Cukor and Collaboration: Subjective Displacement in America's Postwar Years

[...]woman is placed within the constraints of Law, renamed and domesticated by motherhood and wifely duties" in order to "serve the further exploits of men" (22).13I should point out, however, that in enlarging Renov's argument throughout this section with the exemplif cation of Woman of the Year, my purpose is not, via Stevens' filmmaking now, to mount an anti-collaborationist brief against auteur filmmaking tout court. According to Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, once again, "The double standard enforced by British common-law rulings respect?ing divorce, required women to conf ne their sexuality within the narrow boundaries of their reproductive family" and, at the same time, "permitted men to escape those restrictions [so that] [m]an's sexuality could thrive within and without the family" (205). [...]Virginia Carmichael in her admirable Framing History: The Rosenberg Story and the Cold War (1993) alludes to the containing ideology of cer?tain "perfecting myths as attempts to transcend irrational, impalatable, or unbearable social and historical realities" as a "process of making the (sublime) world cognitively apprehensible in bearable terms" (229, n. 8). [...]the anchoring of domestic partnerships like that of Sam and Tess within the later Cold War context of what Kaja Silverman refers to as an ideological "dominant f ction"-sovereign fathers, recep?tive mothers, procreative family-units, etc.-is perhaps, following World War II, America's perfecting myth par excellence through the 1950s and early 60s (39).