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IN THIS study I wish to examine a particular pedagogical application of video, specifically the use of cinema in a French literature class to help students become more aware of their role as receivers in the reading process. The rich critical debate about gender, point of view, and identification in film spectatorship since the seminal article by Laura Mulvey “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” gives us a structure based on a visibly accessible medium in which to examine the textual elements influencing the reception of a work. Expressions such as perception and point of view imply a visual context that can make analysis of these aspects in film appear less abstract than a similar analysis of a printed text, especially to students who have far more experience with film and video than with texts. We will see how the study of the films Le retour de Martin Guerre and Entre nous , in which gender plays a fundamental role in the formation of point of view, helped develop students' awareness of gender's importance in a variety of literary texts such as Erec et Enide, L'histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut , and Moderato cantabile. In the course I describe in this paper, my students and I did not study film as text, nor did we seek to compare a work of literature with its film version. My purpose was to use the films to help undermine a traditional reader's perspective in the students' and the teacher's approaches to the French texts we read together.
The course, a senior seminar, was designed to fill gaps in our students' preparation in French literature and civilization by presenting texts from a broad range of periods and examining them in their historical and social contexts. I also wished to choose a topic that would relate well to the students' contemporary environment and would allow them to draw connections to other texts, other subjects, and their personal experience. I chose to look at couples and relationships in a selection of French texts from the courtly love poetry of the Middle Ages to the satirical cartoons of Claire Bretécher. The course was titled Le Couple et le Rôle de la Femme dans la Litérature Française.
Discussing images of women in a class composed of ten female students gives the opportunity to observe the way these students have learned to relate to such images. Women in works read in most academic programs in French literature are routinely depicted from a predominantly male point of view, both through the male authorship of the canonical texts and through the male perspective of centuries of criticism. But many studies of cinematic point of view now available—most of them inspired by Mulvey's work—can raise students' awareness of how the reader or spectator in a patriarchal society is masculinized. Mary Ann Doane notes the relation between narrative cinema and narrative literature in this process:
The greater amount of leisure time associated with women authorized an analysis of the “feminization” of the process or reading. Yet, although the cinema is often theorized as the extension and elaboration of the nineteenth-century novel, its spectator is almost always conceptualized in the masculine mode. ( Desire 2)
If nineteenth-century narrative genres, written predominantly by men for consumption by women, address an implied audience as if that audience were male, it can be argued that these genres impose a male perspective on a female public. Doane explores the psychological pressure on the reader to accept the dominant point of view in a text in order to find pleasure and avoid feelings of exclusion:
At this historical moment within feminism there is a strong desire to read differently if not to receive differently—even if this entails a violence against the set of norms of criticism, a rewriting of the critical questions. The pressures are great—the pressure to find pleasure, the pressure to laugh, the pressure not to feel excluded from the textual field of a dominant mass culture.… Feminist film theory and criticism have forcefully demonstrated the extent to which aesthetic structures organize and orchestrate psychical investments defined by their very tenacity: (“Masquerade” 2)
Since the strength of these pressures is based on the power of aesthetic structures to manipulate the reader or spectator's fundamental psychological makeup, resistance to such manipulation must be very difficult. The culturally encoded reaction to the aesthetic experience is an important part of a person's identity. An attempt to alter those reactions threatens to undermine that identity and meets resistance from the deeply ingrained responses that contribute to a feeling of belonging to a society through participation in its culture. In a patriarchal society, the assumptions on which these responses are developed are masculine, so an aesthetics that depends on those assumptions cannot function without the expectation of masculine reactions in the audience, even in its female members. Thus the aesthetic experience itself encourages a woman to respond from a male point of view in order to find the pleasure that might be denied if she rejected this position. Not only does the text address the reader as masculine, but the reader tends to respond to the text from that same masculine mode.
What might be the effects of this masculinization of a female audience? We might expect that the adoption of a particular point of view not only would result in limitation of critical perspective on the texts being read or viewed but also could tend to influence one's approach to other works of art or to social issues, especially if such a point of view were dominant in the society. Such a learned male perspective must have an effect on the reader's general outlook beyond the reading process. Christine Gledhill gives a concise account of how masculinization occurs:
That the subject of mainstream narrative is the patriarchal, bourgeois individual: that unified centered point from which the world is organized and given meaning. Narrative organization hierarchizes the different aesthetic and ideological discourses which intersect in the processes of the text, to produce a unifying, authoritative voice or viewpoint. This is the position—constructed outside the processes of contradiction, difference and meaning production—which the spectator must occupy in order to participate in the pleasures and meaning of the text.
Since in this argument narrative organization is patriarchal, the spectator constructed by this text is masculine. Pleasure is largely organized to flatter or console the patriarchal ego and its Unconscious. Simultaneous sublimation and repression of femininity is literally reenacted in the way plot and camera place the female figure in situations of fetishistic idealization or voyeuristic punishment. This had led to the argument that female representations do not represent women at all, but are figures cut to the measure of the patriarchal Unconscious. In particular the “look” of the camera—mediated through the “gaze” of a generally male hero—has been identified as male. (65–66)
In order to find pleasure in such a reading of a text or film, the female reader or spectator must learn to see things from a dominant point of view.
Anne Friedberg applies Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to explore the effect of film on the audience as well as the psychological basis for the audience's reaction to film. In her analysis of the spectator's identification with images on the screen, she describes the audience's tendency to move toward the point of view expressed by a film or indeed any text: “Identification is a process which commands the subject to be displaced by the ‘other’; it is a procedure which refuses and recuperates the separation between self and other, and in this way replicates the very structure of patriarchy” (36). This loss of the identity in the presence of the other is brought about by an anxiety that undermines resistance to dominant forces. We can relate this identification to the “pressure not to feel excluded” (Doane, “Masquerade” 42) and to “the position … which the spectator must occupy to participate in the pleasures and meaning of the text” (Gledhill 65). The anxiety provoking recognition of difference suggests a relation between fetishism and identification that can help us understand the strength of the psychological pressure to conform without question to the intended point of view. According to Friedberg, “Identification is that which conceals and defers the recognition of dissimilitude. If fetishism is a relation incurred by the anxiety of sexual difference, identification is a relation incurred by the anxiety of pure difference” (40). Anxiety-based conformity that prevents a critical questioning of the values inherent in the point of view expected in the receiver of a literary text cannot help but limit such a receiver's critical perspective.
One important pedagogical goal in teaching criticism at the university level must be to develop the students' ability to be conscious of an intended point of view while stepping back from the text to define their own points of view through an awareness of their identities and their personal evaluations of the issues evoked by the text. In exploring this question as it relates to gender difference, E. Ann Kaplan suggests “that by developing feminist discourse outside of the cinema, we may be able to construct historical subjects who are capable of bringing to reception of dominant film, discourses that conflict with those offered. Through such experiences of contradiction we may produce change” (19). A constant reevaluation of point of view is essential in developing the independence needed to understand and resist identification. With this as one of my explicit pedagogical objectives, I encouraged my students to question the ubiquitous male definition of his partner's role in the couple and in society. A series of texts chosen to illustrate various visions of the couple permitted an evaluation of the relative benefits of the relationship for both partners and of the control exerted by one over the other. My students examined not only the system of values implied by the texts themselves but also the one implied by their own reading of the texts. They became aware, as did I, that they had learned to adopt the role of a male reader in order to be able to interpret French texts in an “acceptable” manner.
The students felt that, since early in high school, their teachers had discouraged them from interpreting or criticizing the values inherent in the point of view in a literary text. They had been taught to attempt to read through the worldview apparent in the text, without using their own values as bases for comparison. Although they had learned to avoid applying their present-day views as ahistorical absolutes, they had gone to the opposite extreme of believing the values expressed by the text to be unquestionable. This disengagement can also be seen as a screen protecting the individual student's values from public scrutiny by the class or the teacher. Thus in any text viewed as historical, that is, written before the students were born, they would see any apparent sexism not as an agent of influence on society but only as a natural reflection of prevalent social values. The tendency of female readers to accept the point of view of the intended male reader was especially apparent in my students' initial reactions to the “Turelure” chapters, especially chapter 27, in Aucassin et Nicolette , in which the king remains in bed after the birth of his child while the queen leads the army off to war. They were of course amused by the typical medieval inversion of roles leading to chaos. As the students were unaware that such ritualistic displays of paternity were and are common in many societies and have been documented in Western literature since Marco Polo, it did not immediately occur to them to analyze the king's actions as a reflection of fears prevalent in the male psyche. An examination of several passages from L'un est l'autre , by Elisabeth Badinter, which describe ritualistic couvade as an attempt by the male to acquire the prestige associated with fecundity, helped them consider the possible symbolic and psychological implications of this public assertion of paternity (39, 73–75). Badinter makes reference to prominent anthropologists and sociologists who attest that this widespread practice serves to assuage the distress common among new fathers (73); these allusions reveal an apparent amusement as a serious commentary on gender roles. Even more striking was my students' reading of Les femmes savantes. Moliére succeeds in drawing students into the humor of a text that portrays its female characters as ridiculous in their attempt to play a dominant (i.e., male) role that they were not meant for and that they are incapable of performing. After discussion helped students to establish a greater distance from the text, they decided that they did not approve of the notion, explicitly supported by the text, that it was acceptable for a woman to be intelligent only as long as she didn't let anyone know it. One text whose explicitly male point of view they had no trouble abandoning was Jean-Jacques Rousseau's chapter on the education of woman in Emile. There is a certain irony here, in that Rousseau's claim that a woman need learn only what is necessary to fulfill her natural role as man's servant was a powerful argument in pushing my students toward a feminist reaction.
I had assumed that the students would start from the male perspective of the implied reader. It was interesting, if also disquieting, to observe how hard it was for them to learn to see characters and situations from a different point of view. Naomi Segal's analysis of Manon Lescaut uses Freud's Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious as a basis for understanding how a story about a woman is passed from one man to another.
The woman reader is positively, not just negatively, unintended. Her absence is as essential as that of the woman in the smutty joke. She is therefore alienated in a literal sense: allowed access to the text only by pretending to be male, her actuality as a female is held off, “verfremdet.” (xiii)
The schema of the smutty joke, which always defines the woman as the other to reinforce the alliance between men, reflects the role of narration in establishing a relation between narrator and reader through the assumption of shared values. Segal's deconstruction of the male prejudice assumed in the intended audience leads to critical examination of the patriarchal values inherent in the text. Her insights helped the students to reevaluate their habitual perspective.
One reason we used filmed images of women in this course was to illustrate how the male point of view dominates interpretation regardless of the spectator's sex, not only in the texts' historical context but in present-day French society as well. Students can recognize with relative ease the camera as the male eye looking at women. My students imagined film to be “less filtered” by the reader or viewer's interpretation than written texts are, thus giving the impression, false though it may be, that viewers could directly observe the filmmaker's way of seeing. By situating the point of view, or at least an obvious aspect of it, outside themselves, they were better able to see it and to be critical of it. A powerful cinematographic image can be more accessible than a textual image for students who are often uncertain readers and even speakers of French. Understanding the construction of an image in a text requires both insightful reading and analysis, and the examination of a visual image provides a useful model for this process. The more apparent presence of the male eye facilitates a cognizance of both the way the female image is constructed and the way this image functions in the film. Students can use this heightened awareness to identify the points of view inherent in the values supported by a text and in their own expectations as readers.
Another advantage of using film in this manner lies in the relative ease of demonstrating a distinction between the values that are contemporary with the film's production and those that are associated with its setting. Since students see film as a twentieth-century artifact, whereas they often place texts in a vaguely defined uniform past, they can more readily see how a film depicts a situation differently from a medieval text and associate that difference with the fact that the time periods in which the works were made were dominated by widely differing worldviews. This focus on point of view helps to open the students' eyes, preparing them for a better critical analysis of the techniques used in written texts. The need for such comparisons can be even greater for texts written long ago, whose underlying assumptions seem far removed from the everyday lives of the students. This type of comparison places less emphasis on the nature of the specific differences observed than on the possibility of seeing some difference in perspective in order to raise the question of the relativity of point of view. Some undergraduates find it very difficult to accept the notion that there may be more than one way to read a text. Film can work as a useful catalyst to provoke such an awareness.
As a visual medium, film can quickly convey an impression of a time or place unknown to a viewer. The medieval and Renaissance periods are quite an unfamiliar world, where the social structure as well as the basic values and expectations to many students make little sense. In the film Le retour de Martin Guerre we see an unfaithful wife through the eyes of a male judge in sixteenth-century France. The woman, Bertrande de Rols, whose unloving husband, Martin, leaves her in order to run off to war, accepts as her husband an impostor who shows up many years later pretending to be Martin. The film shows their efforts to guarantee their relationship by obtaining legal proof that the new Martin is indeed her husband. In the marriage scenes at the beginning of the film, the clearly metonymic relation of the woman and her dowry helps make the definition of the woman as property belonging to a husband apparent. The marriage contract agreed to in the film is primarily a list of possessions to be transferred from the bride's family to the groom's. The vivid visual depiction of the historical period contributes much to a better comprehension of sixteenth-century societal expectations. Throughout the film, the legal dispute over Martin's identity is based on the problem of the ownership of property. My students fundamentally agreed with the point of view of the men in the film, that adultery must be condemned as a kind of theft. Yet their own judgment made them uneasy because of their sympathy for the plight of the woman. She is poorly treated and finally abandoned by her husband, Martin, who later returns to collect his “property,” only to find that someone else has taken his place and, in Martin's eyes, stolen his property. The spectator's desire to seek a less dogmatic judgment is indeed reflected in the point of view of the judge responsible for the trial of Arnaud du Tilh, the false Martin. The judge's questioning empowers Bertrande at first by giving her testimony more weight than that of the other witnesses. The judge want to understand her, not simply to pass judgment. Even after she has been found to have perjured herself, he seeks to know what she wishes and why she lied. His need to know her motivation recognizes the value of her desires and of her life as a human being rather than as her husband's possession. However, he can only ask her these personal questions in a closed room with no witnesses, placing this discussion outside the contexts of the law and society. We an identify with him because, like the spectator, he observes and seeks to comprehend the events from a perspective outside the action of the participants. He also differs from the rest of his society in that he is a Protestant and so questions the blind acceptance of the past practice and superstition associated with the Catholic church of medieval France. Indeed we learn that he himself would be executed ten years later. Since from our own cultural perspective we view the values and superstitions of medieval France in much the same way the judge does, out identification with him is strengthened. Le retour de Martin Guerre showed students a visual representation of the place of a woman in sixteenth-century French society as well as a depiction of a woman that seemed less superficial than those of women in the medieval and Renaissance texts studied in the course.
The questions raised when we examined the wife's role contributed to an understanding of a number of the earlier works studied in the class. For example, in the courtly love tradition the woman is viewed primarily as the passive object of a man's love. He must make himself perfect in order to deserve her, but her own feelings are not taken into account. In fact, this love can be considered most perfect when she is not even present, as in the amour de loin of Jaufré Rudel. The comparison of Rudel's images with those of the film helps to make the function of viewpoint more evident.
In Chrétien de Troyes' Erec et Enide the wife does not remain purely passive, but her actions are equated with sin and obedience. Erec has lost the respect of his peers because he has abandoned his knightly duties since his marriage in order to stay in bed all day with his wife. Only when she dares to criticize him does he go on a quest, taking her with him, to prove his worth and teach her the proper place of a wife in medieval society. He fights ever larger forces while she learns to accept his orders and blindly trust his superiority. Both indeed must learn to accept their social roles without question. Her husband forgives her on the condition that she remain passive. Society's definition of the woman's role as a passive object to be admired and possessed by a man is shown beginning to break down in Martin Guerre , where a woman takes action to accept a new mate. But her action is condemned and nullified by the legal system of the sixteenth century. Although Bertrande accepts her inevitable fate when the true Martin returns, her answers to the judge's questioning in private show us that she does not really accept her guilt. Enide, in contrast, does accept her guilt, even though she can never learn the perfectly silent obedience demanded by her husband.
The evolution of the role of love versus financial and social concerns in the formation of a couple is a major problem in literary works from those of the courtly love period to Nathalie Sarraute's Tropismes. Although love does not play a direct role in society's definition of marriage in either Martin Guerre or Erec et Enide , it does become the foundation for the relationships that develop in both works. We have seen that marriage in Martin Guerre functions as an exchange of property. We also see this exchange in Erec et Enide , but it is Erec who takes Enide and gives property to his father-in-law to compensate him for assistance rendered during a joust. Such transactions create ties that define a patriarchal social structure and a network of relationships that permit society to function. Since witnessing the display of emotions in Martin Guerre helped the students view the love of Bertrande for Arnaud as a redeeming virtue, it was possible to transfer this perception to their reading of Chrétien's text. This emotion is very close to modern romantic love, the love that the students believe should be present in modern marriage. This modern idea resembles Chrétien's vision, for although love is not why Erec and Enide marry, it is the love that develops between them that permits Erec to forgive her repeatedly. Here again, love is the redeeming virtue that enlarges the definition of the couple beyond its socially defined limits. The comparison of the relationships in the two works helped the students get past the strangeness of the medieval definition of the couple while questioning the limits of female empowerment inherent in the text's point of view.
The analysis of Bertrande's motivation in Martin Guerre provides a starting point for a similar analysis of L'histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut , by L'Abbé Prévost. Students tend to be highly critical of Manon's infidelity unless they examine the societal pressures that contributed to her motivation by removing all other options for her own personal, active, material success. The male perspective in the text follows the decline of the chevalier des Grieux, who sinks to unspeakable depths because of his love for Manon, a young girl who requires a certain level of comfort, perhaps even luxury, in her life. Her fear of poverty leads her to seek money through prostitution, the only route open to her in the decadent society of the regency of Philippe of Orleans. The students, following the lead of the narrator, felt pity for des Grieux and blamed Manon, even though des Grieux commits far worse crimes, including murder, and receives far less punishment. Although the pressures in Martin Guerre and in Manon Lescaut are not the same, they do force each heroine into actions that her society condemns. Each woman finds her options limited to a silent and passive acceptance of male domination, because any action that permits her to take some control of her life is considered dangerous, threatening, and immoral.
The students participated in society's condemnation of both Manon and Bertrande. Yet the film, through its implicit questioning of the status quo and the visual demonstration of the difficulty of Bertrande's decision, allowed a glimpse of another point of view and thus helped to suggest that there might at least be attenuating circumstances in both instances. If the infidelities were unacceptable, society bore much of the responsibility for creating the pressures exerted on both women. Seeing the pressures on Bertrande conveyed visually made it easier for the students to recognize, or to look for, those faced by Manon. The students then transferred these skills from film interpretation to literary analysis; the habit of looking for the social or economic context that influences or limits the behavior of characters helped students see beyond the point of view of the narrator in a work like Manon Lescaut. In this way they made progress towards the primary goal of becoming better readers.
Twentieth-century texts presented the class with a different set of problems. We studied the film Entre nous , by Diane Kurys, along with Marguerite Duras's novel Moderato cantabile. Here, the film was chosen to focus attention on the progression of a revolt that allows the women involved to redefine their roles without reference to a husband. In these two works by women writers, the point of view shifts away from the socially dominant position, and the ideal of the couple is based on mutual support rather than on dominance. In both works, we see the traditional couple from the woman's perspective, and couples created out of an unequal relation of dominance are broken up.
The Martin Guerre story indirectly served as an introduction to this part of the class. Although that film was directed by a man and the story was based on Arrest Memorable , an account by Jean de Coras, the sixteenth-century judge who tried the case of Arnaud, the false Martin, the point of view in the film is considerably influence by Natalie Zemon Davis, the historian who wrote the modern retelling of the events and who collaborated on the film. This new perspective calls into question the traditional explanation of the woman's crime as the result of her “female weakness.” One major difference we see between Bertrande's marriage to Martin and her relationship with Arnaud is that Arnaud shows Bertrande respect and consideration and the real Martin does not. In the film version, Bertrande knowingly decides to accept and to stay with the impostor because of the complicity she feels with Arnaud, who treats her as an equal.
Bertrande does not actively seek the changes in her marriage: Martin leaves without informing her and Arnaud arrives claiming to be her husband before they even meet. In our two twentieth-century works, it is the woman who seeks separation. Anne Desbaresdes, the wife of a bourgeois executive in Moderato cantabile , is attracted to a bar that is the site of an unknown woman's murder. The text examines the conflict between Anne's desire for freedom and the restrictions imposed by her position in society as wife and mother. For example, she is expected to destroy the freedom she loves and admires in her son by forcing him into conformity through his piano lessons. She is also expected to play the mistress of the house at a dinner party, whether she wants to or not. Both of these dilemmas illustrate the way she is trapped by her environment and forced to play a precisely defined role that inhibits the expression of her personality. At the bar, Anne meets a man named Chauvin. While she drinks wine with him and they talk, he provokes her to explore and to articulate her feelings about the murder. These feelings turn out to be more about her own life, and he seems to be forcing her to recognize her need for revolt. Influenced by David Coward's description of death as a Durasian theme in which a metaphoric suicide liberates a character from the egocentric self and permits a personal renaissance, my students' reading of the text centered on the unknown woman's death, which attracts Anne and comes to signify that her suicide as Anne Desbaresdes permits her to reject the restrictive definition of her social role. One positive aspect of the novel is that her new life does not include Chauvin; indeed it includes nothing representing her former oppressed role, no man, not even her son. She will not leave one relationship based on dominance only to enter another one.
The text by Duras was difficult for my students, who would often focus on comprehending particular expressions or sentences and thus lose track of the situation in the text, which made it hard for them to empathize with Anne's situation and understand her quest for identity. A viewing of Entre nous helped them by providing a visual medium through which to examine the problems of Lena, another woman trapped in a loveless marriage who eventually reaches the difficult decision to leave, to take charge of her own life, to escape the dependence that makes her a prisoner. Lena meets her husband in a Vichy relocation camp during World War II when he sends her a note offering to marry her so that she can leave the camp with him. She accepts the proposal only to escape the camp, but somehow she ends up staying with him as they move to Italy and then back to France at the end of the war. They have two children, and she plays her role as wife and mother perfectly well until she becomes aware that it is possible to find real affection and cooperation in a relationship. She then decides that she can dare to seek these things for herself. Taking her children, Lena leaves her husband to start a new life free of his anger, his condescension, and his expectation that she perform her role as he dictates.
Although the oppressive marriage in Entre nous gave the students a point of reference for comparison with Moderato cantabile , the differences also allowed them to explore the range of possibilities in human relationships and so better understand Duras's protagonist. The central relationship in Entre nous differs from the one in Moderato cantabile in that the love which develops between Lena and another woman, Madeleine, awakens them to what is missing from their marriages. The film medium allowed the students to contrast Lena's relationships with her friend and her husband visually and thus identify the qualities essential for a positive relationship. For example, they could observe cues in body language suggesting that one relationship was based on dominance while the other was based on equality and communication. The eye contact between the two women suggests the ability to communicate and contrasts with the lack of eye contact between husband and wife. The mutual support of the two women can be seen and it compares favorably with the husband's preoccupation with his own needs and his violent outburst when his wife opposes him. The portrayal of an unequal marital relationship helped the students better visualize the situation in Moderato cantabile.
The range of relationships is much narrower in Duras's novel, which contains no such positive image of a couple. Anne's husband appears only as a shadow in a doorway, and although Chauvin does help Anne escape from her oppressive, socially determined role, their relationship is based on alcohol and dominance. The danger Anne faces is that Chauvin will reconstruct her in the image he desires. According to Marianne Hirsch, “As Anne gradually surrenders to Chauvin's pressures, as she becomes the person he constructs, the story of the murder grows” (74–75). This new relationship is finally no better than her marriage, since there is neither real affection nor mutual respect between them and she risks exchanging one master for another. Chauvin's presence can be viewed as a catalyst that allows Anne to react. His manipulation is a springboard to her escape in that it ultimately triggers her rejection of the forces that oppress her. Because of their gender difference, Anne and Chauvin do not relate to the murder story in the same way. “Anne identifies and merges with the victim, Chauvin remains separate and dominant” (Hirsch 76). In identifying with the victim in death, Anne is released from the roles she must play in life, even as mother of her child. “She vomits food and wine on the floor of his room, ridding herself both of maternal responsibility and of maternal power. Having done so, she is free to assume the role of the child herself” (Hirsch 77). As an unconstructed child, she can define herself outside the dominating bourgeois context of her roles as wife and mother.
By identifying the visual cues in Entre nous that communicate specific qualities of the characters and of their interactions, the students became aware that the technique of presentation contributed to the development of a point of view toward each couple. In each of these works, the escape from submission, principally economic submission, leads to a new self-respect. Lena leaves her husband for Madeleine when he begins to show violent resentment of the close relationship that has grown between the two women. He cannot or will not offer her respect or even show an interest in her personal desires and in her dreams. But he demands that she remain only his, that things go back to the way they were. Although he is a good provider and a good father, he continues to treat Lena as little more than a possession. In each work, the decision to leave is difficult and people get hurt. The students, primarily concerned with the women's responsibility to their children, did not view Lena and Anne as blameless. But observing the relationships from the perspective of the women involved, the students could not share the societal judgments present in the works against Anne's failure to fulfill her role at dinner or against the homosexuality of Lena and Madeleine in Entre nous. In part, the comparison helped to encourage a positive view of these women. In addition, where similarities exist between Entre nous and Moderato cantabile , they are strong, especially in their focus on the difficulty and necessity of revolt against societal expectations in order to attain freedom and to define one's identity.
It would have been interesting to compare reactions of men and women to these texts, but since there were no men in the course, this was not possible. In any case, my specific concern was not gender difference in readers or writers but gender bias in the perception of gender difference. Teaching men and women to see multiple points of view must enrich potential readings by both. It seemed that in the texts and films selected for the class, the participation of women in the production of a work contributed to a less phallocentric point of view. But this authorial gender difference is also beyond the scope of this paper. Powerful visual images can help focus students' attention on the author's point of view and on the text's expectations of the reader's point of view. This approach can expose not only gender bias but also the dominance of Western cultural expectations regarding religion, class, work, politics, race, or any other social structure.
Through the power of their imagery, films can help illustrate situations, behavior, and points of view that can then illuminate similar elements in the literary texts studied. The association of the two genres provides a means to understand the influence of the point of view conveyed by narrative fiction on us as readers of this fiction. In my senior seminar, ideas borrowed from feminist film criticism helped teach students about the psychological pressures that lead to a masculinization of a feminine audience. This changed way of seeing helped them to overcome the critical limitations resulting from the automatic acceptance of the dominant point of view, to be more open to multiple readings of a text, and to recognize the way social attitudes appear in literary texts while these same texts influence changes in society. When viewed in their social contexts, the works studied evoke a common theme of malaise in women who have difficulty accepting the roles assigned to them by the dominant forces in society. The students realized that the values inherent in a point of view that does not recognize woman's desires or accept her right to pursue her own happiness could be communicated to a reader, even a female reader, who accepts the narrative stance unthinkingly.
A redefinition of the couple in society can only be arrived at by questioning one-sided patriarchal viewpoints. The enormous difference in perspective across media, genres, and epochs in works such as those my class studied helps make students aware of the importance of this perspective in other works where they might find the point of view more difficult to see. Too often, when the point of view in a text does not conflict with the audience's own values or the values the audience has learned to expect to find it a text, it becomes transparent and thus is uncritically adopted as an element of the status quo. The use of the camera provides visual cues whose analysis can be used to destroy the transparency of the point of view. For students growing up in a culture dominated by visual media, the development of a critical distance from such images can help foster a similar approach to the written word.
The author is Assistant Professor of French at the State University College of New York, Cortland.
Badinter, Elisabeth. The Unopposite Sex: The End of the Gender Battle. Trans. Barbara Write. New York: Harper, 1989. Trans. of L'un est l'autre: Des relations entre hommes et femmes. Paris: O. Jacob, 1986.
Coras, Jean de. Arrest Memorable, du Parlement de Tolose, Contenant une histoire prodigieuse, de nostre temps, avec cent belles & doctes Annotations, de monsieur maistre Jean de Coras, Conseiller en ladite Cour & rapporteur du proces. Lyon, 1561.
Coward, David. Marguerite Duras : Moderato cantabile, London: Grant, 1981.
Davis, Natalie Zemon. The Return of Martin Guerre. Cambridge: Harvard, UP, 1983.
Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire , Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.
———. “Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator.” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture 11.1 (1988–89): 42–54. Rpt. in Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge, 1991. 33–43.
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© 1994 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
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