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Cinema Journal (1998) - Adaptation, Censorship, and Audiences of Questionable Type: Lesbian Sightings in "Rebecca" (1940) and "The Uninvited" (1944)

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This article analyzes the intertextual relationship between Rebecca and The Uninvited, highlighting the "ghosting" of lesbianism in the act of representation and addressing the mediating role of censorship vis–a–vis sex perversion.

Pale women fleet around, whose infinite
Long sorrow and desire have torn their wombs,
Whose empty fruitlessness assails the night
With hollow repercussion, like dim tombs
Wherein some vampire glooms.
— Aleister Crowley, "The Lesbian Heil" (1898)[1]

"When it comes to lesbians ... many people have trouble seeing what's in front of them," writes Terry Castle in The Apparitional Lesbian.2 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 Aliens 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 mansions housekeeper and Rebeccas lifelong devotee.

The Rebecca Connection.

Rebecca's ghostly presence in the film is so profound that contemporary critics emphasized it in their reviews. Variety summed up the storyline as "the strangely fascinating drama of a dead wife's spell over her husband and his new and timorous bride."5 The New York Herald Tribune was even more direct: "there is genuine terror in the fate of a poor young girl who finds a ghost separating her from her husband and her rightful place in his palatial home."6 The Motion Picture Herald also emphasized the dead woman's powers: "while never seen, never heard, Rebecca's spirit dominates the story, as it does the characters."7 According to reporters, Rebecca is an invisible force, a decorporealized creature that must be reckoned with even though she remains unseen.

Rebecca's powers in the film are, indeed, profound, yet reviewers shied away from enumerating exactly what kind of threat she (dis)embodied: "[Rebecca is] a film treatment evocative of a menacing mood, [and] fraught with all manner of hidden meaning."8 Although that meaning remained vague in reviews, Joseph Breen, head of the Production Code Administration (PCA) at the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), was quite explicit about his concerns in preproduction correspondence with the film's producer, David O. Selznick. In a four–page letter to Selznick, Breen offered a list of the movie's transgressions of the Production Code, two of which focus on the (absent) character of Rebecca:

We have read the temporary script ... and I regret to inform you that the material, in our judgment, is definitely and specifically in violation of the Production Code.... The specific objection to this material is three–fold: (a) As now written, it is the story of a murderer, who is permitted to go off "scot free"; (b) The quite inescapable inferences of sex perversion; and (c) The repeated references in the dialogue to the alleged illicit relationship between Favell and the first Mrs. de Winter, and the frequent references to the alleged illegitimate child–to–be.

Later in his missive Breen reminds Selznick of the section of the code that states: "sex perversion, or any inference of it, will not be allowed." He even points out the segments of the script that are problematic: "scenes 393, et seq.: Here are the scenes in which we get the quite definite suggestion that the first Mrs. de Winter was a sex pervert."<note></note> In the main sequence remarked upon by Breen, Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier) tells his new wife (Fontaine) what Rebecca was really like; namely, she was a ruthless vixen. Despite Breen's protestations, however, the scene remained in the final version of the movie, which suggests that a PCA seal of approval was given though inferences of sex perversion persisted.

What did Breen mean exactly by the phrase sex perversion? As the quotation from the Production Code indicates, it is a catch–all phrase intended to include all sorts of unacceptable behaviors/perversions such as incest and heterosexual promiscuity. Yet the very lack of detail attached to the phrase also indicates that what remains unnamed may also be unseen. Here, I want to suggest that Breen's reference to sex perversion is intentionally elusive but decidedly allusive, for there exists a compelling suggestion in Breen's correspondence that the primary form of perversion exhibited by Rebecca is decidedly nonheterosexual. That is, while Breen mentions both Rebecca's illicit affair with her cousin Favell and her pregnancy in his third point, he separates and reserves the phrase sex perversion for his second comment. Breen must, therefore, mean something else by the phrase than heterosexual infidelity or incest. In short, he implies but refuses to articulate the film's lesbian desires.

The hints of sex perversion in Rebecca–code words for female bisexuality and homosexuality in this case–are worth remarking upon at length, given that Breen's other censorship notations were met with significant revisions. Maxim, for example, does not admit to ...

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Rhona J. Berenstein is director and associate professor of film studies at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema.

Notes

My sincere thanks to Lia Hotchkiss for her excellent efforts to compile materials on the history of gay and lesbian communities during the Second World War. Thanks also to Patty White, who kindly lent me a copy of her dissertation so that I could incorporate her arguments into this piece. Her parallel thinking to my own on this and other Hollywood movies has made the task of analyzing films like The Uninvited much more fun. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Ann Donahue, Alison L. McKee, Vivian Sobchack, and the anonymous Cinema Journal reader whose suggested revisions contributed positively to the final form of this article.

  1. ↑ Aleister Crowley, "The Lesbian Hell" (1898), lines 6-15, in The Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse, ed. Stephen Coote (Middlesex: Penguin, 1983), 273-75.
  2. ↑ Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 2.
  3. ↑ Rhona J. Berenstein, "'I'm Not the Sort of Person Men Marry': Monsters, Queers and Hitchcock's Rebecca," cineACTION 29 (1992): 82-96. Reprinted in Out in Culture: Gay, Lesbian and Queer Essays on Popular Culture, ed. Corey K. Creekmur and Alexander Doty (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 239-61.
  4. ↑ Daphne du Maurier's biography was published recently, lending further support to my contention that the film, and du Maurier's novel on which it was based, are queer texts. Du Maurier herself was a cross-dresser and had a lesbian sister, Angela, who wrote the lesbian novel The Little Less.
  5. ↑ Anon., "Rebecca," Variety, 21 March 1940. Since many of the contemporary reviews for both Rebecca and The Uninvited that appear in the following pages were found in the clippings file at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, page numbers were not available for most sources.
  6. ↑ Howard Barnes, "'Rebecca' - Music Hall," New York Herald Tribune, 29 March 1940. Roscoe Williams of the Motion Picture Daily offered a similar description of Rebecca's role in the film: "the spirit of the departed, kept alive by the household in a hundred ways, makes the new wife's life miserable" ("Rebecca," Motion Picture Daily, 27 March 1940, n.p.).
  7. ↑ Walter Selden, "Rebecca: Study in Neuroses," Motion Picture Herald, 30 March 1940. That the ghost of Rebecca pervades the story was underscored by one reviewer for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA): "for the spirit of Maxim's first wife survives in every corner of the estate, in every smallest detail of its routine" (G. Shurlock, MPAA review dated 14 February 1940, MPAA file, Margaret Herrick Library, Los Angeles, Calif.). In future citations, the Margaret Herrick Library will be abbreviated as Herrick Library.
  8. ↑ Anon., "Rebecca," Variety, 21 March 1940.
  9. ↑ Emphases in original. Letter from Joseph I. Breen to David O. Selznick dated 5 September 1939, MPAA file, Herrick Library.
  10. ↑ Letter from Joseph I. Breen to David O. Selznick dated 25 September 1939, MPAA file, Herrick Library.
  11. ↑ The deleted section of the dialogue is a slightly revised excerpt from Daphne du Maurier's original novel. It was to have been spoken by Mrs. Danvers to Jack Favell, Rebecca's alleged lover: "[Rebecca] was not in love with you - or with Mr. de Winter - or anyone! She despised all men. She was above all that!" Emphasis in original. Letter from Breen to Selznick dated 5 September 1939, MPAA file, Herrick Library.
  12. ↑ Lea Jacobs, Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 22.
  13. ↑ Ibid., 23.
  14. ↑ In fact, as a 1944 report suggests, the film was originally conceived without Rick's narration altogether: "because of the unusual and controversial subject dealt with in the film, Producer Charles Brackett and Director Lewis Allen have decided to add a prologue to 'The Uninvited.' ... Decision on the prologue was made after all the rest of the picture had been completed. The writers ... were called in and asked for an opening speech that would be a preparation and explanation" (Anon., "New Prologue for 'The Uninvited,'" source unknown, 4 February 1944, clipping file, Herrick Library).
  15. ↑ The feminization of men is a recurrent motif in this film. Stella's father, for example, is known only as Meredith, an androgynous surname and a feminine first name.
  16. ↑ Anon., "The Uninvited," Variety, 5 January 1944.
  17. ↑ Edwin Schallert, "Classy Spooks Spread Shivers at Paramount," Los Angeles Times, 16 April 1944. Yet another reporter gushed, "Tensely-woven drama, themes from the supernatural, which, in receiving unquestioned wide response from theatergoers should evoke considerable discussion" (Anon., "The Uninvited," Variety, 4 January 1944). Even the Christian Century, a magazine that detailed the depravities of Hollywood in articles during the thirties, printed a kind review: "excellently developed for what it is - a spooky yet outwardly realistic tale for those able to accept it, taut and suspenseful" (Anon., "Current Feature Films," Christian Century, 1 March 1944, 286). Some reporters proclaimed the film's superiority over the novel: "it was a gloriously exciting yarn to read, it is an even more gloriously exciting motion picture to see" (Anon., "The Uninvited," Hollywood Reporter, 4 January 1944, 4). Still others remarked upon its craftsmanship despite generic limitations, as was the case with James Agee in the Nation: "The Uninvited, through adroit counterpointing, syncopating, and cumulation of the natural and the supernatural turns a mediocre story and a lot of shabby cliches into an unusually good scare-picture" (Agee quoted in Anon., "Ghostly Noir: Lewis Allen Directs Ray Milland," Pacific Film Archive Calendar, September 1987). Other favorable reviews appeared in Newsweek ("Ghosts in Good Faith," 28 February 1944, 83) and Time ("The New Pictures," 21 February 1944, 94, 96). Reserved or outright negative reviews were delivered by Philip Hartung in "Not for Fraidy Cats," Commonweal, 4 February 1944, 399 and Anon. in "Sound Track: The Uninvited," Pacific Coast Musician, 15 April 1944.
  18. ↑ William R. Weaver, "Review: The Uninvited," Motion Picture Daily, 4 January 1944. Weaver reiterated his opinion in yet another review: "Not to be confused in any respect with the penny-shocker type of B-calibre melodrama via which the horror-film clientele commonly receives its shudder quota" ("The Uninvited: Ghost Story, Adult," Motion Picture Herald, 8 January 1944, 109). The Los Angeles Examiner offered a similar point of view; here, too, the reporter differentiated the film from its lesser generic counterparts: "'The Uninvited' is so superior to the run-of-the-mill 'chiller' that it is almost a shame to refer to it in that category" (Anon., "'Uninvited' Excellent 'Chiller,"' Los Angeles Examiner, 14 April 1944). Lowell E. Redelings agreed with his colleagues when he asserted, "The net result is a refined mystery film, not to be classed with the ordinary shudder-shocker" ("'Uninvited' a Weird Ghost Film," Hollywood Citizen News, 14 April 1944).
  19. ↑ Motion Picture Herald, 1 January 1944. In her dissertation, Patricia White notes that the pressbook for The Uninvited also compared Paramount's movie with Rebecca. See Patricia White, "The Uninvited: Cinema and the Conditions of Lesbian Representability," Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Santa Cruz, 1993, 108.
  20. ↑ White makes a similar claim about maternal melodramas in her dissertation. See chapters 2 and 3 in particular.
  21. ↑ Emphasis in original, Andrea Weiss, "'A Queer Feeling When I Look at You': Hollywood Stars and Lesbian Spectatorship in the 1930s," in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (New York: Routledge, 1991), 286.
  22. ↑ Rebeccas assumed appeal to women was mentioned in at least two contemporary reviews. Variety's reporter noted that the "best selling novel was primarily a woman's book, and so it will be largely with the picture," while Film Dailys reviewer added the following secondary headline: "BRILLIANT PICTURE WITH SPECIAL APPEAL TO FEMMES, CREATES NEW STAR: SHOULD BE B.O. HONEY" (Anon., "Rebecca," Variety, 21 March 1940 and Anon., "Rebecca," Film Daily, 26 March 1940). There is every reason to believe that Paramount intended The Uninvited for an audience populated primarily by women, especially considering its release during the war years when women formed a significant segment of the labor and cinematic viewing forces in the United States.
  23. ↑ White, "The Uninvited," 93.
  24. ↑ Castle, Apparitional Lesbian, 2.
  25. ↑ Ibid., 28.
  26. ↑ For a further discussion of the links between 1930s horror cinema and homosexuality, please see my book Attack of the Leading Ladies: Gender, Sexuality, and Spectatorship in Classic Horror Cinema (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).
  27. ↑ The haunted house, a favored vehicle for representing the ghost story, is a means of challenging traditional values, specifically those pertaining to the family. As Anthony Vidler writes of what he terms "Unhomely Houses": "the house provided an especially favored site for uncanny disturbances: its apparent domesticity, its residue of family history and nostalgia, its role as the last and most intimate shelter of private comfort sharpened by contrast the terror of invasion by alien spirits" (The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992], 17).
  28. ↑ An interesting generic trait of horror cinema, at least during the thirties, is that many narratives offered fertile ground for alliances between parental roles and monstrosity. Even more apparent in a range of films such as Dracula (1931), The Mummy (1932), The Old Dark House (1932), and Frankenstein (1931) is the striking absence of a "real" mother within the film and the figuration of the monster as a sort of protomother or mother substitute. (This is a point Barbara Creed has made about Dracula's archaic maternal function in vampire films. See Creed, The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis [New York: Routledge, 1993].) Thus, it is not surprising that absent mothers return as monstrous and benevolent ghosts in The Uninvited, for their very absence demands some form of representation, one that is both immaterial and frightening. But it would be unwise to assume that the monster, or ghost in this case, is only a maternal or parental figure, for part of what horror relishes is the disruption of the family unit through the intervention of that which comes from outside the familial domain. Homosexuality in general and lesbianism in particular in the case of The Uninvited serve precisely this generic function - they threaten to dislodge the stability and supremacy of the family, they haunt adults and children alike, reminding them that there are alternatives to the roles and positions they have been assigned in patriarchal culture.
  29. ↑ White, "The Uninvited," 189.
  30. ↑ Ibid., 164.
  31. ↑ Jacobs, Wages of Sin, 85.
  32. ↑ Redelings, "Uninvited."
  33. ↑ Emphasis in original. Dorothy Macardle, The Uninvited (New York: Literary Guild of America, 1942), 144.
  34. ↑ Ibid., 4.
  35. ↑ Ibid., 82.
  36. ↑ Ibid., 2.
  37. ↑ Ibid., 207.
  38. ↑ Ibid., 115.
  39. ↑ Bosley Crowther, "Whooooooo!," New York Times, 21 February 1944.
  40. ↑ Otis L. Gurnsey Jr., "The Playbill: Ghosts Attend Miss Skinner's Film Debut," New York Herald Tribune, 23 January 1944.
  41. ↑ See René Girard, Desire, Deceit and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
  42. ↑ Castle, Apparitional Lesbian, 72.
  43. ↑ Letter from Brendan Larnen to Will Hays dated 10 May 1944, MPAA file, Herrick Library.
  44. ↑ Ibid.
  45. ↑ The Legion reviewers were caught in the fascinating double-bind of conservative (and, sometimes, not so conservative) groups that find fault with media representations. In order to critique images (in order to assert that certain depictions are dangerous to social welfare), reviewers have to watch (and sometimes re-watch) those very representations. The close attention demanded, the level of fascination and commitment required to critique images, suggests a degree of passion for those same images, a passion that cannot be accounted for fully by a sense of social commitment, no matter how ardent.
  46. ↑ Castle, Apparitional Lesbian, 63.
  47. ↑ Ibid., 7.
  48. ↑ Letter from Will Hays to Joseph I. Breen dated 16 May 1944, MPAA file, Herrick Library.
  49. ↑ Letter from Joseph I. Breen to Will Hays dated 17 May 1944, MPAA file, Herrick Library.
  50. ↑ Letter from Luigi Luraschi to Joseph I. Breen dated 29 May 1944, MPAA file, Herrick Library.
  51. ↑ Hays to Breen, dated 16 May 1944, MPAA file, Herrick Library.
  52. ↑ Letter from Daniel A. Lord, S.J., to "Joe" (presumably Joseph I. Breen). No date, but prior to 7 August 1944, MPAA file, Herrick Library
  53. ↑ Letter from Joseph I. Breen to Will Hays dated 5 June 1944, MPAA file, Herrick Library.
  54. ↑ Letter from Joseph I. Breen to Gov. Carl E. Milliken dated 7 August 1944, MPAA file, Herrick Library.
  55. ↑ Letter from Joseph I. Breen to Luigi Luraschi dated 21 April 1943, MPAA file, Herrick Library.
  56. ↑ Jacobs, Wages of Sin, 22.
  57. ↑ White, "The Uninvited," 194.
  58. ↑ Madeline Davis and Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, "Oral History and the Study of Sexuality in the Lesbian Community: Buffalo, New York, 1940-1960," Feminist Studies 12, no. 1 (1986): 23. There exists additional first-person documentation of the era, which includes references to the increasing bar life and visibility of lesbians in the 1940s. Writing of her experiences during the Second World War, Rusty Brown, for instance, describes her youth as follows: "I got to meet a lot of the Navy women. The ones who were in the service had to be on the discreet side, and since I was a civilian, we always met in bars or other places-so-called coffee houses or a friend of a friend of a friend's house. They were called coffee houses, but lesbians hung out there - some civilians, some military" (Long Time Passing: Lives of Older Lesbians, ed. Marcy Adelman [Boston: Alyson Publications, 1986], 146).
  59. ↑ Lillian Faderman, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 127. Allan Bérubé's research on the war years reinforces Faderman's estimation: "with weekend passes and furloughs, the military gave its personnel the freedom to explore the gay nightlife that flourished during the war. In large cities servicemen and women found gay bars like Bradley's in Hollywood, The Black Cat in San Francisco, Mary's Tavern in Denver, and a small number of lesbian bars, such as the If Club in Los Angeles and Mona's in San Francisco. These were the first exclusively gay or lesbian bars in America" ("Marching to a Different Drummer: Lesbian and Gay GIs in World War II," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr. [New York: Nal Brooks, 1989], 390).
  60. ↑ Faderman, Odd Girls, 119. Bérubé's research, again, matches Faderman's: "the tolerance that some homosexual men and women experienced during the war proved to be all too temporary. Many lesbians and gay men saw their wartime freedom disappear as the country they fought for began to turn against them with the advent of peace. Churches, the media, schools, and government agencies conducted a heavy-handed campaign to reconstruct the nuclear family.... A tactic of this campaign was to isolate homosexual men and women and identify them, like Communists, as dangerous and invisible enemies" ("Marching to a Different Drummer," 391). The very tactic of which Bérué6 writes reinforces the haunting status of homosexuality in this culture, its invisible but palpable existence. Another historical factor that can be read into the female hauntings in The Uninvited is a terror of female bonding in general, regardless of sexual desire or orientation. Because the film was released during the war, it may also express cultural anxieties about nonsexual female friendships and work relationships that flourished in the absence of men.
  61. ↑ Castle, Apparitional Lesbian, 2.
  62. ↑ Judith Mayne, Directed by Dorothy Arzner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 178-79.

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