Adaptation, Censorship, and Audiences of Questionable Type: Lesbian Sightings in "Rebecca" (1940) and "The Uninvited" (1944)
1998; University of Texas Press; Volume: 37; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1225825
ISSN1527-2087
Autores Tópico(s)Law in Society and Culture
ResumoWhen it comes to lesbians ... many people have trouble seeing what's in front of them, writes Terry Castle in The Apparitional Lesbian. If Castle is right (and I believe she is), then the inability to recognize lesbians is not only a sad commentary on our status within American culture, it is also a representational dilemma. In one sense, the inability to see lesbians-our precarious position in representational discourses-is what this article is about. Having said that, however, it might be more accurate to note that I am interested here in looking at the specific ways in which seeing and not seeing lesbians-what might be called a dyke disappearing act-are figured in two Hollywood films from the 1940s: Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940) and Lewis Allen's The Uninvited (1944). I want to open my search for lesbians by taking a closer look at Hitchcock's Rebecca, a film that I wrote about a few years ago.3 The arguments I want to make about The Uninvited, which debuted four years after Rebecca's release, are, if not identical, then deeply indebted to my thinking on Hitchcock's motion picture. In my textual analysis of Rebecca I argued that the dead woman of Hitchcock's film, Rebecca de Winter, is a figure of lesbian desire who haunts the mansion in which she lived on the rocky coast of England.4 The haunting, which is implied but never represented, is experienced most forcefully by the film's heroine, the second Mrs. de Winter (Joan Fontaine), and by Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), the mansion's housekeeper and Rebecca's lifelong devot e.
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