Echo and Narcissus

"Do women in classical Hollywood cinema ever truly speak for themselves? Amy Lawrence examines women's voices in eight classic films to show how their speech is repeatedly constructed as a "problem," an affront to male authority. This book expands feminist studies of the filmic representation of women by adding voice to the agenda, enabling us to see these classics in new ways and to ask new questions of other films." "Using Sadie Thompson (1928), Blackmail (1929), Rain (1932), The Spiral Staircase (1946), Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), Notorious (1946), Sunset Boulevard (1950) and To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Lawrence illustrates how, within narratives that require women's submission to patriarchal roles, their attempts to speak provoke increasingly severe repression. She also shows how women's speech is interrupted, made difficult, or conditioned to a suffocating degree by sound technology itself. Telephones, phonographs, voice-overs, and dubbing are foregrounded, silencing women and restoring the primacy of the image." "In feminist and literary criticism the term "voice" is used to define broad issues of authorship and point of view. In film studies, however, the physical voice itself is emphasized. Echo and Narcissus shows how assumptions about the "deficiencies" of women's voices and women's speech are embedded in the history, technology, uses, and marketing of sound, and how the ideologically loaded cinematic and narrative conventions governing the representation of women in Hollywood film include the construction of women's voices. Book jacket."--BOOK JACKET.