Veiled Desires: Intimate Portrayals of Nuns in Postwar Anglo-American Film
Veiled Desires: Intimate Portrayals of Nuns in Postwar Anglo-American Film
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Abstract
In her vibrant screen performance as Sister Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary's, Ingrid Bergman represented the film nun as a mature modern woman who had chosen the religious life with a “complete understanding” of both erotic and spiritual desire. How did this engaging character and her cinematic sisters in later postwar popular film come to be stereotyped as girlish, incomplete, or unimportant characters± Veiled Desires explores this question through a unique, full-length study of nun films over a sixty year period beginning with the 1945 film The Bells of St. Mary's and concluding with Doubt in 2008. It argues for a more complex picture of the film nun as an ardent and active lead character who struggled with a problematic dual identity as a modern women and a religious over the course of the twentieth century. It suggests how beautiful and charismatic Hollywood stars such as Bergman in The Bells of St. Mary's (1945), Deborah Kerr in Black Narcissus (1947) and Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), Joan Collins in Sea Wife (1957), Audrey Hepburn in The Nun's Story (1959), Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (1965), Diana Rigg in In This House of Brede (1975), and Meg Tilly in Agnes of God (1985) called attention to the desires that the veil concealed and the vows of chastity and obedience were thought to repress. In an historically framed and theologically and psychoanalytically informed argument, the book recuperates nun films as a significant genre in Anglo-American cinema. It shows in-depth how they probed the tensions between the selfless and sacrificial desires idealized in religious life as agape and the passionate and aspirational desires valorized in feminist discourse as eros.
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Front Matter
- Introduction
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1
Selfless Desires: Sacrificial and Self-Fulfilling Service to Others in Casablanca (1942), the Bells of St. Mary's (1945), and the Inn of the Sixth Happiness (1958)
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2
Sexual Desires: Repression and Sublimation in Black Narcissus (1947), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison (1957), and Sea Wife (1957)
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3
Subjective Desires: The Role of the Catholic Family Romance in The Nun's Story (1959)
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4
Sonorous Desires: Sweet, Spirited, and Stirring Voices in The Sound of Music (1965) and Change of Habit (1969)
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5
Sacred Desires: Passion and Pathology in in this House of Brede (1975) and Agnes of God (1985)
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6
Spiritual Desires: Sin, Suffering, Death, and Salvation in Dead Man Walking (1995)
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Conclusion: Suspect Desires: The End of a Religious Illusion in Doubt (2008)?
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End Matter
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