1997

20.1

Karen Hollinger
"Respeaking" Sisterhood

The concept of sisterhood has always been a central tenet of the women's movement. The vision of a woman-identified community united by common interests and a determination to combat sexist oppression has fueled feminist rhetoric and ideological commitment. It should not be surprising, therefore, that this notion of sisterhood should have filtered into popular cultural representations aimed at a female audience. Indeed, the recent wave of films and television series dealing with female friendships, mother-daughter relationships, and biological sisterhood testifies to the influence the feminist concept of female bonding has had on the popular imagination.

It is tempting to celebrate this absorption of a major feminist ideological tenet into mainstream representation; however, as Mary Ann Doane warns in her study of Hollywood woman's films of the 1940s, feminist critics have often been too anxious to evaluate positively popular cultural texts directed to a female audience simply because women viewers have found that these works speak to them in some way. Doane believes this tendency represents an eagerness to locate in popular cultural forms something that "escapes the patriarchal stronghold" and belongs to women (180). As a result, these texts are approached redemptively and validated even though when subjected to close textual scrutiny they fail to demonstrate the positive qualities attributed to them, or the texts themselves are ignored and the focus is placed instead on how real female viewers might use these popular cultural forms for their own purposes. According to this approach, women viewers are said to produce for themselves more progressive, empowering, and female-affirmative readings than the texts seem to warrant.

As Doane points out, this perspective ignores an important mass cultural tradition that cultural critic John Brenkman calls "respeaking." According to Brenkman, popular cultural texts "respeak" the real socially rooted needs, desires, and identities of the social groups that produce and consume them. In this process, only an "echo of our actual or virtual collective speaking" is really heard because something gets lost in the translation, and that something makes the message very different from what it echoes (180). This difference can amount to a subtle reshaping of the work's message to make it conform much more closely to established social norms and requirements.

When this reshaping involves the appropriation by popular cultural texts of feminist ideas, it seems to contain limitations that seriously call into question the progressive nature of these works. Some critics go so far as to question whether feminism can even be seen as a significant presence in popular cultural texts at all. They propose that what really happens in these works is a process of "recuperation." Radical, oppositional ideas, like the feminist concepts of sisterhood and female bonding, for instance, can be assimilated by the dominant culture through popular representations in ways that cause them to lose their critical bite. This recuperative tendency makes it appear as if oppositional ideas have caused significant alterations in representational strategies when in fact any changes, if they have occurred at all, are at best superficial. An analysis of two texts that represent recent popular cultural expressions of the feminist idea of sisterhood, the film Crimes of the Heart (1986) and the long-running television series Sisters (1991-1996), demonstrates the recuperative strategies utilized by popular cultural forms to exploit contemporary issues championed by the women's movement and at the same time avoid allowing these issues to provoke in female viewers a serious consideration of women's positioning within the contemporary social order. Each work appears to present new and liberating images of sisterhood but concludes nevertheless by repositioning its female characters safely within conventional patterns. What appears to be an expression of feminist ideas eventually proves to be a simple reassertion of mainstream ideology masquerading as feminism

Bruce Beresford's 1986 film Crimes of the Heart, set in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, takes the notion of sisterhood to the tradition-bound milieu of the Old South and in the process presents a female developmental scenario that illustrates women's maturation within the context of family life. Based on an off-Broadway play by Mississippi-born playwright Beth Henley, the film focuses on the relationship among the three McGrath sisters: Meg (Jessica Lange), Lenny (Diane Keaton), and Babe (Sissy Spacek). Tapping into the tradition of the Southern Gothic, Henley, who is credited with having adapted the film's screenplay, creates a portrait of these three eccentric female siblings as they grow in their own idiosyncratic ways to fuller maturity and selfhood. This growth is shown to be intimately connected to their relationship as sisters and to the emotional guidance they receive from one another. Sisters, the television series created by the male production team of Ron Coner and Daniel Lipman that premiered on NBC in the Spring of 1991, differs from Crimes of the Heart in terms of its upscale setting in Winnetka, a wealthy north

A television series that premiered on NBC in the Spring of 1991, Sisters, created by the male production team of Ron Coner and Daniel Lipman, differs from Crimes in terms of its upscale setting in Winnetka, a wealthy north shore suburb of Chicago. In many other ways, however, the two works are very similar. Like Crimes, Sisters also focuses on the psychological and emotional growth of a group of female siblings, the five Reed sisters: Alex (Swoosie Kurtz), Teddy (Sela Ward), Georgie (Patricia Kalember), Frankie (Julianne Phillips), and in the series's final two seasons the original sisters' long lost half-sister Charlie (initially portrayed by Jo Anderson and in the series's last year by Sheila Kelly). Like the McGraths, the Reeds are shown to rely on their relationships with each other to facilitate their progress through countless traumas and travails to fuller adult female maturity. In both texts, the sisters are shown to be very emotionally attached to each other and to share a much exalted intimacy. They confide their deepest feelings and relay their most personal problems to each other, seeking in one another needed support and advice.

In fact, both works seem to suggest that the way to healthier personality development for women comes from their finding in the love and concern of their sisters the maternal care that their mother either generously offered them or disastrously failed to provide. In Crimes, for instance, female bonding clearly serves as an essential replacement for the loss of maternal affection that the sisters suffered as children when their mother committed suicide after being abandoned by her husband. As a result of this maternal loss, a situation seems to have been created in which one sister must assume the maternal role and nurture the others to more mature femininity. In psychoanalytic terms, the sisters have experienced a devastatingly premature maternal loss that has led them to internalize a punishing mother figure into their psyches. As a result, their adult behavior is often self-destructive and masochistic. This destructive psychological situation can only be altered when this punishing mother figure is replaced by a supportive and caring sisterly presence. After this replacement, the sisters can go on to care for others, and the film suggests that these others will be male lovers who will in turn provide the McGrath sisters with the fulfilling lives they now lack.

Similarly, in Sisters healthy personality development for the Reed siblings involves their finding among themselves the maternal care and support that their mother has taught them to value. The series, in fact, repeatedly stresses the indelible bond between the sisters and their devoted mother Bea (Elizabeth Hoffman). In contrast to Crimes, where the daughters' loss of their mother leaves them psychologically scarred, in Sisters Bea passes on to her daughters a legacy of female nurturance that leads them to turn to each other for affection, advice, and practical help. This sisterly nurturance finds its ultimate symbolic expression when Frankie tries to get pregnant but learns that she cannot carry a child to term. In a demonstration of extraordinary sisterly generosity, Georgie volunteers to act as a surrogate mother and carry Frankie's child for her. The series even ends with one sister taking on the role of maternal caregiver in order to hold her fractious siblings together. After suffering the emotional devastation brought on by their mother's sudden death, the sisters almost allow their petty conflicts and differences to break them apart, but Alex finally recognizes that she must assume the role of family matriarch that her mother's spirit has bestowed upon her. Bringing the series full circle, she assembles her sisters together through a reactivation of a traditional family ritual. She unites the family by staging a Christmas tree decorating ceremony in the middle of Summer, just as their mother had in the series' opening episode. The sisters resolve their differences under the influence of Alex's maternal care, and the series ends on a note of sisterly unity.

The conception of successful female bonding and healthy female development propagated by both Crimes and Sisters thus involves the protagonists' movement through insecurities and self-absorption to a female care ethic that is presented as tempering patriarchal power, curbing women's career ambitions, and providing true feminine satisfaction through devotion to family. The two works do differ somewhat in their conceptions of how exactly this salvific force of female caring is developed within women's psyches. Crimes makes an essential connection between heterosexual romance and the generation of the female care ethic. This connection is demonstrated subtly but effectively in Meg's mode of emotional development. Meg, the most career-oriented and seemingly uncaring of the McGrath sisters, ironically comes by the film's end to assume, like Alex in Sisters, the role of family matriarch. Designated initially as the "bad sister" who has deserted her family to pursue her singing career in Hollywood, Meg initially demonstrates few motherly qualities. She dresses in a sexually provocative manner, admits to knowing that she has had "way too many men," and is branded by the McGrath sisters' vicious female cousin Chick as "cheap Christmas trash." When the sisters decide to cheer themselves up by playing cards-significantly, the game of hearts--Meg deserts the others in order to go off on a nighttime excursion to look at the moon with her ex-lover Doc, a man whom she deserted years ago in order "selfishly" to pursue her career goals. She becomes "the black sister . . . the queen of spades," described by her sisters in terms of the card game as the "worst of all." She uncaringly deserts her needy siblings for a man, and as Lenny points out, a man who is already married and has two small children.

It is Meg's nighttime tryst with Doc that leads her to an epiphany that profoundly effects her character development. She comes to realize that although Doc did not ask her to run away with him, as she had hoped he would, their meeting was of crucial importance to her. She learned that she could care for someone and that she did care for Doc. She also realizes that she cares about her sisters as well and sets out to help them overcome their problems. First of all, she persuades Lenny to rekindle a previous love affair with a man she met through a lonely hearts club and whom she stopped seeing because she feared his rejection if he discovered that she could not have children. Meg's care is also instrumental in helping Babe, whose problems seem connected to her inability to accept her mother's death. In fact, Babe's life in many ways represents an attempt to relive her mother's misery. She masochistically married a domineering and abusive man, tried to kill him, and now seems determined to commit suicide. It is Meg who saves her, and even provides a reason for her to go on living. While attempting to kill herself, Babe experiences a moment of insight. Her obsession with her mother's death seems to involve a failure to understand why she not only took her own life but also performed what appears to be an act of needless cruelty by killing her favorite cat as well. With her head in the oven during a suicide attempt, Babe experiences herself the fear and loneliness she comes to believe her mother must also have felt as she prepared to take her own life. As Babe later tells Meg: "So it wasn't like what people were saying about her hating that cat. Fact is, she loved that cat. She needed him with her 'cause she felt so all alone." Meg then provides Babe with the crucial support she needs to go on living by telling her that she is not alone like their mother. Her sisters are there to provide her with needed emotional support.

Through its portrayal of Meg's developmental scenario and her resulting ability to offer both of her sisters the loving care they so desperately need, Crimes identifies a romantic bond with a loyal, non-dominating male as providing the necessary foundation for the development of the nurturing maternal female personality. Unlike her mother who failed to nurture her daughters because she was deserted by her husband, Meg can begin to support her sisters' personal development because she finally learns from her meeting with Doc that not all men are like her father. Although she thought Doc was going to ask her to run away with him, he never did. While he clearly is attracted to Meg, he remains loyal to his wife and children. Meg tells her sisters that she knows she should be "miserable," "humiliated," and "devastated" by Doc's rejection; instead, she feels strangely "happy." Her happiness seems to stem from the fact that unlike her mother she has found a man--even though he is a man that she can no longer have--who is loyal and loving. Having found this one instance of male fidelity, Meg can go on to care not only for herself but also for her sisters.

Sisters envisions the generation of the female care ethic and the resulting development of the nurturing maternal female personality somewhat differently. The Reed sisters clearly inherit their sense of familial devotion from their mother, who, as noted above, is a crucial influence in all her daughters' lives throughout their childhood and adult years. Although it does not insist, as does Crimes, that heterosexual romance is a necessary precondition for female caring, Sisters still posits a crucial connection among romantic love, maternal care, and family attachment. Except for the "work-obsessed" Frankie, who is portrayed as having unwisely abandoned her family in order to further her career, each of the Reed sisters has found a perfect mate by the series' concluding episode. After several years as an unhappy divorcee, Alex has found complete happiness with a man who absolutely adores her. In the series last year, both Teddy and Charlie also discover true love and marry men who seem to be perfect for them, and Georgie, who had left her husband and family in order to go back to graduate school and "find herself," suddenly decides in the series' concluding moments that what she really wants is to return to her ex-husband and family. Even the career-driven Frankie announces at the very end of the last episode that she is going to give up her high-powered executive position in Japan in order to return to her family.

Other aspects of the series' final episode add to this concluding emphasis on marital bliss and family unity. Not only does Alex assume the role of family matriarch, but the now pregnant Teddy, faced with the possibility that her unborn child may have a birth defect, because of her sense of maternal devotion decides not to abort the fetus. Additionally, Alex's daughter Reed, who has been estranged from her ex-husband and young child, announces to her mother that she has fought successfully to gain joint-custody of her daughter, and Teddy's career-oriented daughter Kat has established a strong romantic relationship with a fellow police officer. The series' concluding emphasis on family unity is, in fact, so often reaffirmed that it becomes absurdly overdetermined.

This overdetermination emblematizes the fact that in the final analysis both Crimes of the Heart and Sisters champion not female bonding but a maternal care ethic that is presented as the ultimate goal of women's personal development. Women's true satisfaction and empowerment are seen as residing only in the private sphere of romantic love and family relationships, and the feminist idea of sisterhood is merely used to help the female protagonists fit all the more successfully into traditional feminine roles. While female bonding as expressed in relationships of biological sisterhood is mythologized in both works, this is accomplished only by representing women's relationships as idealized replications of mother-daughter nurturance. As such, sisterly affection offers the McGrath and Reed sisters an environment of quasi-maternal care that provides them with needed protection from the problems they experience in the outside world.

In both works, these problems are connected at least in part to the patriarchal abuse of power, which is portrayed as an aspect of typical family life in Crimes through the characters of the McGrath sisters' "Old Granddaddy" and Babe's abusive husband Zachary and in Sisters through the philandering Dr. Reed, the sisters' father. It is significant, however, that neither text holds male dominance primarily responsible for the flawed nature of the sisters' lives. Their problems are attributed, instead, to the threat to the nuclear family that male infidelity or desertion poses, and even more importantly in Crimes to the devastation of maternal loss, which is singled out as the primary cause of women's woes. Both works attack not patriarchy itself but an unmediated patriarchy that in the absence of maternal care can destroy women's lives, and they argue that motherly love and its replication in female bonding can prevent this destruction. Significantly, both Meg and Alex save their sisters by assuming a matriarchal role and offering them the maternal care that their deceased mother can no longer provide. Through this strong emphasis on family unity, the patriarchally complicit ideology of romantic love is kept intact in both works. In addition, the potentially subversive notion of female bonding is recuperated for patriarchy by being presented merely as a temporary, if necessary, way station in each woman's journey to the true happiness of a love relationship with a loyal, non-dominating male.

In Crimes, as in Sisters, each woman finds true love by the film's conclusion. Meg sacrifices a relationship with Doc but learns that she does really care for him. Lenny reestablishes her lost romance when she discovers that her ex-lover is not at all troubled by her inability to bear children, and Babe's young lawyer confesses to having loved her unrequitedly since she sold him a pound cake at a local bazaar many years earlier. In each work, the loyal, non-dominating males that the sisters find represent a reformed patriarchy that offers them, if not always the reality, at least the hope of ultimately fulfilling romantic love. Healed by the sisterly care that imitates and substitutes for maternal nurturance, they find in the end a female "maturity" that finally equips them to accept the love these men offer.

In essence, then, both Crimes of the Heart and Sisters use their portrayal of sisterhood only to champion nurturing femininity, the fulfillment of traditional romantic love, and the solace of family life. Rather than attack the patriarchal status quo, they offer female bonding as a new way for women to fit more comfortably and happily into it. Significantly, neither the power of "Old Granddaddy" in Crimes nor that of Dr. Reed in Sisters is ever directly challenged; instead, "Old Granddaddy" lies in a hospital bed dying as his three granddaughters are reborn into new healthier personalities, and Dr. Reed becomes after his death a benevolent ghostly presence in his daughters' lives. Ultimately, they come to regard him as the father they cannot help but love in spite of his faults.

Although in many ways mildly reformist in the sentiments that they seek to engender in their audience, the challenge that these two popular cultural representations of sisterhood offer to male domination is actually quite minimal. Not only do they fail to champion women's entrance into the public sphere, but they tend to portray career goals as either unfulfilling or ultimately destructive for women. In Crimes, only Meg even attempts to establish herself in a career, and her endeavors, based as they are merely on a self-destructive desire to please her grandfather, end by bringing her only to the verge of a nervous breakdown. Sisters differs in that it does allow its female characters to establish themselves at least temporarily in prominent careers. Not only is Frankie a high-powered business woman, but Teddy is a successful dress designer, Alex a television talk show host, Charlie a physician, and Georgie a psychology graduate student. In the series' concluding episodes, however, each sister determines that her career offers her little happiness unless it is conjoined to a happy family life. Alex sacrifices an opportunity to co-host a nationally syndicated talk show in New York City in order to remain with her ailing husband, Teddy seems to have totally abandoned her dress designing business once she marries her doctor lover, Frankie decides to give up her prominent managerial position in a Japanese corporation in order to return home, Georgie realizes once she gets her graduate degree that what she really wants is to mend her broken family life, and Charlie finds true love in an interracial relationship with a fellow physician.

Thus, in both Crimes of the Heart and Sisters the personal psychological development experienced by each of the female characters involves an inexorable movement from a flawed childhood that has hampered her ability to develop a female care ethic through female bonding to a restoration of her ability to care. According to the logic of both works, this sense of caring inevitably finds its final and only legitimate outlet in the sisters' renewed ability to experience romantic love with suitable male love interests and to dedicate themselves above all to maintaining a strong family life. The works' female affirmative stance takes the form of championing the traditional feminine virtues of connectedness and caring within the domestic environment while condemning male familial desertion and irresponsibility. Female empowerment and self-direction are certainly advocated, but only in ways that suggest little real change in the life goals and satisfactions that have been traditionally assigned to women.

Additionally, the female-affirmative aspects of both works are harnessed to plot and character elements that work to recuperate their subversive potential. For instance, Crimes relies heavily on negative female stereotypes in creating its comic portrait of the McGrath sisters' eccentric Southern femininity. This portrayal verges on presenting them as silly frivolous children rather than as intentionally amusing adults. They appear for most of the film to be scatter-brained, overly emotional, irrational, and masochistic. Their silliness allows them to be regarded as foolish female victims who are best kept in the private domestic sphere where they can do themselves and others the least harm. While Sisters refrains from presenting its female protagonists as stereotypically silly women, the absurdity and high melodrama that characterize its plots--many of which are conspicuously drawn from television soap operas and women's melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s--perform a similar function. It is difficult to take seriously the plight of female characters who undergo almost every possible catastrophe that can befall them and somehow always manage to emerge unscathed.

Sisters' use of narrative conventions drawn from soap operas and classic "woman's films," in fact, took a curious turn as the series developed. Initially, this aspect of the series involved a distinctly parodic element. There seemed to be a deliberately playful employment of these conventions in order gently to mock their absurdity. The sisters' younger selves would at times appear to ridicule their current behavior as adults, and the characters would be involved in fantasy sequences that commented on a current plot complication by comparing it to one found in a classic "woman's film." For instance, when Alex has trouble dealing with her daughter, she imagines them as characters from Mildred Pierce (1945), and when she argues with Teddy, she envisions them in a scene from What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). This parodic element suggests that the series may have been originally conceived to imitate the double-voiced discourse that characterizes the classic 1950's melodramas of the prominent Hollywood director Douglas Sirk. Sirk's most critically acclaimed films, like Written on the Wind (1956), Imitation of Life (1959), and Magnificent Obsession (1954), can be seen as deliberately constructed to appeal to two distinct audiences: those who would take the films' highly melodramatic plots seriously and those who would detect an underlying irony and recognize the subtle undermining of melodramatic conventions that Sirk intended. Like Sirkean melodrama, Sisters in its first four seasons exhibits this double-voiced quality, working on both a literal and a parodic level, but as the series matured, its parodic qualities began gradually to disappear, and in its final two seasons they were completely absent. This change in tone is significant in facilitating the series' movement from the definite, if subtle, critique of traditional media representations of women that initially characterized it to a concluding affirmation of the vary images it previously criticized.

The plot structures of both works also repeatedly undermine the importance of female bonding by portraying it as ultimately having only a temporary and limited impact on women's lives. This point is made most clearly in the denouements of both works. In Crimes, Meg, in accord with her new-found nurturing role, has brought her sisters together for a belated celebration of Lenny's birthday. She arrives with a birthday cake "a day late," as the cake's inscription reads, and the three sisters gather around the table as Lenny makes a wish and blows out the candles. After some coaxing from her sisters, Lenny describes her wish as not "really a specific wish," but instead "this vision [that] just sort of came into my mind....It was something about the three of us smiling and laughing together....but it wasn't forever; it wasn't for every minute. Just this one moment and we were all laughing."

Similarly, in Sisters' final episode Alex's determination to hold the family together, symbolized, as noted above, by her fabrication of a mock Christmas tree decorating ceremony in imitation of one that her mother staged in the series' first episode, creates a sisterly unity that is restricted to the sisters' promise to return home periodically in order to participate in this type of ritualistic family celebration. The series ends with the sisters all walking out the door of Alex's home together, but also clearly about to go their separate ways and to return to their respective nuclear families. Lenny's vision and the Reed sisters' departure to lead their separate lives represent each work's final image of female bonding as temporary and largely instrumental in its effects. These endings suggest not only the joy of sisterly affection and emotional support but also its transitory nature and positioning as a stage in female development that presages continued future growth. The implied message is that sisters cannot remain tied to each other, but must move on to something more than their sisterly bond can offer. This continued development seems clearly to involve their future relationships with men, which both works, in spite of their focus on female bonding, still seem to suggest hold the key to lasting happiness for women.

As these conclusions indicate, the kind of female development that Crimes of the Heart and Sisters actually advocate is extremely limited in its implications. The notion of empowerment that is promoted involves women utilizing female bonding to find new ways to adapt more successfully to the patriarchal status quo and to prepare themselves more fully to care enough for men to accept and benefit from the ideology of romantic love. Like so many other popular cultural texts that focus on female bonding, these works offer the promise of female empowerment, but that empowerment ultimately takes the form of accommodation rather than true liberation. Crimes of the Heart and Sisters liberate women only so that they can freely choose very traditional means to personal fulfillment: romantic love, familial devotion, and the female care ethic. What these popular cultural texts really advocate as they "respeak" the feminist ideal of sisterhood is a very conservative type of female empowerment that serves to prop up rather than to challenge the patriarchal status quo. Effectively, they appropriate a tenet of feminist ideology only to drain it of its subversive potential and enlist it, instead, in support of a socially conformist message.

Department of Languages, Literature, and Dramatic Arts
Armstrong Atlantic State University
Savannah, Georgia 31419-1997
 

Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire: The Woman's Film of the 1940s. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987.

Sisters. Ron Coner and Daniel Lipman, prods. NBC TV, 1991-96.