Bearing the Beyond: Women and the Limits of Language in Stanley Cavell — Page 6:
26 However, these films also allow Cavell to work out another idea that is central to his philosophizing. This is the Emersonian theme that language presupposes and enables the creation of a new vision of humanity. Our words (the inflections of tone, the connections we draw, and the allusions we imply) are performances of what it means to be human. The never-ending exchanges of words in remarriage enable a never-ending back-and-forth between new visions of humanity. This intercourse in words begets new understandings of what it means to be a human being. The continuous transformation of self, language, and community is at stake. In the ideal world of the comedies this constant need for transformation is acknowledged. More importantly the remarriage of the leading couple in the comedies presents us with an image of a community of mutual transformation.
27 The task of transformation is however curiously gendered in Cavell's work. He writes at one point, "that the subject of the genre of remarriage is well described as the creation of the woman, or of the new woman, or the new creation of the human" (Pursuits 140). The woman becomes the stand-in for a new humanity. Moreover, her new creation is the result of work done by the leading men in the comedies, as Cavell seems to be saying for example in discussing Peter and Ellie's relationship in It Happened One Night. According to Cavell, Ellie is transformed through Peter's insistence that she humble herself and that she accept the food he cooked for her (Pursuits 57). Yet, Cavell also states that Ellie creates herself as a new woman. The question of who transforms whom in these movies or who has agency in the shaping of the new human community leads to ambiguous results.
28 This ambiguous relationship between the leading woman's activity and passivity reveals itself most clearly in Cavell's description of Walter and Hildy in His Girl Friday:
I mention several features of their intimacy which this film picks up quite unmodified from the laws of the genre of remarriage. There is the early, summary declaration that this woman has recently been created, and created by this man. What he created her from is a "doll-faced hick," which thus satisfies the law that they knew one another in childhood, anyway in a life before their shared adulthood. And what he created out of her was a newspaperman [sic!]. This creation accordingly hinges with the further feature in which accepted differences between the genders are made into problems, several related ones. The conventional distribution of physical vanity, first of all, is reversed. Our opening glimpse of Walter is of him primping, and soon he will be giving himself a flower to wear, as though dressing for battle. It takes a while for Hildy's comparative casualness about her looks to reveal itself [. . .]. The question which of them is the active and which the passive partner is treated at the close of their initial interview as a gag, as in Bringing Up Baby, about who is following whom, or about who should be. In His Girl Friday it takes the form of issues about who is to go first down the aisle through the city room and about who is to hold the door and a gate open for whom. (Pursuits 168)
29 Cavell's thoughts about the role of the camera and of the audience in these films can help to analyze further the question of activity and passivity in the creation of the woman. In his essay "Ugly Duckling, Funny Butterfly," Cavell describes as an essential aim of the comedies that they exploit "film's power of metamorphosis or transfiguration." Cavell continues with the claim that in these films this power is "expressed as the woman's suffering creation, which cinematically means the transformation of flesh-and-blood women into projections of themselves on a screen. Hence the obligation in those films to find some narrative occasion for revealing [. . .] the woman's body, the body of that actress" (Contesting 122).
30 In this passage, Cavell follows an insight from his earlier work The World Viewed. Here he had argued that whereas the actor on a stage disappears behind the character he or she plays, the camera makes the actor on screen into a star (World 33, 175). The camera emphasizes the physical presence as photographic presence of the actor, an emphasis which demands the display or suggestion of the naked body "of the woman" (Pursuits 140).
Thus does film, in the genre under consideration, declare its participation in the creation of the woman, a declaration that its appetite for presenting a certain kind of woman a certain way on the screen — its power, or its fate, to determine what becomes of these women on film — is what permits the realization of these narratives structures as among the highest achievements in the art of film. (Pursuits 140)