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feelings and thoughts she evokes, and how well the film maker has drawn
the cultural matrix of which she is an integral part. If Rayette is a pathetic
and hopeless figure at whom it is possible
to
laugh, it is not an unqualified
or glib laughter she evokes. We do not, in the end, take her for granted,
though we know that serious engagement of issues that affect her is beyond
her, and will have to be urged upon more competent individuals. What
makes Rayette what she is, is not the simple fact that she is a woman, but
that she is a particular kind of woman in a culture better equipped to satisfy
other kinds. The density of the film 's imagined universe is a function of its
resistance to the feminist call for willed transcendence, and to other similar
demands .
3. The theory assumes that a new perception of women is self-evidently
useful and progressive, and that right-thinking people will agree upon an
ideological framework in which to structure just such a perception . The issue
here is of course much larger than a limited concern with movies and the
demands made upon them by feminist critics, and it is not therefore some–
thing we ought to neglect. Briefly put, feminist critical theory supposes that
in the current state of our culture there can be no rational disagreement on
key issues, attitudes which have as a consequence become almost canonically
prescriptive. Thus, like most other forward-looking people, Ms. Mellen
sneers with knowing disdain at' .Catholic doctrine itself which values obedi–
ence above individual judgment," and by extension at benighted persons
who seek to design their lives in accordance with the values of modesty and
obedience. Ms. Mellen finds nothing peculiar or disturbing in the unquali–
fied reliance upon a negative ethic of individual judgment and the appeal to
spontaneous emotion. Old-fashioned characters, in this view, have nothing
to teach us, and simplicity of conviction is mere simple-mindedness.
Feminist critics find most deplorable any work of art which promotes,
no matter how complexly and ambivalently, an idea of women as biologi–
cally rooted and therefore limited creatures. This is not surprising, since,
if
we are to have
II
a new perception of women," we shall need to believe that
there is nothing unalterable, nothing biologically inherent in them, aside
from their capacity
to
bear children . Film directors who suggest that women
may suffer because of instinctual drives which at the same time it may not be
in their interests to resist or refuse
to
acknowledge, become enemies of en–
lightenment, of the emergent brave new world. That
is
why the great Swedish
film maker Ingmar Bergman has become anathema to so many feminists,
including Ms. Mellen, who devotes a large part of her book
to
an attack on
his work. Bergman is far from a biological or Freudian reductionist, but he
is notoriously committed to a view of human beings, men and women,
which insists upon the significance, not the primacy, of instinct and of
