In a 1937 film review for the New York Times, Frank S. Nugent prophetically noted, “it seems unlikely that historians will find Olive Higgins Prouty's ‘Stella Dallas’ [sic] among the imperishables of literature.”Footnote 1 He claimed the story “too dated,” even in 1937 when Samuel Goldwyn had just released the second and most critically acclaimed film version of Prouty's 1923 novel. Nugent was right, of course. Outdated and out of print, Prouty's best-selling novel has gone the way of other popular novels penned by women – dismissed and forgotten in our literary-historical record.Footnote 2 Yet Prouty's story of one woman's ambition cruelly thwarted by class determinism and gender imperatives has endured in film far longer than in print. The first film adaptation, directed by Henry King, starred Belle Bennett in the title role and premiered in 1925, only two years after the novel's publication. The success of this first film influenced Goldwyn's decision to remake Stella Dallas in 1937. Directed by King Vidor and starring Barbara Stanwyck, this version is considered the definitive adaptation, garnering Oscar nominations for Stanwyck and Ann Shirley (the actress who plays Stella's daughter), inspiring a long-running radio show, and attracting much scholarly attention.Footnote 3
We can turn to Nugent's 1937 review for insight into the story's enduring screen appeal. He explains, “but mother love and sacrifice, which are at the heart of the Prouty work, are durable dramatic commodities.”Footnote 4 Indeed, the heart of the story, “mother love,” propels it across the twentieth century. Prouty's novel would enjoy one more film iteration in 1990, titled Stella, directed by John Erman and starring Bette Midler. Even as film reviewers rightly grumble about the inconsistencies of Erman's film version, they also praise the screen representation of what Nugent identified as “mother love and sacrifice.” Fifty-three years after Nugent's film review, Janet Maslin, again for the New York Times, offered a similar sentiment: “the heart-tugging aspects of this mother–daughter drama retain their ability to bypass the brain.”Footnote 5 Both reviews emphasize the sentimentality of the films, highlighting the melodramatic notes of the popular woman's film. However, as is characteristic of the genre of the woman's film, Stella's story does more than simply capitulate to the dominant sociopolitical culture. It also challenges the singular role of motherly self-sacrifice for women.
Film scholars situate the genre of the woman's film historically during the first half of the twentieth century and the golden age of Hollywood. Scholars distinguish the genre in two ways. First, the woman's film, as Jeanine Basinger explains, is “a paradox.”Footnote 6 She writes that “of all the genres in Hollywood's history, the woman's film is the most deceptive … Everything the woman's film is, it also isn't. Everything it endorses, it undermines. Everything it destroys, it reaffirms.”Footnote 7 Second, although the woman's film typically ended with the female protagonist either resituated in her proper role as wife and mother or punished for her attempts to broaden or escape these boundaries, it also made women and women's concerns the central focus. Molly Haskell notes that “in the woman's film, the woman – a woman – is at the center of the universe.”Footnote 8 Thus the woman's film, as Lucy Fischer explains, is “one of the few commercial paradigms to authorize a complex female protagonist.”Footnote 9 Simply put, the woman's film features a female protagonist, typically played by a charismatic Hollywood star, who is independent and strong.
That these films can be read as simultaneously submissive and subversive is evident in the scholarly response to Stella Dallas. It is indeed the 1937 representation of Prouty's character played by Barbara Stanwyck that resonates with audiences today, in particular feminist film scholars.Footnote 10 I would be remiss if I did not acknowledge the film's significance to the field of film studies. Linda Williams's essay “Something Else besides a Mother,” published in Cinema Journal in 1984, sparked a firestorm of debate that included such film scholars as E. Ann Kaplan, Stanley Cavell, Patrice Petro and Carol Flinn, Christine Gledhill, and Tag Gallagher.Footnote 11 This debate questioned the availability of what Laura Mulvey refers to as “the male gaze”Footnote 12 to a female audience when viewing a female protagonist, the classic woman's film structure. It is important to note, too, that Stella Dallas had already made its way into feminist film analysis via Molly Haskell's foundational 1974 study From Reverence to Rape. The hold that Stella Dallas has on scholars is further evident in her starring role in other book-length studies, including Jeanine Basinger's A Woman's View (1993), Lucy Fisher's Cinematernity (1996), and Joan Copjec's Imagine There's No Woman (2002).Footnote 13 Yet, aside from Jennifer Parchesky's 2006 essay “Adapting Stella Dallas,” very few scholars have considered the novel and three film adaptations. Here, Parchesky offers the durability of Stella's character as a way to map class and consumer shifts since Stella's debut in 1922 as a serialized character.Footnote 14
Despite all the scholarly attention that Stella Dallas has garnered, very little has been said about Stella's foil, Helen Morrison, or the relationship that develops between them. While, on the surface, Stella and Helen appear to be opposites, at their core they are both mothers who together function as symbols for idealized American motherhood characterized by unwavering love and sacrifice. Even in the twentieth-first century, motherhood and women's reproduction remain hot-button topics in public discourse. In her comprehensive overview of the academic field of motherhood studies, Samira Kawash reviews the recent increase in popular books, websites, and attention to motherhood and notes the emphasis on intensive mothering.Footnote 15 The May 2012 cover story in Time magazine exemplifies this emphasis, asking American women, “are you mom enough?” The cover photo featured Jamie Grumet, a white, upper-middle-class stay-at-home mother daringly staring into the camera as she breastfeeds her four-year-old son. The discursive construction of motherhood, here, points to a raced and classed ideal of motherhood that encourages competition between women to be “mom enough,” an ideal that pits women against each other in the race to be the best mother and precludes any efforts at cooperation or friendship between women. This discursive construction reenacts the good-mother/bad-mother dichotomy that emerges in the early twentieth century and that provides the conflict in the story of Stella Dallas.
The novel and subsequent film adaptations appear to elevate the idea of “mother love and sacrifice” in the depiction of Stella and her ostensible antagonist Helen Morrison. Yet the mother–mother couple of Stella and Helen upholds this ideal while simultaneously portraying the clandestine collusions that women employ within and without a dominant social structure that demands women's erasure into motherhood. The invisibility to film scholars of the friendship between Stella and Helen further emphasizes the division among women of different economic class statuses. In my analysis of Stella Dallas, I argue that Stella and Helen together form a covenant for the sake of Stella's daughter, establishing for the viewing audience upper-class Helen as the good mother and working-class Stella as the bad mother.Footnote 16 Yet the narrative depends on the clandestine collaboration between Stella and Helen, a collaboration that remains invisible to film scholars and to the dominant patriarchal ideology that privileges motherhood over womanhood. While the good-mother/bad-mother dichotomy works to separate women, within the structure of the narrative, the audience also witnesses a woman-to-woman relationship that is constrained, yes, by imperatives for women, but that also exploits those imperatives.
Mothering in Stella Dallas
The story of Stella Dallas, like that of any good woman's film, is a roller-coaster of emotions for the audience. Stella, a young working-class woman, marries a man from a higher socioeconomic class status and gives birth to their daughter.Footnote 17 Stella's working-class roots limit her view of elite society to representations in popular fashion magazines and other popular media, and this limited view results in her gross misunderstanding of what it means to be upper class. Stella understands the social elite only in terms of appearance and social activity, and this narrow understanding manifests in her excessive dress and behavior. However, Stella is not the only one who misunderstands. As Williams notes in “Something Else besides a Mother,” “in the eyes of an upper-class restraint that values a streamlined and sleek ideal of femininity … Stella is a travesty, an overdone masquerade of what it means to be a woman.”Footnote 18 They perceive Stella as willfully and disastrously unsuccessful in her efforts to assimilate to her husband Stephen's class expectations. Both Stella's working class and Stephen's upper class display a solipsism or denseness about class mobility, relying on a “class-as-essence” ideology that simultaneously challenges the democratic ideals of a burgeoning nation and reinforces the emergence of industrial capitalism that depends on the separation of workers and capitalists.
They separate when Stephen takes a job in New York. Stella continues to live as if her marriage is intact and her place in society assured. Neither Stephen nor the society to which he belongs understands Stella and both misinterpret her behavior based on their own sense of propriety and their preconceived notions about the laboring classes. Eventually recognizing that she is the reason for her daughter's rejection by the upper class, Stella pretends she no longer wants to be a mother in order to convince her daughter to live with her father and his wealthy new wife, Helen Morrison. Once Stella has managed to cast the good mother for her daughter in Helen, she observes from the shadows her daughter's social success. Each film adaptation attempts to respond to the evolving class structures. Parchesky observes that the “narrative proved to be a remarkably malleable vehicle for representing changing discourses of class, consumption, and femininity in America.”Footnote 19 Yet the powerful and unchanging ideal of “mother love and sacrifice” remains, revealing and reinforcing a limited ideal of motherhood and its restrictive and isolating demands on women. These demands gained traction at the turn of the twentieth century as industrialization took hold and the ideal of the nuclear family began to emerge.
By the end of the narrative, the class difference collapses and both Helen and Stella together come to represent the enduring ideal of “mother love and sacrifice.” However, their different class statuses determine how these two characters participate in upholding this ideal. The story takes great pains to ensure that Stella is seen initially as a grotesque character, and locates the source in her working-class background. It is not until the conclusion, when Stella relinquishes her daughter, that she is redeemed. Until then, Stella's behavior, though mostly innocent, is consistently misunderstood. One cannot deny that Stella Dallas is a story about class in the US. This class system is organized hierarchically, is justified as universal and natural, and is reflected in various forms of cultural representation. In her analysis of the 1937 film adaptation, Kathleen McHugh situates the class division in the arena of fashion. She explains that the film “represent[s] the tragic difference, the split between mother Stella and daughter Laurel, as that between low and high fashion.”Footnote 20 That Stella makes rather than purchases her and her daughter's clothes, according to McHugh, marks Stella as irreparably lower class. Stella becomes a parodist mirror for the elite, but the joke is always on her.
In her classic essay “Woman Is an Island,” Judith Williamson argues that the social insistence on gender difference serves a necessary purpose in maintaining existing class and economic structures. Williamson argues that women function as the “dumping ground for all the values society wants off its back but must be perceived to cherish.”Footnote 21 “Mother,” “motherhood,” “mother love and sacrifice” are potent symbols in this ideological lexicon. Together all the idealized permutations of “mother” function as a repository for ideals seemingly at odds with a capitalist economic system. As Williamson explains, “the sphere which is supposedly most different from the capitalist system is crucial to it, both economically and in producing its meaning.”Footnote 22 Williamson, here, refers to the sphere of “private and family life,” the sphere so obsessively associated with women, and the guardian of this sphere is Mother. Not just any mother, of course, but the intensive and sacrificial mother, one who forgoes her own pleasures and desires for her family.
Thus the novel is dated but motherhood is “timeless” and fixed, and this fixed ideal remains in each iteration of Stella's story. This ideal of “mother love and sacrifice” gets enshrined because it is so necessary in so many ways – to maintain society and its population, to harbor the values associated with women in order to remove those values from public life, and to ensure the rightness of this arrangement. But this ideal is just that, an ideal, and despite its obsessive cultural maintenance, the ideal of motherhood, and consequently womanhood, does not necessarily obtain in women's actual material lives, thus calling into question not the legitimacy of the ideal but instead individual women's own femininity, mothering, and womanhood. Very few women actually experience the privilege to pursue this ideal unencumbered by economic factors.Footnote 23 Despite a popular ideology of egalitarian opportunities for class mobility, Kawash explains that “class matters, both as it creates or constrains material and social opportunities and as it shapes the values, goals, and identities that mothers bring to raising children.”Footnote 24
Offered as a foil to Stella is Helen Morrison, Stephen's second wife and childhood sweetheart. Stephen and Helen were engaged to be married before the revelation that Stephen's father embezzled his wealth. Because of the shame Stephen experiences due to his father's transgressions, Stephen leaves Helen and his father's estate to hide out and remake himself in the mill town where Stella and her family live. Helen attempts to reach out to Stephen, but he remains undercover, and Helen eventually marries an older, wealthier man. When Stephen and Helen reunite, Helen is a young and wealthy widow raising three perfect boys. Parchesky explains that in the early forms of Stella's story, “Helen's innate refinement legitimates her position, even to marry another woman's husband and raise her daughter … because she knows how to value and care for these gifts properly.”Footnote 25 Where Stella's appearance and behavior are outrageous, Helen's is refined and subdued. A model of what Williams calls “upper-class restraint” and “streamlined and sleek” femininity,Footnote 26 Helen is presented as the true blue blood of American society and the ideal of “mother love and sacrifice.” Stella, on the other hand, embodies the myth of the working class. She presents as crass and gaudy, selfish and conniving. Yet Stella and Helen are not that different. They both sacrifice their autonomy for the sake of home and family.
Stella's Maternal Inheritance
Stella's effort to escape the life into which she is born, at first, is depicted as motivated by her selfish and misguided ambition. However, a more powerful, though hidden, contributing factor exists: Stella's own mother and the underclass life she leads. Stella wishes first to rescue herself and then her daughter from a fate like her own and her mother's. Interestingly, each film adaptation moves Stella further away from her family, her mother especially, a relationship that in the novel clearly fuels Stella's determination to achieve a lifestyle better than the working-poor existence of her childhood. Stella's mother, truly sacrificial and therefore downtrodden, gets erased in the 1925 film, rendered as barely visible backdrop in the 1937 version, and reduced to a ridiculous anecdote in the 1990 version. Removing Stella's mother removes a very powerful motivating force for Stella's actions and as such a necessary context for her behavior, including her image of herself as the bad mother, her desires for her daughter, and her ultimate collusion with Helen.
In Prouty's novel, Stella's desire to distance herself from her mother and, more importantly, what her mother represents, fuels her early efforts to improve her situation and her continued efforts to ensure that her daughter Laurel escapes such a life. The summer house that Stella builds in her family's yard in which to meet her suitors surrounds her in the illusion of homemaking and of middle class. It keeps her suitors from the intimate and insular space of her family's home and clothes her in a different reality than the actual. This separation from her family is intimately associated with the figure of Stella's mother. As the novel explains, “during the spring and summer and early fall these young men seldom caught a glimpse of her mother in the ugly mouse-colored wrapper and flat shoes shuffling about in the kitchen, washing dishes, or mixing bread.”Footnote 27 Buried in the descriptions of Stella's dilapidated childhood home and her magazine-perfect summer house, this sentence explicitly associates the home with Stella's mother. This “shuffling” woman is “the kitchen” in which she cleans and cooks, in which she labors.
This is a particular kind of motherhood that Stella rejects, a kind very different from the ideal that American society and culture so obsessively uphold. Poised on opposite sides of the national transition from agrarian to industrial society, Stella and her mother reflect this great shift. Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English detail this shift in the opening chapter of their book For Her Own Good. As they explain, the transition from agrarian to industrial society destroyed “the Old Order” where “life is not marked off into different ‘spheres’ or ‘realms’ of experience.”Footnote 28 Instead, all members of the family and community worked to maintain the domestic space. In the Old Order, Ehrenreich and English explain, “the skills and work of women are indispensable to survival.”Footnote 29 However, at the turn of the twentieth century when Prouty pens her story, the world of industry and wage work firmly holds. In the household, any members who could be spared took wage jobs in the new factories, most often leaving the woman alone in the home. While members of the middle and upper classes enjoyed greater access to the new products and time-saving gadgets of the burgeoning industries, those in the lower classes continued to struggle with the Herculean challenges of maintaining a home without such luxuries as running water or electricity.Footnote 30 In this situation, Stella's mother does not “mother” because she does not have the privilege or the luxury to mother. Further, she is isolated from the community in that the sphere of her influence shrinks with the introduction of industrialization's new products for the home. Instead, Stella's mother is ground down by the ugly work of an abject motherhood, not quite an agentic subject but not a passive object either.
Stella rejects this type of mothering, which requires debilitating and unfeminine labor. Indeed, as Williams argues, Stella's desire to be “something else besides a mother” serves as her primary transgression. Of course, Stella does work: she builds the little summer house; plants and nurtures the surrounding flowering vines; makes her own clothes; and, once married and a mother herself, makes all her daughter's clothes. Yet this labor is not the same kind of labor that Stella's mother performs. Her mother's labor is more the difficult and repetitive type of work that gets immersed in the term “women's work” and is required to maintain a home and its inhabitants – in this case, two grown men and a daughter. As Adrienne Rich defines it, this is the type of “work that others constantly undo.”Footnote 31 This constant undoing of her invisible yet expected labor means that there is no completion or finality to the work, no sense of a final product or of accomplishment. Instead, the type of labor that “others constantly undo” is never done, never completed, and never acknowledged – and, therefore, ineffective.
For Stella, this type of motherhood characterized by its never-ending labor, isolation, and subsequent loss of self is exactly what she wishes so desperately to avoid. Prouty emphasizes Stella's fear and rejection of this type of motherly labor:
[Stella] had a horror of growing old and unattractive – a horror connected with the memories of her own mother. She could recall that twenty years ago her mother had been gray and shapeless, her face covered with light brown moth-spots, wrinkles, and long hairs here and there – a spiritless creature, who wore loose, mouse-colored wrappers and flat men's shoes.Footnote 32
This “spiritless creature” is worn down by the demands of her life and family. Even when Stella's mother was young, “twenty years ago,” she had the appearance of an older woman – “gray and shapeless” – who did not have the time or the luxury to be concerned with her appearance or herself. Stella's concern with her mother's worn-down appearance does not signal simply Stella's superficiality. Rather, Stella's fixation on her mother's physicality, with her “flat men's shoes,” also signals Stella's rejection of her mother's economic and psychological poverty. Her mother's “flat men's shoes,” perhaps already used-up cast-offs from her husband or son, are economically more viable and physically more practical for long periods of standing. Yet, for Stella, the “flat men's shoes” blur the boundaries between men's work and women's work, a symbol of the Old Order where men's and women's labor were both needed and valued to maintain the domestic space. The physicality of the labor performed by Stella's mother in the New Order of industrialism and a capitalist market attests to her mother as unfeminine and unacknowledged, herself a human casualty.
While the novel explicitly details Stella's relationship with her mother, the films diminish this role. In the 1990 version, Stella tells Stephen that her father died in a fight over a poker game and her mother died from alcoholism. Her mother makes one more appearance as an anecdote Stella relays. After realizing she is pregnant with Stephen's child, Stella tells a friend that her mother used to say “she stubbed her toe” when referring to a woman who became pregnant out of wedlock. In the 1990 adaptation, Stella's home life is no longer something she wants to leave behind. Rather, it is the reason for her inevitable class status. Like the last adaptation of Stella's story, in the 1925 film Stella's mother is nonexistent. Instead, Stella is the only woman in the home and is responsible for the care of her father and brothers. This adaptation continues the association of Stella's efforts to rise above her class with the experiences of her childhood home, introducing Stella's home life with an intertitle that reads, “Since childhood, Stella Martin schemed to rise above her sordid surroundings.” The language here is telling. Instead of recognizing Stella's efforts as heroic, they are presented as “schem[ing],” and her home life is described as “sordid.” Within her home, there is a clear division of labor. Her father and brothers work at the mill while Stella is responsible for the cooking and cleaning. We see her making coffee for her father, cooking meals, but also “schem[ing]” to find a way out, railing already against the imposed and idealized servitude of working-class domestic space. While performing the household duties, she also reads fashion magazines, where she sees the article about a “love nest” and copies the description to transform her porch, according to the intertitle, into “a clever little trap into which a lonely man wandered.”
The absent mother certainly obtains in women's popular fiction since the early nineteenth century, in part, as a response to discursive cultural fears regarding the increasing presence of the woman alone, a woman without male protection.Footnote 33 Stella's mother does make an appearance in the 1937 film. According to E. Ann Kaplan, Stella's effort
to escape from her background is understandable, given the place her mother occupies within the family. This gaunt and haggard figure slaves away at sink and stove in the rear of the frame, all but invisible on a first viewing. She only moves into the frame to berate Stella for refusing to give her brother the lunch he wants … betraying her economic and psychological dependence on this young man, not yet ground down (as is her husband) by toil at the mill.Footnote 34
For Stella, motherhood and family life mean “economic and psychological dependence.” This all-encompassing dependence demands she abandon her self to become the “gaunt and haggard figure” who “slaves away at sink and stove.” This oversimplified type of motherly labor remains invisible to those on whom she depends because it is expected in exchange for their “economic and psychological” support, even though in this depiction there is no real gain in this exchange. All members of Stella's family are worn down from work and toil. Significantly, though, Kaplan qualifies this invisibility with the phrase “all but invisible” because this family role for mother is anything but invisible to Stella. Rather, it is a clear and definite model of what is expected of her.
Stella and Helen's Covenant
Even while the mother–daughter bonds between Stella and her mother and Stella and her daughter, Laurel, are severed, the woman-to-woman bond established between Stella and Helen is strengthened. As many scholars have noted, friendships between women remained unremarkable until well into the nineteenth century when separate spheres kept women and men apart for most routine daily activities, even after marriage. Many factors contributed to the dissolution of separate spheres at the turn of the twentieth century, including industrialization and the primacy of wage work; a new emphasis on the child; and an increasing suspicion of woman-to-woman relationships fueled by the popularization of the work of Sigmund Freud, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, and Havelock Ellis.Footnote 35 Pat O'Connor notes, “women's relationships with their husbands and children are in some way seen as more conducive to their happiness and well-being than any other relationship.”Footnote 36 Rather than challenging these expectations, according to O'Connor, women's friendships “play a part in reflecting and reinforcing class positions and marital structures.”Footnote 37 Indeed, Stella and Helen's covenant capitulates to American society's values and signals a resignation to the inevitableness of gender and class imperatives. The novel foreshadows Helen's position as a foil to Stella when Stephen introduces the plan for Laurel to stay with Helen for two weeks. Laurel explains to Stephen that she remembers meeting Helen once before because, as Laurel states, Stephen had told Laurel “to notice her, and listen to her nice voice, for she was somebody you'd like me to grow up to be like.”Footnote 38 Stephen worries that Stella does not offer the right kind of role model for Laurel and anxiously points out a more appropriate model in Helen.
As the model for refined and restrained upper-class values, Helen comfortably moves among the different classes. For example, in the novel, she performs charity work with unmarried pregnant girls and women. Further, the narrator tells readers that Stephen never asks about Stella when Laurel visits, an omission of which Laurel is painfully aware. Stephen's silence enacts the erasure of Stella and affirms her requisite invisibility. However, when Stephen takes Laurel to Helen's home, Helen speaks freely of Stella: “It was when [Helen] was hanging up the last dress in the closet that she remarked, ever so naturally, ‘I think your mother has beautiful taste, Laurel.’”Footnote 39 Helen speaks of Stella as if there is nothing to be ashamed of, as if Stella were a real, authentic person. This ease surprises Laurel, who to this point has only heard others speak of her mother in hushed and condescending tones, if at all. In contrast to Stella, the beloved and omnipotent mother figure Helen, by virtue of her inherent class status, evinces a deeper insight and greater perspective.
The most telling example of Helen's upper-class refinement comes when Helen first meets Stella. This scene plays in the novel and each film adaptation. In the novel, Stella contacts Helen and requests a meeting at Helen's home. Despite the fact that a phone call from Stephen's estranged wife is the last thing Helen expects, the narrator explains that she “replied, with no surprise in her voice.”Footnote 40 When Stella arrives at Helen's door for the scheduled meeting, her appearance is one of overdone and outdated femininity:
She had on a dark-blue suit, and wore a summer fur – white fox, fastened behind. The dead animal's head hung halfway down her back. Stella's coat was tightly buttoned, and fitted her generous bust and hips without a ripple. Her hat was large and broad-brimmed, and didn't take a veil well. Therefore she had adjusted her veil over her bare head before putting her hat on. The veil was drawn tightly over her generous cheeks and chin, and it also fitted tightly.Footnote 41
This description emphasizes Stella's ridiculous and spectacular figure. The “summer fur” she wears, rather than being fashionable, includes a “dead animal's head.” The snug fit of both Stella's coat and veil indicates that she is overweight by highlighting “her generous bust and hips” and “her generous cheeks and chin.” Stella's attempt to emulate what she considers to be high fashion blatantly fails.
The description of Helen's physical appearance that precedes Stella's entrance into Helen's home helps to emphasize Stella's failure. Helen models refinement and restraint, the two characteristics that Stella's wardrobe and appearance lack. Helen wears a “white skirt and waist and low shoes”; she doesn't show her age, keeping “the same young-girl slenderness (not the slightest thickening of neck and shoulders, hip or ankle), the same young-girl lightness.”Footnote 42 Further, where Stella is anxious and flustered, “there was on Helen's face a look of settled calm … there were only quiet smiles and submission.”Footnote 43 Where Stella rails against her fate, Helen is resigned and calm. When Stella enters her home, Helen does not react to Stella's overdone appearance. Instead, “Helen looked at nothing but Stella's eyes.”Footnote 44
As in the novel, in the film versions Stella enters Helen's home as the spectacle she has become only to be welcomed without condemnation for the first time in her life. This is a transformative moment for a woman accustomed to being regarded as a disgrace. In the 1925 and 1937 adaptations, the women are framed so that they are represented equally. At first, Stella sits in a chair slightly above Helen, who sits on the sofa. As they talk, Stella moves to the sofa beside Helen. As Stella explains to Helen that she no longer has the time, desire, or means to care for Laurel in the manner she wishes and Laurel deserves, Helen quickly realizes Stella's subterfuge and real purpose. Although Stella is rightly reluctant to confide completely in Helen or to accept her efforts to comfort Stella, she does soften slightly under Helen's care. In both early film adaptations, Helen listens intently to Stella's story, and as she comes to realize the sacrifice Stella desires to make, she moves closer and closer to Stella until they are embracing. In the 1925 film, Stella explains to Helen, “you're the kind of mother [Laurel] could be proud of; I – I ain't.”
Once Stella has secured Helen's promise to marry Stephen, adopt Laurel as her own, and provide Laurel with all the benefits her class position will allow, the two tour Helen's estate home. Their covenant sealed, in the 1925 adaptation, the intertitle reads, “Arm in arm, two mothers united by an understanding beyond words, walked through the great house.” This “understanding beyond words” represents the collapse of the differences between them. No longer are they represented as opposites, with Helen as the good mother and Stella the bad mother. Instead, they are “two mothers united.” Together, Stella and Helen collude to ensure that Laurel receives the social advantages Helen can provide and Stella so desperately desires. The novel explains that during their meeting “there was no mistake about the tears in Helen's eyes now. She rose, went quickly over to Stella, and put her arm about her shoulders. ‘I see! I understand!’ she exclaimed, softly.”Footnote 45 Though Stella is redeemed in the audience's eyes, in the narrative no one, with the exception of Helen, understands, sees, or accepts Stella. Stella and Helen can make this covenant because, as the text explains, they are both mothers.
It is important to acknowledge that this alliance does ugly work as well. Stella recedes into the background, losing her beloved daughter completely, while Helen must make herself and her home hypervisible to communicate with Stella, something to which Helen, in her idealized refinement, is unaccustomed. To this end, she places regular announcements in the social pages of the newspapers, and on the day of Laurel's wedding, Helen insists the curtains remain open, knowing that Stella will be in the crowd outside. In the 1925 film, Helen leads Laurel to the window, ostensibly so she can wish on a star. However, Helen knows that Stella is in the crowd outside, and she takes Laurel to the window so Stella can get a glimpse of Laurel in her wedding gown.
The strength of this covenant and friendship is emphasized in the novel. At one point, Helen notices Stella in the shadows of the alley beside her home. The narrative states, “Helen's first impulse was to raise the window – to call. She hesitated … was it wise to establish communication with her when she was taking such pains to avoid it? No. Laurel's mother knew best.”Footnote 46 The covenant they made together dictates that Helen respect Stella's desire for anonymity and concedes Stella's place as a mother. Thus Stella can take her triumphant walk at the close of the films safely and comfortably in the knowledge that Helen is going to fulfill her promise. The narrative acknowledges Helen's commitment: “Oh, Stella should not be defeated, if Helen could help it.”Footnote 47
Neither Stephen nor Laurel recognizes that the “two mothers united” orchestrated this collusion, and Stella and Helen's plan hinges on this misunderstanding. Stella is fully aware that Stephen won't discover their plan, once again, because of the cushion of his socioeconomic privilege and, certainly, his gender. In fact, so much does she expect him not to understand that it is not even a concern. She rightly assumes he will misjudge her. Helen is the only person who does not judge Stella. She's the only one who will speak of Stella in the novel. Helen does not see with the “eyes of an angel”; she sees with the “eyes of a mother,” as she corrects Stephen in the 1937 film. That Stella gives up her daughter through such an elaborate and hurtful ruse acquiesces to the rightness of the idealized middle- and upper-class values that the story seems to perpetuate. Everything about Stella is wrong: she's not a mother; she's not a woman; she's a throwaway person. Only when she finally recognizes and accepts her place, accepts the position socially prescribed for her, does she become redeemed for the audience.
Conclusion: That Triumphant Walk
Significantly, all three film versions of Prouty's novel Stella Dallas conclude with Stella's triumphant walk, a scene that varies little among the films. After enduring seventeen years of disapprobation from her husband and his upper-class society for attempting to cross class boundaries, Stella resigns herself to class determinism and relinquishes custodial care of her now teenage daughter. However, it is not only class boundaries that Stella challenges, but also her refusal to assume the role of sacrificial mother, especially emphasized in the 1925 and 1937 versions. Stella's most significant transgression is not her artifice or her entrapment of Stephen but her insistence on her independence from traditional ideals of motherhood and her refusal to give up pleasure once she becomes a mother. Williams explains, “Their judgment rests on the fact that Stella insists on making her motherhood a pleasurable experience by sharing center stage with her daughter. The one thing she will not do, at least until the end, is retire to the background.”Footnote 48 Stella refuses to take on the type of abject “mother love and sacrifice” that she has witnessed in her own mother. Instead, she attempts to play the role of a socialite, but this role has been projected to her through the images of popular culture (movies, magazines, and cheap novels). In all the versions of Stella's story, she is a failure in her attempt and consequently disciplined by society around her.
This final walk does not appear in the novel; rather the novel offers an even drearier ending. Stella, who to this point has “worked” only at mothering, by the end of the novel is resituated in her rightful place working in a factory and serving as caretaker for her dissipated husband Ed. This is a marriage not of love but, oddly, of convenience. Stella's marriage to Ed, the man to whom she has been linked falsely throughout the narrative, is the only way she is able to convince Laurel to live with Stephen and Helen. The novel ends with a police officer ordering Stella away from the scene of her daughter's coming-out party (in the films, Stella views her daughter's wedding.) Yet here, too, Stella glories in her triumph. She is the casting director for Laurel's life. Unable to play the part of idealized motherhood, Stella assumes the role of director, casting the various parts for her daughter's premiere as she sees fit. As Stella stands in the street watching her daughter through the window, she assures herself that “everything was as it ought to be. Even Lollie's mother was as she ought to be – also wearing pearls, also beautiful, also queenly. My! Mrs. Morrison was made for the part.”Footnote 49 Stella has internalized the class and gender imperatives she so desperately tried to overcome. According to these imperatives, Stella is not the mother “she ought to be”; instead, the refined, subdued, and pearl-yoked Helen Morrison is more appropriately “made for the part.”
Yet this division into good mother and bad mother does not hold. Stella and Helen, together, as “two mothers united,” perform the mothering for Laurel. As Joan Copjec explains,
the melodramatic world is one in which masks proliferate as masks, as disguises that flaunt their thinness. The many copies or simulacra circulating through it refer not to an ideal lodged elsewhere that one strives to attain while feeling powerless to do so, but rather float the complaint that no such ideal exists.Footnote 50
In other words, this final scene is the result of an elaborate web of substitutions with the characters taking the position of other characters – the “masks proliferate as masks.” Mrs. Morrison substitutes for Stella, and Laurel's acceptance into upper-class society substitutes for Stella's own thwarted desires. Further, Stella's motherly sacrifice substitutes for her own lack of mothering from her mother. The ideal of “mother love and sacrifice” once so clearly embodied in Helen is now represented by both Helen and Stella, no longer fixed in a singular constraint of economic viability. The good-mother/bad-mother dichotomy collapses with their collusion.
It is Stella's reaction to society's punishment – her triumphant walk – that has caused the most trouble for film scholars. Her apparent acquiescence and martyrdom lead to what seems to be complete self-annihilation. For most of the narrative action, Stella rebels against the social and cultural expectations for women and, more specifically, for mothers. Williams argues that “certainly this final scene functions to efface Stella even as it glorifies her sacrificial act of motherly love.”Footnote 51 Further, Williams notes that “Stella appears in this scene for the first time stripped of the exaggerated marks of femininity – the excessive make-up, furs, feathers, clanking jewelry, and ruffled dresses – that have been the weapons of her defiant assertions that a woman can be ‘something else besides a mother.’”Footnote 52 By letting go of her daughter, Stella has let go of her “defiant assertions.” Yet I agree with Cavell's blunt assertion: “I deny that Stella is eradicated as a woman and as a mother.”Footnote 53 Rather, she has become “a mother” by relinquishing her motherly responsibilities.
That Stella registers triumph at the culmination of her goals for her daughter – Laurel's marriage into bourgeois society – functions as an indication of the film's and Stella's subversive message. Stella triumphantly leaves the scene of her daughter's wedding not because she has acquiesced, simultaneously refusing and insisting on the imperatives of class and gender, but because she has exploited these imperatives. Film scholars conclude that even as Stella takes her triumphant walk at the close of the film, middle-class values are vicariously reinforced. Haskell explains, “central to the woman's film is the notion of middle-class-ness, not just as an economic status but as a state of mind and a relatively rigid moral code.”Footnote 54 Similarly, Williams writes that “although the final moment of the film ‘resolves’ the contradiction of Stella's attempt to be a woman and a mother by eradicating both, the 108 minutes leading up to this moment present the heroic attempt to live out the contradiction.”Footnote 55 However, from the beginning of the story, Stella resists the fate prescribed to her due to her class and gender.
Although the films marshal the primary conflict through the misunderstandings between classes, the overarching and primary message of the narrative to women is simple: a woman's role is to renounce her autonomous self for those whom she is to love – her children, her husband, and her family. In contrast to the life her daughter Laurel obtains, Stella purposely adopts a lower-class existence. The artifice that surrounds Stella illustrates the ways her ambition and desire, driven by her youth spent as working class, are constructed in opposition to the supposed natural and authentic discursive construction of middle- and upper-class values, reinforcing the rightness and singularity of these values. Yet the story of Stella works to enforce to the female viewing audience the necessity to aspire to this presumably universal and natural ideal of motherhood represented in the character of Helen and sensationalized in the character of Stella. McHugh explains that
the text resolves its conflict by making Laurel an image screened, boxed, held up to be aspired to and admired, her (m)other an enraptured spectator. Even if Stella cannot finally inhabit Laurel's world and her refinement, at the end of the film she can recognize and appreciate it.Footnote 56
Stella's final act, her sacrifice of her daughter's companionship, is an act of love, what “women stand for,” as Judith Williamson claims. As Copjec asserts, “the end of the film is no longer about giving something up, about maternal sacrifice, but about giving, or maternal love.”Footnote 57 However, the subtext of female friendship challenges this construction which ignores the pleasure that both Stella and Helen experience with the success of their covenant to care for their daughter. Stella's final triumphant walk exudes the freedom she now enjoys safe in the covenant forged with Helen. Cavell notes that by the end of the film Stella has learned that she “has the right not to share their tastes, that she is free to leave.”Footnote 58
Scholars have made much of the class and gender dynamics that comprise the primary conflict in Stella Dallas. However, if mentioned at all, the relationship between Stella and Helen figures as one of competition – Helen functions as Stella's foil, her perfect opposite. Yet, as I argue, the story hinges on the collusion between Stella and Helen and their willingness both to exploit and to embody class differences for the sake of a daughter beloved by both. The biological mother sacrifices her right to motherhood so that the nonbiological mother can help provide the monetary support to guarantee the daughter's future. What the mostly female audience experiences as part of the subtext is the clandestine interclass friendship between Stella and Helen, a relationship forbidden in a patriarchal society that relies so vehemently on women's division and isolation, but one that can be exploited in order to gain freedom from those imperatives, whether for the self or deferred to a beloved other.
