Feminism and Ideology: The "Terms" of Women's Stereotypes

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Feminism and Ideology: The "Terms" of Women's Stereotypes Author(s): Ellen Seiter Source: Feminist Review, No. 22 (Spring, 1986), pp. 58-81Published by: Palgrave Macmillan JournalsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1394937Accessed: 19-07-2015 06:04 UTC

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FEMINISM AND IDEOLOGY: The Temxs of Women's Stereotypes Ellen Seiter

Terms of Endearmentl belongs to a cycle of quality family melodramas produced in the US since 1979 which have been well received by critics, lauded within the industry and popular at the box office. In Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Ordinary People (1980) and On Golden Pond (1981), the narratives focused on the importance of the father's role (played by Dustin Hoffman, Donald Sutherland and Henry Fonda, respectively), and on- men as sources of emotional support in the nuclear family, thus displacing women as wives and mothers from their conventional place at the centre of the family melodrama. Each of these films has been criticized for embodying conservative, anti- feminist values, by punishing women who work outside the home (Seiter,1983). Like these films, Terms of Endearment (1983) portrays a white, upper-middle class family and features prrstigious actors - Jack Nicholson, Shirley MacLaine and Debra Winger. But in this film women re-take centre stage as the narrative focuses on the relationship between mother and daughter. There is also an infusion of other generic elements, most notably the woman's film, the situation comedy and the made-for-TV-movie (Kellner, 1985). Like its predecessors, Terms of Endearment has been harshly criticized by left-liberal critics, who have seen the film as a 'right-to-life soap opera' (Biskind,1984; Sarris,1983).

Terms of Endearment successfully tapped into a cultural interest in mother-daughter relationships which flourished in the media. The film's advertising, which has featured various shots of MacLaine and Winger posed in affectionate exchange with one another, snapshot style, has emphasized this aspect of the narrative. Women's advice columns, magazines and programmes on daytime television began to capitalize on this interest in mothers and daughters in the late seventies. Nancy Friday's bestseller My Mother, My Self was published in 1977. The ABC daytime serial General Hospital climbed to the top of the Nielsen ratings after producer Gloria Monty decided to concentrate on the relationship between the teenage character Laura Weber and her mother Lesley. The Phil Donahue Show broadcast several

FeministReview No 22, February 1986



58 Feminist Review

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discussions about mothers and daughters. Recently, a mother and daughter team, Wynonna and Naomi Judd, has recorded a top country and western single (entitled 'Mama, He's Crazy').

The media attention to mother-daughter relationships grows directly out of the women's movement with its concentration on consciousness-raising groups, the examination of personal history and the way that gender roles are learned. There has been a large and original amount of feminist research on mothers and daughters. In 1977, Adrienne Rich published Of Woman Born, an analysis of motherhood 'as institution and experience'. Nancy Chodorow (1978) has written a compelling, if controversial, re-reading of Freud to account for the strength of the mother-daughter bond - a relationship which is, according to Chodorow, never entirely resolved. Similarly, French theorists Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray have discussed the psychoanalytic model, its relationship to the mother-daughter relationship and the problematic of the mother's desire (Hirsch, 1981). While the sizeable body of psychoanalytically informed research on mothers and daughters and on the model of spectatorship dominant in film theory and its relation to female spectators is outside my interests here, it represents an important attempt by feminists to respond to the influential psychoanalytic model (Kaplan, 1983b). The significance of feminist research on mothers and daughters has been explained by Marianne Hirsch this way:

There can be no systematic and theoretical study of women in patriarchal culture, there can be no theory of women's oppression, that does not take into account woman's role as a mother of daughters and as a daughter of mothers, that does not study female identity in relation to previous and subsequent generations of women, and that does not study that relationship in the wider context in which it takes place: the emotional, political, economic, and symbolic structures of family and society. Any full study of mother-daughter relationships in whatever field, is by definition both feminist and interdisciplinary. (1981:202)

This article brings together contemporary feminist research from the social sciences with the ideological analysis of film and television. Stereotypes are one area in which theories about ideology and cultural representation can be most helpfully informed by feminist theory. Terms of Endearment provides a good example for such an analysis for two reasons. First of all, as a family melodrama, it already problematizes relationships within the nuclear family, generational conflict and the separation of the public and the domestic spheres. Second, the film provides relatively realistic and complex versions of stereotypes about women, and was therefore widely apprehended as an especially moving, powerful and true-to-life story.

Terms of Endearment embodies many elements of the rhetoric of the anti-abortion New Right which has been prominent in the US media of the 1980s. This article offers an ideological analysis of the



Stereotypes inFilm 61

film while avoiding the tendency to read the text as 'nothing but ideology', and in doing so failing to account for its 'use value' as a cultural product for a large audience of women. Terry Lovell has argued that the theory of ideology advanced by Louis Althusser, which has been extremely influential on film theory and textual analysis, is faulty in its identification of cultural production as ideology. Lovell suggests that there must be a 'strategic withdrawal' of the concept of ideology from certain areas - cultural production among them - in order for the term to retain its usefulness:

If ideology can be specified more naxTowly, less inclusively, then the degree of closeness/distance between ideology and given instances of cultural production can be gauged. We are not entitled to assume that cultural production per se is also and at the same time the production of ideology, even where that cultural production takes the form of capitalsst commodity production. (1983:48)

Althusser's 'appropriation of the categories of experience and practical activity for ideology' is mistaken, according to Lovell, because these are essential features of the capacity to formulate a critique of ideology, to produce knowledge outside of the prevailing ideological order (1983:49). Lovell's critique of Althusser is particularly important for feminist analysis, since any theory of ideology must account for the existence of the women's movement, feminist activism and women's widespread recognition of and protest against sexism in the media.

In this article I will be using Lovell's definition of ideology as:

. . . the production and dissemination of erroneous beliefs whose inadequacies are socially motivated. This definition recognises two other categories: erroneous beliefs which are not so motivated, and valid beliefs which are, but places them both outside the category of ideology. (1983:51-2)

This definition has particular usefulness for feminist criticism, since it allows questions about the appeal of cultural products which are not specifically feminist - how these are used in everyday life, what kind of pleasure they provide - without reducing the audience to a mass of duped spectators suffering from false consciousness. Terms of Endearment offers many reactionary ideas about motherhood, sexuality and the nuclear family, where, to use Lovell's terms, 'key areas of experience and practical activity are suppressed, denied or distorted' (1983:51). But the film must also be seen as having successfully inserted itself into a larger social and cultural interest in mother-daughter relationships- an interest triggered, in part, by the feminist movement. Terms of Endearment validated certain aspects of women's social reality which cannot be reduced to ideology: the intensity of the mother-daughter bond, the arduousness of childcare



62 Feminist Review

and housework, the sexual desire of middle-aged women. Feminist analysis must account for the kinds of pleasure films such as Terms of Endearment offer women as an audience, both in their recognition of shared experience and in their expression of wish-fulfilment. We must understand how Terms of Endearment rings true, as well as how it falsifies our lives.

Melodramatic satisfactions

Melodramas provide the audience with situations which are analogous to those commonly experienced in family and personal life . . . In melodrama our interest is not in the gradual exposition and development of a character's personality and decision making, but rather in the direct portrayal of the social psychological situation itself in its artistically disguised, but relatively 'raw' form. (Kleinhans, 1978:43)

Terms of Endearment follows more than thirty years in the lives of its heroines, Aurora Greenway and her daughter, Emma. This extended time span for the narrative lends the film an episodic quality typical of the family melodrama, which tends to chronicle- in rapid succession - the joys and sorrows of family life and to produce in the spectator a kind of emotional roller-coaster effect (Elsaesser, 1973). Before the titles' sequence has ended, Emma's father has died and she has grown from infancy to adolescence. The film's central problems - Aurora's unconventional, narcissistic personality and a reversal of traditional mother-daughter roles between Aurora and Emma- are played out across a series of events which span the next fourteen years: Emma's marriage to Flap Horton (a man Aurora disapproves of), the birth of her three children, Emma's marital problems, Aurora's affair with a middle-aged playboy, terminal illness and the reconstitution of the family.

Evaluations of the film's 'realism' based on this episodic structure filled the critical reviews at the time of Terms of Endearment's release. The film was condemned for 'sloppy pacing, episodic sitcom structures, characters introduced and then dropped like hot potatoes', then was charged with being 'unbelievable' on the one hand (Beale, 1984) while being hailed as dealing with 'the absolute stuff of real life from new and sometimes dazzling angles' on the other (Benson, 1983). Such critical disagreement has typified discussion of melodrama's (and especially soap opera's) realism, and has often failed to take into account the conventional nature of all popular narrative forms.

The widespread tendency to see Terms of Endearment as somehow 'true-to-life' presents a particularly interesting question for feminist analysis. While the narrative is highly conventional, bearing resemblances to such nineteenth-century melodramas as Mrs Henry Wood's East Lynne, each narrative episode represents a landmark in personal life as it is experienced by many women: marriage,




pregnancy, childbirth, separation from the other, marital problems (f1nancial and emotional), the return to the maternal home, the ordeal of illness. The f1lm conf1nes itself to white, middle-class, heterosexual norms - or rather, idealized norms, since most women work outside the home, unlike Emma and Aurora. Yet the f1lm focuses on the emotional significance of events which occur in most women's lives. Each of the narrative situations has special relevance to the way women struggle with demands placed on them as adults in a society based on gender inequality. Many of the film's scenes address those areas of greatest conflict, tension and contradiction in terms of the social organization of women in the family: economic dependence of women on men, women's sole responsibility for childcare and for housework, and the isolation of women in the domestic sphere (while men pursue wage-earning in the public sphere). As the film progresses, its tenor changes from that of situation comedy to that of melodrama, and the hardships experienced by Emma accumulate, promoting an increasing emotionalism. Part of the recurring appeal of melodrama is made possible because the social organization of the family means that some experiences are shared by women across class lines, such as the struggle for independence, the desire to move away from home, conflicts over money and where the family will live, friction between spouses and in-laws, and between mother and daughter. Many scenarios found in family melodramas are emotionally charged because they correspond to situations of conflict in the social order, in the family, in relations between men and women and in relations among women. Identif1cation is made possible because they are social and shared, rather than merely emotional and individual.2

Most ofthe scenes in Terms of Endearment take place in the home. The restriction to domestic space contributes to the film's sense of familiarity, despite the affluence of its setting (much of the film takes place in a wealthy section of Houston). Emma, who bears none of the liberated trappings of the heroines of women's f1lms of the 1970s such as The Turning Point (1977) or An Unmarried Woman (1978), remains at home throughout most of the film, except for during her brief aflair with a middle-aged banker, Sam Burns, whom she meets at the grocery store. We see Emma involved in the routines of childcare and domestic work in scene after scene: folding laundry, making the children's school lunches, caring for a sick baby, putting the kids to bed, seeing them off to school, visiting the paediatrician, making dinner. More than any other kind of work, housework and childcare are invisible, because they are performed by workers who are isolated in the home and because the work must be repeated so often. It is invisible in a cultural sense, since it is rarely represented anywhere other than in television commercials (which purport to do away with housework through the use of commodity goods). The visibility of women's everyday work in Terms of Endearment may have given the f1lm a more realistic look to its women viewers than its conventional narrative would make it look to male critics. Housework and childcare



64 Feminist Review

are also two of the greatest producers of stress in women's lives, as the work of feminist sociologists Ann Oakley (1974) and Heidi Hartmann (1981) has shown. Terms of Endearment not only represents the routines of domestic work, but it also valorizes them through association with the selfless, heroic and loving Emma.

The film's peak dramatic conflict parallels a serious social one: it is the logical result of gender inequality in the family.3 After devoting herself to the service of others, caring for the home and the children unassisted for years, Emma discovers that her husband has betrayed her by moving the entire family to Nebraska against Emma's wishes (in order to continue his affair with another woman). All of Emma's sacrifices appear, at this moment in the film, to be futile- even her children are difficult and ungrateful. Rather than offer any criticism of the nuclear family, the film allows Emma to leave it all behind, to quit her job, as it were. She discovers that she is terminally ill and receives, on her deathbed, the full expression of appreciation and love for all she has done. Through her death, Emma is granted a status she never enjoyed in life: the housewife and mother as martyr.

In its portrayal of primary life changes and rites of passage for women, in its depiction of everyday work in the home, and in its attention to the problems of a life devoted to serving others, Terms of Endearment addresses some very real and poignant contradictions in women's lives. The film's ending, however maudlin and masochistic, must also be seen as offering a kind of wish-fulfilment: the granting of a particularly valorized status to the heroine while allowing her to relinquish her role in the family.

The good mother

. . . stereotypes have what I refer to as a 'flexible range'. Essentially the same stereotype can be presented very starkly and blatantly or relatively complexly and 'realistically' . . . Aesthetic disputes about whether or not a certain character in a film is a 'stereotype' may concern a relatively complex and 'realistic' version of a stereotype. This flexibility is undoubtedly important in maintaining credibility and communicability. (Perkins, 1979:146)

The character Emma Horton in Terms of Endearment incorporates several stereotypes about women, both positive - good mother, earth mother, country girl - and negative - dowdy wife, mother who 'doesn't keep herself up', nagging wife. The success of the characterization derives, impart, from the actor Debra Winger's career-long association with such roles, in Ellms such as Urban Cowboy (1980) and An Officer And A Gentleman (1982), where she plays a down-to-earth country girl who knows how to stand by her man. In Terms of Endearment, Winger's role is expanded to encompass motherhood. The attributes which signal the character's status as a good mother also increase her




susceptibility to exploitation. From the film's first scenes, Emma exhibits the capacity to be emotionally accessible at all times to everyone around her: mother, husband, best friend, children. Only after she has contracted cancer can she be cared for by others and voice her own demands. (Even on her deathbed she concerns herself primarily with what will happen to her children.)

The main term of the stereotype of the good mother is sacrifice. The historical moment when this became the central feature of the ideology of motherhood can be traced to the seventeenth century, as Elizabeth Badinter has demonstrated. Reviewing the writing on motherhood in Europe, Badinter observes:

As the maternal role gained in responsibilities, they repeatedly insisted, in proportionately louder voices, that devotion was an integral part of 'feminine nature, and the surest source of her happiness'. If a woman did not consider this her calling, morality was called in to help, requiring her self-sacrifice. This calamity must have been more common than anyone wanted to admit, since by the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, motherhood was discussed only in terms of suffering and sacrifice, omitting through either oversight or deliberate neglect the promise of happiness that should 'naturally' have been the result. (1981:232)

The stereotype of the good mother insists that the capacity for sacrifice is innate to all women.

One of the ways in which the film establishes Emma Horton as a good mother is through her association with 'naturalness' in speech, in dress, in interpersonal style, in sexuality and, finally, in a direct connexion to emotional life. Emma Horton speaks with a southern- rural accent. She neglects the artificial codes of fashion, dressing at home in functional, men's clothes in many scenes (flannel shirts, long johns, heavy woollen socks).4 She exhibits a lack of artifice in her interpersonal relationships by repeatedly telling others what is on her mind and confronting them in search of the truth. Her naturalness is further confirmed by her sexual desires, which are spontaneous, frequent, easily satisfied, linked to procreation and therefore 'naturally' heterosexual. Terms of Endearment emphasizes Emma's direct connexion to emotional life and the happiness she derives from simple pleasures: watching her son play in the yard, buying her husband a present, receiving a hug from her mother. Emma's happiness results from her being 'so easy to please', as Flap tells her in the hospital.

Even Emma's extra-marital afEair seems to be an act of emotional generosity, proving that her capacity for love is not limited to family. Sam Burns is so lonely and pathetically in love with Emma, as well as being sexually deprived (since his own wife will no longer make love with him), that Emma could scarcely refuse him, good-hearted as she is. The scenes of love-making between Emma and Sam Burns were



66 Feminist Review

reportedly edited out of the film, something which desexualizes the afEair, presents it as a kind of charitable act on Emma's part.

Emma Horton's characterization in Terms of Endearment exemplifies a 'relatively complex' version of stereotyping - the kind of stereotype which is widely recognized as 'realistic'. T. E. Perkins's essay, 'Re-Thinking Stereotypes' (1979), is extremely useful when analysing stereotypes of women and the extent to which they may be thought of as ideological, that is, both erroneous and socially motivated.5 Perkins reminds us that the term stereotype is usually used to mean that a representation is simply false, but that this negates the potential power of stereotypes in socialization and as a means of controlling relationships. The notion that stereotypes are erroneous is like arguing 'that the social (that is, commonly accepted) definitions of you have no effect on you, in which case it would be very difficult to see how ideology or socialisation works at all' (Perkins, 1979:140). The strength of a stereotype, and its usefulness in the process of socialization, are based on three factors: 'its simplicity; its immediate recognisability (which makes its communicative role very important); and its implicit reference to an assumed consensus about some attribute or complex social relationships' (1979:141). Perkins offers a useful outline of the systematic way in which stereotypes distort social relationships, while insisting that their strength lies in a 'combination of validity and distortion' (1979:154). Cultural representations (which usually employ stereotypes) may be much better analysed using Perkins's distinctions between what is true and false in stereotypes, and her model of how stereotypes falsify social reality:

. . . stereotypes present interpretations of groups which conceal the 'real' cause of the group's oppressed position. Secondly, stereotypes are selective descriptions of particularly significant or problematic areas and to that extent they are exaggerations. (1979:155)

What is ideological, then, about the stereotype of the good mother is the attribution of a particular set of characteristics - a capacity for nurturance, attentiveness to the psychological and emotional states of others, willingness to sacrifice one's own desires for the needs of others - to woman's nature. According to the stereotype, most women are born with the talent for mothering: it is not learned. In Terms of Endearment, Emma begins to exhibit nurturing behaviour as a child, while her mother, Aurora, behaves in a selfish, childish fashion. Stereotypes of good mothers obscure the fact that the capacity for mothering is learned by girls in the nuclear family as a result of the sexual division of labour. The social organization of the family, in which women take primary responsibility for childcare and for the family's psychological and emotional needs, will tend to reproduce girls who are better at mothering than boys.

The stereotype of the good mother is a distortion because it defines the practice of mothering in terms of characteristics which are not



Stereotypes in Film 67

essential to the care of children but which are essential to a social order in which women serve men, care for their material needs (the reproductive work of shopping, cooking, cleaning, etc.) as well as their emotional ones, and in which women are heterosexual, monogamous and sexually available to the men they care for. Many features of the good mother stereotype (such as chastity, self-sacrifice, cleanliness, obedience) are in fact characteristics of the good wife in traditional marriage, where the wife has very little social power. The stereotype confirms the belief that women must mother because they have the innate capacity to do so. What is absent from the stereotype - what it distorts - is the fact that childcare has a very low status in our society. As M. Rivka Polatnick has persuasively argued, one of the reasons that men do not rear children in our society is because so little social power is attached to it: 'Women's responsibility for children in the context of the nuclear family is an important buttress for a male-dominated society. It helps keep women out of the running for economic and political power' (1983:20). In Terms of Endearment, Emma's zeal for the role of mother (she tells Flap on their honeymoon, 'I hope I get pregnant tonight') obscures the fact that she has no discernible options: no money of her own, no skills or education, no experience of working. When Flap decides to move to Nebraska, Emma says that she does not know why she stays with him except that 'he's cute'. Such an explanation obscures what little choice she has in the situation, short of moving back home with her mother.

The film insists that work in the home is the only natural and morally correct role for women by bringing Emma into contact with a group grossly stereotyped as 'career women'. (The film used a stereotype here that was so blatant that even favourable reviews of the film took note of it.) After the doctor informs Emma that she has cancer, she visits her best friend, Patsy, who is now living in New York City. Patsy introduces Emma to three of her city friends, women who are visibly shocked when Emma tells them, 'I never really worked'. Emma's plain clothes and lack of make-up contrast sharply with the women's high-fashion look and affected speech. Realizing that she has been patronized by the women because she is a traditional wife and mother, Emma vents the full fury of her moral rectitude:

Why do those women have to act like that? In less than two hours two of them told me that they had had abortions. Three of them told me they were divorced. One of them hasn't talked to her mother in four yenars and that one has her little Natalie in a boarding school because she has to travel for her job?!! I mean hell, Patsy! Oh, the one with the yeast disease, she has vaginal herpes. If that's fit conversation for lunch, what's so god awful terrible about my little tumors?

Career women (the only women in the film besides Aurora's servant who work outside the home) are identified as heartless, unstable, even diseased - but the common feature on EmmaXs list of their moral



I

68 Feminist Review

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deficiencies is their lack of commitment to a husband, to the nuclear family. The laudatory stereotype of the 'good mother' relies on the pejorative stereotype of the 'career woman' in delimiting women's roles.

Emma's mothering differs radically from the behaviour and the attitudes of her own mother. Emma is shocked when her mother suggests she have an abortion rather than face a third pregnancy in the midst of marital and financial problems. When Emma's daughter Melanie is born she is the envy of all the women she knows, includillg




her mother. Emma does not learn how to mother, it comes to her instinctively. It is a natural process, like pregnancy itself (not something she acquires from experience with her own mother). Thus mothering, a socially learned function, is equated in the stereotype with pregnancy, a biological one. Women who do not mother according to the norms set by the stereotype of the good mother are deemed unnatural. One of the most pernicious things about the good mother stereotype is how it has affected real mothers who may suffer from tremendous guilt, or who may have their children taken away from them by the state if they do not meet the standard. The idolatry of the natural mother has had, by and large, a damaging effect on women, as Eva Feder Kittay explains:

. . . the gifts of maternal nature are for men: periods of romanticism have not been periods in which women have made advances toward autonomy. In idealizing the maternal aspects of women, men reduce the full scope of woman's human capabilities to her reproductive functions; by sentimentalizing an ideal mother, men can vent their envious anger on the actual woman who fails to meet the measure ofthe idea. (1983:106)

In the relationships between the laudatory stereotype of the good mother and pejorative stereotypes of career women the role of ideology can most clearly be seen.

The terms of women's stereotypes

A stereotype will probably develop about a group because it has, or is presenting, a problem (for example, changing status, difficult but central relationship, and so on). Consequently most stereotypes do concern oppressed groups (because a dominant group's position is relatively stable and unproblematic). (Perkins, 1979:147)

Perkins suggests that the positive or negative evaluation involved in a stereotype will be determined by the interests of the dominant groups in society. Black stereotypes uphold white supremacy; stereotypes of the poor or the working class present these groups as inherently less intelligent than the upper classes, thereby justifying the social order. Stereotypes of women evaluate characteristics based on their desirability vis-a-vis men. I have argued that the stereotype of the good mother has much more to do with women's relationship to men in marriage, and to roles in the nuclear family, than it does to the strict requirements of childcare. If we imagine the character Emma Horton as a single mother on welfare, we may see how rapidly her status changes and how similar characteristics are evaluated negatively in the stereotype 'welfare mother'. The class-bound nature of the stereotype becomes clear. Devotion to children on a full-time basis could be taken as laziness and the avoidance of working for pay; lack of



70 Feminist Review

skills and education could be taken as stupidity; her 'country' accent could connote being a 'hick', a hillbilly; her lack of interest in fashion could suggest slovenliness; her sexual drive could be seen as promiscuous. In stereotypes, the same characteristics are evaluated differently depending on the status of the group involved. Most stereotypes define women in terms of their relationships to men. They are ideological in that, in general, what is good for men (for maintaining a system of gender inequality) is presented as laudatory, and what is inconvenient, or conflict-producing, is presented as objectionable.

In Terms of Endearment Aurora Greenway, Emma's mother, presents a problematic figure because she is unmarried. Throughout the film, Aurora creates disruptions. The film's narrative can be seen as the process of recuperating Aurora into a 'normal' relationship with a man within a family. The story redeems Aurora as a mother at precisely the same time that it redeems her as a woman, by finally replacing her within the family as one who cares for children. The f1lm accomplishes its sympathetic evaluation of the character Emma through a negative comparison to Aurora Greenway. The tendency to dichotomize female figures in this way has a long cultural history (for example, Christian theology with its comparison of the Virgin Mary to Mary Magdalene, and to all mortal women), and has been analysed by many feminist writers since Simone de Beauvoir. Women in film have been represented according to a series of oppositions embedded in the narrative: virgin/whore, good girl/bad girl, good mother/bad mother. Despite the seeming diversity of the characters Emma and Aurora in Terms of Endearment, the representations run parallel, and in striking contrast, throughout the film: (see right).

Whiie this list comprises those aspects of the characterization specific to Terms of Endearment, many of these terms can be seen at work in other cultural representations which dichotomize female figures. Looking at the list we may notice that many of the opposing terms are frequently used, in a value-laden way, to characterize women, but are rarely used to characterize men. We do not, for instance, tend to pay attention to men's marital status, fertility, temperament, observance of fashion or sexual partners to nearly the same extent that we do women's. The comparison of Emma's dowdiness to Aurora's narcissism exemplifses what Roland Barthes has described as 'neither-norism', where a normative meaning is worked out by opposing two alternatives and revealing both to be unsatisfactory (1983:143). Standards of physical appearance for women present a particularly contradictory cultural demand, tantamount to the classic-double bind.

On the other hand, attributes which contribute to a pejorative characterization of Aurora Greenway are often given a laudatory connotation in representations of men. For instance, we expect men as breadwinners to concern themselves with material goods. Rebellious- ness is frequently associated with male heroes. Being educated or from




Emma PROCREATIVE MARRIED DOWN-TO-EARTH Use of slang and profanity, country-rural accent, living in Midwest DOWDY Unconcern with fashion, no make-up, unstyled hair, wearing men's clothes and socks, unglamorous

OBEDIENT Does not display anger, does not question husband, follows him to Iowa and Nebraska

SEXUALLY RECEPTIVE Sex for procreation (naturally heterosexual), spontaneous (desire for'quickies'), sexually available (asks Flap, 'How can you . . . make me wet just like that?'), sex as wholesome fun (making love to musical showtunes), orgasmic PRIMACY OF EMOTIONAL LIFE Marrying for love not money or status, open communication, unflagging nurturance of others, sentimental

SELF-SACRIFICIAL Putting the needs of others first HAPPY Close-ups of Emma smiling, relaxed: on phone, in bed, watching her children, scenes of Emma laughing

Aurora MENOPAUSAL SINGLE PRETENTIOUS Educated speech, Boston blue-blood background, overconcern with etiquette, putting on airs, prudish NARCISSISTIC Worry over appearance, overdressed, fussing with her clothes, choice of extremely feminine outfits: flounces, voile, low necklines, elaborately styled hair (which causes humiliation when she loses her hairpiece) REBELLIOUS Angry, hysterical outbursts, insults men, openly contemptuous of men, manipulative, abrasive,

. . .

wlsecracKlng

SEXUALLY INHIBITED Sexually unavailable to men, avoiding men's touch, angry response to being fondled by Breedlove, must have lights off to make love, celibate for many years and, by implication, frigid

PRIMACY OF MATERIAL GOODS Concern with appearances (her daughter's, her home) rather than comfort, concern with possessions (Renoir painting) rather than people (her grandchildren), 'hates to part with money', objects to Emma's marriage because of Flap's lack of wealth and status SELFISH Putting her own needs first CROSS Close-ups of Aurora frowning, grimacing, angry: on phone, in conversations with others, at dinner party



72 Feminist Review

an upper-class background is often positively associated with men, but with women it takes on the meaning of pretentiousness, being superior, being uppity. It also means something very different for a man to frown, to appear angry or to raise his voice than it does for a woman. When a man does not smile, we do not tend to evaluate this as being cross, but rather as being serious. Many of Emma's 'positive' characteristics - obedience, emotional vulnerability, selflessness - are present in stereotypes about men but receive, however, a negative evaluation: the wimp, the sissy, the hen-pecked husband, the guy who lets himself be pushed around. Perkins describes the relationship between male and female stereotypes this way:

Stereotypes of pariah groups may be unambiguously pejorative, but the pejorativeness of female stereotypes is concealed since they must resolve the specific contradictions of women's position. Hence the stereotype presents female characteristics as desirable, for women, and masculine characteristics as undesirable. (1979:158)

Perkins cites the trait 'intelligence' as an example of how something is shown to be undesirable by excluding intelligent women from being mothers (as with the career woman) or from sexuality (the bluestocking).

In Terms of Endearment these characteristics are embedded in a narrative which problematizes Aurora's mothering. The film belongs, in many respects, to the genre of the maternal melodrama.6 One example from Hollywood's classic period, Stella Dallas, has received considerable attention from feminist critics, and bears some resemblance to Terms of Endearment. E. Ann Kaplan has argued that Stella Dallas

. . . violates the patriarchal myth of the self-abnegating mother, who is supposed to be completely devoted and nurturing but not to satisfy any of her needs through the relationship with her child. She is somehow supposed to keep herself apart while giving everything to the child; she is certainly not supposed to prefer the child to the husband, since this kind of bonding threatens patriarchy. (1983a:84)

Like Stella Dallas, Aurora Greenway is condemned for wanting too much from Emma, as opposed to the neglectful mother who is condemned for abandoning the child, as in Kramer vs. Kramer. Mothers provide a good example of a group occupying a 'diffilcult but central position' about whom stereotypes will arise. Individual mothers are supposed to take sole responsibility for a child's physical, emotional, psychological and social development and to do so with little support from other individuals or, to a large extent, from institutions. In cultural representations, mothers alternately seem to mother too much (becoming 'overbearing') or not enough. The mother's role in society is so full of strains and contradictions that individuals




find it impossible to meet the demands adequately. Stereotypes increase the real mother's feelings of guilt and anxiety by presenting mothers as being selfish, either for mothering too much, or for mothering too little. In the stereotype, this is judged as the failure of individual women rather than a sign of the strain inherent in mothering as a social position.

In the film's first five sequences, Terms of Endearment dramatizes the common complaints of the daughter against the mother, identifying, as it leaps forward in time, the kinds of conflict described in Nancy Friday's bestseller My Mother, My Self. The first pre-titles sequence establishes Aurora's mothering as neurotic. The screen is black except for a child's night light visible in the lower right-hand corner of the screen. In voiceover we hear a man and a woman arguing (Aurora and her husband Rudyard - his only presence in the film). The man's voice - the voice of reason - argues: 'Honey, it's not good for you to be checking on the baby every five minutes imagining one terrible thing after another.' Aurora enters the room, flicks on the overhead light, comes up to the crib and tries to climb into it. In close-up we see her lean over the baby and pinch her arm until she begins to cry. 'Oh, good, that's better,' Aurora says, walking briskly out of the room. The positions are drawn: the mother is selfish and immature, even sadistic, the daughter is the victim receiving unwelcome attention - nagging- instead of love. In the next scene, which takes place after the father's funeral, Aurora pretends maternal concern for Emma when she wants to be taken care of herself (the film's mother-daughter role reversal). Emma must try to take care of her mother at the same time as she suffers her mother's incessant fussing: 'What are we going to do about this hair?' Aurora repeatedly asks. In the scene of adolescence, Aurora adjusts Emma's bra straps for her, nags her about coming home on time, ignores Emma's best friend. In the film's fourth sequence, Aurora's tyranny and thoughtlessness are confirmed. She informs Emma on the night before her wedding to Flap that she will not attend the ceremony, predicting that the marriage will 'ruin your destiny and make wretched your days' (an observation which turns out to be correct).

The terms of pejorative stereotypes of mothers have to do with specific activities which are expected of all mothers. The problem has to do with the frequency of such attentions to the child: the neglectful mother does them too rarely or not at all, the overbearing mother does them too much. Mothers' positions as authority figures are especially problematic. They are expected to teach the child what s/he must know in order to function in society, yet children do not find a great deal of confirmation of women's knowledge, wisdom or status in the society as a whole. The mother-daughter relationship is particularly troubled because part of the mother's socialization of the child consists of teaching her daughter a system of gender inequality in a society which purports to be egalitarian. The mother's attention to the daughter's appearance and her restriction of the daughter's activities, for



74 Feminist Review

example, may be sources of considerable resentment. The tendency towards mother-blaming- evident in many different cultural forms, as diverse as the film Terms of Endearment and the bestseller My Mother, My Self (Friday, 1977) - fails to recognize the way that mothers are required to fulf1l a socializing function. Judith Arcana explains:

Any society prepares its children to perform the tasks expected of adults - the forms our mothers teach us are those of contemporary women's roles - they are not, as we so often assume, the specific ideas, designs and purposes of our mothers. The job of mothers is to prepare their children to maintain society as it is, so they perpetuate their own situation. (1979:53-4)

In Terms of Endearment, Aurora's behaviour towards Emma is presented as a result of her personality (aggressive, self1sh) rather than her social role.

The mother-in-law stereotype logically extends the overbearing mother stereotype. Its popularity attests to the extent to which mothers-in-law are perceived as conflict-producing in our society; its crudity attests to the degraded status of mothers-in-law as a group. They may, in fact, be one of the few 'pariah groups' in which members can be white, middle class and heterosexual. The problem of the mother-in-law is inherent in the position of all mothers in a society where they are expected to relinquish their rights over children literally overnight. The situation takes its most aggravated form in the relationship between a mother and her son-in-law (jokes on this subject are the stock-in-trade of stand-up comedians). The stereotype devalues the counsel mothers offer to married daughters, holding it up as an object of ridicule. This masks the fact that the mother's influence frequently threatens the husband's authority over his wife. Anything which the mother-in-law does or says is interference, according to the stereotype, and an invasion of the husband's right to privacy; it has no status as the sharing of knowledge and experience - hence, 'old wives' tale'. The absence of a correspondingly strong father-in-law stereotype is very signif1cant: men rarely have primary responsibility for parenting in the first place, and they typically maintain some authority and control (often economic, through inheritance) over their children after marriage, therefore their position is less tension-ridden.

By the time Aurora Greenway becomes a mother-in-law in Terms of Endearment she has been so thoroughly discredited as a mother that her status is doubly degraded. Her repeated 'interfering' - telephone calls which interrupt Emma and Flap at moments of greatest intimacy - is not even based on sincere, selfless concern for Emma. Mother-in-law jokes, then, provide the f1lm's primary source of comedy. The humorous treatment of generational conflict is central to the genre and to situation comedy in particular; it provides Terms of Endearment with relief from an otherwise typically melodramatic story. Aurora's awkward adjustment to middle age is targeted for




comic treatment as well; her hysterical outbursts are played as slapstick. When Emma announces that she is pregnant with her first child (at a dinner party at her mother's house), Aurora trembles with rage, yelling, 'Why should I be happy about being a grandmother!' Emma's husband laughingly retorts, 'Does this mean you won't be knitting the baby any booties?', to which everyone at the table explodes with laughter. Aurora is correct in surmising that the 'grandmother knitting baby booties' is not a social status to be envied, but her inappropriate response to Emma's announcement simply confirms her selfishness - her sin against 'natural' mothering. The conflict between mother and son-in-law continues throughout Terms of Endearment, culminating in the dispute over custody of the children after Emma's death. In an extremely ambiguous ending, Flap is punished for his sexual infidelity by losing his children; Aurora 'wins' by gaining the chance to devote herself- once again - to mothering.

Social effects and sexual causes

When a woman's got a husband and you've got none, why should she take advice from you, even if you have read Balzac and Shakespeare and all them other high-falutin' Greeks! (Meredith Willson, The Music Man)

T. E. Perkins suggests that the primary way stereotypes function is by inverting cause and effect. Stereotypes about blacks, for example, refer to differences in educational levels between blacks and whites. The complex and deeply entrenched factors which keep blacks from succeeding in a white-dominated educational system- an effect of their subordinate position in a racist society- is represented in the stereotype as a single, racial characteristic: blacks are less intelligent than whites. Black stereotypes attempt to explain and to justify obvious inequalities in a society whose ofElcial ideology is racial equality. Perkins uses the example of the 'irrational, illogical, inconsistent (female logic) stereotype' to explain this ideological process. The housewife's job demands that a woman develop a variety of skills but that she be able to change skills very rapidly and that she shift attention from one task to the next frequently. The most obvious example of this is the case of housekeeping performed simultaneously with childcare, where the housewife must be constantly attentive to the child's needs while she cooks, cleans, does the laundry and so on:

What the stereotype does is to identify this feature of the woman's job situation, place a negative evaluation on it, and then establish it as an innate female characteristic, thus inverting its status so that it becomes a cause rather than an effect. It is these features of stereotypes which explain why stereotypes appear to be false - indeed, are false. The point is to identify their validity, because the strength of stereotypes lies in this combination of validity and distortion. (Perkins, 1979:154)



76 Feminist Review

The flightiness that is associated with women in the female logic stereotype is, in fact, a desirable characteristic for those who must perform the job of housewife. In the stereotype it is negatively evaluated, ascribed to nature and used to justify women's unsuitability to other kinds of labour.

This inversion of cause and effect operates in the stereotypes found in Terms of Endearment as well. In the characterization of Emma as a good mother we see how the fact that women mother - an effect of a long process of socialization in the family and outside of it - is turned into a cause: women mother 'naturally' therefore they, and only they, must mother. The same distortion lies behind both the pejorative stereotype (which presents the bad mother as unnatural) and the positive stereotype (which praises the good mother for fulfilling her natural destiny).

Women's sexuality is usually represented in stereotypes as the cause of a characteristic or set of characteristics which may be positively or negatively evaluated. Thus, Emma's procreative heterosexuality is seen as the source of her happiness, the reason she is 'so easy to please'. Women's essence, their very being, is usually tied to sexuality, something which obscures the social consequences for a woman of choosing not to identify with a man. In Terms of Endearment Aurora's aberrant behaviour is explained in the narrative as the result of her sexuality: she is frigid. Her hysterical outbursts are caused by her lack of sexual fulfilment, are not the result of her rage and frustration at being patronized and confronted by men, or of being powerless in a society which devalues menopausal women. Aurora's attempts to gain control are presented as a kind of lunatic impotence. In every scene which might convey her independence as a single mother, the film problematizes her lack of a sexual relationship with a man. Finally, her affair with Garrett Breedlove (who treats all women as sexual objects) 'cures' her of her over-mothering, her selfishness, her hysterical behaviour. Through sexual experience she gains maturity.

In the first half of the film Aurora obsessively strives for control - over Emma and everyone around her; it is not until she relinquishes control in her relationship with Breedlove that she becomes a Real Woman, a sympathetic character. The overbearing Aurora (who has expressed nothing but contempt for men until this point in the film) finally reveals her vulnerability. 'I'm a moth to flame,' she tells Emma, crying, 'I never thought I would start to need him.' Sexual fulfilment for Aurora means that she finally assumes the position of (monogamous) dependency on a man. The notion that this is the only morally correct and psychologically healthy position for a woman in society is what motivates the presentation of sexuality in all stereotypes about women. Adrienne Rich describes this as 'the lie of compulsory female heterosexuality':

The lie is many layered. In Western tradition, one layer- the romantic- asserts that women are inevitably, even if rashly and tragically, drawn




to men; that even when that attraction is suicidal (e.g. Tristan und Isolde, Kate Chopin's The Awakening) it is still an organic imperative. In the tradition of the social sciences it asserts that primary love between the sexes is 'normal', that women need men as social and economic protectors, for adult sexuality, and for psychological completion; that the heterosexually constituted family is the basic social unit; that women who do not attach their primary intensity to men must be, in functional terms, condemned to an even more devastating outsiderhood than their outsiderhood as women. (1980:657)

The powerful presence of this ideology in film and television narratives - which have obsessively dealt with heterosexual romance throughout their history- is obvious.

In the novel on which Terms of Endearment is based (a segment of which originally ran in Playboy magazine), the character Aurora Greenway becomes sexually involved with a neighbour because she can no longer afford to maintain her house. Frigidity plays no part in the characterization. The film's director James L. Brooks explained the significance of Aurora, as a 'woman about 50', and her affair with Breedlove, this way: 'I wanted to say something optimistic about that group of women in this country. I really did. And the way to do that was with a romance you could believe' (Brooks, 1984:22). The optimistic solution offered by Terms of Endearment is the sexualization of the middle-aged Aurora. Certainly this can contribute significantly to the film's appeal to women. As Terry Lovell (1981:52) has suggested about soap opera, the sexualization of middle-aged women can function as a refusal of the ageist depreciation of women who do not resemble the images of beauty which permeate the media. Enthusiasm in the media for those aspects of women's liberation which concentrate on sexual fulfilment in isolation from the demands for social and economic equality, however, does not necessarily serve the interests of women. The sexual code to which Aurora subscribes at the beginning of Terms of Endearment is part of a defensive strategy which was articulated by many feminists in the nineteenth century, who 'argued that sexuality needed to be controlled by women in order to bring men under the same standard of sexual morality as women, thus eliminating the double standard' (Ferguson, 1983:169). Under 'liberated' standards, women may be labelled repressed or frigid when they do not comply with the sexual desires of men. (This is precisely what happens with Aurora's first suitor in the film, Edward Johnson.) Sexual liberation per se does not necessarily entail a gain in power for some women, just as Aurora Greenway's afEair does not entail a liberation. The explanatory power given to frigidity in the narrative is what makes it so pernicious. Aurora is a bad mother because she is not in a sexual relationship with a man. After her affair with Breedlove, she stops calling on the phone, she stops nagging Emma, she learns how to love her daughter in an acceptable way.

The explanatory power given to sexuality in stereotypes about



78 Feminist Review

women who are black, Asian and Latino is much more insidious. By typing most women who are not white as promiscuous, or more 'natural', and therefore compelled by sexual desire, the stereotypes present them as lacking in self-control, therefore justifying their oppressed position and their abuse by (often white) men. Feminists have long recognized the crucial role that men's control of women's sexuality plays in the oppression of women. The definitive part sexuality plays in stereotypes about women is to be expected:

The inversion of effect into cause is the primary means of conceptually resolving the contradiction involved, for example, in the socialisation of oppressed groups. However, it can become a cause only because it makes ideological sense. The content of stereotypes is not arbitrary (nor are they interchangeable). Stereotypes are selective descriptions - they select those features which have particular ideological significance. (Perkins, 1979:156)

Conclusion

Audience rating: Primarily for women of all ages; but nominations and awards broaden the film's range to include all who might otherwise refuse to accompany sweethearts and wives. Business prediction: Very good in selected mid- to up-market popular cinemas. (Screen Internationcgl, 10 March 1984)

Every indication is that Terms of Endearment proved to be an enormously pleasurable experience for its mostly white and middle-class audience. Men could read the film as a domestic comedy, a screwball battle-of-the-sexes. Women could enjoy the humour and the satisfaction of seeing a film deal with some of the most emotionally charged and conflict-ridden aspects of everyday life. The narrative focus on a mother-daughter relationship is itself a significant break with the notion that women are always more interested in men than they are in each other. But the film also reveals the way that ideology touches on the most personal aspects of our lives: how we think about our children, our mothers, ourselves, our sexuality, our very thought processes. While this seems more conspicuous in some cultural representations (advertising, for instance) than in others, it remains a powerful force through stereotyping even in relatively complex, 'realistic' representations like Terms of Endearment. As feminists, we need to understand the power of such representations and the pleasure of recognition they offer women, as well as the distortions, exaggerations and reversals involved. We must try to understand what motivates laudatory and pejorative stereotypes; we must think hard about their effect on the way we see other women and the way we see ourselves.




Notes

Ellen Seiter teaches fWllm and television at the University of Oregon, USA.

I am indebted to Christine Gledhill, whose valuable article 'Developments in Feminist Film Criticism' greatly influenced my thinking and brought to my attention the work of Tessa Perkins.

Terms of Endearment (1983). Produced, directed and screenplay by James L. Brooks, with Debra Winger, Shirley MacLaine, Jack Nicholson. Paramount Pictures.

2 For a discussion of how women from different class backgrounds share similar mother-daughter conflicts, see Arcana (1979), Rich (1980) and Robinson (1976). Melodramas such as Terms of Endearment are so overwhelmingly white, that it would be ridiculous to speculate on any appeal to black women. But in its predominant TV form, the soap opera, melodrama captures a substantial black audience.

3 The political and psychological impact of the separation between public and private is discussed by Chodorow (1978) and Zaretsky (1976).

4 Cross-dressing takes on radically different connotations when the character is not coded as heterosexual, or is male, see Dyer (1980).

5 This paper has been strongly influenced by Christine Gledhill's invaluable overview of feminist film criticism (1984), to which I am indebted for the reference to T. E. Perkins's work.

6 See Kaplan (1983a) and Williams (1984) for a discussion of the maternal melodrama.

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80 Feminist Review

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Feminism and Ideology: The "Terms" of Women's Stereotypes

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