Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama.

By E. Ann Kaplan (New York: Routledge, Chapman and Hall Inc., 1992. xv plus 250pp. $16.95).

I learned to kiss watching television--movies in the afternoon when home sick from school--to tilt my head slightly to the side, raise a foot, expect (and rarely experience) "the swoon." As a member of a generation who cannot remember a pre-television era when mass media did not interrupt and interpret our daily and private lives, my Oedipal narrative, which eventually and "successfully" and culminated in both heterosexuality and reproduction, was partly instituted and reinforced before and through the normative constructs of the flickering screen with which I interacted. l cannot guess the person I would be if Catwoman's frustrated libidial over-drive had not forced her to terrorize Gotham city, Ginger never slinked through "Gilligan's Island" in a formal ball-gown, or the sexually aggressive Glenn Close hadn't risen like an insane medusa from the bathwater only to be sent back bleeding into the watery tub-womb of the feminine unconscious. While feminist analysis may never answer the above questions, two recently released books, Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama by E. Ann Kaplan and Creating the Couple: Love, Marriage and Hollywood Performance by Virginia Wright Wexman, attempt to articulate how ideological constructs work to create the feminine within an ever proliferating mass consumer culture. the

Kaplan's book employs a feminist psychoanalytic approach to read both ideologically resistant and complicit texts directed towards women under the genre of melodrama. Tracing changing philosophical constructs of ideal mothering genre from Rousseau's Emile to the present post-modem era in which the newly visible fetus takes precedence over and reduces the mother to biological receptacle, Kaplan articulates how popular images are constructed to support patriarchal gendered norms. While Wexman's Creating the Couple reads certain film scenes and narratives through a psychoanalytic discourse, her reading of film text prefers theories of performance within an aesthetic dialogue rather than that between representation and spectator. Wexman's emphasis (increasing as than the book progresses) on methods of acting and various modem and than post-modernist approaches to film direction, tends to neglect the idological agenda of such changes as they may concern the subject/spectator. Her idological strategy, as she declares in her preface, is not to historicize her reading within an an ideological continuum but to investigate various approaches to reading film texts. Wexman's book is best read as a series of individual essays gathered together in order to illustrate a style of interpretation as applied to various film genres that include rather than focus on gender. Kaplan, on the other hand, constantly reminding the reader of the interrelation between philosophical, economic, and historical forces and representation, places the historical spectator integrally within the ideological agenda as s/he whose positioning is formed and informs the master narrative in which s/he is constructed. While I hestiate to favour one approach over the other, Kaplan's strong tendency to historicize does help to convey a sense of the interaction among social factors, culture and psychic life. Read side by side, however, the two books create a dialogue on women in heterosexual relations: Wexman on women who (we hope, ideologically speaking) are going to be mothers (because part of a couple) and Kaplan on those who already are. be mothers (because part of a

In Wexman's Creating the Couple, the author observes that 95 percent of all Hollywood films before 1960 "have romance as either a main plot or a secondary plot." While Kaplan supplies no such data in regards to plots of mothering, both types of narrative, the melodrama and those including romance, represent two stages within an Oedipal narrative designed to entrench heterosexuality. The films studied delineate boundaries of what is subjectively possible for women under patriarchy; women who resist the limited subjectivity allowed them within the heterosexual Oedipal narrative come to "bad ends," punished by twists of fate made inevitable by their rebellions.

Human behaviour is relative to its historical/cultural moment and is predicated upon what cultural scripts are available to what groups of people in any given era; Kaplan and Wexman explore popular forms of culture that fetishize heterosexual romance and reproduction which act as ideological state apparatus to entrench scripted norms of behaviour within an Oedipal narrative. While Kaplan's book more successfully articulates the relationship between representation and ideology, both Wexman and Kaplan's work suggest a conflation between theatrical and "real-life" performances in relation to gender. Women who act out scripted norms of behaviour within an Oedipal narrative of heteroxexuality and reproduction ensure continuation of partriarchal hierarchies. In Kaplan's view, the experience of the viewing subject within the spectacular discourse of the cinema mimics the pre-Oedipal child who experiences the self as inseparable from the image under its gaze. Like the mother under patriarchy, the cinema "stands in" for the father's law, and it is perhaps for this reason that cinematic structure and context invest and it themselves so heavily in heterosexual/Oedipal narratives. While neither Creating the Couple or Motherhood and Representation discuss whether the marriage of ideological intent to content can be shaken from its position within popular film discourse, Kaplan's book investigates arising postmodern parodic strategies which offer a site from which the "naturalized" discourse of the Oedipal narrative may be disturbed and exposed. As Kaplan argues throughout her book, such change is also dependent upon the ideological needs of society; despite the recent success of such films as "The Crying Game" that disrupt gendered binaries, the more traditional mythologies of sexuality continue to be popular culture's overwhelming discourse. As such, "the movies" remain convenient and appropriate tools by which the Oedipal narratives of heterosexual patriarchy continue to be invented.