Consuming Maternities?

I was just contemplating the films we have screened so far, and it seems that all -- save for Gone With the Wind, though this could certainly be thrown into the mix, and Blonde Venus -- present some really fascinating links between femininity, consumption and the figure of the mother. In Now, Voyager, a “mother’s love is tyranny:” it is oppressive and an impediment to Charlotte’s independence to “buy, wear and sleep” (a.k.a. ‘sleep with’) whatever and wherever she chooses. Indeed, in an opening scene, Charlotte rants, "My mother disapproves of dieting... My mother approves of sensible shoes. My mother, MY MOTHER!" Shortly after, the famous shot of Bette Davis standing atop the boat ramp begins at a low-angle, slowly tracking across her new pumps:
In Stella Dallas, Stella is a much more generous figure than mother Vale, but her excessive love of ruffles and “stacks of style” must be sloughed off before Holly can fully enter a stable class upbringing. In Clueless, the absence of the mother proves to be not just a convention of the teen film, but a part of the context for Cher’s freedom to “buy, wear and sleep,” as she pleases, so to speak.

These films seemingly suggest that a certain slaying of the mother must happen before the daughter can become a proper consumer and enter a normative symbolic order of femininity. This seems a particularly interesting connection given the centrality of the Oedipal complex in Doane and Riviere’s configuration. For Riviere, the mother must be symbolically tortured for the feminine rivalry she poses. Doane, on the other hand, doesn’t explicitly talk about the function of the mother in psychoanalysis, but does obliquely reference her at any mention of the castration complex and the female lack of temporal distance from her own body (she sees and knows simultaneously; or she sees the penis and immediately registers it as lack and therefore can never fetishize it away). I think it is Linda Williams who reminds that, for Freud, the little girl never has an identificatory break with her mother like boys do; she becomes her mother. Granted, the figure of the mother is, of course, going to loom large in both Now,Voyager and Stella Dallas, because they both could be read as maternal melodramas. But it seems peculiar and worth perhaps a longer discussion that, in these films, the mother is inextricably tied to the young girl’s development, not just as a sexual subject, but as a consuming feminine subject. Oh, the maternicide; ‘tis cruel.

And, of course, all of this can be explained outside of psychoanalytic language (particularly in terms of the ageism built into feminine style cultures; generational breaks must be made apparent so that ‘new’ consumers can be groomed -- perhaps a bit too Frankfurtian of a reading). But, I don’t want to veer too far away from the methods we encountered this week.

Hope this made some modicum of sense; or maybe I just have mom issues?