#women on screen

oh-sewing-circle:

“Similar to the transformation of the homosexual pansy to asexual sissy, the sexualized mannish women of the pre-Code era were transformed into asexual tomboys or cold maiden aunts. Lesbian-film theorists Patricia White and Rhona Berenstein have argued that another method for hinting about lesbian desire in Code-era films was to keep the lesbian character offscreen altogether. In Rebecca (1940) and The Uninvited (1944), for example, queer women are dead by the time each film begins. As the other characters search for these women (or seek to understand their deaths), a sense of dark and taboo secrecy begins to assert itself, and audiences are left to guess exactly what that secret might be. Various moments in the films imply that the dead women were intimately involved with other women―but neither the films nor their characters explicitly define what those relations were. Letters and memos indicate that Production Code officials were aware that these relations could be read as lesbian and worked with filmmakers to keep them obscure enough to earn the Code’s seal of approval. Rebeccca also has a more obvious onscreen queer―Rebecca’s housekeeper and personal maid Mrs. Danvers, played by Judith Anderson, in a long black skirt and a tightly pulled-back hair bun. In one sequence, Mrs. Danvers takes the new lady of the house through Rebecca’s meticulously preserved bedchamber. Almost as if hypnotized, Mrs. Danvers lovingly caresses Rebecca’s pillowcases, her combs, and even her sheer stockings and underwear, ‘made especially for her by the nuns in the convent of St. Clair.’ Mrs. Danvers never specifically says that she was in love with her former companion, and the word lesbian itself is never spoken. But her obsessive, creepy devotion to Rebecca is made quite clear.”

-FromQueer Images: A History of Gay and Lesbian Film in America by Griffin Benshoff