In order to clarify the significance of this transition for the voices of women, I shall briefly review the ways two prominent theorists have attempted to describe the appeal of listening. As one of the few early film theorists to address the topic of sound-without-image Dziga Vertov's sound experiments being the other major example , Rudolf Arnheim attests to the pleasure "pure" sound could offer, describing it in terms eerily resonant of Guy Rosolato's "sonorous envelope," but on a massive, even national scale Rosolato , p.
In his book Radio, written in Germany in , Arnheim conjures up the image of the radio audience as an unseeing, eagerly listening mass, enthralled as their imaginations thrill to the bidding of a benevolent disembodied voice.
It is very significant that certain expressive voices do not strike the naive listener as "the voice of somebody one doesn't see" and whose appearance can be speculated on, but rather transmit the experience of an absolutely complete personality.
Arnheim , p. In a chapter entitled "In Praise of Blindness: Emancipation from the Body," Arnheim argues that the recorded or transmitted voice has been. In broadcasting as in recording, "Resonance is eliminated, out of a very proper feeling that the existence of the studio is not essential to the transmission and therefore has no place in the listener's consciousness. The listener rather restricts himself to the reception of pure sound, which comes to him through the loudspeaker" ibid.
The notable lack of spatial signifiers described in Arnheim's ideal radio broadcast enables him to construct the disembodied voice as an infinite one comparable, as will be argued, to the infinity defined and filled by the voice of the mother.
Not only does Arnheim wish to eliminate our awareness of space, but also of the body—and, consequently, gender. Roland Barthes contradicts Arnheim by insisting on the voice's relation to the body, the voice as physical signifier.
For Barthes, rather than being "pure sound," the "grain" of the voice signifies, first, the body. I am determined to listen to my relation with the body of the man or woman singing or playing and that relation is erotic" Barthes , p.
It should be noted that Barthes is dealing exclusively with recordings of singers and not with live performance. The possibilities of ownership, repetition, and control increase the potential identification of the recorded voice as object and fetish. Secondly, for Barthes, the voice exists in a constant, negotiated relationship to language. What he calls the "grain" is not merely a physical trace but "the very precise space.
Barthes aims to describe the effect of listening not to "the whole of music but simply. Inasmuch as the speaking voice is involved in producing both language and sound, "the grain of the voice" is involved in "a dual production—of language and of music" Barthes , p. When recorded, the voice, so often lost track of in the attempt to capture the meaning of the sounds articulated, reemerges, becomes a capturable object, a source of pleasure separable from its function within the symbolic field.
In Barthes' account, this awareness of the sound of the voice already creates a space or distance between the voice and language. Referring to Julia Kristeva's work, he differentiates between her concepts of the "pheno-song," which covers "all the features which belong to the structure of the language being sung. In short everything in the performance which is in the service of communication," and "the geno-song," which. It is, in a very simple word but [one] which must be taken seriously, the diction of the language Barthes , pp.
In this elevation of diction defined in the Random House College Dictionary as "the accent, inflection, intonation, and speech-sound quality manifested by an individual speaker" , [32] Barthes goes so far as to differentiate between consonants and vowels. Consonants, in Barthes' reading, are on the side of the symbolic, setting limits, symbolizing restriction: "always prescribed as needing to be 'articulated', detached, emphasized in order to fulfill the clarity of meaning " italics in original.
Vowels, on the other hand, partake of the geno-song, encouraging the listener as well as the singer or speaker to dwell on a sound without limits: "There lay the 'truth' of language—not its functionality clarity, expressivity, communication ," but instead its status as "pure" sound, as the place where one can discover the body in the grain of the voice.
When sung properly, "the range of vowels received all the significance which is meaning in its potential voluptuousness.
He states, "Isn't it the truth of the voice to be hallucinated? By invoking the fantasy of a boundless space, Barthes reintroduces the figure of the mother. Mary Ann Doane also describes the voice as being at once language and that which exceeds language and leads us back, again, to the mother.
The voice thus understood is an interface of imaginary and symbolic, pulling at once toward the signifying organization of language and its reduction of the range of vocal sounds to those it binds and codifies, and toward original and imaginary attachments, "representable in the fantasm by the body or by the corporeal mother, the child at her breast.
What Barthes finally wants is a way to theorize the effect of the voice of the other on the listener, to give an "impossible account of an individual thrill that I constantly experience in listening to singing," and "to succeed in refining a certain 'aesthetics' of musical pleasure.
And one way to "lose" the subject, to flee the symbolic, the letter, the Law, is in pursuit of the presymbolic. While it is not actually possible to regain access to a condition before language, it is a frequent characteristic of cultural production to appeal to its vestigial traces, the lingering nostalgia for that time. Barthes' difference with Arnheim rests on Barthes' insistence on 1 positing a male subject and 2 wanting it both ways—wanting an infinite space inside the voice of the mother and an erotic relation to the "grain" of the voice, which always points back to the body.
This seeming contradiction grows out of the fact that our construction of a presymbolic condition is "superimposed upon infancy from a subsequent temporal and spatial vantage" Silverman , p. The fantasy of the maternal voice is invented in a post-Oedipal present and imposed on the past.
Barthes wants to recapture the prelinguistic state where difference is abolished while keeping the erotics—the desire for the mother as woman, as difference—possible only for a post-Oedipal male subject. As psychoanalytic theory has been of great significance to feminist film theory and to work on sound, it might be helpful now to briefly outline the Lacanian scenario of subjectivity to which I shall be referring throughout this work.
According to Lacan, the mirror stage provides the child's first awareness of itself as separate from its mother, the world, and, most crucially, itself. The progression toward subjectivity requires a series of separations and losses. What becomes separate is objectified the mother, the figure of the Other onto which the child projects imaginary attributes, whatever is external as the child defines what is internal its self in terms of its separation from these objects.
As Silverman succinctly puts it, "to the degree that the object has been lost, the subject has been found" ibid. With the accession to language, the subject is subsumed into the symbolic.
However, as the subject has been constructed around this "splitting," being cut off from what it was, it is haunted by a sense of loss, absence, or lack.
As I shall attempt to show, the process of listening isolates, intensifies, and crystalizes the subject's relationship to the other present through the medium of the voice. Thus, the listening situation can become a crucible where the subject works through its relationship with the other and, in doing so, momentarily, and pleasurably, reconstructs a sense of wholeness.
As an invention, the phonograph provided unique new ways of listening and dramatically different relationships to the voice. Given the theory cited above, it is possible to posit a psychological reason for the shift away from. The voice heard during playback is always the voice of the other—crucially, even when it is the listener's own. Exposed, the subject's voice becomes comparable to the numerically limitless, but inherently less important , voices of others. It sounds too high because heard for the first time outside the resonance of the cranium.
It may sound monotonous and uninflected. It frequently sounds more like the voices of family members than oneself. The splitting of the subject is made unnervingly concrete when one is confronted with a playback of one's own voice.
It is seldom a source of pleasure. Jean-Louis Comolli identifies the extreme care taken to preserve synchronization of the actor's voice and image in film as the sign of ideology at work, with dis-synchronization "scandalizing" one's sense of mastery and ownership see Doane in Weis and Belton , p. How much more of an affront dis-synchronization must be when the technologically externalized, "objectified" voice is one's own. With the sound reproduction industry's shift to marketing prerecorded phonograph records a move that effectively replaced or eliminated home recording , [34] the voice became openly and unproblematically that of the other, requiring a less drastic adjustment or fragmentation of the listening subject, and as such, could be substituted for other voices including, most crucially, that of the mother.
The mother's actual voice is displaced to the realm of the "external" and "otherness" following the accession to language. Listening thus becomes an intimate affair, infinite in promise because keyed to an ancient desire, without calling to mind a possibly overwhelming and ambivalent relation to an actual parent.
In discussing what Silverman calls the "fantasy of the maternal voice," it becomes clear that the nature of the subject's relationship to the maternal voice is spatial. Rosolato's famous description of the mother's voice as a "sonorous envelope" surrounding the child identifies the voice as a place, a place to be, a space that is at once everywhere and nowhere. Chion is Silverman's main example of the negative version of the fantasy.
The speaking subject recreates the mother's voice as "either cherished as an object a —as what can make good all lacks—or despised and jettisoned as what is most abject, most culturally intolerable" Silverman , p. Sound reproduction, as I shall attempt to illustrate, is particularly suited to the fantasy of submission to the imaginary because of its unique ability to create a position for the listener as isolated, surrounded by sound but alone,. And it is "the fantasy of the maternal voice" that returns again and again as the model and locus of this imaginary operation.
Rosolato suggests [that the voice] can spill over from subject to object and object to subject, violating the bodily limits upon which classical subjectivity depends, and so smoothing the way for projection and introjection. The difficulty of establishing distance from the voice of the mother is suggested by its inclusion among Lacan's lost objects, or objets a , "those objects which are first to be distinguished from the subject's own self, and whose 'otherness' is never very strongly marked.
The acoustic confusion of internal and external is not linked to the woman's voice per se. As Barthes illustrates, the voice we capture on recordings and choose to luxuriate in may be the most masculine basso profundo. If the "otherness" of the maternal voice, as objet a , is "never strongly marked" neither is its "difference. As Nancy Chodorow points out in The Reproduction of Mothering , "mothering" and "maternal" behavior are defined by a group of actions and are not inherent or gender-based.
The desire for non-subjectivity precedes issues of gender the "symbolic castration" of the accession to language preceding the awareness of sexual difference and manifests itself clinically in hypnosis. In the mirror stage, vision abets language and the voice in inscribing separation of self and other.
Sound, especially as discussed here in reference to recordings and radio, can provide the illusion of repairing the split by reincorporating the other.
The physical markers of hypnosis the trance, insensitivity to pain, etc. The confusion between subject and object in hypnosis is reiterated in clinical practice. Lawrence S. Kubie and Sydney Margolin have described the dissolution of the subject in response to the induction of a hypnotic state: "Once the subject is going 'under,' it is only in a purely geographical sense that the voice of the hypnotist is an influence from the outside.
Subjectively it is experienced rather as an extension of the subject's own psychic process" Kubie and Margolin , p. This condition is achieved through the classic methods of having the immobilized patient concentrate on repetitive visual stimuli such as a metronome or swinging watch as the hypnotist repeats various phrases.
This simultaneous restriction both on the motor and sensory side reduces to a minimum the variegated sensory contrasts upon which Ego boundaries depend. It is the dissolution of Ego boundaries that gives the hypnotist his [ sic ] apparent "power"; because his "commands" do not operate as something reaching the subject from the outside, demanding submissiveness. To the subject they are his own thoughts and goals, a part of himself. Such a condition is not restricted to classical hypnosis alone.
Kubie and Margolin state that "such an obscuring of Ego boundaries, so dramatic in its manifestations when it is total, is frequently encountered in normal psychology as a partial phenomenon. The theorization of listening pleasure is a necessary preliminary step to considering the issue explored in the remainder of this book—the representation of women's voices in classical Hollywood cinema.
As I've shown, the ideology of sound recording eventually sought to hide the effects of the apparatus on the sound being recorded, particularly when that sound was the human voice. And yet a theme that resurfaces time and again in phonography, radio, and sound film is the persistent "problem" of recording, transmitting, or reproducing women's voices.
If we return to the very beginnings of sound technology with women's voices in mind, we find something at once obvious and rather startling: the basic ability to record the human voice was predicated on the ability to record the male voice.
The original inventors were, of course, men, who recorded themselves. In news photographs, the introduction of new audio-technology is always performed surrounded by serious-looking gentlemen.
A photograph of one of the early phonograph parlors shows over a dozen men hooked to eartubes, eager to hear the latest invention Read and Welch , p. No women are present. Women do appear in ads, though.
They are shown as consumers, and are often depicted as little girls demonstrating how simple it is to operate the equipment. The three major reasons given for the problems sound media encountered with women's voices are: the myth of woman's "naturally" less powerful voice, technical deficiencies, and what might be called, somewhat amorphously, "cultural distaste" for women's voices.
Let us look at each in turn. In her study of the social effects of electronic amplification on women's voices, Anne McKay rebuts the popular misperception that women cannot speak as loudly and clearly as men. Throughout the nineteenth century, as the pressures of various political movements caused social barriers against women speaking in public to fall, women began to emerge as powerful public speakers well before the advent of the loudspeaker. One woman, whose voice was reported as being "clear and musical, but not at all strong" was said to be able to address "five hundred or five thousand.
A series of experiments at Bell Laboratories in the twenties, for instance, mirrors the cultural assumptions of the period.
Instead, they found that "adult men and women modify their articulation of the same phonetic elements to produce acoustic signals that correspond to the male-female archetypes. In other words, men tend to talk as though they were bigger, and women as though they were smaller than they actually may be" Sachs et al. The "technical deficiency" explanation tends to center on problems associated with recording or transmitting women's voices owing to the fact that women's voices whether because of physical determinants or by choice are usually higher pitched than men's.
A radio station manager in the twenties declared that "in no case does the female voice transmit as well as that of the man" McKay , p. And in a representative of Bell Laboratories told the Scientific American, with some finality, that "the speech characteristics of women, when changed to electrical impulses, do not blend with the electrical characteristics of our present day radio equipment" McKay , p.
Throughout the first half of this century, engineers were clearly working on ways to improve the reproduction and transmission of women's voices. However, the Bell Laboratories authority quoted above makes it clear that the inadequacy of radio technology in regard to women's voices was not the result of mere technological chance. He asserts that " the demand of the radio public for radio equipment to meet their aural fancy had led to [the] design of equipment that impairs the reproduction of a soprano's voice" McKay , p.
As McKay concludes, "The ideal radio voice. The cultural distaste for women's voices noted earlier in relation to "talking records" was clearly still in effect in the twenties in regard to radio. One radio executive proclaimed "it is my opinion that women depend upon everything else but the voice for their appeal.
Their voices are flat or shrill, and they are usually pitched far too high to be modulated correctly. Whatever the reason, too little personality or too much, a woman columnist of the twenties reported that "a canvass of listeners [by station WJZ] resulted in a vote of to 1 in favor of men as announcers.
A man's. Evidently the "problem" of the woman's voice is always a tangle of technological and economic exigencies, each suffused with ideological assumptions about woman's "place. When they attempted to use it in ways that would lead to change in the traditional order and in women's customary roles, their right to use it at all was challenged" ibid. In the following chapters I analyze a group of films that each construct woman's speech as a "problem. The language she speaks is an affront to male authority and middle-class decorum; her very ability to make sounds is fraught with obstacles; and, in the final instance, the story she tells threatens to undermine the patriarchal order.
As these films show, the "problem" of the speaking woman provokes increasingly severe methods of repression because she refuses to be silenced. Attempts to stop her from speaking rupture classical conventions of representation, however, and expose the way patriarchy uses language, image, sound, and narrative to construct and contain "woman. The question I seek to answer throughout this work is: "Can a woman ever be said to 'speak' in classical cinema?
Looking at a series of adaptations of a short story written in gives us an opportunity to analyze the way "woman" and her voice are constructed across a series of texts that themselves make the transition from silence to sound. In each of the works examined here, the character of the woman is the catalyst for the action. Her "character" and motivations are the subject of speculation and concern for others in the narrative. However the dialogue from the play, while much reduced, is still prominent in the silent film.
Therefore in addition to analyzing the function of language in constructing the character "Sadie Thompson," I raise the larger issue of how texts make allowances for other "voices. However, if sound itself is the other "voice" being introduced to silent cinema, what are the implications of associating sound, defined as a potentially disrupting force, and the woman through the presentation of her vocie?
In silent film, what are the implications for the woman's "voice" when her words are literally set apart, her ability to speak defined by the image? Unlike the Maugham story, the play and the three films I shall be examining are average works and should not be considered artistically groundbreaking.
Raoul Walsh's Sadie Thompson was perceived in its day as an entertaining vehicle for Gloria Swanson and for Walsh's own roughhouse, "masculine" comedy style. Lewis Milestone's Rain and the Curtis. Bernhardt adaptation Miss Sadie Thompson likewise do not stand out from other films of their periods or even within the arguably limited oeuvres of these particular directors. Representative of their eras in styles of filmmaking, use of sound, and the representation of women, these texts will serve to demonstrate a series of general propositions about the relationship of mode to the representation of women and women's speech.
In the movement from Sadie Thompson to Rain we can see how the conventions of classical silent cinema were challenged and forced to adapt to the presence of the sound-reproduction industry. Also present in these works is the pervasive influence of theater. While early sound film bears the alleged ignominy of flooding the screen with "non-cinematic" theatrical adaptations, silent cinema had never ceased adapting plays from the time of the Film d'Art movement onward.
Producers were, in fact, always eager to turn to the stage for pre-sold material that promised to combine art with profit. As each film claims descent from both play and story, we need a theoretical approach that will allow us to examine historical evolution, transformation within and between forms, and the relation between form and "subject matter," which in turn exerts pressures on, and is responsive to, formal change.
Summarizing the work of Marxist theorists, Fredric Jameson argues that every social formation or historical moment is made up of several overlapping modes of production, survivals of older methods now relegated to dependent positions what Raymond Williams calls the "residual" , as well as anticipatory tendencies that point toward new methods yet to become standardized the "emergent".
In a highly conventionalized system, "emergent" or experimental modes of production and new styles are the rarely seen parameters of classical style. They keep the form fresh without ever shaking our confidence that we've been here before and will have no trouble "reading" the text. Williams's discussion of hegemony, the dominant, residual, and emergent, is entirely in reference to social change, but it is helpful to appropriate his terminology in conceptualizing formal changes in cinematic style, keeping in mind the need to "find terms which recognize not only 'stages' and 'variations' but the internal dynamic relations of any actual process" Williams , p.
At any time, forms of alternative or directly oppositional politics and culture exist as significant elements in the society. Any hegemonic process must be. The decisive hegemonic function is to control or transform or even incorporate. The precedence and subsequent coexistence of a multi-part sound industry phonographs for recording blanks or playing prerecorded cylinders and discs; radio networks constituted a potential challenge to the originally image-based industry of cinema.
Radio threatened the economic base of cinema by drawing away its audience. Once the film industry chose to incorporate sound, sound recording posed a challenge to the formal system of signification within film texts by seeming to change the definition of "cinematic" to a style favoring speech over image. It then fell to the hegemony, here the dominant style, to incorporate or transform the threat posed by a wholesale switch to a sound-based system, and to make sure that the elements of sound that were used strengthened and reenforced the classical model.
Hollywood's classical project is by definition ahistorical, as it seeks to hide the materiality of cinema and obscure its signifying functions behind established conventions. In Rain the residual elements of silent film style, already five years out of date, are unusually prominent, disrupting the impression of a smooth "sound film" surface transparently "communicating" narrative information.
Many transitional films for instance, the half-silent, half-"talkie" films suffer from an even more disturbing lack of consistency. Although much of the use of sound in Rain functions according to what were to become the classical conventions of the sound film, the film also demonstrates the new range of alternatives made possible by the cinematically emergent technology of sound. All films to some extent juggle conventions formed in earlier eras.
However, the varying modes of production visible in Rain , the antagonistic systems and styles, do not yet fit comfortably together. The older methods of the silent era clash visibly with newer methods, some that would become standard, others seldom to be seen after this transitional period. According to Williams, the "active presence" of these competing elements. That is to say, alternative political and cultural emphases [as well as the evolution of styles and processes of significantion]. Williams , p.
Accordingly any understanding of classical style has to take into account "the internal dynamic relations" between dominant conventions, residual and.
In his essay "Discourse in the Novel," Mikhail Bakhtin examines the novel as the form par excellence not only for revealing heteroglossia Bakhtin's term for the dialogization of the many languages within a given language system but as the one form that creates itself out of this multiplicity of languages and their interaction.
Furthermore, every aspect of communication, being historically determined, shows traces of its determination.
Bakhtin states that "verbal discourse is a social phenomenon—social throughout its entire range and in each and every one of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning" , p. He goes on to note that "proper theoretical recognition [needs to be] found for the specific feel for language and discourse that one gets in.
However other forms of discourse besides prose and the novel will also, by necessity, reveal the workings of heteroglossia. Film is only tangentially a form that "orchestrates its themes by means of language," but cinema studies can expand the application of Bakhtin's concepts to other forms of artistic communication.
In cinema, language or verbal discourse becomes only one of the modes of discourse in a complex of audio and visual forms, each vying for dominance. By examining the transformations of a specific short story a prose work where "language" is the whole, but which in itself contains the interplay of many languages as it is adapted into a play, a silent film, an early sound film, and a classical Hollywood musical, we can trace the displacement of verbal discourse in favor of other "languages," each in its own way a complex of languages passing through a historical evolution and serving a specific signifying function.
With each change, the way woman is represented, here in the character of Sadie Thompson, undergoes changes reflecting the alteration in mode, style, and convention, as well as changes in the cultural position of women from the period of one adaptation to the next. What makes cinema a potential example of heteroglossia beyond the fact of the multiple discourses simultaneously at work in a film is the dialogization of those discourses.
Bakhtin notes that "the fundamental and wide-ranging significance" of the "dialogic nature of discourse. I shall argue that in early sound films the competing discourses—the image-based signifying system of silent film, the newly potent dialogue-based discourse from theater and radio drama, and the voices, music, sound effects, and ambient sound of the sound mix, each with its own power to signify—become dialogized as they struggle for dominance in the new cinematic form.
The value of these transitional films lies precisely in their struggle, which the critical focus on classical films has ignored. The same could be said of an evolving signifying system like cinema where signs of stylistic struggle are repressed in favor of a myth of a coherent, unified classical style.
Three areas of early sound film can be opened up when considered in terms of heteroglossia. First, dialogue is the most obvious and often the sole verbal discourse carried over in adaptations of literary works into films, yet because it stems from pre-cinematic sources, whether drama or prose, dialogue is seldom considered worthy of intensive examination in cinema studies.
Dialogue, as well as being a chief carrier of narrative in sound film, performs a substantial narrative function in silent film and the change between the function s and placement of dialogue in silent film and in sound film is one of the major areas untheorized in the transition to sound.
Second, heteroglossia is characteristic of entire prose works and not merely of the dialogue of the characters. A character's "language"—that is, sociocultural position—can "infest" and interpenetrate the author's discourse and open a dialogue with the other languages passing through the text. This, I would argue, is also possible in cinema, where the forms of "cinematic" communication surround and inform the spoken dialogue. Third, by comparing various periods of cinematic history classical silent film, early sound, and classical sound film we can chart the evolution of the dominant hierarchical relationship between the languages within cinema.
Through extreme industrial, technical and formal pressures, Rain in its very archaic, old-fashioned quality momentarily leaves bare the various functions of sound and image as the text suffers a temporary—historical—difficulty in hiding its enunciation.
Through a combination of technological, cultural, and economic factors, the silent film hierarchy of languages is redefined as new conventions and a new hierarchy are formed. As the substance of Maugham's story is subjected through a series of adaptations to the historically evolving properties of different media, it becomes possible for us to trace the effects of different systems on a single element—the representation of woman's voice.
The potential for heteroglossia in a film's form then becomes particularly relevant to feminist analysis. The dominant conventions of cinema have traditionally been used to position woman within.
Once these conventions are broken and new forms become possible for instance under the pressure to create a new signifying hierarchy in sound film , what was previously contained might break free. Traces of the truth of women's lives might, for example, be glimpsed through the cracks; a woman might snatch a fleeting opportunity to express her own experience in words that do not serve any patriarchal project.
However in any medium, whether short story, play, silent or sound film, a "voice" is the product of conventions of representation, and I shall first chart the way in which each of these forms constructs the speaking woman. Somerset Maugham's short story "Miss Thompson" was first published in Later that year it was produced as a play on Broadway under the title by which it is now known, Rain. The story was subsequently reprinted under the title "Rain," reflecting the popularity of the play.
It has been filmed three times. In Joseph Schenck, who had distributed the silent version for Swanson through United Artists, chose the property for a sound remake to serve as a vehicle for Joan Crawford.
This version was directed by Lewis Milestone, who had established himself as a pioneering director of sound films with All Quiet on the Western Front and The Front Page in This version was not commercially successful it was the only film version that did not make money or garner critical praise for its star.
The story was not adapted again until , when it became Miss Sadie Thompson and provided a starring role for Rita Hayworth abetted by color and the new 3-D process , supported by Jose Ferrer and Aldo Ray, and directed by Curtis Bernhardt.
Each of the films claims to be based solely or in part on the original story. Owing to legal complications, the version declares itself to be entirely based on the original, while the film credits the story, the play, and unspecified additional script work by Maxwell Anderson.
However, it is important to keep in mind that it is the play that forms the foundation of all the major film versions.
In order to appreciate the importance of the changes made by Colton and Randolph and carried over into the films, it will be necessary to look at the story at some length, in regard both to heteroglossia within the prose form and how it relates to the characters and their subsequent realizations in dramatic and cinematic form.
The story concerns several people forced by quarantine to spend two weeks together on a South Sea island. Macphail and his wife meet the Reverend Alfred Davidson and Mrs. Davidson who are missionaries in the Pacific on a ship bound for the island of Apia. When they stop in the port of Pago Pago, they are informed that no ship will be leaving for two weeks and that they.
There they find that another passenger from the ship, Sadie Thompson, has also taken a room. Hearing loud music and men's voices coming from her room, Davidson realizes that she is a prostitute from Honolulu and exhorts her regarding her evil ways. He is thrown out of her room by some sailors. After this, Davidson alternately prays for her soul, condemns her wickedness to Macphail, and demands of the island's governor that she be deported on moral grounds.
Afraid of being returned to San Francisco, where a prison sentence awaits her, and under a great deal of mental stress, Sadie repents and becomes totally dependent on Reverend Davidson, who has persuaded her to go back to San Francisco as punishment for her sins. The night before she is to leave, Davidson goes to pray with her; the next morning he is found on the beach, having cut his own throat.
Back at the inn, Dr. Macphail discovers Sadie, dressed vulgarly and playing her phonograph loudly. When Macphail, horrified, insists she turn off the music out of respect for the dead man and his widow, she screams at him that men are all alike, "filthy pigs.
Any summary of a literary or cinematic work inevitably ends up privileging the diegesis over the structure. Just as form is inseparable from "content" and is essential to the creation of any meaning a work might have, it is impossible to discuss heteroglossia through plot summary.
One of the most interesting things about Maugham's story is that most of the action takes place "offstage"—the story is built around absences and enigmas, which are in turn re-presented to Dr. Macphail, who functions as a witness within the text. Macphail hears noises and deduces that Davidson has been thrown out of Sadie's room by the sailors.
He is told that Davidson has been to see the governor, that Davidson has bad dreams and prays for Sadie's soul, that Sadie has later repented. Most important, it is through him that we are given to understand what has led to Davidson's death something never made explicit in any of the versions of the story. Everything we learn is filtered through Macphail, our observer and the author's representative of objectivity and accurate perception.
Macphail is presented as a doctor. By profession he is thus an educated, disinterested observer, a purveyor of "scientific" discourse, a moderator between the excesses of Sadie and Davidson. His relation to excess is noted early on, when he is eager to see some native cases of elephantiasis.
However it is the exaggerated and perverted emotional extremes that become the bulk of the story's action, and that are diagnosed as such by the doctor. The prayed was heard and granted. Who did Narcissus fall in love with? Narcissus fell in love with his own image which he saw in the still water of the pool, where he had gone to satisfy his thirst. At last what happened with Narcissus? The body of Narcissus withered away and it turned into a stem of flower with lovely gold and white blossom.
What was special about him? Narcissus was handsome young man. The speciality about him was the everybody who saw him, fell in love with him immediately. Who cursed him and why? What was the curse? The speciality about her was that the could talk to anybody on any subject at any time. Once she engaged, the Goddess in some casual talks.
Hera was at that time about to make love with Zeus. This interruption from Echo annoyed the Goddess so much that she curced Echo, the nymph that she could utter nothing in future except the last words she has heard. Why did Echo follow Narcissus? Echo wanted to see the beauty of Narcissus and so she followed him through the trees. Echo followed Narcissus because the wanted to have him near. Describe what happened during the meeting of Echo and Narcissus? Echo came out of hiding place to approach Narssius.
But Narcissus pushed her away and ran back. He said — I would die before I would have you near me. Why was the nymph embarrassed and a shamed? What was the result of it. Echo had not expected that rude treatment from Narcissus. She was highly embarrassed and ashamed. She hid herself in a cave and never came and never came out into the air and sunlight again. Her beauty and youth withered away, Shrinking her body to the extent that eventually, she Vanished and became just a non entity. Who prayed to Gods against Narcissus?
What did she pray? Narcissus had played with many hearts and at last one of the those he had scored prayed to the Gods that Narcissus would some day find himself scorned by one he loved. The prayer was heard and granted? What happened to Narcissus when he went to the pool, to quench his thirst. As he leaned over the shining surface of the pool, he saw the reflection of the most beautiful face he had ever seen.
His heart trembled at the sight and he could no take himself away from it. That was the reflection of his own beautiful face. He had not raise his eyes from the surface and only murmured words of love. His body withered away and what remained there was a flower with gold white blossom and that flower is called Narcissus.
What feeling you have when you see your reflection in a mirror? The mirror tells the truth. One cannot deceived himself after seeing the reflection in the mirror. Group Discussion 1. If you meet two persons, one having a beautiful face and the other a beautiful heart, whom would you prefer and why? Falling in love with oneself is dangerous. Do you agree? All the creatures on this earth are creation of God.
God has created men, women, animals, birds, flowers and trees of different size, shape and colour. Persons with white skin and good physique and appearance are appreciated and people get attrached towords him or her. But we fail to understand that the beauty we see is limited only to the skin which covers the whole structure of the body. As we know, Lord Krishna was of black colour which we call Shyam Verna or colour of a cloud but he was very- very attractive. Moreover, we must realize that the real beauty is inside the skin i.
Look up a dictionary and Write two meanings of the following words— the one in which it is used in the lesson and the other which is more common. Handsome, Beautiful , Attractive 2. Pleaded , Requested , To appeal 3. Tiny , small , Little 4. Roamed, Wandering , Walking here 5. They must contend with demands, judgments, and self-centeredness. Narcissists put themselves first, and their codependent partners concur.
This makes their relationship work … in the beginning. Eventually, the partner feels drained, hurt, resentful, disrespected, and lonely. They long to be seen, to have their needs met, and their love returned.
Many partners of narcissists sadly pine away for years longing to feel respected, important, appreciated, and cared about.
Their self-esteem suffers over time. They risk turning into empty shells of their former selves. Even though Narcissus and Echo both long for love, Narcissus can neither give love, nor receive the love Echo offers. You have more power than you think. Discover how to raise your self-esteem , find your voice, and how to determine whether your relationship can improve.
There are many things you can do to significantly better your relationship with anyone highly defensive or abusive , as described in Dealing with a Narcissist: 8 Steps to Raise Your Self-Esteem and Set Boundaries with Difficult People.
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