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Films
Spanglish
Thomas Wartenberg ponders the classic dilemma of the Good Mother in a film about ethnicity, renunciation and cookery: Spanglish.
Feminist film theorists have found the maternal melodrama to be fertile ground for speculation. Films in this genre, very popular during the classical era in Hollywood, tell the stories of women who are forced to choose between motherhood and romance, as if patriarchy refused to allow women to find fulfillment in both of these spheres simultaneously. The feminists’ idea is that these films accurately portray the double bind in which women find themselves, for they cannot take care of their progeny in the way they would like and also find satisfaction for themselves in adult romance.
The paradigmatic film of this type is King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937). Born in a small mill town in New England, Stella (Barbara Stanwyck) has aspirations to live among its mill owners rather than the working-class family in which she finds herself.
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