How Now, Voyager?
59
Cooper’s Mrs. Vale is portrayed as an individual who is evil, not as the
embodiment of a malevolent class, which is the case with Ray Milland’s Mr.
Barrett. Oliver Barrett is determined to reject all the prerogatives of his class
because of his hatred for his father. In this vein, as well, albeit comically, we
find the film George Apley, who in spite of his virtues, is somehow unpleasant.
Apley’s trusteeship of the “Boston Society for Waifs,” and his insistence that
those who are comfortably well-off have a duty to assist the less-fortunate come
off as insufferably pompous, and he gets his comeuppance. Whereas Charlotte
Vale, inadvertently rewarded for precipitating her mother’s sudden death with a
massive inheritance, will zealously aggrandize her legacy.
So let us conclude with Charlotte Vale, the most admirable portrait of a
Proper Bostonian on film. De Certeau’s argument at the opening of “Histoire et
psychanalyse” is almost a gloss of Charlotte’s triumph over “cannibalizing
history.” What is more, it is as though she is inscribing a de Certeauvian
“historiography” over her old self (477-78). She is a heroine who endows
“Cascades,” the sylvan mental institution that restored her sanity, donates a new
building for it, and serves on its board of trustees. What is more, she selflessly
agrees to go on taking care of the rebarbative Tina, her child-by-choice,
indefinitely, and abjure further carnal knowledge of her lover. And if we can
regard “Proper” Boston as a Never-Never Land, how perfectly fitting it is that
Bette Davis’ Charlotte Vale should admonish Paul Henreid’s Jerry Durrance by
saying: “Don’t let’s ask for the moon, we have the stars.”
Suffolk University
Thomas F. Connolly
Notes
1 “Shor H