; home and 24, 35, 45, 47, 53, 55, 74, 109; ideology and 114, 129, 178, 215, 222; maternal-feminine 39, 55; mobility and 182; national/nationalistic image of 181–83, 188, 194, 196, 198, 204–5, 212–13, 215, 220–21, 233; normativity and 46, 51, 109, 116, 129, 220–21, 231; nuclear 2, 235; ‘perfect’/idealized 70, 74–76, 83, 212; performance and 72, 233; post-war 182; private 27, 188; public 27; traditional 109, 113, 116, 122, 127, 232, 236; transitional 234–35; Western 213; white 203, 212, 214, 220; working class 45, 92, 99; see also family, Black and France and futurity, reproductive and patriarchy and queerness family, Black, 179, 182–84, 185–88, 192, 198, 215; identities and 179, 192; see also Index of Film Titles family, chosen, 17 family planning, 25, 90, 101, 139 Fanon, F., 204–5, 209, 211, 213–14 fathers, fatherhood, 2, 9–10, 23, 26, 46–47, 50–53, 55–56, 66, 69, 88–89, 100, 106, 113, 116, 122, 124, 210–12, 222, 230, 232, 236, 240; absent 45, 147, 232–33; Black 211, 228; castration and 156; emasculation and 56; law of the father 9–10, 44, 238; single 72; see also children; see also Index of Film Titles Faye, A., 190–92, 195 Featherstone, B., 16, 125

271

feminism, 2, 4–5, 7, 14, 16–17, 26, 28, 35, 92–93, 103, 114, 174, 241; Black feminism 189; ‘corporeal’ feminism 18; criticism and 25, 73; empowerment and 57; Freud and 5; intersectionality and 183, 228; Marxism and 99; melodrama, theories of 142; politics and 4; second-wave 11, 25–26, 88; self-determination and 115; subversion and 70–1; theories of mothering and 35; white/middle class 173–75; see also abortion and Britain and France and rights, reproductive and Varda, A.; see also Index of Film Titles femininity, 4–5, 9, 25, 39–40, 44, 49, 65–66, 68, 75–78, 142–43, 156–57, 175, 224, 226, 236; Black 201; boys’ fear of 44; commodification of 66; consumerism and 45; household and 44, 49; idealizations and 74, 238; intersubjectivity and 57; as masquerade see masquerade, feminine; maternal-domestic 39; ‘New Wave’ 193; objectification and 4, 226; performances and 157; role playing and 68; space and 24; subjectivity and 58, 103, 117, 128, 141; threat to men and 46; see also consumerism and mothers, motherhood and women; see also Index of Film Titles fertility. See women; see also infertility Fischer, L., 12 Fiske, J., 53 Flitterman-Lewis, S., 154 foetus, 88–89, 108, 112, 123–24, 135, 141, 151; aborted 112; citizenship and 112; disabled 92, 98, 135, 175; humanity and 112; personhood and 88, 112, 123–24, 128; rights and 88–89, 141; viability and 141; victimhood and 88; see also abortion and mothers, motherhood Forbes, B., 233 Frader, L.L., 179, 197 France, 2–3, 14–15, 19–21, 23, 25–26, 29, 35–37, 61–62, 87–89, 133–40, 145, 152–53, 157, 162, 164, 174, 176, 182, 196; ‘art of the everyday’ (quotidian) and 62–63, 76–77; Algerian War and 37; antinatalism 139, 152–53; birth rate and 90, 133–34, 140; Black subjects and

272

Index

184, 196; colonization 191; colonization (internal) and 190–91; decolonization and 36–37, 180–82; depopulation and 133–34; empire, collapse of 178; families and 134, 191, 193–95, 213–14; feminism and 25–26, 28, 91, 135–37; Frenchness and 179, 190, 197; imperialism and 36, 176–77; magazines and 76–77; migration, Black and 178–82, 205; miscegenation (métissage) and 197–99; modernity and 37; modernization and 37, 61, 63; motherhood and 137–38, 175, 178, 242; motherhood, white and 182, 214; ‘mother-of-thenation’ figure and 134; particularism and 179; pronatalism and 90, 133–34, 138–40, 168, 176, 178–80, 193, 198, 204; protests (May 1968) 1–2, 21–22, 25; race/racism and 178–79, 199, 208, 220; Republicanism and 179, 197; suffrage and 133; trente glorieuses 180–81; universalism and 178–79, 190–91, 197, 205; see also abortion and mothers, motherhood and New Wave cinema (France) and reproduction and rights, reproductive; see also Index of Film Titles Francis, M., 37 Franco-Prussian war, 133 Franklin, S., 88 Free Cinema (British New Wave). See New Wave cinema (Britain) Friedan, B., 71; The Feminine Mystique 71 Freud, S., 5, 9–11, 44, 49, 156; see also feminism and psychoanalysis, Freudian futurelessness, 119–21 futurity, cultural, 7, 56, 87, 90, 109, 112–13, 129, 173, 183, 197, 201–2, 204, 209, 211, 221; patriarchy and 109, 173, 211–12; racism and 183, 197, 204, 210, 212; see also Child (construct) futurity, ideology of, 124, 180–82, 232 futurity, racist. See racism futurity, reproductive, 6–9, 11–15, 29, 35, 87, 119–20, 183–84, 186, 188–89, 195, 199–200, 204, 211, 215, 220–22, 226–27, 233–36, 239–40; Edelman and 6–8, 11, 13–14, 29, 87, 118, 183,

197, 220; eugenics and 200; Eurocentric 197, 207; family and 7, 204; gender and 214 masculinist 14; misogyny and 189; narcissist hypocrisy and 15; nationalist 193, 202, 204; patriarchy and 207, 215, 221, 227, 236–38, 241; queerness and 220, 222, 226, 230, 233, 235; racialized 195, 204; race/racism and 183, 205–6, 212, 214; see also Child (construct); see also Index of Film Titles Fyfe, F., 100 de Gaulle, C., 2, 90, 194 Gay Liberation Movement, 223 gaze, male, 3, 68, 127, 152 gaze, oppositional, 196 gaze, racist, 209 gaze, white, 184–87, 196 genealogy, 52, 69, 116, 191, 204, 210–11, 221, 233, 248 gender, 7, 11, 18–19, 24–26, 38–40, 44, 46, 62, 64, 71, 76, 93, 99, 104, 115, 120, 147, 150, 158, 175, 182, 189, 193, 210, 228, 240; advertising and 76; choices and 71; class and 99; coding and 157–58; criticism and 25; domestic space and 24; patriarchy and 16; politics and 26, 133; roles and 21, 26, 114, 157; segregation and 2, 182; see also commodities, household and consumerism and New Wave cinema (Britain) and New Wave cinema (France) and power; see also Index of Film Titles Germain, F.F., 180–81 Gillain, A., 147, 149 Gilroy, P., 206, 210 girls, 46, 57, 123, 156; castration complex and 156; ‘nice’ girl 102–3; objectification of 8; penis envy and 156; queerness and 233; womb and 156 Giroud, F., 21 globalization, 36, 191, 247 Godard, J.-L., 1–3, 27–28, 37, 39, 64–68, 72, 75–78, 138, 145, 149–63, 167–68, 184, 247; abortion and 138, 145, 153, 162, 168; commodities and 65; contraception and 162–63; consumerism/domestic

Index

273

objects and 28, 39, 64, 77, 79; distancing techniques and 78; effet de réel and 78; gender and 65–66, 157; intimacy, feminine and 167; mirroring and 78–79; motherhood and 67, 76, 79, 162, 247; occult and 153; pre-1968 films and 162; pregnancy and 153–54, 156–57, 159–60, 162; reproduction and 75, 77, 154, 157, 167, 247; superficial images and 153; womb imagery and 153, 158; women and 150, 153, 156, 162, 167 Green, J., 203, 223 Greenwald, L., 25 Grosz, E., 18 Guha, M., 191 guilt, 28, 106, 108, 111–12, 128, 139–41, 143, 195; see also men Gumpert, L., 62

homophobia, 7, 173, 207 homosexuality, 7, 27, 29, 118–19, 129, 151, 222–27, 234, 239, 244n41, 247–48; see also men and queerness and women; see also Index of Film Titles Hondo, M., 184–85, 204–8, 212–15, 220, 248; background of 205 Hottell, R., 72, 80 housewives, 39, 43–44, 61, 64, 70–71, 73–74, 100, 113–14; everyday (quotidian) and 64; ideal and 71, 77; sexual liberation and 73 housework, 71, 81–83 housing, 182, 184, 188, 234, 239, 244n41 Houston, P., 20 Hungary, Soviet invasion of (1956), 21 Huxley, A., 187 Huyssen, A., 64

Hades, 57–58 Halberstam, J.J., 227, 241 Halimi, G., 136, 141 Hall, S., 189, 192 Handyside, F., 161–62 happiness, 45, 47, 56, 65, 70, 72, 75, 80–83, 116, 122, 139, 221 Harwood, S., 237 Haycock, J., 150 Hayward, S., 147 heterosexuality, 25–26, 50, 121, 129, 143, 149, 152, 197, 221, 224–26, 229, 234–37, 239–42 Higson, A., 43, 105, 232 Hill, J., 24–25, 36, 45, 56, 105, 108–9, 113, 116, 231, 236, 238 Hill-Collins, P., 175 Hindell, K., 97 Hirsch, M., 57–58 Hoggart, R., 43, 45, 47, 67; The Uses of Literacy 45, 59n10 Hollway, W., 16, 125 Hollywood, 3, 11–12, 22, 27, 36, 63, 70, 74, 158, 237 Holmes, D., 146, 148 Holt, T.C., 187, 191 home. See family and mothers, motherhood and women Homer, S., 50

identities: Black, 27, 179, 187–89; class and 240; cultural 176, 247; diaspora and 176, 192; domestic 37; family and 191; feminine 4; immigration and 37; individual 27; marginalized 17, 27, 242; migrant 27; national/nationalistic 29, 37, 63, 134; personal 65; racial 191; reproduced 75, 78; reproductive 18, 200, 229; self- 57, 114; social 26, 127, 239; subjective 79, 82; working-class 48, 52; see also family, Black and motherhood, Black and mothers, motherhood and queerness and sex, sexuality imperialism, 26, 176, 203, 212; neo-imperialism 204, 215 impressionism, 80 infertility, 167 Ingram, R., 146, 148 Insdorf, A., 147 Institute for Sex Education and Research, 101 integrity, cultural, 37, 63, 134 intersectionality, 29, 99, 174, 176, 179, 183, 228; see also feminism Irigaray, L., 7, 9–11, 16, 18, 24, 46, 54, 57, 67, 69, 75, 89, 116, 147, 195, 229; family and 245; Freud and 10; motherhood and 9, 11, 16, 46, 57, 69, 147; patriarchy and 9, 54, 75, 195, 229, 245; pregnancy and 89, 153; Women on the Market 66

274

Index

Ivory Coast, 181 Jackson, B., 54 justice, reproductive, 174–76, 200, 228, 242 Kaplan, E.A., 11, 142, 246 kinships, 11, 16, 19, 29, 44–45, 120, 182–83, 196, 208, 211, 222, 231, 236–38, 240; abortion and 115; Black 184, 196–97; intergenerational 192, 227; interracial 248; intersubjective 16, 242; maternal 189; migrant 29, 177, 184; mothering subjectivities and 221; non-biological 177; queer see queerness; race and 183; structures and 29, 44; subjectivities and 188; transnational 248; see also patriarchy and realism, social and Swinging London films; see also Index of Film Titles kitchen sink film cycle, 20, 23–24, 27–28, 39, 42, 87, 103–4, 109, 149, 186, 222, 229, 246; ‘angry young men’ and 246; Black families and 186–87; consumerism and 39, 43, 64; English society and 42; masculinity and 46, 114, 246; mass culture and 39, 43; mechanized ‘mam’ and 188; misogyny and 24, 64, 246; outsider communities and 221; sexuality and 92, 103–4, 109; see also abortion and realism, kitchen sink; see also Index of Film Titles Klein, M., 156–57 Klein, Y., 62 Kristeva, J., 7, 9, 11–13, 16, 54, 147, 206–7, 229, 238; abjection and 11–13, 207; motherhood and 9, 13, 16, 206, 229, 238; see also mothers, motherhood and Tyler, I. Kuhn, A., 11 Labour. See migration, migrants; see also Index of Film Titles Labour (UK political party), 43 Lacan, J., 35, 50, 65, 189 Le Pen, J.-M., 197 Léaud, J.-P., 145 Lefebvre, H., 38, 61–62; Critique de la vie quotidienne 62

London, 110, 114, 119–20, 122, 136, 187, 191, 201, 234; feminine power and 114; socio-economic geographies and 188 London Foundation for Marriage Education (LFME), 101 London Rubber Industries, 101 Loshitsky, Y., 68 Lovell, T., 43, 45–46, 229, 232–33 Lovenduski, J., 97 Luckett, M., 25, 109–10, 114, 122 Luker, K., 174, 228 Lumumba, P., 214 Luna, Z., 174, 228 MacCabe, C., 66 Macmillan, H., 2, 37, 42, 55 Madonna, the, 13, 67, 70, 238 Malcolm X, 214 Mali, 181 Marie Claire, 77, 79 marketing, mass, 79 marriage, 25, 46, 50–51, 58, 71, 101–2, 105–6, 109–10, 122–23, 141, 148, 197, 221, 224, 237; see also mothers, motherhood and New Wave cinema (Britain) and pregnancy Marx, K., 1–3; see also criticism, Marxist and feminism and theory, Marxist masculinity, masculinities, 7, 9–10, 13, 16, 23–28, 40, 43–48, 50–58, 70, 102, 108, 113–16, 159, 162, 194, 214, 230, 236, 240, 246; Americanized 27; art forms and 54; British 240; cars and 61; culture and 53–54; futurity and 14; genealogies and 54; Hollywood and 63; imperial 41n10; manual labour and 38; migrant 207; posterity and 69; punishment and 109; queer 119; spaces 24; subjectivity and 44, 58; threats to 39, 57; values and 39, 43; virility and 38, 105; white 198; working-class 48, 105, 108, 246; see also Child (construct) and kitchen sink film cycle and masculinity, Black; see also Index of Film Titles masculinity, Black, 184–85, 211, 214; see also Index of Film Titles mask, feminine. See masquerade, feminine masquerade, feminine, 65–68

Index

maternity, biological, 45 Mauritania, 181, 184, 205 Mazzetti, L., 20 Medhurst, A., 223–27 media, mass, 36, 54, 77 men, 2–3, 9–10, 15, 22, 24–25, 35, 41n10, 44–46, 48, 50, 55, 64, 66–70, 73, 83n4, 104, 107, 110, 115, 123, 127, 134, 137, 144, 151–52, 155, 157, 161, 167, 181, 184–85, 211, 221; ‘angry young men’ 25, 44, 52, 104, 246; conservative 8; culture and 64; feminine knowledge and 108; gay 220, 222–24, 234, 237; ‘good’ 122; innocent/guilty and 106–7, 109–11, 113, 115, 120–22; murder and 148; philandering and 110, 113; pregnancy and 107; as producers 53; promiscuity and 110; queer 7–8, 242; recklessness and 107; responsibility, avoidance of 104; role playing and 70; selfishness and 111; sexuality and 104, 149, 164; slavery and 55; white 182, 198, 200; working-class 92, 246; see also masculinity, masculinities men, Black, 182, 184–85, 188, 198, 201, 239; white women and 184, 198–201, 204, 209; sexuality and 182, 198, 201, 209, 211; see also relationships, interracial migration, migrants, 17, 27, 29, 37, 175, 178–85, 189–93, 196, 207–8, 220, 234, 247–48; Black 180–84, 187, 190–93, 196–97, 208, 210, 215, 220, 234; gender and 182, 193; labour and 179–84, 194–95, 248; see also Britain and France and kinships and women; see also Index of Film Titles Millar, E., 99 mirroring, maternal, 230 miscegenation (métissage), 197, 199–201, 209; see also Child (construct) and France; see also Index of Film Titles misogyny, 10, 12, 24, 35, 50, 52, 58, 64, 100, 103, 110, 123, 137, 150, 157, 167, 198, 207, 209, 221; see also futurity, reproductive and kitchen sink film cycle and New Wave cinema (France) and patriarchy and racism Mitchell, J., 5, 44

275

modernity, 21, 23, 37–40, 47–48, 61, 67, 162, 194; see also Britain and France modernization, 37, 48, 61, 63, 76; see also Americanization and France Modleski, T., 11 Monet, C., 80 monogamy, 72, 102 More, K., 20 Moreau, J., 136 Morrey, D., 158 ‘Mother Africa’, 189 Mother, the (construct), 4, 8–9, 11, 13–14, 19, 173, 245–47; castration and 44–46, 51, 54, 56, 110; dystopia and 8; futurity and 198; as homemaker 43; ideal and 4, 173, 245; ideology and 19, 242; institutionalized 181; marginalization and 9; mechanization and 39; as object 11, 35, 198, 205–7, 245; as product 39; subjectivity and 46, 173; subordination of 8; as universal 14; see also bodies, maternal and motherhood, Black and mothers, motherhood motherhood, Black, 179–84, 187–88, 192, 196, 201, 203, 214, 220; identities and 179; see also cinema (general) mothers, motherhood: abject, concept of (Kristeva), 11–13, 124, 206–7; absent 3, 9, 56, 58, 80, 88, 93, 116, 118, 121– 22, 126–28, 138, 146, 163, 177, 188, 192, 197, 221; ambivalence 125–26; baby, devotion to and 125; ‘bad’ 28, 46, 55–56, 67, 87, 126, 146–47, 229–30; becoming 16, 18, 160; biological 4, 17, 227; Black see motherhood, black; body of see bodies, maternal; castration and 51–52, 54, 56, 156; cathexis of 10, 14, 221; Christianity and 13, 238; cinema and 3, 22, 27; citizenship and 88–89, 91; commodification and 45, 50, 68, 72, 78, 117; commodities and 49, 53, 76–77; concept of 3–7; consumerism/ consumer culture and 27–28, 39, 46, 64–65; consumption and 52, 67; corruption and 57; cultural decline and 27; daughters and 3, 10, 16–17, 47, 50, 57–58, 126, 196, 230, 232; depersonalization and 27, 87; discourse and 5,

276

Index

18, 123, 133, 147, 150, 153, 186, 193, 197, 221, 241–42, 246–48; domesticity and 27–28, 37, 64, 77, 82, 91, 121, 168; dress and 49; fatherless 232; foetus and 88; France and 133–34; Freud and 44; ‘good’ 4, 47, 51, 59n23, 67, 72, 75–77, 80–82, 87, 116, 127, 146, 221, 226–27, 246; ‘good-enough’ 131n87; home and 27, 35, 38–40, 65; as host to foetus 88; ideal/idealized and 4, 14, 70, 72, 77, 79, 81–82, 124–25, 146, 173–75, 188, 195, 238, 245; identities and 9, 29, 76, 79, 98, 125, 174, 176, 178, 185, 228–30, 233, 235, 242, 245; ideologies and 13, 16–17, 29, 114, 129, 137, 175, 183, 203, 222, 225–27, 229, 231, 242, 246–48; illegitimate 140; imaginaries and 248; institutional 19, 181–82, 198, 204; intersubjectivity and 14, 195; labour and 79, 82; marginalized 9, 29, 228; matrophobia 10; Médaille de la Famille française and 90; moralized 45; mothering subjects 2–4, 10, 15, 17–19, 66–68, 70, 74, 79, 82–83, 87, 117–19, 121–22, 125–28, 146, 176, 180, 189, 192, 197–98, 200, 203, 208, 220, 222, 233, 241–42, 245, 247–48; nationalism/nationhood (‘mothers-of-the-nation’) and 26, 29, 75–76, 90, 134, 140, 175, 189, 193, 198, 201–3, 210–11; non-being and 5, 88; non-biological 221; non-mothering 119, 180; nonpatriarchal 18; nurturing 69; as object 12– 15, 35, 75, 81, 173, 182, 195, 198–99, 206–7, 221; objectification and 4, 6, 11, 13, 15, 27–28, 65, 67, 81, 173, 182, 199, 235, 240; Otherness and 4, 6, 166, 211; patriarchy and 4, 9, 14–16, 27–28, 35, 39, 57–58, 74–75, 113, 175, 181, 202, 226, 231–32, 238, 241–42, 245; perfect see ideal/idealized; politics and 27, 91, 114, 200; practices and 29; primitive 13; private 27, 76; privatization of 245–46; public sphere and 26–27; psychoanalysis and 11; racial purity and 206; racism and 181, 206, 220; rights of 88–89; role playing and 65–66, 68–70; roles of 24; as scapegoat 248; self, erosion of and

117; self-expression and 128; selfishness and 57; single 115–16, 231, 233, 241; slavery, maternal 193–94; sons and 9, 89, 146–48; space and 24; as spectacle 76; spiritualization and 126; subjectivities and 4, 10, 16, 18, 35, 87, 89, 107, 113, 116, 122, 124, 126–28, 141, 154–55, 166, 176, 183–84, 186–88, 200, 211, 214–15, 221, 227, 231–32, 236, 238, 240, 242; subordination and 8; traditional 28; transnational 189; un-childed 225; unmarried 140, 239; unrealized 236; unwilling 88, 90, 97; as value type 66–67; white 183, 186, 188, 201, 203–4, 212; working class 45, 71, 74; see also abortion and bodies, maternal and futurity, reproductive and intersectionality and New Wave cinema (Britain) and New Wave cinema (France) and pregnancy, unplanned and reproduction and women; see also Index of Film Titles Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF), 25, 136 Mulvey, L., 3, 66, 127, 150, 153, 157–58 Murphy, D., 205, 209–10, 214 Murphy, R., 24, 45, 122–23, 126 Narboni, P., 22 narcissism, 13, 15–16, 49, 66, 173, 187–88, 197–98, 203, 205; see also consumerism and futurity, reproductive and patriarchy and reproduction National Front (France), 197 nationalism, 26, 140, 181, 206–8, 240; see also mothers, motherhood neocolonialism, 29, 181–82, 193–96, 200, 205–6 neorealism, 52 Neupert, R., 21, 160, 163 New Statesman, 239 New Wave cinema (Britain): characteristics of 23; different from French New Wave 23; Free Cinema 20, 23; gender and 26; heroines and 25; hierarchies and 64; interracial relationships and 199; married life and 56; masculinity and 26; motherhood and 35, 67, 246;

Index

patriarchy and 24–26; politics and 26; working-class and 23; youth and 3, 20–21, 138; see also abortion and Swinging London films; see also Index of Film Titles New Wave cinema (France): Black characters and 184, 215; characteristics of 23; ‘cinéma de papa’ 2, 39; commodities/ objects and 64; contraception and 163, 247; everyday (quotidian) and 62–64; femininity and 63–64, 193; film-à-thèse style and 23, 138, 144, 150, 162; gender and 26, 64; interracial couples and 199; masculinity and 26; misogyny and 164; motherhood and 24, 35, 147, 188, 246; patriarchy and 24–26; politics and 26; sexuality and 144, 165; youth and 3, 20–21, 138, 144, 164–65; see also abortion and Godard, J.-L. and Varda, A.; see also Index of Film Titles New Wave cinema, post- (France), 39; consumerism and 39; mass culture and 39 New Wave cinema, pre- (France), 138–39 nouvelle vague. See New Wave cinema Nowell-Smith, G., 21–23 Oedipus, Oedipal complex/models, 5, 10, 19, 44, 52, 56–58, 67, 87, 106, 113, 145– 46, 156, 197, 229; see also patriarchy Offen, K., 133 O’Reilly, A., 16, 18 O’Sullivan, T., 223 Other, the, 12, 116, 180, 206, 220, 233, 239, 241; Black 209, 211; see also Index of Film Titles Palmer, T., 162–67 panic, 99, 134; cultural 45, 220; panic, demographic 180–81; moral see abortion and contraception; racist 202 parenthood, 90, 104, 116; biological 18; interracial 29, 177 Paris, 1, 120, 144–45, 148–50, 152, 154–55, 158, 181, 184, 186, 190–92, 199, 208, 212; banlieues and 190; flâneur, figure of 191 Parker, C., 184 Parker, R., 16, 125–26

277

patriarchy, 4–7, 9–10, 13–18, 24, 27, 35, 39–40, 44–48, 50–52, 54, 56–58, 65, 67, 69, 71–72, 74, 88, 100, 109, 114–15, 119, 122, 137, 157–58, 173, 177, 181, 183, 188–89, 196–200, 211, 230, 233–35, 240–41; authority and 50; capitalism and 39, 53; citizenship and 89, 112; discourse and 10, 58, 137, 142, 196, 227; disrespect for 109; European 13, 197; family and 9, 35, 51, 54, 71, 75, 83, 104, 106, 108, 111, 113, 115, 119, 121, 227, 231–32, 235–36, 240–41, 245; fantasies 9, 83, 100, 176, 188, 212; genealogy and 52; idealism and 125; ideology and 18, 35, 40, 54, 75, 79, 124, 176, 182, 232, 241; heteropatriarchy 6–7; imperialism and 195; kinship and 227; law and 202, 227; medical establishment and 114–15, 128; misogyny and 10, 221; moralizing and 142; Narcissus and 182; objectification and 16, 25; Oedipal 52, 57; order and 106, 112, 227, 241; police and 202; politics and 157; reproduction and 38, 69, 115, 128, 198, 215; resistance to 114; social orders and 12–13; subjectivity and 55; traditionalism and 47; values and 91, 108, 137; voyeurism and 150; white 176, 183, 188, 197, 199, 215, 220; see also abortion and Child (construct) and children and futurity, cultural and futurity, reproductive and mothers, motherhood and New Wave cinema (Britain) and New Wave cinema (France) and power and queerness and racism Pepsi, 2–3 permissiveness. See sex, sexuality; see also Index of Film Titles Persephone, 57 Petchesky, R.P., 175, 228 phallocentrism, 9, 44, 67, 241 pill, the, 2–3, 101–2, 114 pop art, 38 pop culture, 26, 73 postcolonialism, 181, 189, 193, 208, 213, 215, 217, 248 Powell, E., 244n41

278

Index

power, 10, 14, 26–27, 57, 88, 99, 161, 173, 179–80, 184, 195–96, 202, 210, 217n42, 245; cultural 6, 199; feminine 10, 114, 157; gendered 70; male/masculine 44, 46, 50, 69, 115; patriarchal 88, 199–200; social 7, 194 pregnancy, 27–28, 51, 69, 88, 93, 96–97, 100–102, 106–10, 112–17, 125, 133–34, 136–37, 142, 149–63, 167, 175, 186, 199–200, 202, 228–30, 240; female knowledge and 100; low-income mothers and 174–75; unmarried women and 220; women of colour and 174–75; see also abortion and bodies, female and children and men and Irigaray, L. and mothers, motherhood and women; see also Index of Film Titles pregnancy, unplanned, 18, 22, 28–29, 87–88, 93, 99, 103–10, 123–24, 127–28, 135, 139–40, 144–45, 160, 165–66, 222, 230, 234, 247; see also abortion and queerness and Swinging London films; see also Index of Film Titles pregnancy, unwanted. See pregnancy, unplanned Premysler, F., 163 production, mass, 2, 27–28, 36–38, 42, 47–48, 55, 69–70, 75–76, 83, 246–47; see also commodities, household and culture, mass pronatalism. See Britain and France prostitutes, prostitution, 46, 66–67, 72, 223–34, 238–39 psychoanalysis, Freudian, 4–5, 11–12, 35, 44, 50, 62, 221 queerness, 7, 11, 35, 120–21, 129, 186, 221–22, 224, 226, 228, 230–42, 248; characters 29, 239; cinema and 222; collectives and 17, 220, 235; domesticity and 228, 240–41; as failures 241; family and 220–22, 234, 238, 240; film and 29; futurity and 119, 127, 225, 227; identities and 29; kinships and 29, 120–21, 220–22, 227, 230–31, 233–38, 240–41, 248; men and 7–8, 183, 242; non-futurity and 225; non-reproductivity and 236; patriarchy and

227; space, coded 186; subjectivities and 177, 235; unplanned pregnancy and 29; see also masculinity, masculinities and men and realism, social and Swinging London films and women; see also Index of Film Titles race, 7, 29, 120, 174, 176, 178–79, 182–84, 187–90, 194, 198, 200, 202–4, 206, 214–15, 221, 228, 247–48; mixed-race 197, 201–2, 229; see also racism racism, 37, 173, 175, 178–79, 181–82, 185– 89, 192, 196, 198–200, 203–14, 220, 228; abjection and 206; anxiety and 181, 202, 207; biological 197; cultural 212; erotic fantasies and 209; futurity and 181–82, 197–200, 204, 208, 210, 212; genealogical 204; gender and 193; hierarchies and 175, 198; housing and 188, 244n41; institutionalized 181; interracial relationships and 198–200; maternal-familial 182; middle-class 212; misogyny and 198–99; ‘new racism’ 206, 210, 213; objectification and 211; patriarchy 182, 196, 198, 207; violence and 202, 204; see also abortion and Britain and contraception and France and futurity, reproductive and mothers, motherhood; see also Index of Film Titles Raissiguier, C., 182 Rank Organisation, 23 realism, kitchen sink, 23 realism, political, 22 realism, social, 20, 22, 27–29, 39, 92, 104, 127, 144, 185, 188, 203, 215, 220, 248; Black characters and 185; migrant characters and 215; queer kinship spaces and 220; racism and 203; ‘social problem’ genre 199, 201, 204, 223; see also kitchen sink film cycle and realism, kitchen sink realism, working-class, 20, 22 Reichenbach, F., 189, 192, 194 Reisz, K., 20, 48, 105 relationality, 11, 149, 186, 215, 220 relationships, interracial, 198–200, 204, 208– 11, 220; see also Index of Film Titles

Index

Relph, M., 203, 223 Renoir, P.-A., 80; A Dance at Bougival 80 reproducibility, 28, 50, 65–66, 70 reproduction: biological 18, 71, 183, 207, 220; Black 187; commodities and 55; culture and 49–50, 203, 207; domestic 50; films and 78; France and 133–34; identity and 75–76, 78; mass 2, 28, 38–39, 44, 50, 53, 64–65, 76, 79, 247; material 71; maternal 46, 49–50, 65, 78; mechanical 37–38, 49, 78, 247; motherhood and 3, 26–27, 50, 65, 69–70, 76, 78–79, 87, 90, 133–34, 139, 200, 203; narcissism and 203; self-reproduction 173, 180, 199; social 50, 71, 220; state and 134; subjectivity and 160, 163; see also control, reproductive and futurity, reproductive and Godard, J.-L. and patriarchy and Varda, A. and women; see also Index of Film Titles rhetoric, political, 6, 19, 29, 113 Rich, A., 5, 7, 9–11, 13–14, 16–18, 57, 230; patriarchy and 10, 88, 181, 230 Richards, J., 37, 48, 105 Richardson, T., 20, 228 rights, reproductive, 22, 25–26, 28–29, 87–89, 91–92, 103, 114, 133, 135–40, 167, 174–76, 247–48; Britain and 87, 89, 103, 114, 133–34, 174; feminism and 88, 91–93, 134–35, 162, 174; France and 25, 29, 87–89, 93, 133–40, 169n1, 174; working class and 92; see also choice, reproductive and control, reproductive and women Riviera, French, 193 Riviere, J., 65; see also masquerade, feminine Roberts, C., 99 Robinson, J.C., 136 role playing. See femininity and men and mothers, motherhood and women Ropars-Wuilleumier, M.-C., 67 Rose, J., 8, 142, 248 Ross, K., 37–38, 61–62, 64 Rupprecht, C., 153–54, 156–60 Sanogo, A., 207–10 Sartre, J.-P., 64 Schlesinger, J., 39

279

Schwarz, B., 37, 198 Seberg, J., 158, 162 Second World War, 37, 133–34, 140, 197 Sellier, G., 25, 39, 144, 147, 152, 158, 164–65 Sembène, O., 192–95, 215, 217n42, 220, 248 Senegal, 181, 189–94, 196 Seurat, G., 80 sex, sexuality, 1–3, 7, 18, 21–26, 38–39, 46, 48, 51–52, 56–57, 61, 69, 72–73, 90–93, 101–5, 109, 112, 114–16, 118–20, 123, 127–28, 131n57, 135, 138, 141–44, 149–53, 157, 159, 161– 62, 165, 167–68, 174, 182, 187, 198, 208–10, 214, 220–22, 226, 230–31, 234–35, 237–41; anxiety/fear and 91; assault and 165; autonomy 114–15, 117, 122, 167; choice and 56; consumerism and 64; desire and 127; discourse and 241; education and 2, 101–3, 128; empowerment 114; excitement and 74; exploitation and 165; expression and 25, 73, 89, 101, 114; husbands and 69; identities and 129, 202, 233, 237; interracial 201, 211; liberation and 2, 26, 87, 89, 91–93, 110, 113–14, 122, 134, 164; masturbation and 101; maturity and 23, 101–2; non-reproductive 129; objectification and 58, 64–65, 68, 146–47; Other and 241; perversity 60n43; pleasure and 101, 103, 110, 119, 122, 211; permissiveness and 91, 109–10, 113, 117, 127; premarital 46, 101–2; progressivism 97; queer 118, 183; selfishness and 109; subjectivities and 25, 164–66, 211; youth and 165; see also housewives and kitchen sink film cycle and women and women, Black; see also Index of Film Titles Sheldon, S., 97–100 Sight and Sound, 20 Sillitoe, A., 104 Silverman, K., 13; The Acoustic Mirror 13 Simms, M., 97 Simpsons, The, 6 Sirk, D., 11 Situationists, French, 38, 63 Smith, A., 25, 70, 74, 80, 175

280

Index

Smith, B., 184 Smith, D., 77 Smiths, The, 240 spinster (term), 17 Steel, D., 96, 98 Steinberg, D.L., 88–89, 123–24 sterilization, 174 Sterritt, D., 161 Stetson, D., 135, 139 Stockholm Syndrome, 72 subjectivities, Black, 188 subjectivities, mothers and. See mothers, motherhood subjectivities, relational, 193–96 subjectivities, reproductive, 160–63, 202 subjectivities, sexual, 25, 164–66 Suez Crisis (1956), 21 Surrealism, 62 Swinging London films, 22, 25–26, 28–29, 109, 114, 116–17, 144, 201, 215, 222, 247–48; abortion and 104, 109, 127; Black families and 186–87; Black women and 201; as feminine genre 109, 114; migrant characters and 215; outsider communities and 221; queer kinship spaces and 220; reproductive control and 104, 127; sexuality and 22, 114; unplanned pregnancy and 29; see also abortion; see also Index of Film Titles Swinging Sixties, 116 television, 36, 38, 47, 51–56, 61, 126, 155, 163, 188, 199, 248; affluence and 54; mistrust of 54–55; see also Index of Film Titles Thalidomide, 98 theory, Marxist, 22, 175 Truffaut, F., 2, 20, 22, 24, 67, 138, 145, 149, 162–63, 168; mothers, depictions of 146–49, 188; see also Delsol, P. Tusscher, T., ten 91 Tyler, I., 12–13, 206–7; abjection and 12–13; ‘national abjects’ 206; Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain 12 Ukadike, N.F., 205

un-childed (term), 17, 225 United States of America, 36–37, 61, 63 uterus 88, 119, 134. See also Child (construct) values, working class, 46–47, 105 Vandal, J., 166 Varda, A., 24, 27–28, 39, 64–67, 70–73, 75–76, 79, 136, 138, 154, 162–63, 247; abortion and 93, 136–38, 163; contraception and 163; domestic objects and 28, 64; feminism and 92–93; fine art and 80; gender and 66, 72; magazines and 79, 81–82; mass culture and 64; mirroring and 82–83; motherhood and 76; musical choice and 82; pregnancy and 154–56; reproduction and 75 Venus de Milo, 68 victimhood, 28–29, 88, 142 violence, racial, 203 Virgin Mary, 121, 142; see also Madonna, the virgins, virginhood, 46, 66–67, 238 Walters, S.D., 11 Ward, S., 37 Webster, W., 182, 185–87, 189, 198, 201, 221 welfare state, 248 white goods, 36, 61–62 white supremacy, 183, 185, 197 whiteness, 180, 197, 203, 210, 239 Whitworth, L., 43 Williams, P., 205, 209–10, 214 Wilson, H., 122 Winnicott, D.W., 125, 147 Winstanley, M., 98 Wolfenden Report. See Britain women: abortion and 89, 91–92, 97–98, 100, 106–9, 111–15, 117–18, 124, 126, 128–29, 133, 135, 138–44, 149, 161, 168, 173–74, 247; autonomy and 135, 138, 167–68, 236; body and 3, 18, 91, 100–101, 103, 106, 115, 135, 144, 167, 199; child-free see child-free (term); childbirth and 98, 116; childlessness and 226; citizenship and 91; of colour 174–76; commodification and 2, 41n16, 49–51, 55, 64, 68, 159; commodities

Index

and 41n16, 44, 48, 64, 76, 153; consumerism and 45, 48–49, 53, 64–65; contraception and 91, 101, 119, 152, 158–59, 162, 168, 173–74; domestic labour and 46, 71, 81; empowerment and 70; exploitation of 113; fertility and 89, 99, 101, 119, 137; Freud and 5–6; futurity and 90, 137; heterosexual 225, 235, 242; home and 39, 42–43, 61, 64–65; homogeneity of 18; homosexuality, victims of 225; ideal and 70, 75, 77; ‘immorality’ and 137; infantilization and 100; lesbians 151, 176, 220, 233–36, 238–39, 241; low-income 103, 174, 176; magazines and 76–77, 79, 81; marginalization and 9, 103; market value and 66–70; mass culture and 43, 45, 47; middle-class 92, 99, 117, 135; miscarriage and 140; mixed-race 201; ‘modern’ 73–74, 165–66; as mothers 4–5, 8, 14–16, 18, 35, 39–40, 50, 65–67, 76–77, 83, 87–88, 90, 93, 98, 109, 114, 125, 134, 137, 147, 174, 180, 199, 203, 214, 220, 226–27, 229–30, 235–36, 240; non-mothering 119; objectification and 3–4, 8, 55, 64–66, 68–69, 110, 147, 150; patriarchy and 15–16, 45, 72, 115, 121, 128; pregnancy and 17, 22–23, 88–89, 96–97, 100, 103, 106, 109, 114, 117–18, 124, 135, 140, 142, 152–53, 156, 159, 167, 174, 220, 247; queerness and 121, 176, 240; representation and 25–26, 73, 93, 150, 193; reproduction and 8, 14, 16, 54, 90– 91, 100, 104, 114, 121, 134, 137–38, 152–53, 163, 173–74, 220, 229, 242; rights and 28, 89, 97–98, 100, 103, 121, 133, 135, 138; role playing and 65–66,

281

70; self-determination and 105–6, 114–15, 121, 123, 128, 135, 153, 192; sexuality and 2–3, 18, 26, 46, 64, 66, 73, 89, 91–93, 102, 109–10, 114–15, 122, 135, 142, 149, 161, 164–67, 201, 204, 211, 226, 235–36, 246, 248; sexual adventure/liberation and 25, 69–70, 73, 80, 109–10, 114, 122, 127; sexual pleasure and 103, 122; as slaves 55; solidarity with other women and 57, 107, 128, 152, 157–58; subjective expression and 15; subjectivities and 2, 4, 87, 107, 113, 137, 144, 157, 163–66, 168, 230; suffrage 133; suppression and 5; ‘traditional’ 74; undocumented migrant 175; white 174, 178, 182, 184–86, 192–93, 198–99, 201, 204, 207–8, 210–11, 214–15, 234; womanhood 67, 69, 198; working-class 71, 74, 99, 109, 118, 135, 195; see also abortion and Child (construct) and mothers, motherhood and rights, reproductive and sexuality and women, Black; see also Index of Film Titles women, Black, 175, 182, 194; 201; fetishization and 201; migrants 183; as mothers 183–84, 196; mothering subjectivities and 185; racial violence and 203; sexuality and 201; see also motherhood, Black Women’s Liberation Movement (France). See Mouvement de Libération des Femmes (MLF) Wyndham, F., 239 youth, culture of 1, 21–22, 25–26, 106, 127, 150; sexuality and 101, 106, 122, 128, 150