Bearing the Beyond: Women and the Limits of Language in Stanley Cavell — Page 5:
21 Cavell's reading of The Letter of an Unknown Woman, describes how this ideal of knowledge affects the unknown woman. Lisa Berndle, the character played by Joan Fontaine who gave the film its name, is left to create herself. But she has to do so without reciprocity and conversation with Stefan Brand, the addressee of the letter. Rather Lisa creates herself in isolation from Stefan, played by Louis Jourdan, and for him. She does this moreover privately — as her voice-over tells him (and us) posthumously: Quite consciously I began to prepare myself for you. I kept my clothes neater so that you wouldn't be ashamed of me. I took dancing lessons; I wanted to become more graceful, and learn good manners — for you. So that I would know more about you and your world, I went to the library and studied the lives of great musicians. (Contesting 107)
22 She wants to know more about him and his world but she is disbarred from doing so in relationship with him. Consequently, Lisa herself remains unknown because knowing her would move Stefan into a relationship of reciprocal knowledge and thus transformation. The problem in the films of the genre lies in the masculine desire to remain unchanged, unexposed, and private. In Stefan's denial of reciprocal knowing Lisa's "existence has been unacknowledged, a fact that quite literally, kills her. This is the reason she comes back to haunt the screen; her plea for acknowledgement posthumously directed both to Stefan and to us," as Carla Marcantonio comments (no pag.).
23 In short: the skeptic imagines knowledge to be constituted according to a logic of objectification where the knowing subject positions himself ideally in contrast to the world, desiring a form of knowledge that is possible only if he remains disconnected from his epistemic object. Similarly, the men in the melodrama understand desire according to a logic of objectification. In order to be desirable the woman has to be known without reciprocity. To be know or desired like a woman means to be objectified. To know and to desire like a man means to stand outside the processes of objectification.
The Hollywood Comedies of Remarriage as Sites of Transformation
24 What would it mean to overcome this imagination of absolute disconnect and objectification? How do women and men acknowledge and cultivate their attunement on which all their claims to knowledge rest? These are the systematic questions that Cavell explores in his reflections on the films he calls "comedies of remarriage" (e.g., Frank Capra's It Happened One Night or Howard Hawks' His Girl Friday) in Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. These movies provide a happy vision of marriage as the bond of speaking and being together.[6]The other movies Cavell discusses are: Leo Mc Carey's <em>The Awful Truth</em>, George Cukor's <em>The Philadelphia Story</em> and <em>Adam's Rib</em>, Howard Hawks' <em>Bringing Up Baby</em>, and Preston Sturges'<em> The Lady Eve</em>. Here Cavell describes a world in which women and men solve the issue of being fated to each other in language and in community.
25 This positive vision however reflects more than a simple consummation of a desire for intimacy. Cavell's reading engages the fact that in the American political imagination, the ideal marriage is an emblem of the bonds that bind society together (see Cott). According to Cavell, this ideal marriage is best understood as remarriage, i.e., as the constantly threatened and regained bond of reciprocity in speaking and listening. "What does a happy marriage sound like," asks Cavell; and he points to the "sound of argument, of wrangling, of verbal battle" (Pursuits 86). Given that using a language is an appeal to community in the optative, as we have already seen, we can understand these marital conversations as an appeal to a new community, one which does not yet exist but that is there to be created by the couple. In this community the woman and the man can find their individual and separate voices. At the same time, husband and wife have to find words in which to express themselves and to speak for each other in mutuality. With the help of the comedies, Cavell develops therefore the Wittgensteinian idea that language is not a contractual relationship but one based on our willingness to speak together and thus to remain exposed and attuned to each others words. And, as any musician knows, the job of tuning in is not simply finished in the moments before the performance starts. Tuning, remaining in tune, is a constant ongoing and mutual process. The comedies provide Cavell with the imagery and the sound of the struggles by which we are, become, and remain attuned to each other's words.