Malevolent Moms and Desperate Daughters: The Viper Years

By the forties, the mildness of women's magazine articles and the gentleness of the maternal melodrama begin to recede. Forties films were filled either with wartime propaganda or, as the war came to a close, with the urgent need to recuperate women into acceptable postwar family life. This shift, from a more benign view of the mother/daughter relationship to one steeped in psychological

condemnations, seems fundamental here. It entailed a shift away from a focus on class and toward a focus on sexuality, as Michael Renov has pointed out: "In the context of American social life during the World War II years, it was sexual difference rather than class conflict that constituted the crucial problematic to which countless cultural artifacts and public utterances were addressed."^[26]

By 1942, a year that witnessed the publication of Philip Wylie's Generation of Vipers , one of the most virulent attacks on women in the last fifty years, we get a very different sort of representation of mothers and daughters than in the prewar years. Wylie's book remains one of the most astoundingly misogynist tomes in recent memory. His basic thesis—that America was being weakened from within by a horde of omnipotent "moms" who turned men into sniveling company dolts and women into awful moms-in-training—found a home in the mid to late forties.

Generally, the architects of "momism" focused on the deleterious effects of overprotective/domineering/smothering moms on the men of the nation. The concern was primarily with mothers and sons. Although "moms" created cowardly men unable to fight bravely for their nation, the effect on girls is understood more as a reproduction of mom herself: "And it is not always the son who suffers. I have known many a young woman who has realized that she was being dominated by her mom, and upon the mom's death experienced a feeling of freedom and relief, but ultimately has lived strictly according to her mom's selfish code."^[27]

For Wylie, Edward Strecker, and their ilk, the psychic health of girls was of little concern when such weighty problems as the moral fiber of the nation were at issue. Daughters were thought to be victims of moms too, but the model here was one of endless generational reproduction rather than specific and deadly aberration: "In most cases, a mom is a mom because she is the immature result of a mom."^[28] Yet the implications of the ideology of momism on the mother/daughter relationship are profound and far-reaching.

Now, Voyager (1942) pulls no punches in its portrayal of maternal evil and its deleterious effects on unwitting daughters. Most critics have not focused on the mother/daughter aspects of this film, tending instead to see it in terms of the explicit psychiatric narrative or the hopeless love story of Charlotte (Bette Davis) and Jerry (Paul Henreid). But insofar as the story is a classic Cinderella one, with Bette Davis as the ugly duckling virtually imprisoned by her tyran-

nical mother, we must understand her quest, and thus these secondary narratives, as motivated by the desire to grow up and away from the maternal nest.

Now, Voyager contains an impressive cast including Bette Davis, Paul Henreid, and Claude Rains. It tells the story of Charlotte Vale, a spinster living in fear of her domineering and tyrannical mother, who, since the death of her husband, has kept Charlotte a virtual prisoner in their Boston Brahmin mansion. Charlotte is the archetypical spinster: shy, unattractive, overweight, with strange and quirky hobbies that signify her "otherness" (woman without man).^[29] Enter the hero, this time in the split form of a psychiatrist who promptly diagnoses the mother's guilt and viciousness ("Mrs. Vale, if you had deliberately tried to ruin your daughter's life you couldn't have done a more complete job") and an inaccessible lover who proves to the ugly duckling that she is indeed a swan.

The discourse of psychiatry is pronounced and explicit here: Dr. Jacquith is presented right off as the expert who can cure Charlotte of the neuroses her mother has produced in her. But, significantly, the figure of the mother is the block to emotional cure: she distrusts the medical profession, as she informs Dr. Jacquith, and shames Charlotte in her meeting with a psychiatrist. In this scene, when the doctor is brought to the house by Charlotte's sister-in-law to examine Charlotte, Mrs. Vale expresses her contempt for the profession and, in doing so, reveals a decidedly outmoded understanding of psychiatry:

Mother: "Probably one of those places with a high-wire fence and yowling inmates."

Dr.: "Well now, I wouldn't want anyone to have that mistaken notion. Cascade is just a place in the country. People go to it when they are tired. . . ."

Mother: "The very word psychiatry, Dr. Jacquith. Doesn't it fill you with shame? My daughter, a member of our family."

Dr.: "There's nothing shameful about my work or frightening or anything else. It's very simple really what I try to do. People walk along the road, they come to a fork in the road, they're confused, they don't know which way to take. I just put up a signpost. Not that way, this way."

During this speech, the doctor is first standing, and the mother is looking up at him. This pattern is repeated throughout the film.

Toward the end, though, he is positioned between Charlotte's chair and the mother's chair, as if to signify his role as mediator between the two warring women, and the close-up at the end of his little discourse on psychiatry further establishes his position of mastery. More important, this speech affirms the mother's backward idea of psychiatry and produces a very benign and innocuous perception of the psychiatric enterprise: the sanitarium is just a place in the country, and the doctor is simply a traffic warden of the soul.

This attempt to normalize psychiatry is consonant with the more general explosion of popular psychology onto the cultural scene.^[30] In a period when "the advice of experts" was increasingly becoming the commonsense culture of American everyday life, the mother's resistance to the doctor can be seen not only as a holding on to her daughter (which is wrong, of course), but as an impediment to progress (which is also wrong, of course, especially in a soon to be postwar economy).^[31] If Stella is the impediment to social mobility and class ascendancy for her daughter, the aristocratic Mrs. Vale is the impediment to social health/social control; in holding back her daughter, she may just hold back the nation. The "old-fashioned," commonsense parenting approach of the mother is shown to be overpowering, exclusive, smothering, and unhealthy. It is associated with the rigidity the mother expresses in the first few minutes of the film as she berates the erring servants. Stella's mothering was merely "not enough" for her daughter's social growth, but the mothering of the evil Mrs. Vale is clearly malevolent. Charlotte needs treatment, expert help, so she may "grow free and blossom," as the doctor puts it.

Indeed, the mother here is very visibly the figure of Victorian repression: She is consistently dressed in a clearly Victorian costume with tightly buttoned collar and lace around her wrists and neck. She "matches" the Victorian furniture in her relic of a mansion. She is altogether anachronistic, an obsolete old woman who is the physical embodiment of an era long surpassed.

Charlotte does get "saved" by the good doctor, but medicine alone cannot right the wrongs of a woman-dominated woman: enter the other hero, this time in the dashing figure of Jerry (Paul Henreid), a sorrowful and lonely man whose "sick" wife sounds suspiciously like Charlotte's neglectful mother. The curative powers are now placed onto Charlotte: they fall in love, and Jerry is reborn, but he will never leave his wife (duty before desire).

The shipboard affair between Charlotte and the long-suffering but noble Jerry is the first of many scenes that are repetitions: Charlotte here is repeating a disastrous sea journey she had as a young woman on which her repressive mother cut off her affair with a sailor. In this flashback scene, the connection between Mrs. Vale's repressiveness and class becomes apparent. Charlotte's suitor is unsuitable, a common man whom Charlotte must avoid just as she must avoid the other tourists on board. Apparently, this aristocratic elitism was dissonant with the forties wartime emphasis on a sort of pluralistic patriotism.

Now cured, Charlotte repeats the journey. This time her sexuality fully "blooms" sans the restrictive presence of her mother. But most important, Charlotte gets to "redo" her mothering when she takes Jerry's lonely daughter under her wing (they meet at the sanitarium, where Charlotte has gone for a tune-up after her mother has conveniently died in a moment of rebellious confrontation) and makes her well through the love and attention that neither "girl" received. In this film, the only good mother is a pseudo one: Charlotte gets the chance to "do mothering right" where two mothers have so profoundly failed: "While biological mothers in the film are distinctly lacking in mothering skills . . . Charlotte turns motherhood into a profession—part psychotherapist, part nurse, part charming companion."^[32] In doing so, she must renounce her sexuality: Paul will never leave his wife.

The film ends with the classic cigarette lighting scene in which Charlotte tells Jerry, "Oh, Jerry, we have the stars, let's not ask for the moon." The stars presumably are the shining light of motherhood, and the moon is the murky and changing passions of adult sexuality. Charlotte thus becomes an advertisement for the "constructed mother." In this film, as in much of the culture at large, maternal instincts are depicted as often aggressive and destructive; one must learn how to be a good mother.^[33] Charlotte has learned, as the happy child proves. And that, of course, is the happiness Charlotte seeks.

The merger in this film of the psychiatric discourse and that of mothering is striking. They depend on each other for their legitimation. The former depends on the figure of the "unhappy couple" of the evil mother and the neurotic daughter to justify the therapeutic intervention. Indeed, the strong, male voice of the doctor serves as an omnipresent reminder to Charlotte of how to conduct

herself. As Charlotte returns home from her second sea voyage—the one on which she is reborn—she goes upstairs to see her mother. Right before she enters the room, the doctor's disembodied voice-over gives her strength: "Just remember that honoring one's parents is still a pretty good idea. You're going to be a shock to her. I advise you to soften the blow. Give her a little time to get used to you. Remember that whatever she may have done, she's your mother."

Charlotte enters the room and finds it difficult to resist the overpowering mother, and we sense a failure in her future. In the nick of time, she receives flowers from Jerry and thus finds the power to resist, to be her own woman. Thus two men give a woman the strength to fight off another woman. Charlotte is now able to give her triumphant "I'm my own person" speech to her furious mother: "Mother, I don't want to be disagreeable or unkind. I've come home to live with you in the same house. But it can't be in the same way. I've been living my own life, making my own decisions for a long while now. It isn't possible to go back to being treated like a child again. I don't think I'll do anything of importance that will displease you. But mother, from now on you must give me complete freedom."

Mother does grant her complete freedom, forties style: she throws herself down the stairs in defiance of her daughter's defiance. In this scene, Charlotte is off camera during her grand speech, and all we see is the back of the mother, tapping her laced hand on the daughter's bedpost, while Charlotte's voice emerges from an adjoining dressing room. Charlotte's inability to face her mother signifies the incompleteness of her cure. The full resistance can occur only after Charlotte herself is "full" with a man and child (Jerry and his daughter) and the mother has completely disappeared from the family picture.

What is striking is the explicitness of both discourses. Charlotte even mocks the psychiatrist when she first meets him ("She locks the door, doctor. Make a note of it. Its significance."). But it doesn't take much for the good doctor to break through Charlotte's "defenses" and whisk her away for a cure at Cascade, mildly described as a "place in the country." Throughout the film, Charlotte refers to her "repression," her "inhibitions." She becomes the advertisement for the new psychology, even suggesting that Jerry send his daughter to Cascade.

Perhaps it is the aristocratic setting of the film—replete with Victorian mansion, servants, and ocean cruises—that allows for a more explicit discourse of psychology and maternal evil. Released from any financial concerns (except Charlotte's mild anxiety over her inheritance), Charlotte and her mother can now immerse themselves fully in psychological concerns. Although psychology has most assuredly replaced class here as a central narrative theme, the aristocratic upper classness of Mrs. Vale is depicted as part of her anachronism. Her snobbery is part of what oppresses the daughter, although she seems to live off her mother's beneficence without excessive guilt.

In a crucial scene, when Charlotte refuses to be scared by her mother, refuses to give in, she uses this as ammunition: "Dr. Jacquith says that tyranny is sometimes the expression of the maternal instinct." At this point, when Charlotte confronts the agent of her oppression, the mother has a heart attack, slumps in her chair, and dies. Although Charlotte now believes she killed her mother ("I did it, I did it"), symbolically the mother has been killed by the burden of the new psychiatric "truth."

As Karen Anderson points out in her book on wartime women, a good deal of the anxiety expressed about the working mother both during the war and with much more vigor afterward was related to the fear that the much vaunted "maternal instinct," which had always been a bedrock of biological arguments about "women's place," was perhaps not so firmly ingrained as had been previously thought: "The fear expressed about women rejecting their children, especially by psychologists and social welfare officials, reflected a surprising anxiety about the presence or strength of the 'maternal instinct.' Similarly, the apprehension regarding the abandonment of feminine roles belied the conventional wisdom regarding an ostensibly immutable feminine personality."^[34]

Even many of the women's magazines, in the rush to adapt psychology to a popular, female audience, stressed that mothers ought not to rely so firmly on their "maternal instinct," but instead should depend on more reliable sources, as this article from a January 1945 Good Housekeeping implies: "The average woman tends to accept her offspring at face value and to depend on her Mother's Intuition to keep her informed of what's going on—and not, as she should, on observation, psychology, and the ability to face facts."^[35] This mutation from Stella Dallas's intuitive knowledge of what to do for her

Fig. 5.
Bette Davis appears again, this time as the mother-oppressed Charlotte 
Vale in the classic melodrama  Now, Voyager,  here confronting the demon 
as she announces her newfound independence. 
(Warner Brothers, 1942; photo courtesy of Photofest)

daughter (even how to sacrifice) to a new construction of inherently evil motherhood (maternal instinct as flawed and thus in need of medical intervention to set it straight) can be seen as an attempt to avoid the implications of changing social/sexual relations by deflecting the real transformations in the body politic (particularly women's increased involvement in the paid labor force) onto the question of maternal instinct.

Bad maternal instinct must be eradicated and replaced with the sentiments of the constructed/scientific mom (Charlotte), whose "good mothering" to her pseudodaughter (Jerry's daughter) is very clearly the result of "observation, psychology, and the ability to face facts." They do, after all, meet in the mental institution under the watchful eyes of the expert/psychiatrist (Charlotte even refers to him as "God"). In the war to liberate daughters from their fearsome mothers, psychiatry is clearly the best weapon.^[36]

In a 1944 film, Mr. Skeffington, Davis is again paired with

Fig. 6.
Pseudomom Charlotte finds her own mother-neglected little girl to save 
in lover Jerry's (Paul Henreid) "ugly duckling" of a daughter. (Warner 
Brothers, 1942; photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive)

Claude Rains; but this time she is the vain, rejecting mother, and Rains is the long-suffering Jewish husband, Job Skeffington, who raises their daughter in Germany while party girl Fanny (Davis) devours younger and younger men. Youth conscious mom is startled by the sudden arrival of her now grown daughter, and when the ravages of diphtheria take their toll, she is eventually taught the error of her decidedly nonmaternal ways. Although it is clearly too late for repentant mom to make it up to the daughter she abandoned, her maternal instinct is now reawakened, and she is redeemed through the return of Job, now blinded and weakened after years in a concentration camp.