Stella Dallas (1937)

For me this film was a rare character study of a woman that encompassed over 20 years of her life. Barbara Stanwyck gave a really great performance as Stella Dallas, a lower class girl that marries up bit then refuses to leave her small town and winds up devoting everything of herself to her daughter. It is obviously a look at what a self-sacrificing mother should be, but there is something tragic about Stella and her relation to fashion and acquiring material objects (like furs) as status symbols. Over the course of the film, which is meant to be about 20 years of her life, we see Stella's relationship to these objects and her dress slowly spiral out of control as her lower class complex roots itself ever more deeply into her psyche. By the end of the film she is an over-exaggerated embarrassment and the flits of her self-awareness of her over-display are the most dramatic, charming and well acted parts of the film. She is struggling with knowing that she has lost control of her fashion and staying resilient as they strong woman she always has been.

At the beginning her motivations really suck and make no sense to me, watching this movie today. She married the man of her dreams and had a child. Why didn't she want to go to New York with him and live the good life? Instead she stayed in her small town, to stay in the small town upper-class circles and hang out with the drunk. Her decision to stay seems so unmotivated and out of character, but then colors her downward spiral and misery for the rest of the film. I was left asking the whole time "Why doesn't she just move to New York already?"

In class we talked about Stella's push and pull of recognition and resistance in relation to class and how different classes use money/fashion to show status. This returns in the 80s and 90s with Working Girl and Pretty Woman. Pretty Woman is a parable about capitalism. Gere finds a soul in a hooker with a heart of gold. In relation to Bartky Julia Roberts is a woman learning to survey herself through the eyes of patriarchy. Of course there is no way to understand black maid in Stella Dallas or the guy carrying the luggage in Pretty Woman in relation to the readings for today and 2nd wave feminism.