SCARLET WOMEN, BASTARDS, AND HAPPY FAMILIES:

Cinematic Representations of Adoption.

By Marley Elizabeth Greiner

 

Dedication:  Nina C. Leibman, Ph.D. 1957-1995

Hundreds of films can be identified as “bastard films,” but a surprisingly small number portray bastardy or adoption from the point of view of the bastard, adopted child or adult.  A large number of bastard films are melodramatic and deal with “good” women abused by men through rape or simple sexual utility, deserted girlfriends, teen pregnancies (frequently facilitated by uncaring, cold or too-busy parents) and self-sacrificing single mothers.  A smaller number of films view the bastard/adoptee from the perspective of infertile couples.  Subsequently, the role of the bastard can often be determined only through the backdoor; through the treatment of the birthparent and adoptive parent characters.  While adopted persons or bastards may hold an important role in the narrative, the locus of the story remains on the woman who made a bad decision or has been used poorly by those around her, or on childless couples.  Bastards/adoptees are, broadly speaking, portrayed in the passive role—an object of desire acted upon by individuals or impersonal social forces. They are seen and interpreted through the experience of others.

            The majority of contemporary analysis of the family melodrama is written from a feminist theoretical perspective.  A feminist sensibility can be helpful in the study of bastard films, especially in terms of the depiction of the birthmother, the relinquishment process, and as a general critique of the family.  For the viewing of adoption-themed films, however, we need to develop a bastard eye with a bastard consciousness to place the bastard/adoptee in a historical, cultural and social context.

The emphasis of this article will be on the bastard/adoptee experience as portrayed in selected American films, though this experience is often filtered through the birthmother, adoptive parents, or society in general.  It is organized in three parts:  Where We Came From (The Birthmother Experience), The Bastard Life (The Adoptee Experience), The Happy Family (The Adoptive Family Experience) and closes with some comments on current trends in bastard films, including the growing positive view of birthmothers, search and reunion, and adoptee rights. The terms, "orphan’ and “foundling” are often euphemisms, especially in older films, for “illegitimate” or “bastard” and was understood as such by the audience for which the films were made.  In addition, the term “bastard” is used here in the political sense of a person whose birth and/or adoptive status renders her or him marginalized by the social and legal system. 

The Birth Mother Experience:  Where We Came From

D.W. Griffith:    Many adoption films are family melodramas, and from the earliest films, the wronged woman and her child - wronged by husbands and fathers, parents, reformers or social workers - have been the subject of film.  The study of American adoption film starts with D. W. Griffith.  Griffith’s artistic view was more than loosely Victorian with values drawn from the antebellum South, theatrical melodrama, and Populist agrarianism.  Griffith was a notorious melodramatist even when traditional melodrama was out of style; a non-Marxist advocate for the oppressed and powerless; an upholder of the bourgeois family as the ideal.  He was against the forces of reform and the hypocritical “uplifters” whom he mercilessly attacked his films.  The subject of many Griffith films is the interpersonal drama of the family within its social and historical setting—under attack from within or without—a form which continues in family melodrama and soaps today.  His dramas were usually a structured attack on or a defense of the integrity and/or virtue of the woman and the social codes and prohibitions which enable her to maintain her place.

While the Cult of True Womanhood, with its Rousseau-like view of female piety, purity, domesticity and submissiveness, was still widely sanctioned in the US prior to World War I, Griffith’s early Biograph maternal melodramas were excessive for his era, and became more so as time went on.  Between 1909 and 1920 Griffith directed at least 10 films that can be identified as bastard/adoption- related including A Baby’s Shoe (1909) Ramona (1910) and Female of the Species (1912), a Darwinian survival tale of three gun-toting women who find a lost infant while fighting their way across a dust-choked desert.  This theme was later developed by John Ford and others in the maternal-male genre seen in films such as Three Godfathers and Three Men and a Baby, a genre still produced today.  One of Griffith’s early Biographs, The Rocky Road (1910) exemplifies his simple yet extreme moralizing, and in terms of today’s open records debate, it shows the melodramatic consequences that might befall those who are adopted and cannot access information about their origins.  The plot involves Ben Cook, “a man of intelligent energy”, who, in the face of financial reverses, takes up liquor.  Cook beats his wife and 3-year old daughter, runs away to another town to sober up and gets a job in a sawmill.  Cook’s wife searches for him, and when her mind becomes unhinged, her daughter is adopted by another family.  Years later, the daughter, played by 13-year old Blanche Sweet, unwittingly becomes engaged to marry her own father.  When her mother learns of the impending wedding, she rushes to the church, and falls dead into the arms of her former husband.

While one can laugh at over-dramatized psychosexual plots such as The Rocky Road, Griffith’s serious bastard/maternal work can be found in his classic films, Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms (1919), and Way Down East (1920)  These films explore the issues of poverty, child abuse, bastardy, and motherhood in and out of marriage - all within the framework of Progressive reform and often hypocritical judgment and “uplift.”

Decrying the encroachment of urbanization and industrial capitalism, Griffith’s work followed the tradition of conservative social commentators like H.L. Menken who identified reformers as meddlesome, hypocritical busybodies (a thread that runs through many adoption films.)  Numerous "uplift committees" and "purity leagues" fell before Griffith’s irony and satire. This is especially true in Mother and the Law, the contemporary arc of Intolerance where the uplifters were identified as the newest representatives of intolerance, perpetuating the very conditions they professed to ameliorate.  Griffith assigns the motive of the uplifters to a half-conscious envy of youth, vitality, freedom—and, viewed with a bastard eye—the "other woman"’s fertility.  The pointedly unattractive old maid sister of mill owner Jackson is seen leading an increasingly ambitious and mean-spirited classist campaign against saloons, whorehouses and workers' dances.  The intertitle describes their work:  “When women cease to attract men, they often turn to Reform as a second choice.”

When The Boy (Bobby Harron) is framed by The Friendless One (Miriam Cooper) and sent to prison for murder, Miss Jackson and her friends march in prudish lockstep to the working class flat of his wife, The Dear One (Mae Marsh), declare her an “unfit mother” and literally wrestle her baby from her arms.  They remove him to an orphan asylum, where is he watched over in the baby ward by nurses who dance the two step with each other accompanied by the intertitle:  “Of course, hired mothers are never negligent.”  Another frighteningly self-righteous relinquishment scene is played for laughs 10 years later in the classic flapper film It (1927).  In It, Betty Lou, (Clara Bow) pretends to be the mother of her unmarried roommate’s baby when two neighborhood Grundys attempt to take him to a “home.”  Where Griffith suggested that Jackson’s sister needed a husband, Bow was more blunt:  “If women like you would stay home and have babies of your own, we’d all be better off.”

While Intolerance examined contemporary urban life, Way Down East, an old fashioned horse and buggy melodrama, exuded a late-Victorian backwater mood of prejudice and small-mindedness that belied the cultural and sexual realties of America portrayed in Intolerance.  Heroine Anna Moore (Lillian Gish) is caught in the nexus of two cultures: the high life of the city and the simplicity of the country.  While the “city playboy” with his lure of material goods and marriage is the agent of Anna’s fall, she is guilty of nothing worse than naiveté and misplaced trust.  The revelation that her marriage is illegal, coupled with the death of her newborn baby, forces Anna to flee to the restorative calm of the country.  It is here where Anna runs afoul of Miss Jackson’s Country Cousin, more than happy to spread the word about Anna’s unwitting unwed motherhood.  The malicious meddling of the neighbor and the prejudice of her new suitor’s father, drive Anna from Eden and into the arms of the most famous blizzard in film history, and to certain death on an ice floe (only to be saved in the nick of  time by the love and courage of a good man.)  Gish’s Anna marks the turning point in American melodrama:  a rejected and solitary individual against the current.  All-powerful destiny has been replaced by all-power society, a general theme that American melodrama and bastard films continue to follow.

 

The Fallen Woman:  With Griffith’s help, the cinematic portrayal of women who transgressed sexual boundaries was in place by the early 1920s.  The modern maternal melodrama, however, was only fully developed with the Fallen Women films of the 1930s. Many of these films were made before the Motion Picture Production Code took effect, a code which greatly limited the type of sexual activity and its consequences that could be portrayed on the screen.

Fallen Women films find their genesis in 19th century European women’s novels and plays which sympathetically portrayed female sexuality yet ultimately forced the protagonist to pay for her sexual through rejection, anonymity and death.  While these elements appeared in earlier films, for bastard film purposes, the Fallen Women films can be fixed with the 1920 release of Madame X.  The Madame X theme followed a formula:  a woman is separated from her legitimate child, falls from her social class and founders in disgrace.  In the meantime the child grows up in respectability and enters society where he or she stands for progress and advancement.  The fallen woman watches the progress of her child from afar since she cannot risk jeopardizing her child’s fortunes by contamination from her life of ill repute.  Chance eventually draws mother and now-grown child together and the partial or total rehabilitation of the mother is accomplished, often through a courtroom scene.  In the European tradition, the disgraced mother is punished and comes to an unhappy end.  In the American version, however, while unhappy endings are not uncommon, happy endings are often tacked on which do not reflect the basic pessimism of the story.  Film critic Christian Viviani in the 1979 essay, "Who Is Without Sin? The Maternal Melodrama In American Film 1930-39" develops two lines of Madame X mothers and progeny:  the Legitimate (Lego) line in the European style where fallen women were portrayed as submissive, resigned, sickly, naive, defenseless, lacking in energy or decisiveness, and the much more numerous and interesting American Illegitimate (Bastard) line where they rise from their shady beginnings through talent and brains to redeem themselves through money and success.

To Americanize the genre, the American melodrama needed to be adapted to a society without aristocracy where the ideal was represented by the petit bourgeoisie.  This was exemplified in Way Down East’s conflict between the unwed mother and her culture.  The first important film of the American Bastard subgenre was Frank Capra’s Forbidden (1932) (aka Backstreet without Bastards) with Barbara Stanwyk, which created the archetype of the energetic, decisive and liberated heroine.  This film was followed by Frank Stahl’s Only Yesterday (1933), which featured Margaret Sullivan in her first role as an unwed mother who chooses anonymity of her own free will rather than respectable marriage with a man who has forgotten her (just as  Ginger Rogers would do later in Kitty Foyle (1940).)  Setting the course for many unwed mothers to follow, Sullivan finds honorable work, and unlike her European counterparts, refuses the life of a social outcast.  Menial work which was popular in pre-1932 films such as Lumox (1930) is rejected by most of the heroines in the post-1932 films, except if will lead to a “good marriage” as in Common Clay (1930) and Private Number (1936).  The unwed mother in most cases takes up a profession.  Barbara Stanwyck in Forbidden is a nurse and later a journalist; Constance Bennett is a nurse in Born to Love (1931); Bette Davis and Ginger Rogers are secretaries in That Certain Woman (1937) and Kitty Foyle respectively; Ann Harding is a milliner in The Life of Vergie Winters (1934), Ruth Chatterton is a world-acclaimed opera singer in Sarah and Son (1930) and Margaret Sullivan, Ann Harding, and Barbara Stanwyck are interior decorators in Only Yesterday, Always Goodbye (1938) and Gallant Lady (1933).  According to Viviani, the unwed mother is set up as the antagonist to a “hoarding, speculating society—the repository of false and outworn values.”  With her bastard child she symbolizes the result of a decadent order and the hope of the new and better system which will evolve out of them through dedication without promise of immediate compensation. In other words, the fallen woman and her child are sort of a vague New Deal project.

Not all bastards are kept, however, and to some extent these films, while progressive in their attempt to makes heroines of the mothers, are nonetheless reactionary . Unlike their European Lego-sisters, the bastard is not taken away from her mother, but instead is relinquished voluntarily, (sometimes after the mother attempts to rear the child on her own), in order to assure the child an education and social and “moral standing.”  Convinced to give the child to a childless couple—often the birthfather and his infertile or sickly wife, the unwed mother makes the ultimate sacrifice.  The bastard remains in the family, though no one may bother to tell him he’s adopted much less the real story. That Certain Woman contains an unintentionally hilarious encounter between birthmother Bette Davis and Anita Louse, the crippled wife of birthfather Henry Fonda, in which each woman declares her eternal love for Fonda and demands that the other not only take the child, but Fonda as well.

Some of these plot maneuverings may be silly, but the entire genre tends to recognize the rights of the birthmother.  The weapon that the decadent family uses against her is clearly hypocrisy (Wayward (1932), Common Clay, Private Number, Give Me Your Heart (1936), That Certain Woman, Kitty Foyle.)  The birthmother uses a ruse to regain her rights (Gallant Lady, Wayward, Always Goodbye) or else they are restored by accident (The Life of Vergie Winters, That Certain Woman).  The pessimism of Forbidden is a glaring exception.  In the final scene, Barbara Stanwyck, in an act of revolt, and some may say stupidity, tears up the will that declares her the mother of politician Adolph Menjou's’s daughter and guarantees them his fortune.

While the unwed mother is central to the maternal melodrama and played by a star of some magnitude, the birthfather most always performs a secondary role, and was seldom played by an actor of much prominence—at least at the time the film was released.  He is usually a weak-willed and vacillating character who wants his family to make up his mind for him.  In Common Clay, he lets his family treat Constance Bennett as a blackmailer; in Kitty Foyle he stands by silently while his family orders Ginger Rogers to attend finishing school; and in That Certain Woman, Bette Davis and Henry Fonda are married only three hours when Fonda acquiesces to his wealthy father’s demand for an annulment.  The birthfather is often overly attached to his mother as in Wayward, creating a young mother versus old mother theme of Oedipal proportions.  Often he is married or committed to someone of his own social class.  He can also be absent. In The Old Maid (1939) and The Great Lie (1941) the father, played by George Brent in both films, either dies in battle or is presumed dead in a plane crash.  In some cases of course, he's just a bounder as in Sarah and Son where he steals the baby and puts it up for adoption, then runs off the to Marines.

 

Teen Sex:  Earlier films such as Not Wanted (1949) gave a hard-edged look at teen pregnancy and maternity home life, but not until the mid-late 1950s did Hollywood’s emphasis on the noble, sacrificing and respectable fallen woman take a turn south and begin to explore teen sex—a sure money-maker in the midst of the mid-century teen culture rumble.  Films such as Rebel Without A Cause (1955), Splendor in the Grass (1959), All Fall Down (1962), A Summer Place (1961), Blue Denim (1962), The Young Lovers (1964) and the classic camp Ed Wood script The Violent Years (1956) were a far cry from Fallen Women films, not to mention earlier 'youth' films such as Henry Aldrich Gets Glamour (1943), Love Laughs at Andy Hardy (1946), and A Date with Judy (1948).  Peyton Place (1957) carried a triple whammy:  the stepfather rape, impregnation and subsequent illegal abortion of Selena Cross; the bastardy of Allison MacKenzie, and the unwed mother issues of Constance MacKenzie. MacKenzie moves from noble Fallen Woman to become an angry, sexually repressed, but successful business woman who is as concerned about finding her slut-gene in Allison, as she is about keeping her secret past from her daughter and the town.

Two films in particular explored untimely teen pregnancy and depicted, with stomaching-churning precision, the consequences to “nice girls” who transgressed middle class sexual mores in the name of love:  Blue Denim and A Summer Place.  Blue Denim is an important, though flawed portrayal of teenage sexuality, a subject previously taboo in mainstream Hollywood where sexually active women had been portrayed as mature women who knew the score.  Based on the hit Broadway play of the same name by Philip Dunne, the film attempted an honest and sensitive portrayal of teenage sexuality, pregnancy and family dysfunction.  This is done through the characters of Arthur (Brandon DeWilde) and Janet (Carol Lynley) who find themselves “in trouble” after their first and only sexual encounter.  The play was hard-hitting and controversial, but the illegal abortion ending was too hot for Hollywood, even in the waning days of the Production Code. The film was toned down, much to the dismay of conservative Catholic critics who complained that Arthur and Janet’s happy compulsory cinematic marriage should never have taken place.  The reviewer for the Catholic Legion of Decency was so unhappy with the ending that he declared that Janet should have been left to have the baby without a young and probably doomed marriage.  The ideal ending, according to the critic, would have been for Janet to keep the baby and to grow into a mature relationship with Arthur.

A Summer Place, the ultimate dirty movie for a generation of high school girls, is full-blown melodrama at its best, featuring family secrets, illicit sex, repressed sexuality, and alcoholism - all exposed in public scandal.  The plot centers around nice girl Molly Jorgenson (Sandra Dee) and her summer romance with clean-cut Johnny Hunter (Troy Donohue.)  Molly is sexually precocious, but clearly inexperienced.  Johnny vacillates between wanting to sleep with Molly and putting her off.  Only a few days into the vacation, Molly and Johnny take an afternoon boat excursion, get caught in a storm and are forced to spend the night on an island.  When they are found by the Coast Guard the following morning, Molly’s man-hating monster mother (Constance Ford), obsessed with Molly’s virginity, her own dirty thoughts, and her family’s social status, hysterically sends for a doctor to make sure that Molly is still intact.  This leads to one of the most chilling scenes in teen film history, with Molly wrapped in a blanket pleading, “I haven’t done anything wrong.  I’m a good girl.”  Eventually Molly does become pregnant by Johnny.  At the end of the film Molly and Johnny, having been mentored by Molly’s father (Richard Egan) and Johnny’s mother (Dorothy McQuire), former teenage lovers themselves who have left their respective abusive spouses and are now married to each other, are seen arriving at the island where they first met, holding hands, eagerly looking forward to their untested life as teenage parents, untroubled by the fact that they are totally unprepared for such a life.       

Blue Denim and A Summer Place were considered progressive for their day.  A Summer Place, especially, seemed to say that teen sex was normal and to be expected but stopped short of endorsing it.  A closer reading of these films and other like-themed films such as The Young Lovers, where illegal abortion is rejected and balloons are seen gently floating skyward at the end, suggests a contrary and reactionary message quite different from the preceding decades.  Teen sex may be a fact of life, but the wages of sex are marriage.  Unlike their predecessors, these films, although ostensibly more understanding and liberal, suggest that proper and acceptable sexual relations will only be found within the bourgeois marriage bed.  Bastardy (or abortion), secret or open, will not be tolerated.  While “nice kids” Arthur, Janet, Molly and Johnny and their bastards superficially represent a turn from post-war conservatism  (and the Production Code), they in fact legitimize that very conservatism the films pretend to reject. This is done with their ultimate acquiescence to marriage, and without the spunk and ingenuity demonstrated by their Fallen Women predecessors.  One expects to see this unhappy foursome a few years down the road trapped in group therapy sessions paid for by their parents after a day at some low-end job with Arthur and Johnny finally chucking it all for the Summer of Love and Janet and Molly collecting food stamps, going to keypunch school, and wondering what in the hell they ever saw in those two losers.

 

End of Part 1

 

Coming in the Summer 2000 BQ: Part 2.  The Bastard Life (The Adoptee Experience in Film)

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Marley Greiner is Executive Chair and Co-founder of Bastard Nation. Marley also heads the MOB - Mad-Ohio Bastards, which has been instrumental in educating Ohio citizens on adoptee civil rights through direct action and press outreach.

(This feature appeared in the Spring 2000 issue of the Bastard Quarterly.)

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