Summary of Maria La Place’s Producing and Consuming of Women’s film

- Gowreesh VS

In this essay, Maria LaPlace analyses Now, Voyager, tracing back its historical context of origin
and its relation to aspects of consumerism, stardom and women’s fiction. By this attempt, she
tries contributing a retrospective understanding of women’s film and female spectatorship and
how these films ‘position’ women and ‘construct’ femininity.
LaPlace mentions the immense popularity that woman’s film enjoyed back in the 1930s- 40s and
the conviction of Hollywood studios had about women constituting the majority of the audience.
She observes in this era, massive production of films both in A and B circuits, targeting women
in the order of dramas, romance, musicals. As she maintains, woman’s film had to have a female
protagonist, the story had to be told from a female perspective and required to be based on
woman’s ‘realistic’ life experiences in the familial, romantic and domestic domains. As love and
emotion reigned as major themes in women’s films, it was the interactions and relationship
between women characters that formed one the undergirding in this genre. This study for
LaPlace is to highlight the usually understudied elements of contradictions, ideology and
subversive capacities in the text of films, keeping a sharp view on patriarchal hegemony. For this
examination, she employs three categories that inspire such films which are consumerism, the
image of a female star and women’s fiction.

Consumerism
By referring to Stewart Ewan, La Place says that consumerism capitalized on the feminist
discourse of 1920- 1929 and their fight for freedom and equality of women. In this sphere also
women were acknowledged and targeted as ideal customers. Some of the marketing strategies
portrayed and defined women as homely and as belonging to this domestic sphere. While on the
other hand, they sold commodities like cigarettes promoting it as an accessory that reflects the
newfound freedom of women and their publicness in that era. Cosmetics, fashion, etc. were
marketed as way to achieve external ‘beauty’ of women and made it appear as a quality that does
not need to be inborn but as something that can be achieved, along with other requirements of
successful womanhood. Drawing from social psychology’s idea of the social- self, the ads also
perpetuated the idea of the woman who stood out in their social circle for the wrong reasons and
their products being the sole solution to prevent this from happening. According to Charles
Eckert, who La Place cites, cinema borrows these trends that fetishized women as glamourous
consumable objects and their mise-en-scene projects a consumerist lifestyle. For Eckert, the
films often turn out to be tie-ins between Hollywood studios and manufacturers that are directed
to female consumers. This discourse broadly worked in selling the idea of women shaping
herself as a desirable object through her consumption of mass-produced objects.
LaPlace talks of the film and its tie with consumerism. In her view, Now, Voyager is a market-
oriented transmedial project. The film advertises itself through its collaboration between national
 and local businesses in the form of merchandise, which often presents star actress Bete Davis as
a fashion guide. These attempts also call forth its audiences to watch beautiful clothes, locales
and to realize the consumer in them while watching the film. With the inserts of flashbacks, we
get to know that the character arc of Charlotte alternating between a period of her being
beautiful, then her being ugly and then finally returning to the state being confident and
externally appealing. Through this cycle of evolution, the film implies her ugliness as a
consequence of her mother’s toxic control and dominance of her, a condition in which her
sexuality is suppressed and her choices are disvalued. The return to her attractive self is shown as
her reclamation of control from her mother, embracing her personal desires and making her
decisions. The physically transformed Charlotte is framed in the film to be seen/ to be consumed
as an object of desire. In this physical beauty, she gains attention, validation, and love which she
was deprived of in her earlier/ugly demeanor. La Place finds it important in the film that
Charlotte on no occasion asks for male approval but receives it without demanding. As Charlotte
commands adoration and popularity like never before in the course of physical transformation
the film implying that physical transformation, external appearance, consumerist behavior as
important to carve a new likable identity.

Star and star system

La Place observes an overlap in Bette Davis’s star text over her character Charlotte, which
produces complex intertextuality in this scenario. She says stardom has a role to play in the
saleability of the film and deconstructs Davis’s star image for the discussion. For LaPlace,
Davis’s cinematic image is of an actor who has mainly specialized in women’s films and the off-
cinematic image is of a star hailing from New England, who has worked her way up to the height
of acclaim and stardom in Hollywood. Here, the cultural stereotype of her being a Yankee,
therefore hardworking and professional, is forced to her identity of being a genuine star. The film
also in its promotional material exploits this image of the star interchangeably with the character
of Charlotte which Davis plays. These promos stress on the similarities of the star actress to
physically transformed Charlotte, trying to juxtapose the former’s persona of a non-domestic,
attractive and successful public figure to the latter.

Women’s fiction
The third connection is with American woman’s fiction, which according to LaPlace, was largely
ignored as a source of inspiration for women’s film. These writings, according to her, had themes
of women fighting social adversities and emerging successful, promoting the image of the self-
made woman. According to her, they had a quite different take on women’s day to day struggle,
from the exaggerated and purposefully unrealistic storytelling of gothic fiction. In woman’s
fiction, female literacy and education are transformative of a woman's life which helps her
acquire power and knowledge. In this literature, stress was not on institutions or economy but
was on narratives of self-discovery and in the development of personality. Paradoxically, at the
same time, they also subscribed to oppressive Victorian values of domesticity and in considering
family as a central agent of social transformation. In such perspectives, it was women’s duty to
change the family into a happy one, while the familial system stood as an allegory for the larger
society.
While 19th-century women’s fiction concentrated on the theme of fallen women, who are
sexually suppressed and socially oppressed, the 20th-century literature drew from Freudian
psychoanalysis, which LaPlace calls Vulgar Freudianism, in acknowledging the desires of
women, whether economical or sexual. The ads of this Now, Voyager also declares its
connection from the novel written by the author of bestselling novel Stella Dallas (which was
later turned into a movie), which was return in response to these times.
Conclusion
LaPlace concludes that Now, Voyager brings together complexities and contradictions from these
sources, recalibrating them in addressing women, creating a space of resistance reflecting on the
wider culture of women. The references of consumerist lifestyle, plot settings, the character
development of Charlotte, her changed relation to her mother and her lover, Jerry, her adoption
of Jerry’s daughter Tina, all carry the utopia of the freedom and confidence that the new
feminine subjectivity has gained.