The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Theories of Representation and Difference) [Paperback]

Mary Anne Doane (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 22, 1987 | ISBN-10: 025320433X | ISBN-13: 978-0253204332 | Edition: First edition.

"Brilliantly argued and lucidly written... the definitive psychoanalytic account of the repression of woman in Hollywood cinema." —Tania Modleski

"... complex and challenging... " —The Women"s Review of Books

"... magnificently ambitious... some of the most original and intelligent essays in film theory today." —Journal of Modern Literature

"... deeply commited to the psychoanalytic approach... " —Contemporary Sociology

The Desire to Desire traces the way in which female spectatorship is specified primarily by its lapses or failures, arguing that the women's film simultaneously asserts and denies female desire, attributing to the woman only an impossible gaze.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

What is female spectatorship? When Hollywood films are geared for an audience of women, what ideals do they tend to promote? How should feminist theory contend with the image of women that the cinema passes on? In The Desire to Desire Mary Ann Doane responds to these questions, focusing specifically on "woman's pictures" of the 1940s. She argues that while most of the films she discusses are conceived through lenses that are masculine in nature, feminists attempting to critique these films should not dismiss them as sexist or attempt to develop a way of seeing that is simply the opposite of the one handed down. Instead, Doane offers a critique of vision itself, contrasting the way the camera views the women in these films, the way the films' female characters look out onto their worlds, and the way the Hollywood movie industry manufactures images that it expects female audiences to consume.

From Publishers Weekly

A professor of film and semiotic theory at Brown University and co-editor of Re-vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, Doane offers a study of four genre subgroups of "the woman's film" of the 1940s: "medical discourse" films, in which male doctors treat female patients (Possessed; maternal melodramas (To Each His Own; love stories (Humoresque; and "paranoid women's films" (Rebecca. Using elements of feminism, psychoanalysis and film theory, she argues that these films simultaneously assert and deny female desire, attributing to the woman only a "gaze" that is impossible for her to expand on or realize. She also asserts that the "processes of imaging women and of specifying the gaze in relation to sexual difference, like most forms of sexism, are far more deeply ingrained than one might suspect." While suggesting avenues for future study, this work is mainly for those committed to the author's viewpoint.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Indiana University Press; First edition. edition (June 22, 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 025320433X
• ISBN-13: 978-0253204332
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #487,451 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars really awesome used book, October 2, 2005

By 

Jennifer Ann Vilchez (Berkeley, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s (Theories of Representation and Difference) (Paperback)

Thank you for the great book, it was better than I thought it would be for my very first used book order online. Thank you so much.