Pictures from the Margins of Marriage: Representations of Spinsters and Single Mothers in the mid-Victorian Novel, Inter-war Hollywood Melodrama and British Film of the 1950s and 1960s

Analyzes the impact of the "fallen woman" & "self-sacrificing mother" images portrayed in Victorian novels on the representation of spinsters & unmarried mothers in 20th-century GB. By charting the use of these images in Hollywood melodramas, shown in GB during the 1930s & early 1940s, & in British social problem & New Wave films of the 1950s & early 1960s, one can see the opportunity offered by films both to explore changing attitudes toward female sexuality & to examine the continued dominance of marriage in the portrayal of women's sexual & maternal relationships. Adapted from the source document.