Bearing the Beyond: Women and the Limits of Language in Stanley Cavell — Page 8:
36 This idea prompts for Cavell the question of what happens to the women who cannot find such a man. Do they possess their own powers to overcome the skeptical violence? Here we return again to the melodrama of the unknown woman. While the villains in these films are male, the women are cast in the double role of being both victims and saviors. The female stars represent therefore the Emersonian ideal of being open to change by embodying exposure to the future and to each other without metaphysical or grammatical guarantees. Where men deny the possibility of mutual conversation and where they refuse to join a community of transformation, "the woman must achieve her transformation otherwise" (Cavell, Contesting, 117). She must be considered to possess her own power to create herself in the face of the violence of masculine knowing. This power for self-creation is expressed in these movies through the trope of gaining a new identity, one which is visualized through changes of her body — or in and around her body, new ways of carrying herself, new dresses and appearances.
37 An example of this new creation of self, dressed in the visualization of bodily changes, is Stella Dallas's scandalous choice of donning excessive jewelry and furs when she, the working class woman and heroine of the movie Stella Dallas, appears at the resort hotel frequented by the upper class friends of her husband's Stephen. Cavell interprets this "Christmas tree spectacle" as Stella's way of appealing to the "distaste of those for whom she knows she is distasteful" (Contesting 202). Stella performs her exclusion from Stephen's world by presenting her audience with their own reading of her. According to Cavell, we have no reason to assume that her over-decorated appearance reflects Stella's own taste (Contesting 202). The care with which her preparation for this appearance is shown, suggests rather that she plans to be a spectacle. In so doing she reveals what it means to be a woman in an unwelcoming world of men:
The woman's problem is not one of not belonging but one of belonging, only on the wrong terms; unlike the exile, the woman is not between two different cultures but is at odds with the one in which she was born and is roughly in the process of transfiguration into one that does not exist, one as it were still in confinement. (Contesting 213)
38 Her spectacle theatricalizes the fact that Stella is at odds with Stephen's culture. And it declares Stella's right not to accept the terms of his culture, not to accept Stephen's terms of association and conversation. The spectacle prepares her for the freedom to leave "not just the man of the marriage but the consequence of a marriage she allowed herself to believe would transform her" (Contesting 217). In this freedom Stella can express and realize her own taste, and this is no longer a taste for the world of men. Has it ever been the world of men? By characterizing her family of origin as primitive, Cavell suggests that Stella early on had a sense of being out of place in this world she was supposed to call home. Cavell recalls for us
the wooden, shadowy father delivering ugly orders; the monosyllabic, helpless mother; the noisy, nervous brother, the filthiness of whose hands is ambiguous as being caused by his work in the mill, or by his maleness or by his incestuousness; and Stella's primping before the cheap mirror, as if always knowing that, wherever else she finds to be, she does not belong, she from the beginning does not belong here, at what the world calls home. (Contesting 218)
39 At the end of the movie, and of her attempts to find a home in the world of men, Stella walks away, ratifying her own taste, "that is the taking on the thinking of her own existence" (Contesting 219). She proves her own existence without fully knowing who she is. Here she is stripped of ornaments and Barbara Stanwyck's Stella is without spectacular beauty or "obvious glamour" (Contesting 219). Despite this lack, we know, says Cavell, that she has a future, "because she is presented here as a star (the camera showing her that particular insatiable interest in her every action and reaction), which entails the promise of return, of unpredictable reincarnation" (Contesting 219).
40 Whereas the stars in the comedies stand for humanity achievable in mutuality, the female stars in the melodrama stand for humanity achievable only through an aversion of the terms of a society that has no knowledge of them. In this aversion the women of the melodrama are not only asserting their right to speak their own mind. They are also empowered to judge this male world, which has nothing but silence to offer to them; a silence which is either the result of the negation of her voice in an abusive marriage or the silence of inexpressiveness in her isolated state of being unknown (cf. Contesting 127). The women of the melodrama demand the transformation of a man's world, and they transcend the position ascribed to them in this world.