All That Hollywood Allows explores the representation of
gender in popular Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s, the last
decade in which film enjoyed a pivotal cultural position. Both a
work of feminist film criticism and theory and an analysis of
popular culture, this provocative book examines from a cultural
studies perspective the top-grossing film melodramas of that
decade, including
A Streetcar Named Desire,
From Here to
Eternity,
East of Eden,
Imitation of Life, and
Picnic.
Stereotypically viewed as a complacent and idyllic time, the 1950s
were actually a period of dislocation and great social change as
Americans struggled to regain their equilibrium in the wake of
World War II. Jackie Byars argues that mass-media texts of the
period, especially films, provide evidence of society's consuming
preoccupation with the domestic sphere -- the nuclear family and
its values. The melodramas included in her study appeared in
theaters just as women were leaving their homes for the workplace.
Some films challenged and some reinforced previously sacrosanct
gender roles. Byars shows how Hollywood melodramas participated in,
interpreted, and extended societal debates concerning family
structure, sexual divisions of labor, and gender roles.
Byars's readings of these films assess a variety of critical
methodologies and approaches to textual analysis, some central to
feminist film studies and some that previously have been bypassed
by scholars in the field. She specifically questions the validity
of readings grounded solely on the premises of psychoanalysis,
arguing that the male norm inherent in the psychoanalytic viewpoint
may well prevent us from hearing, let alone understanding, the
female voices that make their way into the most patriarchal of
films. Byars thus critiques earlier approaches to the study of
women's films and offers fresh readings, emphasizing from several
important perspectives the suppressed female voice.
