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The Woman’s Film of the 1940s

This book explores the relationship among gender, desire, and narrative in
1940s woman’s films which negotiate the terrain between public history and
private experience. The woman’s film and other forms of cinematic melo-
drama have often been understood as positioning themselves outside history,
and this book challenges and modifies that understanding, contextualizing
the films it considers against the backdrop of World War II. In addition, in
paying tribute to and departing from earlier feminist formulations about
gendered spectatorship in cinema, McKee argues that such models empha-
sized a masculine-centered gaze at the inadvertent expense of understanding
other possible modes of identification and gender expression in classical
narrative cinema. She proposes ways of understanding gender and narrative
based in part on literary narrative theory and ultimately works toward a
notion of an androgynous spectatorship and mode of interpretation in the
1940s woman’s film.

Alison L. McKee is an associate professor in the Department of Television,

Radio, Film, and Theatre at San José State University, California.
Routledge Advances in Film Studies

1 Nation and Identity in the New 8 The Politics of Loss and Trauma
German Cinema in Contemporary Israeli Cinema
Homeless at Home Raz Yosef
Inga Scharf
9 Neoliberalism and Global
2 Lesbianism, Cinema, Space Cinema
The Sexual Life of Apartments Capital, Culture, and Marxist
Lee Wallace Critique
Edited by Jyotsna Kapur and
3 Post-War Italian Cinema Keith B. Wagner
American Intervention, Vatican
Interests 10 Korea’s Occupied Cinemas,
Daniela Treveri Gennari 1893–1948
The Untold History of the Film
4 Latsploitation, Exploitation Industry
Cinemas, and Latin America Brian Yecies with Ae-Gyung Shim
Edited by Victoria Ruétalo and
Dolores Tierney
11 Transnational Asian Identities in
5 Cinematic Emotion in Horror Pan-Pacific Cinemas
Films and Thrillers The Reel Asian Exchange
The Aesthetic Paradox of Edited by Philippa Gates &
Pleasurable Fear Lisa Funnell
Julian Hanich
12 Narratives of Gendered Dissent
6 Cinema, Memory, Modernity in South Asian Cinemas
The Representation of Memory Alka Kurian
from the Art Film to Transnational
Cinema 13 Hollywood Melodrama and
Russell J.A. Kilbourn the New Deal
Public Daydreams
7 Distributing Silent Film Serials Anna Siomopoulos
Local Practices, Changing Forms,
Cultural Transformation 14 Theorizing Film Acting
Rudmer Canjels Edited by Aaron Taylor
15 Stardom and the Aesthetics of 24 Masculinity in the
Neorealism Contemporary Romantic
Ingrid Bergman in Rossellini’s Italy Comedy
Ora Gelley Gender as Genre
John Alberti
16 Postwar Renoir
Film and the Memory of Violence 25 Crossover Cinema
Colin Davis Cross-cultural Film from
Production to Reception
17 Cinema and Inter-American Edited by Sukhmani Khorana
Relations
Tracking Transnational Affect 26 Spanish Cinema in the Global
Adrián Pérez Melgosa Context
Film on Film
18 European Civil War Films Samuel Amago
Memory, Conflict, and Nostalgia
Eleftheria Rania Kosmidou 27 Japanese Horror Films and
Their American Remakes
19 The Aesthetics of Antifascism
Translating Fear, Adapting Culture
Radical Projection
Valerie Wee
Jennifer Lynde Barker

20 The Politics of Age and 28 Postfeminism and Paternity in

Disability in Contemporary Contemporary US Film
Spanish Film Framing Fatherhood
Plus Ultra Pluralism Hannah Hamad
Matthew J. Marr
29 Cine-Ethics
21 Cinema and Language Loss Ethical Dimensions of
Displacement, Visuality and Film Theory, Practice, and
the Filmic Image Spectatorship
Tijana Mamula Edited by Jinhee Choi and
Mattias Frey
22 Cinema as Weather
Stylistic Screens and 30 Postcolonial Film
Atmospheric Change History, Empire, Resistance
Kristi McKim Edited by Rebecca Weaver-
Hightower and Peter Hulme
23 Landscape and Memory in
Post-Fascist Italian Film 31 The Woman’s Film of the 1940s
Cinema Year Zero Gender, Narrative, and History
Giuliana Minghelli Alison L. McKee
“My tears mix with the ink as I write him letters—letters with only the barest hope that he’ll so much
as read them!” Duchesse de Praslin (Barbara O’Neil), All This, and Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940).
The Woman’s Film of
the 1940s
Gender, Narrative, and History

Alison L. McKee
First published 2014
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group,
an informa business
© 2014 Taylor & Francis
The right of Alison L. McKee to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation
without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McKee, Alison L., 1961–
The womanʼs film of the 1940s : gender, narrative, and history / by
Alison L. McKee.
pages cm. — (Routledge advances in film studies)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Women in motion pictures. 2. Sex role in motion pictures.
3. Motion pictures—United States—History—20th century.
4. Historical films—United States—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN1995.9.W6M383 2014
791.43′6522—dc23
2013046601
ISBN: 978-0-415-83306-6 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-50658-5 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
 For my mother,
Mary Driscoll McKee
(1919–1987),
whose narratives were lost;
for Charles,
who listened to mine;
and
for Harold,
who made writing them possible
This page intentionally left blank
Contents

List of Figures xi
Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction: To Speak of Love 1

1 Film Theory, Narrative, and the 1940s Woman’s Film 14

2 The Fate of One Governess: Lost Narrative, History, and

Gendered Desire 38

3 Melodrama, History, and Narrative Recovery 73

4 Temporality and the Past: Haunting Narratives and

the Postwar Woman’s Film 99

5 By My Tears I Tell a Story/The “Absent” War 131

6 Telling the Story Differently: Toward an Androgynous

Spectatorship and Interpretation 160

Bibliography 193
Index 199
This page intentionally left blank
Figures

(Frontispiece). “My tears mix with the ink as I write him letters—
letters with only the barest hope that he’ll so much as read
them!” Duchesse de Praslin (Barbara O’Neil), All This,
and Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940). iv
2.1 Henriette’s audience of schoolgirls listens attentively to her tale. 46
2.2 Henriette (Bette Davis) narrates her own history to students
at Miss Haines’s School for Young Ladies. 47
2.3 The Duchesse de Praslin’s “heavy, flowing pen strokes.” 52
2.4 Rebecca’s “bold, slanting” handwriting. 52
2.5 The Duc (Charles Boyer) positioned between his wife (Barbara
O’Neil) and the governess (Bette Davis). 53
2.6 The Duchesse de Praslin (Barbara O’Neil) lounges in her chair
during the interview with Henriette Deluzy-Desportes. 53
2.7 Henriette Deluzy-Desportes (Bette Davis) strikes a similar
pose as the Duchesse (Barbara O’Neil) during her interview
for the position of governess. 54
3.1 That nameless, faceless Hamilton woman. 79
3.2 Emma’s (Vivien Leigh) desire animates narrative space. 84
3.3 The centrality of Emma’s (Vivien Leigh) desire. 85
3.4 “What a century it’s been!” 88
3.5 A passive Smithy (Ronald Colman). 93
4.1 Lucy (Gene Tierney) places the portrait of Captain Gregg
(Rex Harrison) in their shared bedroom. 107
4.2 Captain Daniel Gregg (Rex Harrison) in The Ghost
and Mrs. Muir. 109
4.3 Stefan Brand (Louis Jourdan) in Letter from an Unknown
Woman. 109
4.4 The points of view of Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney) and Captain
Gregg (Rex Harrison) are spatially and metonymically
linked across the divide of gender difference. 112
xii Figures
4.5 Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney) and Captain Gregg (Rex Harrison)
share a point of view across gender lines articulated
metonymically in spatial terms: “Like looking down from
high up, all dizzy and unsure.” 113
4.6 “You seem to be very earthly for a spirit.” 114
4.7 Captain Gregg (Rex Harrison) fades away through
special effects. 115
4.8 Filmscape: a time of history and a time of repetition. 123
4.9 Half physical reality, half mindscape. 124
5.1 “He wishes!” 140
5.2 Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) gazes at the scene of her own
narrative desire. 152
5.3 Laura (Celia Johnson) wanders the streets after her aborted
liaison with Alec (Trevor Howard) in Brief Encounter. 155
5.4 Lisa (Joan Fontaine) wanders the streets after her aborted
liaison with Stefan (Louis Jourdan) in Letter from an
Unknown Woman. 155
6.1 An androgynous point of view, an impossible shot. 167
6.2 Laura’s (Dorothy McGuire) point of view. 177
6.3 Oliver’s (Robert Young) point of view. 179
6.4 and 6.5 Catherine (Olivia de Havilland) is often caught
between her suitor (Montgomery Clift) and her father
(Ralph Richardson). 184
6.6 Catherine (Olivia de Havilland) is trapped in the Sloper
house on Washington Square. 185
Acknowledgments

The writing of a scholarly book, no less than filmmaking during the classical
Hollywood era, is a collaborative effort. Although the former may bear the
title of a single author, he or she has been inspired, influenced, helped, and
mentored by a whole host of individuals and institutions, sometimes over
many years. This book is no different.
To Janet Bergstrom, whose faith in me has always been unwavering, even
when my own resolve faltered, and whose acumen, insight, and work in
theory, history, and critical method have always set a prodigious example,
I owe a debt of intellectual and personal gratitude that I can never repay.
This book would not exist without her insight, support, or friendship.
My sincere thanks and gratitude go to Charles Wolfe, whom I initially
met as a first-term college freshman and from whom I took my first three
American film courses: there is no finer teacher, more eloquent lecturer, or
more generous scholar of America film history than he. I have kept his example
before me always.
To the brilliant, witty, and self-deprecating Garrett Stewart, who was the
first to inspire, encourage, and mentor my interest in narrative theory in
both literature and film when I was a young graduate student and who has
remained a steadfast friend over the years, I am forever indebted.
At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where the seeds of
this volume took root, Nick Browne’s perspicacity in graduate seminars put
me on my mettle. Teshome Gabriel was unfailingly generous in his praise of
my burgeoning concept of “lost narrative” and would routinely hail me with
a welcomed cup of coffee at his habitual outside seat at the North Campus
dining commons at UCLA. He is much missed by many. Jonathan Kuntz,
an encyclopedic source of information about anything to do with American
film, was and is always at the ready to answer any question I have. Steve
Mamber turned me on to the home movies sequence in Rebecca with his
characteristic sense of humor, irony, and detail, and Peter Wollen inspired
me with a simple question about patriotism and the love story in That Ham-
ilton Woman that ultimately led to the third chapter of this book. To them
all I owe my deepest thanks.
xiv Acknowledgments
No one could have had a finer, more stimulating, and inspiring cohort
with whom to go through a rigorous doctoral program and share ideas
in the making than I. Among them (in strict alphabetical order!): Richard
Allen, Rhona Berenstein, Vicki Callahan, Kelley Conway, Maria Elena de
las Carreras, Nataša Ďurovičová, Cynthia Felando, David Gardner, David
Gerstner, Hamid Naficy, Edward R. O’Neill, David Pendleton, Nita Rollins,
David Russell, Ayako Saito, and Britta Sjogren. Each provided invigorating
support and much laughter along our shared and respective routes. I would
not be who I am today without their collective influence and example.
To each of the many thinkers, critics, and historians whose work I con-
sider at length or in passing in the following pages, I owe an enormous debt.
My thoughts were formed always in relation to their work, and my profes-
sional and intellectual life has been the richer for it in ways that citations and
bibliographies cannot measure.
My thanks go to the librarians, curators, archivists, and assistants at the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library
(especially Jonathan Wahl, Benjamin Friday, and Marisa Duron), the USC
Warner Bros. Archives (in particular, Jonathon Auxier), UCLA’s Special Col-
lections, and the National Archives, Paris, for their endless patience and help
during my time at each location.
At two very different points, UCLA and San José State University sup-
ported the research and writing of this volume with both time and financial
assistance. They helped make this book possible.
Routledge’s acquisition, editorial, and production processes were support-
ive and seamless from start to finish, thanks to terrific teams that included
editor Felisa N. Salvago-Keyes, editorial assistant Andrew Weckenmann,
and copyeditor Jennifer Zaczek.
I have a large community of Facebook friends who graciously tolerated
my minute book-related status updates with good humor (and no doubt a
bit of eye-rolling), and they helped me stay the course. Skype played a role
as well: many a video chat with dear friends and colleagues, including Elena
Creef, Kimb Massey, and Ayako Saito—often at extremely odd hours—kept
me focused, moving forward, and (most importantly) laughing when my
subject was tears and melodrama. To three additional kindred spirits along
this academic path—Tanya Bahkru, Ursula K. Heise, and Britta Sjogren—go
my love and appreciation. Collectively, these cherished people have kept me
sane—or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
Finally, to Harold and a multitude of cats for their indefatigable patience
and support during the writing of this project goes an appreciation I can
never adequately express but feel most profoundly. They have my heart.
***
An earlier, partial version of chapter 2 was published as “ ‘L’affaire Praslin’
and All This, and Heaven, Too: Gender, Genre, and History in the 1940s
Woman’s Film,” in The Velvet Light Trap, vol. 35. Copyright © 1995 by the
University of Texas Press. All rights reserved.
 Acknowledgments xv
An earlier, partial version of chapter 3 was published in “What’s Love
Got to Do with It? History and Melodrama in the 1940s Woman’s Film,”
Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal 39, no. 2 (December 2009)
5–15, and as “ ‘It Seems Familiar, but I Can’t Quite Remember’: Amnesia
and the Dislocation of History and Gender in Random Harvest (1942),”
Bright Lights Film Journal 69 (August 2010).
This page intentionally left blank
Introduction
To Speak of Love

“IF ONLY IT WERE SOMEONE ELSE’S STORY AND NOT MINE”

A middle-aged woman with handsome, expressive eyes sits in an armchair

across from her husband in their comfortable, middle-class living room,
where they are passing the evening. A fire burns quietly, and their two young
children are in bed for the night. He is doing a crossword puzzle, as is
apparently his custom, and requires a missing word to complete a line from
Keats, which he seeks from his wife: “ ‘When I behold upon the nights
starr’d face / Huge cloudy symbols of a high—?’ Something in seven let-
ters.” “ ‘Romance,’ I think,” she replies, after a moment. “I’m almost sure
it is,” and tells him it will be in the Oxford Book of English Verse. “No,
that’s right, I’m sure,” he says, as he writes it into his puzzle. “Because it
fits in with ‘delirium’ and ‘Baluchistan.’ ” A moment passes. The woman
rises to put some music on the radio, and almost immediately the sound
of Rachmaninov’s second piano concerto fills the room. The woman sits
again and takes up some needlework but is soon diverted. Not by anything
external this time, such as a question from her husband, but rather (we
are about to learn) by her recent painful memories of a love unexpectedly
found and far too quickly lost, chronicled in an exquisitely crafted series of
flashbacks. For this is David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), and as the film
quickly makes clear to its audience, we have just entered the narrative ter-
rain of the woman’s film—in which love and loss are often twins, in which
the experience of female characters is marked and rendered as subjective,
and in which feminine subjectivity itself performs a haunting game of hide-
and-seek within and across the landscape of narrative.
I invoke Brief Encounter because it is a woman’s film par excellence, and
the sequence I have described is eloquently emblematic of concerns that
this cycle of films addresses in the 1940s. As the passage so clearly demon-
strates, if hermeneutics and puzzles are the traditional cinematic province of
the male (think of the detective films and film noir also popular during the
1940s), then romance (albeit in the popular rather than the literary Keatsian
sense) is deemed the province of women: it is, in fact, with love and romance
that the woman’s film is so often intimately preoccupied. Occupying what is,
2 The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s
from a patriarchal perspective, a fantastic no-man’s land lying somewhere
between “delirium” (a morass of emotion verging on madness) and “Balu-
chistan” (at the time still a British province of India, a far away and exotic
locale near which romance may reside without troubling British colonial
patriarchy too particularly), romance and desire are the very stuff of which
this ordinary woman’s inner landscape in these films is comprised. Although
momentarily invisible to the eye, their haunting presence is already evoked
in the strains of Rachmaninov’s music, associated throughout the film with
this woman’s subjectivity.
“Fred. Fred. Dear Fred. There’s so much that I want to say to you. You’re
the only one in the world with enough wisdom and gentleness to under-
stand. If only it were someone else’s story and not mine. As it is, you’re the
only one in the world that I can never tell. Never, never.” So begins Laura
Jesson’s (Celia Johnson) one-sided inner dialogue with her husband (Cyril
Raymond), spoken in a celebrated voice-off that rivals and even exceeds the
beauty and nuance of the equally well-known voice-off in Max Ophüls’s Let-
ter from an Unknown Woman (1948) only three years later. As in Ophüls’s
film, the voice-off is a prelude to a lengthy flashback to a woman’s painful
tale of love found and lost, and as voice-offs and flashbacks tend to do in
any genre, they highlight the act of transmitting narrative, even of the dif-
ficulties that occasionally inhere in that task. In the woman’s film, when
such narrative structures exist, they are inextricably linked to questions of
desire, usually of that of the female protagonist, and of the representability
of that desire narratively (in the story world of the film), culturally (in the
world in which the film was created), and institutionally (in terms of the
film industry that produced it). In Laura’s case, her desire is at least three-
fold: it encompasses a romantic and sexual desire (however thwarted) for
Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) with whom she has fallen in love; a desire to
know (another kind of life from the surface calm of her ordinary middle-
class existence); and a desire to tell (her story), which ultimately she both
does and does not do. Precisely because it is so manifestly about her own
desire(s), Laura can never tell her story to the one person whom she feels
would understand it best—her husband—for fear of hurting him. Thus, her
tale takes the form of what I shall call in this volume a “lost narrative,” one
that is structured as a story that, paradoxically, cannot be told yet must be
told, a tale that can be communicated only with the greatest of difficulty.
In such lost narratives in the 1940s woman’s film, as I shall discuss in
ensuing chapters, processes of transmission and elision within the tales are
highlighted and are the result of multiple pressures brought to bear upon the
stories—again, narrative, cultural, and institutional. My critical approach
to elision both is predicated upon and departs from Freud’s view of ellipsis
within the dreamwork, because for Freud an absence cannot necessarily be
filled in with a corresponding “presence”; rather, such gaps or absences can
suggest many others, as well as refer to, and cause a reinterpretation of, the
manifest content. Thus, in the following chapters, I will be arguing in part
 Introduction 3
for a kind of feminist “guerilla” reading of woman’s films that, like older
“recuperative” interpretations, read against the grain and allow for the elu-
cidation of those lost narratives. At the same time, however, I will extend the
textual reading process into historical research that will inform such read-
ings. For example, the flashback structure that marks Brief Encounter is not
present in Noël Coward’s original Still Life (1936), the brief one-act play on
which the film is based. These flashbacks accentuate the process of narration
and the difficulties that inhere in the task of Laura’s telling her story at all.
As well, mindful of the need for the film to pass the British Board of Film
Censors to secure its release, the filmmakers decided that the consummated
affair between Laura and Alec in Still Life would be recast as a narrowly
averted unconsummated love affair in Brief Encounter (as the Production
Code Administration’s story summary for the film’s distribution in the United
States in 1946 put it, using an editorializing tone, the two go to the flat of
a friend of Alec’s, and “fortunately, the friend arrives before anything can
happen, and [Laura] runs away in horror, oppressed by the feeling of deg-
radation” [italics mine]). (Story Summary, Brief Encounter).Together, these
two simple decisions greatly affected the shape of the film’s presentation of
this tale of desire, love, and loss, recasting it as Laura’s story more than Laura
and Alec’s and affecting the cinematic treatment of a woman’s desire, as I
shall suggest in a subsequent chapter.
Because Brief Encounter is marked by flashbacks, it inevitably also raises
issues of temporality (time in the film is alternately elongated, compressed,
and even repeated). As Richard Dyer observes, “Time, its pressure, its fleet-
ingness, is endlessly referenced in the film” (1993, 45). In turn, issues of
temporality are related to issues of representing the past generally and his-
tory more specifically, as Maureen Turim has pointed out:

If flashbacks give us images of memory, the personal archives of the

past, they also give us images of history, the shared and recorded past.
In fact, flashbacks in the film often merge the two levels of remember-
ing the past, giving large-scale social and political history the subjective
mode of a single, fictional individual’s remembered experience.
(1989, 2)

On the one hand, Brief Encounter, shot in 1945 before the end of World
War II, is set just prior to the beginning of the war, and on the surface it
would seem that the very private tale Laura tells has little to do with a pub-
lic history generally or with World War II specifically. And yet some of the
emotional response it generated in its original audiences derived from its
indirect invocation of the unseen war nearing an end during the time of the
film’s production. Indeed, Kent Puckett argues that Brief Encounter

is almost entirely about war . . . many of the film’s images, scenes, and
sounds would have reminded contemporary audiences of wartime: war
4 The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s
monuments that mourn a war to come; trains and train stations that
conjure the boredom of life between battles; cups and cups of tea that,
in their very abundance, invoke the ongoing privations of rationing; and
train whistles that sound like buzz bombs” (2011, 58).

In the skilled hands of David Lean, who was known for his early work in
sound editing, the omnipresent train whistles also give voice to the threat
of imminent departure and farewell, as well as to the inner shrieking of the
human heart when it is torn from a thing or person it loves.
And so it is that Brief Encounter also points to a tension between private
and public histories and women’s relationship to them, which is something
that a number of 1940s woman’s films do. It is common to assert that Hol-
lywood film specifically (to which the English Brief Encounter obviously
does not belong, although it participates in the conventions of the woman’s
film) represents historical events in terms of the story of its impact on indi-
viduals rather than on larger social, political, cultural, or economic groups.
However, much remains to be said about the discursive relationship that
the woman’s film constructs among history, temporality, narrative, gender,
and subjectivity. If classical woman’s films often represent history neither
accurately nor with much historiographical complexity, what exactly do
they do with history? Are the love stories told by the woman’s film truly
“situated outside the arena in which history endows space with meaning,”
as Mary Ann Doane has suggested (1987, 96)? Or do some woman’s films
combine issues of history and gender in ways that are narratively meaning-
ful, if rarely historically accurate or ideologically progressive? Moreover,
how do answers to these questions further our understanding of what is at
stake in the classical woman’s film and in existing critical studies of them?
These are some of the questions that this volume ultimately explores in the
chapters that follow.

A PHANTOM GENRE?

In 1999, advocating for what he called a “process-oriented” approach to

genre in which parameters are forever shifting and transforming in an inter-
active process among film, producers, critics, and audiences, Rick Altman
traced a brief history of the terms “melodrama” and “woman’s film.” Not-
ing that producers are more flexible in their conception and application of
generic categories than academics and critics, Altman prefaces his remarks
by observing, “We critics are the ones who have a vested interest in reusing
generic terminology, which serves to anchor our analyses in universal or
culturally sanctioned contexts, thus justifying our all too subjective, tenden-
tious and self-serving positions” (1999, 71). Invoking both Russell Merrit’s
and Ben Singer’s astute observations that melodrama has been a “slippery
 Introduction 5
and evolving category” (71), Altman then returns to the work of Steve Neale
(1993), concluding that

it seems clear that a major goal of the 1993 article is to demonstrate

that scholars have misused the term melodrama and its derivatives in
describing what are now often called “woman’s films.” As Neale shows,
in the 40s and 50s melodrama meant something else; recent critics thus
make improper use of the term when they apply it to “the weepies.” Yet
a generation of feminist critics has systematically used the term melo-
drama in reference to the female-oriented films of the 40s and 50s. Their
analyses have taken for granted—and thus reinforced—the existence
and nature of this genre and its corpus.
(72)

There are multiple difficulties here in Altman’s assessment. Present in Alt-

man’s quotation of Neale’s work is a curious idea that there is a definitively
“proper” use of the term “melodrama” (and, by extension, “woman’s
film”)—as opposed to different historical and interpretive uses of it as Neale
describes them. Some critics, like Linda Williams (1998, 2001), consider
melodrama a transgeneric mode of expression rather than a discrete genre,
as do I, which might be applied to many genres, as evidenced by the histori-
cal record to which Altman points by way of Neale. Further, if a conflation
of the terms “melodrama” and “woman’s film” is a topic of Altman’s writing
here, he himself conflates and flattens differences between “melodramas” of
the 1940s and those of the 1950s. Others, I among them, would question
Altman’s phrase “female-oriented films of the 40s and 50s,” noting distinct
differences (notwithstanding some similarities) between the “ ‘feminine’
excesses of 40s ‘weepies’ and 50s films directed by Douglas Sirk” (71). For
me, what differentiates the woman’s film of the 1940s from the 1930s and
from the family melodramas of the 1950s and 1960s is not so much the pre-
sumed address to a female audience (a key point for Doane, as I will discuss
in a subsequent chapter), as its different narrative emphasis and dynamic.
While woman’s films from the 1930s and 1940s occasionally share similar
plots, the 1940s woman’s film speaks to the issue of desire gendered as femi-
nine in a more direct way than does its 1930s counterpart, in part because
the 1930s woman’s film, produced during the Great Depression, is often at
least as preoccupied with class and economic issues as it is with questions of
desire. The 1940s woman’s film, on the other hand, foregrounds the issues
of subjectivity and desire usually (though not always) at the expense of an
explicit consideration of class.1 The world it depicts is usually comfortably
middle- or upper-middle class, and questions of economic survival generally
pale before questions of sexual, emotional, or psychic well-being. Both the
1930s and the 1940s woman’s film generally differ from the melodramas
of the 1950s, however, in that there is a strong tendency in the 1950s to
6 The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s
focus on the configuration of the nuclear family, and particularly on the role
of father (and son as potential father) within that family. Even when the
1950s family melodramas do center on a female protagonists and her desires
(as, e.g., in Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession [1954] and All That Heaven
Allows [1955]), they usually do so in ways that foreground the woman’s
relationship to her family rather than the woman as (relatively) autonomous
being and her own experience of subjectivity.
While acknowledging Neale’s point and, by association, Altman’s, that
the very real earlier and broader application of the term “melodrama” was
to such films as the war, adventure, horror, and thriller categories, I find
curious in Altman’s assessment of Neale an implicit assumption that there
is a singular, proper way to apply the term—as if, somehow, feminist critics
of the 1970s and 1980s made some kind of error in asserting the existence
of the woman’s film as a genre, as opposed to asserting a deliberate political
and aesthetic call to critical and filmmaking action. Beginning with Molly
Haskell’s work in 1973, then moving on through Mary Ann Doane’s The
Desire to Desire, Altman rightly asserts that “one of the major tasks of femi-
nist film criticism over the past twenty years has been to rehabilitate the term
woman’s film and thereby restore value to women’s activities” (1999, 77)—
still, however, without fully seeming to appreciate the complexity of those
films and of the nuances of their importance to feminists. That is, even as
Altman recognizes the existence of a political project and, indeed, makes
it part of his point about the influential role that Doane and others played
in defining and arguing for the existence, however blurry, of a genre of
woman’s films that might earlier have been discussed according to different
paradigms, he asserts,

I do not mean to claim that Doane was by herself capable of turning

a motley assortment of old films into a widely recognized genre, but
I would suggest that a major purpose of The Desire to Desire is to
establish the woman’s film as a genre.
(75)

A “motley assortment of old films”? Even if writing facetiously or ironically,

Altman here seems to reproduce the exact contempt that he himself quotes
Haskell describing as far back as 1973: “As a term of critical opprobrium,
‘woman’s film’ carries the implication that women, and therefore women’s
emotional problems, are of minor significance” (Haskell [1973] 1974, 154).
After nearly forty years of dedicated scholarship about women and cinema,
such an attitude is disquieting, as is Altman’s surprise at how long it took
for critical attention to be paid to the genre:

We have already noted the extent to which the building of genres is often
a critical, rather than a production-based, concern, so the only thing
surprising about Haskell’s attempt to rehabilitate the woman’s film by
 Introduction 7
broadening and strengthening its definition is the delay between the
production of the films in question and the moment of critical invention.
(73)

Not so surprising, really, considering that second-wave feminism got its start
in the late 1960s and early 1970s and that genre studies was initially domi-
nated by male practitioners and scholars in Anglo-American film studies
criticism at that time.
For the purposes of this volume, then, I regard melodrama as a mode of
expression that is present in a range of genres and forms of media and art and
the 1940s woman’s film as a loose cycle of films produced during that decade.
Both the periodization of my project (the 1940s) and my acceptance of the
term “the woman’s film” to denote a (more or less) coherent body of work
and a legitimate field of inquiry acknowledge my debt to the work of extraor-
dinary feminist scholars before me and accept the assumption that many films
from the 1940s are not only “about women” in some unique sense but were
also, in fact, originally targeted by the Hollywood studio system for what it
presumed, rightly or wrongly, was a female audience thrown into prominence
by World War II. I am less interested in defining (or defending) a specific genre
or corpus, however, than I am in exploring certain issues of gender, narrative,
and history that surface within some woman’s films from this decade, often
though not always as a related constellation of concerns, and in engaging
in conversation with those feminists and scholars who share these interests.
My selection of relatively few films for this volume is an eclectic one that is
intended to be suggestive rather than definitive. I occasionally point toward
other titles that are equally relevant (I could point to many more or to differ-
ent ones entirely); it is always my intention to suggest rather than proscribe
issues for continued debate about woman’s films belonging to this decade.
But why revisit the 1940s woman’s film now? Hasn’t enough been written
about these films in past decades? Altman’s overview of the 1970s and 1980s
does point to a very fruitful period for studies of melodrama generally and
the woman’s film specifically, although I would also argue that the de facto
conflation of 1950s family melodrama and the woman’s film by Altman itself
indicates that further work remains to be done. More importantly, however,
as cultural studies made increasingly significant contributions to the field of
film studies and as the field itself entered a new phase in the early twenty-
first century, morphing to include new research and analytic paradigms of an
increasingly digital age, debates having to do with issues of film narrative, cin-
ematic spectatorship, and desire were prematurely truncated and displaced.
As I shall discuss in the first chapter, the earlier brilliant studies of narrative,
gender, and subjectivity were more or less abandoned at the exact point at
which alternative critical models might have begun to be theorized in ways
that were less pessimistic and allowed for a greater play of meaning and sense-
making in classical cinema generally and in feminist film theory in particular.
In part, of course, this was due to an increasing sense of frustration with these
8 The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s
earlier models that sometimes seemed to ignore a range of issues pertaining
especially to class, race, and sexuality and that LGBTQ and cultural studies
productively sought to correct. At the same time, however, debates about the
nature of classical narrative, identification, and subjectivity in classical cinema
remain unresolved from this earlier period. Reexamining them now through
a revised critical lens can not only further enlarge our understanding of an
important historical period of cinema and theorizations about it but also,
by extension, cast new light on contemporary filmmaking genres that derive
directly or indirectly from the woman’s film (such as romantic dramas, or
rom-drams, and to a lesser extent, romantic comedies, or rom-coms).
Thus, in the first chapter of this volume, “Film Theory, Narrative, and the
1940s Woman’s Film,” I examine the way in which much of contemporary
film theory over the past forty years—feminist or otherwise—focused on the
gaze and on paradigms of looking, usually with the intent of exposing ideo-
logical assumptions present in the very conventions of cinema, particularly
narrative cinema produced in Hollywood. For the sake of convenience and
shorthand, I retain the notion of “classical Hollywood cinema” throughout
this volume to refer to a period between, roughly, 1920 and 1960, and to
argue that its representational modes and strategies are not as monolithic
and standardized in relation to gender as has occasionally been suggested.
Narrative cinema itself has been theorized largely, though not entirely, as
a relay of looks. However, as Teresa de Lauretis points out in an investiga-
tion of the “structural connection between sadism and narrative” in Alice
Doesn’t (1984), issues of narrative and narrativity—that is, the dynamics of
narrative and the principles of movement that underlie all narrative, what-
ever the medium—were usually neglected in favor of technical, economic,
ideological, or aesthetic aspects of filmmaking and film viewing in the for-
mulation of theories about the gaze within and at cinema. I discuss the ways
in which feminist film theory of the 1970s and 1980s particularly—and most
ironically—fetishized the gaze as a signifying discourse at the cost of other
meaningful cinematic registers. Arguing that a study of narrativity in itself is
a discrete area of investigation that simply did not develop and does not exist
to any significant degree within film studies, I discuss its potential utility to
and resonance for a study of the 1940s woman’s film that is long overdue.
In chapter 2, “The Fate of One Governess: Lost Narrative, History, and
Gendered Desire,” I apply the ideas in the first chapter to perform a case
study of All This, and Heaven Too (Anatole Litvak, 1940), a historical wom-
an’s film adapted from a novel of the same title based on the real-life murder
of the Duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin in France in 1847. I examine not only
the film but also some of the archival historical and fictional discourses sur-
rounding the Praslin affair, concluding that, in all iterations of the Praslin
case—cinematic, novelistic, or overtly historical—a culturally structured
desire gendered as feminine is figured as the motivating force of the (various)
narrative(s) built around it and that its articulation is most powerfully ren-
dered at the level of narrative movement as defined most clearly by literary
 Introduction 9
theorist Peter Brooks. Throughout this volume, I use the term “gendered
desire” to indicate desire coded by a cultural product as masculine, femi-
nine, or sometimes, in specific instances, both.
In chapter 3, “Melodrama, History, and Narrative Recovery,” I explore
critical discussions of melodrama and history, and my interest in the woman’s
film’s construction and articulation of gendered desire in relation to history
continues. Rather than an extended case study, the chapter examines two
very different woman’s films produced during World War II: That Hamilton
Woman (Alexander Korda, 1941) and Random Harvest (Mervyn LeRoy,
1942). While gendered desire and subjectivity are explicitly foregrounded
in the experiences of both female and male characters in both films, they
also construct relationships among the historical period of World War II
(directly presented or indirectly evoked on the screen), the present moment
and circumstances of the films’ production, and their audiences’ positioning
in relation to those histories.
Chapter 4, “Temporality and the Past: Haunting Narratives and the
Postwar Woman’s Film,” turns to a consideration of loose and very small
subgrouping of the 1940s woman’s film—the postwar romantic ghost film,
represented here by The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1947)
and Portrait of Jennie (William Dieterle, 1948). Looking at the ways in which
a melancholy desire is figured as not only narratively active but also occasion-
ally both masculine and feminine, I then turn away from considerations of
history, per se (highlighted in the preceding two chapters), to broader impli-
cations of temporality, concluding that these romantic ghost films encourage
a reevaluation of the ways in which previous theorists have conceived the
relationship between different temporal modes (eloquently expressed by
Tania Modleski as “the time of repetition” and “the time of history” [1984])
in the 1940s woman’s film, particularly in the aftermath of World War II.
In chapter 5, “By My Tears I Tell a Story/The ‘Absent’ War,” I discuss the
wartime American film Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942) and England’s
Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) in order to examine ways in which
desire in these films is usually gendered as feminine, successfully articulated
as such, and yet experienced as both masculine and feminine by men and
women alike in the very forward movement of the narrative itself. In addi-
tion to sharing such moments, Now, Voyager and Brief Encounter each
feature a modern setting and were both produced during World War II, yet
at the level of narrative, neither has anything to do with the war and both
are set in a period immediately preceding its start. Unlike the films I have
examined in earlier chapters, Now, Voyager and Brief Encounter banish
the war and history to their extratextual margins, but that lost narrative is
imbricated with issues of desire in each film and with its reception in inter-
esting and curious ways.
Finally, in chapter 6, “Telling the Story Differently: Toward an Androg-
ynous Spectatorship and Interpretation,” I examine three very different
woman’s films—Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940), The Enchanted Cottage
10 The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s
(John Cromwell, 1945), and The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949)—and argue
for a fluid notion of gender in interpreting classical cinema that permits a
way of identifying and reading a film androgynously (and perhaps quix-
otically) in and through narrative. Taking as my point of departure and
speculation the paradigm of the 1940s Gothic romance film in which gen-
dered points of view are explicitly thematized, I discuss the three films in
terms of how they correspond and deviate from that paradigm, examining
how each calls into question the conventional theoretical binaries of mascu-
line and feminine points of view, identification, and narrative interpretation.

CONTESTED TEARS: WHOSE VOICES MATTER?

At the foundation of this volume is the still-unresolved (and perhaps defini-

tively unresolvable) question that has haunted the woman’s film and the
many who have watched and studied them for decades now: Whose stories
do these films really tell? Whose voices do we hear, whose voices matter,
and—in the case of woman’s films that explicitly engage with or evoke
history—whose stories are told and what relationship do these films con-
struct among history, narrative, and gender? Some of these same questions
also reside at the heart of the “history” constructed about the woman’s
film in and through academic discourse of the past forty years. That dis-
course has shaped our perceptions of generic parameters, oeuvres, and issues
deemed worthy of scholarly debate, and it has also participated in wider
conventions about critical and authorial legitimacy within academic film
and media studies itself.
To illustrate my point, let me briefly invoke the mid-1990s work and
reception of American philosopher Stanley Cavell in Contesting Tears:
The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1996). Construct-
ing his argument in both implicit and explicit dialogue with his earlier
work on Hollywood romantic comedies (1976), Cavell maintained that
four films—Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), Now, Voyager (Irving Rap-
per, 1942), Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944), and Letter from an Unknown
Woman (Max Ophuls, 1948)—constitute a genre he called the unknown
woman film and that these films “recount interacting versions of a story, a
story of myth, that seems to present itself as a woman’s search for a story,
or of the right to tell her story” (3). An unsurprising assertion to those
familiar with the notable and extensive work in film studies on melodrama
and the woman’s film that was done prior to Cavell’s book, the volume
considers the woman’s film not in relation to issues of gender, feminism,
or its related critical discourses but rather to Cavell’s own earlier study of
what he has termed “comedies of remarriage.” Thus, Cavell positioned
himself outside the notable and highly visible work that sought variously
to identify melodrama as a transgeneric mode of representation up to that
point (e.g., Peter Brooks [1976]), deconstruct a gendered alignment of
 Introduction 11
subjectivity within the woman’s film within a specific decade (e.g., Doane
[1987]), or locate issues of mode, genre, gender, and representation within
a particular social and historical moment—to cite merely a few instances
of such work (Gledhill [1987], Byars [1991]). As a result, in responses to
earlier drafts and presentations of his own study, as well as to the final book
itself, Cavell found himself criticized for ignoring the work of feminists and
film scholars (see, in particular, responses and reviews by Modleski [1990]
and Kaplan [1998]). Asserting “I have no standing, and no motive, from
which to attempt to place these different emphases nor to seek out others,”
Cavell argued for the legitimacy of his own interest in various relationships
among cinema, philosophical skepticism, tragedy, melodrama, gender, and
psychoanalysis, choosing to stay largely within the terms of philosophical
debate most familiar to him. Sketching a timeline for the evolution of his
interests (to demonstrate their autonomy and integrity), he simultaneously
acknowledged that the work of feminist film scholars existed, declared his
independence from that work, and curiously remarked upon his “sense for
a long time of intellectual isolation” (1996,199) as his interests developed.
Feminists might (and did) argue that Cavell’s was a self-imposed isolation,
but E. Ann Kaplan’s assessment of his book in Film Quarterly is interest-
ing to me today for two reasons. First, Kaplan engaged in a conscientious
effort to assess Cavell’s work on the woman’s film and acknowledged her
own investment in the controversy surrounding it. Second, and perhaps of
more interest now, she also identified what she called “anxieties of time and
gender” (as well as discipline) at work in Cavell’s book (Kaplan 1998, 78).
Though she did not discuss them as such in her review, time and gender
are precisely the well-known twin anxieties that haunt melodrama and the
woman’s film specifically, with the melodramatic “too late” generally tied
to an experience of women’s waiting (for love, for recognition) that may
never come or come past the point to make any difference (Doane 1987;
Modleski 1988; Williams 1998, 2001). Read today, Kaplan’s observation
functions almost as a gloss not only on the woman’s film but also on a curi-
ous element of the debate between Cavell and his feminist critics: it played
out as a kind of discursive melodrama in academic circles, with Cavell
himself taking up the traditional position of the woman as the one who
waits (for love, for recognition from his academic peers). Cavell’s anxiety of
time, Kaplan said, emerged partly as his “need to lay claim to the authority
that comes from doing research for so long. Perhaps there is anxiety about
running out of time to complete his projects” (78; emphasis mine). As for
the anxiety of gender, Kaplan pointed to its expression in Cavell’s choice
not to engage with long-standing feminist debates about the woman’s film
that both preceded and were occurring simultaneously with the develop-
ment of his work:

. . . his excuse for not paying attention to the feminist melodrama work
because not “specifically invited to” still strikes me as disingenuous.
12 The Womanʼs Film of the 1940s
Cavell evidently only engages with research that is in line with his own
thoughts: he sees no need to take other points of view into account.
(1998, 78; emphasis in original)

Dramas of invitation and rejection, acknowledgment and dismissal, play out

in Cavell’s own words as he levels a somewhat inverted claim at his critics,
recasting it in somewhat labored but wounded prose:

Even I, for all my overlaps yet asynchronies with the interests of my

culture, have had to recognize that the expression of intellectual indebt-
edness or helpfulness is no longer dischargeable on exactly intellectual
grounds. No doubt it never was. But it is as if a current preoccupation
with an [anti] metaphysics of citationality and of authorship have come
to mask a politics of who is citable by whom and who not.
(1996, 199)

If Kaplan’s review unselfconsciously evokes tropes of the trajectory of a

woman’s film, Cavell’s own words might be said to correspond to scenar-
ios more similar to the 1950s family melodrama of authority and privilege
about which Thomas Elsaesser wrote so compellingly in “Tales of Sound
and Fury” (1972). A palpable sense of resentment and disappointment
seems to permeate Cavell’s comments here: they are a grudging, backhanded
admission that, although he may not have been influenced by others outside
his discipline working on related material, such materials existed. They are
an expression of irritation that his work should “have to” allude to or be
assessed in any kind of relation to that material. They also give voice to
his disappointment that, just as he may not have considered the work of
feminist and other film scholars directly relevant to his project, those same
people, in turn, have chosen not to engage as fully with his work as he might
have wished.
I refer to the debate around Cavell’s work on the woman’s film not to cen-
tralize it or the debate unduly but rather to observe that, taken together, they
dramatize issues that subtend critical discussion within any academic field:
Whose voices “count” and are acknowledged as relevant or authoritative
and why? Perhaps not coincidentally, issues of authority, voice, and interpre-
tation are also matters that many woman’s films emphasize through plot and
assorted enunciative strategies, both visual and aural. As the final chapter of
this volume will indicate, I like to think that my reading of woman’s films
of the 1940s is an act of listening to the voice of desire itself, and that it is
admittedly and unabashedly as much a work of fiction as it is of theoretical
and critical inquiry (if, indeed, the two impulses are distinct). Influenced by a
range of theoretical practitioners and critics and interrogating the absences
and silences within the woman’s film, I occasionally (re)write lost narratives
from the point of view of the characters who have been left in the margins
and tell their stories as they could never have told them. Christine Gledhill
Random documents with unrelated
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so as to embrace the whole scheme of the universe, I should no
longer perceive the contents of that universe as dispersed through
space, because I should no longer have as my special standpoint a
here to which other existence would be there.
My special standpoint in space may thus be said to be
phenomenal of my special and peculiar interests in life, the special
logical standpoint from which my experience reflects the ultimate
structure of the Absolute. And so, generally, though the conclusion
can for various reasons not be pressed in respect of every detail of
spatial appearance, the spatial grouping of intelligent purposive
beings is phenomenal of their inner logical affinity of interest and
purpose. Groups of such beings, closely associated together in
space, are commonly also associated in their peculiar interests, their
special purposes, their characteristic attitude towards the universe.
The local contiguity of the members of the group is but an “outward
and visible sign” of an “inward and spiritual” community of social
aspiration. This is, of course, only approximately the case; the less
the extent to which any section of mankind have succeeded in
actively controlling the physical order for the realisation of their own
purposes, the more nearly is it the truth that spatial remoteness and
inner dissimilarity of social purposes coincide. In proportion as man’s
conquest over his non-human environment becomes complete, he
devises for himself means to retain the inner unity of social aims and
interests in spite of spatial separation. But this only shows once
more how completely the spatial order is a mere imperfect
appearance which only confusedly adumbrates the nature of the
higher Reality behind it. Thus we may say that the “abolition of
distance” effected by science and civilisation is, as it were, a
practical vindication of our metaphysical doctrine of the comparative
unreality of space.
Similarly with time, though the temporal series may, in a sense, be
said to be less of an unreality than the spatial. For it does not seem
possible to show that spatial appearance is an inevitable form of
finite experience. We can at least conceive of a finite experience
composed entirely of successive arrangements of secondary
qualities, such as sounds or smells, and the accompanying feeling-
tones, though we have no positive ground for affirming the existence
of such a type of experience. But the temporal form seems
inseparable from finite intelligence. For the limitation of my existence
to a certain portion of time is clearly simply the abstract and external
aspect of the fact that my interests and purposes, so far as I can
apprehend the meaning of my own life, occupy just this special place
in the logical development of the larger whole of social life and
purpose of which my own life is a member. So the position of a
particular purposive act in the temporal series of acts which I call the
history of my own life, is the outward indication of the logical place
filled by this particular act in the connected scheme of interests
which form my life on its inner side. But it is an inevitable
consequence of the want of complete internal harmony we call
finitude, that the aims and interests of the finite subject cannot be in
the same degree present to its apprehension all at once and
together. In being aware of its own internal purpose or meaning, it
must, because it is finite and therefore not ultimately a completely
harmonious systematic whole, be aware of that purpose as only
partially fulfilled. And in this sense of one’s own purposes as only
partially fulfilled, we have the foundation of the time-experience, with
its contrast between the “now” of fulfilment and the “no longer” and
“not yet” of dissatisfied aspiration.
For this reason, dissatisfaction, unfulfilled craving, and the time-
experience seem to be bound up together, and time to be merely the
abstract expression of the yearning of the finite individual for a
systematic realisation of its own purpose which lies for ever beyond
its reach as finite. If this is so, only the absolute and infinite individual
whose experience is throughout that of perfectly harmonious
systematic realisation of meaning, can be outside the time-process;
to it, “vanished and present are the same,” because its whole nature
is once for all perfectly expressed in the detail of existence. But the
finite, just because its very nature as finite is to aspire to a perfection
which is out of reach, must have its experience marked with the
distinction of now from by and by, of desire from performance. In this
temporal character of all finite experience we may perhaps
afterwards discern the ultimate ground of morality, as we can already
discern in the unresting struggle of the finite to overcome its finitude,
practical evidence that time is not a form which adequately
expresses the nature of Reality, and must therefore be imperfect
appearance.[154]
Thus we seem finally to have reached the conclusion that time and
space are the imperfect phenomenal manifestation of the logical
relations between the purposes of finite individuals standing in social
relations to each other; the inner purposive life of each of these
individuals being itself in its turn, as we have previously seen, the
imperfect expression, from a special logical “point of view,” of the
structure and life of the ultimate infinite individual. For the infinite
individual itself the whole of the purposes and interests of the finite
individuals must form a single harmonious system. This system
cannot itself be in the spatial and temporal form; space and time
must thus in some way cease to exist, as space and time, for the
absolute experience. They must, in that experience, be taken up,
rearranged, and transcended, so as to lose their character of an
endless chain of relations between other relations.
Precisely how this is effected, we, from our finite standpoint,
cannot presume to say. It is natural to draw illustrations from the
“specious present” of perception, in which we appear to have a
succession that is also simultaneous; or again, from the timeless and
purely logical character science seeks to ascribe to its “laws of
nature.” But in the “specious present” we seem obliged to attend to
one aspect, succession or simultaneity, to the exclusion of the other;
probably we never succeed in equally fixing both aspects at once. It
thus presents us rather with the problem than with its solution. And
again, after our discussion of the meaning of law, we cannot affirm
that Nature is, for the absolute experience, a system of general laws.
Hence it seems well not to take these illustrations for more than they
are actually worth as indications of the merely phenomenal character
of time. Metaphysics, like the old scholastic theology, needs
sometimes to be reminded that God’s thoughts are not as ours, and
His ways, in a very real sense when Philosophy has done its best,
still past finding out.[155]

Consult further:—F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chaps. 4

(Space and Time), 18 (Temporal and Spatial Appearance); L.
Couturat, L’Infini Mathématique, pt. 2, bk. iv. chap. 4 (against the
Kantian antinomies); H. Poincaré, La Science et L’Hypothèse, pp.
68-109; H. Lotze, Metaphysic, bk. ii. chaps. 1-3; W. Ostwald,
Vorlesungen über Naturphilosophie, lects. 5, 8; J. Royce, The World
and the Individual, Second Series, lect. 3; B. Russell, Foundations of
Geometry: Is Position in Space and Time Absolute or Relative (Mind,
July 1901), Principles of Mathematics, pt. 6, vol. i.; H. Spencer, First
Principles, pt. 2, chap. 3.
 141. The student who desires to think out the problems for himself
would probably do well to take the discussions of Locke (Essay, bk.
ii. chaps. 13-15) and Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, bk. i. pt. 2)
rather than that of Kant as his starting-point, as they are less vitiated
by psychological superstitions. In recent metaphysical work the
chapters on the subject in Mr. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality will
probably be found most useful. Much may be learned from Mr.
Russell’s work, Foundations of Geometry, with which should,
however, be compared the largely discrepant results of his later
article, “Is Position in Space and Time Relative or Absolute?” (Mind,
July 1901).
142. We are not called upon to enter into such specially
psychological questions as, e.g., whether both directions, past and
future, can be detected within the “specious present” of direct
perception, or whether the specious present only contains the
elements “now” and “no longer,” the “not yet” being a subsequent
intellectual construction, as is held, e.g., by Mr. Bradley and Mr.
Shadworth Hodgson.
143. We may indeed go still further, and say that every unique
moment or experience has its own unique spatial and temporal
system. The method by which I weave the perceived space-time
systems of different experiences within my own mental life into a
single conceptual system, is in principle the same by which the
spaces and times of myself and other men are made into one
system for the purpose of practical intercourse.
144. For an account of the psychological processes involved in all
this, see, e.g., Stout, Manual of Psychology,3 bk. iii. pt. 2, chaps. 3-5;
bk. iv. chap. 6.
145. Thus Dedekind (Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen? p. xii.)
maintains that none of the constructions of Euclid involve the
continuity of space.
146. Of course, a physical vacuum is not the same thing as empty
space. For the purposes of any special science a vacuum means a
space not occupied by contents of the special kind in which that
special science is interested. Thus, in the ordinary parlance of
Physics, a vacuum means simply a space in which there is no mass.
Whether it is desirable, for the purposes of physical science, to
assume the existence of vacuum, is altogether a question for
Physics itself, and to decide it in the affirmative is not to maintain the
existence of that unmeaning abstraction, absolutely empty space. In
any case, it may be observed that the widespread notion that motion
is only possible in a physical vacuum is a mistake, motion being
perfectly possible in a fluid plenum.
147. It must be carefully noted that distance as thus defined is not
properly a quantitative relation, and involves no notion of magnitude,
but only of relative place in a series. It should also be observed that
in assuming the existence of such a unique relation between every
pair of points, it is tacitly taken for granted that the number of
dimensions of the spatial order is finite. In a space of an infinite
number of dimensions, such unique relation would be impossible.
(See Russell, Foundations of Geometry, p. 161 ff.) Our justification
for making this assumption, as also for taking time to be of one
dimension only, seems to be that it is indispensable for all those
practical purposes which depend on our ability to create a science of
Geometry, and that we have no positive ground for assuming the
opposite. Thus ultimately the assumption appears to be of the nature
of a postulate.
148. The ablest detailed account of the relativity of spatial position
readily accessible to the English reader, will be found in Mr. Russell’s
Foundations of Geometry, chaps. iiiA, iv. Mr. Russell has since, in
Mind for July 1901, attempted to prove the opposite view, that
positions in space and time are inherently distinct, but without
discussing his own previous arguments for relativity. Into the purely
mathematical part of Mr. Russell’s later contentions I am not
competent to enter. I may, however, suggest that the question of
Metaphysics cannot be decided merely by urging, as Mr. Russell
does, that fewer assumptions are required to construct a geometry
on the hypothesis of absolute than on that of relative position. The
superior convenience of an assumption for certain special purposes
is no proof of its ultimate intelligibility. And when Mr. Russell goes on
to admit that points in space are indistinguishable for us, he seems
to me to give up his case. For is not this to admit that, after all, the
space with which we deal in our geometrical science is relative from
beginning to end? How differences of quality of which we, by
hypothesis, can know nothing, can help or hinder our scientific
constructions, it is indeed hard to see.
149. This may be brought home even to those who, like myself,
are not mathematicians, by the perusal of such a work as
Lobatchevsky’s Untersuchungen zur Theorie der Parallel-Linien,
where a consistent geometry of triangles is constructed in entire
independence of the postulate of parallelism. Of course, in the end it
must be a mere question of nomenclature whether a form of serial
order independent of these quasi-empirical restrictions is to be called
“space” or not.
150. It must be carefully remembered that the essential defect of
the indefinite regress is not its interminableness, but its monotony.
We ourselves held that Reality is an individual composed of lesser
individuals which repeat the structure of the whole, and that the
number of these individuals need not be finite. But, in our view, the
higher the order of individuality the more self-explanatory was its
structure, whereas in the indefinite regress an incomprehensible
construction is endlessly repeated in the same form.
151. Normally, that is; for brevity’s sake I omit to note the possible
case of a coherent dream-life continued from night to night. In
principle there would be a difference between the case of the space
and time of such a dream-life and those of our waking hours.
152. So the events of my dreams, though not occupying any place
in the temporal series of the events of waking life, are so far logically
connected with that series as both sets of events stand in relation to
certain identical elements of psychical temperament and disposition.
Another interesting case is that of so-called “dual personality.” The
experience of both the two alternating personalities can be arranged
in a single temporal series only because of the way in which both
sets are inwoven with the systematic interests of other men, whose
personality does not alternate, or alternates with a different rhythm. If
all mankind were subject to simultaneous alternations of personality,
the construction of a single time-series for all our experiences would
be impossible. In this discussion I have throughout followed the full
and thorough treatment of the problem by Mr. Bradley, Appearance
and Reality, chap. 18.
 153. Otherwise, conceptual space and time are, as we have seen,
derivatives of the number-series, and we have already learned that
the number-series leads to the problem of summing an endless
series, and is therefore not an adequate way of representing ultimate
Reality. (Bk. II. chap. 4, § 10). Another form of the same difficulty
would be that conceptual space and time are applications of the
numerical series,—but application to what? To a material which is
already spatial and temporal. All these puzzles are only different
ways of expressing the essential relativity of space and time. But see
the anti-Kantian view in, e.g., Couturat, L’Infini Mathématique, pt. 2.
154. Compare Prof. Royce’s remarks, The World and the
Individual, Second Series, lect. 3, “The Temporal and the Eternal,” p.
134. I should certainly have had to acknowledge considerable
obligation to Prof. Royce’s discussion had not the present chapter
been written before I had an opportunity of studying it.
155. Against the plausible attempt to solve the problem by simply
thinking of the whole physical order as forming a “specious present”
to the Absolute Experience, we may urge that the “specious present”
itself regularly consists for us of a multiplicity of detail, which we
apprehend as simultaneous without insight into its inner unity as the
embodiment of coherent system. Hence the direct insight of the
Absolute Experience into its own internal meaning or structure
cannot be adequately thought of as mere simultaneous awareness
of the detail of existence. So long as a succession is merely
apprehended as simultaneous, its meaning is not yet grasped.
 CHAPTER V

SOME CONDITIONS OF EVOLUTION

§ 1. The concept of evolution an attempt to interpret natural processes in terms of
individual growth. § 2. Evolution means change culminating in an end which is
the result of the process and is qualitatively new. The concept is thus
teleological. § 3. Evolution, being teleological, is essentially either progress or
degeneration. If it is more than illusion, there must be real ends in the physical
order. And ends can only be real as subjective interests of sentient beings
which are actualised by the process of change. § 4. Thus all evolution must
take place within an individual subject. § 5. Further, the subject of evolution
must be a finite individual. All attempts to make “evolution” a property of the
whole of Reality lead to the infinite regress. § 6. The distinction between
progressive evolution and degeneration has an “objective” basis in the
metaphysical distinction between higher and lower degrees of individuality. §
7. In the evolutionary process, old individuals disappear and fresh ones
originate. Hence evolution is incompatible with the view that Reality consists
of a plurality of ultimately independent finite individuals.

§ 1. We saw, in the first chapter of the present Book, that evolution

or orderly development is a fundamental characteristic of the
processes which compose the physical order as apprehended by the
various empirical sciences. For the purposes of Mechanics and
Mechanical Physics, indeed, we have no need to look upon Nature
as the scene of development; for these sciences it is enough to
conceive of it as a vast complex of changes of configuration and
transformations of energy, connected by regular uniformities of
sequence. As soon, however, as we come to regard Nature from the
standpoint of those sciences which explicitly recognise differences of
quality, as well as differences in position and quantity, among the
objects with which they deal, this narrowly mechanistic conception of
natural processes becomes inadequate. With the notion of physical
processes as productive of changes of quality we are inevitably led
to think of the physical order as a world in which the qualitatively new
is derived from, or developed out of, the previously familiar by fixed
lines of deviation and under determinate conditions.
 Naturally enough, it is from the biological sciences, in which the
study of organic growth plays so prominent a part, that the impulse
to conceive of physical change as development originally comes. As
long ago as the fourth century B.C., Aristotle had taken the concept of
growth or development as the foundation of the most influential
scheme of metaphysical construction yet produced in the whole
history of speculation. In Aristotle’s view, however, the process of
development was regarded as strictly confined within the limits of the
individual life. The individual organism, beginning its existence as an
undeveloped germ or potentiality, gradually unfolds itself in a series
of successive stages of growth, which culminates at the period of
complete maturity. But the individual germ itself is a product or
secretion derived from a pre-existing mature individual of the same
type as that into which this germ will ultimately grow. The number of
distinct typical processes of growth is thus strictly determined, and
each such process implies the previous existence of its completed
result. In other words, the boundaries between species are fixed and
ultimate; there can be no beginning in time of the existence of a new
species, and therefore no origination of new species by development
from other types. As Aristotle epigrammatically puts it, “It takes a
man to beget a man.”
A further point of weakness in the Aristotelian theory is the
absence of any definite account of the machinery by which the
process of growth is effected. We learn, indeed, that the latent
capacity of the organic germ to develop according to a certain
specific type is stimulated into activity by influences contained in the
environment, but the precise nature of this process of stimulation
was necessarily left in obscurity, in consequence of the imperfect
knowledge possessed by Aristotle of the minute character of natural
processes in general.
In the evolutionary theories of modern biology, it is precisely the
problems of the origination of new species, and of the special
character of the relations between the species and its environment
by which this process is conditioned, that have attracted almost
exclusive attention. And, with the steadily increasing success of
evolutionary hypotheses in dealing with biological problems, there
has naturally arisen a tendency to extend the application of the
general concept of evolution far beyond the sphere in which it first
originated. We have now not only more or less well-accredited
hypotheses of the production by evolution of our chemical elements,
but even ambitious philosophical constructions which treat the
concept of evolution as the one and only key to all the problems of
existence. In the presence of these far-reaching applications of
evolutionary ideas, it becomes all the more necessary to bear in
mind, in our estimate of the worth of the evolution concept, that its
logical character remains unaltered by the extension of its sphere of
applicability; it is still, in spite of all minor modifications, essentially
an attempt to interpret natural processes in general in terms of
individual growth.
We are not, of course, in the present chapter in any way
concerned with the details of any one particular theory as to the
special conditions which determine the course of organic or other
evolution. What those conditions in any special case are, is a
question, in the first instance, for that particular branch of empirical
science which deals with the description of the particular aspect of
the processes of the physical order under investigation. And though
it would be a proper question for a complete Philosophy of Nature
how the details of a well-established scientific theory must be
interpreted so as to harmonise with the general metaphysical
implications of the physical order, it is for many reasons premature to
raise such a question in the present state of our actual knowledge of
the details of evolutionary processes. All that can be done here is to
ask what in general are the logical implications involved in thinking of
a process as an evolution at all, and how those implications are
related to our general interpretation of the physical order.
§ 2. Evolution obviously involves the two concepts, already
criticised at length, of change and the dependence of the order and
direction of change upon determinate conditions. But an evolutionary
process is never a mere orderly sequence of changes. For instance,
the changes of configuration and exchanges of energy which take
place when work is done in a material system, conceived as
composed of moving masses without any element of secondary
quality, are not properly to be called a process of evolution. They are
not an evolution or development, because, so long as we keep to the
strictly kinetic view of natural processes as consisting solely in the
varying configuration of systems of mass-particles, the end of the
process is qualitatively undistinguishable from its beginning; nothing
qualitatively new has emerged as its result. Or rather, to speak with
more accuracy, the process has really no end and no unity of its
own. It is only by an entirely arbitrary limitation of view, due to purely
subjective interests of our own, that we isolate just this collection of
mass-particles from the larger aggregate of such particles which
form the physical order as regarded from the strictly kinetic
standpoint, and call it one system; and again, it is with equal
arbitrariness that we determine the point of time beyond which we
shall cease to follow the system’s changes of configuration. In the
indefinitely prolonged series of successive configurations there is no
stage which can properly be called final. Hence from the rigidly
mechanistic point of view of Kinetics and Kinematics there are no
evolutions or developments in the universe, there is only continuous
change.
Development or evolution, then, definitely implies the culmination
of a process of change in the establishment of a state of things
which is relatively new, and implies, further, that the relatively new
state of things may truly be regarded as the end or completion of this
special process of change. Thus the fundamental peculiarity of all
evolutionary ideas is that they are essentially teleological; the
changes which are evolutions are all changes thought of as
throughout relative to an end or result. Except in so far as a process
of change is thus essentially relative to the result in which it
culminates, there is no sense in calling it a development. We may
see this even by considering the way in which the concepts of
evolution and development are used in the various departments of
Physics. We sometimes speak of a chemical process as marked by
the “evolution” of heat, or again we say that, if the second law of
Thermo-dynamics is rigidly and universally true, the physical
universe must be in a process of evolution towards a stage in which
none of its energy will be available for work. But we can only attach a
meaning to such language so long as we allow ourselves to retain
the common-sense point of view according to which there are real
qualitative differences between what abstract Mechanics treats as
equivalent forms of “energy.”
We can speak of the evolution of heat, just because we,
consciously or unconsciously, think of heat as being really, what it is
for our senses, something qualitatively new and distinct from the
other kinds of energy which are converted into it by the chemical
process. So we can intelligibly talk of the gradual conversion of one
form of energy into another as an evolution only so long as we
regard the various forms of energy as qualitatively different, and are
therefore entitled to look upon the complete conversion of the one
into another as the qualitatively new result of a process which is
therefore terminated by its complete establishment. From the
standpoint of the physical theories which regard the distinction
between the forms of energy as only “subjective,” there would be no
sense in regarding that particular stage in the course of events at
which one form of energy disappeared as the end or result of a
process which terminates in it, and thus such terms as evolution and
development would lose their meaning. Only the establishment of
the qualitatively new can form a real end or result, and so afford a
logical basis for the recognition of the changes in the physical order
as distinct processes of development.
§ 3. This essentially teleological character of development is
emphasised in the language of the biological sciences by the
constant use of the concepts of progress and degeneration. For
biology an evolution is essentially a process either in the progressive
or in the regressive direction. Every evolution is an advance to a
“higher” or a decline to a “lower” state of development. Now progress
and regress are only possible where the process of change is
regarded as throughout relative to the end to be attained by the
process. Exactly how we conceive this end, which serves us as a
standard for distinguishing progress from degeneration, is a
secondary question; the point of fundamental importance is that,
except in reference to such an end, there can be no distinction at all
between progressive and retrogressive change. Thus, unless there
are really ends in the physical order which determine the processes
of change that culminate in their actual establishment, evolution
cannot be real. If the ends, by the establishment of which we
estimate progress in development, are merely arbitrary standards of
our own to which nothing in external reality corresponds, then the
physical order must really be a mere succession of changes which
are in no true sense developments, and the whole concept of nature
as marked by development will be a mere human delusion. And, on
the contrary, if there is any truth in the great scientific conceptions of
evolution, there must be real ends in the physical order.
Now, there is only one intelligible way in which we can think of a
process of change as really relative to an end. The resultant state
which we call the end of the process, as being the final stage which
completes this special process, and enables us to mark off all that
succeeds it as belonging to a fresh process of development, must
also be its end in the sense of being the conscious attainment of an
interest or purpose underlying the whole process. It is only in so far
as any state of things is, for some sentient being, the realisation of a
subjective interest previously manifested in an earlier stage of
experience, that that state of things forms the real culmination of a
process which is distinguished from all other processes, and
stamped with an individuality of its own, by the fact that it does
culminate in precisely this result. The conceptions of end or result
and of subjective interest are logically inseparable. Hence we seem
forced to infer that, since evolution is an unmeaning word, unless
there are genuine, and not merely arbitrarily assigned, ends
underlying the processes of physical nature, the concept of evolution
as characteristic of the physical order involves the metaphysical
interpretation of that order as consisting of the teleological acts of
sentient beings, which we had previously accepted on more general
grounds. It would be useless to attempt an escape from this
conclusion by drawing a distinction between two meanings of
“end”—“a last state” and “the achievement of a purpose.” For the
whole point of the preceding argument was that nothing can be an
“end” in the former sense without also being an end in the latter.
Unless processes have ends which are their subjective fulfilment, it
is only by an arbitrary convention of our own that we assign to them
ends which are their last states. And if it is only an arbitrary
convention that physical processes have ends in this sense,
evolution itself is just such a convention and nothing more.[156]
 § 4. What is in principle the same argument may be put in another
form, and the equivalence of the two forms is itself very suggestive
from the metaphysical point of view. Evolution or development, like
all change, implies the presence throughout successive stages in a
process of something which is permanent and unchanging. But it
implies something more definite still. Whatever develops must
therefore have a permanent individual character of its own of which
the successive stages in the development process are the gradual
unfolding. Unless the earlier and the later stages in a connected
series of changes belong alike to the gradual unfolding, under the
influence of surroundings, of a single individual nature, there is no
meaning in speaking of them as belonging to a process of
development. Only the individual can develop, if we are to attribute
precise meaning to our words. We speak of the evolution of a society
or a species, but if our words are not to be empty we must mean by
such phrases one of two things. Either we must mean that the
species and the society which develop are themselves individuals of
a higher order, no less real than the members which compose them,
or our language must be merely a way of saying that the life of each
member of the social or biological group exhibits development.
When we reflect on what is really involved in our ordinary loose
expressions about the “inheritance” of this or the other physical or
social trait, we shall see that the former alternative is far less
removed from ordinary ways of thought than might at first seem to be
the case. If any kind of reality corresponds to our current metaphor
of the “inheritance” of qualities, the groups within which such
“inheritance” takes place must be something much more than mere
aggregates of mutually exclusive individuals. A group within which
qualities can be thus inherited must, as a whole, possess a marked
individual nature of its own. Now we have already seen that all
individuality is in the end teleological. A group of processes forms an
individual life in the degree to which it is the expression of a unique
and coherent interest or aim, and no further. Hence, once more, only
what is truly individual can develop or evolve. And we readily see
that it is precisely in so far as a set of processes form the expression
of individual interest, that the demarcation of the group as a
connected whole from all previous and subsequent processes
possesses more than a conventional significance. Hence only
processes which are the expression of individual interest possess
“ends” or “last states,” and thus the two forms of our argument are in
principle identical. Once more, then, the significance of evolutionary
ideas, if they are to be more than a purely conventional scheme
devised for the furtherance of our own practical purposes, and as an
artificial aid to classification, is bound up with the doctrine that the
events of the physical order are really the expression of the
subjective interests of sentient subjects of experience.[157]
§ 5. To proceed to a further point of the utmost importance. Not
only does evolution imply the presence of individuality in the subject
of the evolutionary process; it implies its possession of finite
individuality. An infinite individual cannot have development or
evolution ascribed to it without contradiction. Hence the Absolute,
the Universe, or whatever other name we prefer to give to the infinite
individual whole of existence, cannot develop, cannot progress,
cannot degenerate. This conclusion might be derived at once from
reflecting upon the single consideration that temporal succession is
involved in all evolution, whether progressive or retrogressive. For
temporal succession is, as we have seen, an inseparable
consequence of finite individuality. But it will be as well to reach our
result in a different way, by considering certain further implications of
the concept of evolution which are manifestly only present in the
case of finite individuality.
In every process of development or evolution there are involved a
pair of interrelated factors, the individual nature which develops, and
the environment which contains the conditions under which and the
stimuli in response to which it develops. The undeveloped germ is as
yet a mere possibility, something which will yet exhibit qualities not
as yet possessed by it. In its undeveloped state, what it possesses is
not the qualities characteristic of its later stages, but only
“tendencies” or “dispositions” to manifest those qualities, provided
that the environment provides the suitable stimulus. Hence, if either
of the two interrelated factors of development, the individual or the
environment, is missing, there can be no evolution. Now, the infinite
individual whole of existence has no environment outside itself to
supply conditions of development and incentives to change. Or, what
is the same thing, since the “possible” means simply that which will
follow if certain conditions are realised, there is no region of
unrealised possibility outside the realised existence of the infinite
whole. Hence in the infinite whole there can be no development: it
cannot progressively adapt itself to new conditions of existence; it
must once and for all be in its reality all that it is in “idea.” The infinite
whole therefore evolves neither forward nor backward.
This impossibility of ascribing development to the whole of Reality
is strikingly illustrated by a consideration of the impasse into which
we are led when we try in practice to think of the whole universe as
in process of evolution. So long as you are still in the presence of the
fundamental distinction between the developing subject and its
environment, you are logically driven, if everything is to be taken as
a product of evolution, to supplement every evolutionary theory by a
fresh evolutionary problem. To account for this special evolution
(e.g., the evolution of the vertebrata) you have to assume an
environment with determinate qualities of its own, influencing the
evolution in question in a determinate way in consequence of these
qualities. But if everything has been evolved, you have again to ask
by what process of evolution this special environment came to be
what it is. To solve this problem you have once more to postulate a
second “environment” determining, by interaction, the course of the
evolution of the former. And thus you are thrown back upon the
indefinite regress.
Unless, indeed, you are prepared boldly to assert that, as all
determinate character is the product of evolution, the universe as a
whole must have evolved out of nothing. (You would not escape this
dilemma by an appeal to the very ancient notion of a “cycle” or
“periodic rhythm” of evolution, in virtue of which the product of a
process of evolution serves in its turn as the environment for the
reiterated evolution of its own antecedent conditions, A thus passing
by evolution into B and B back again into A. For you would at least
have to accept this tendency to periodic rhythm itself as an ultimate
property of all existence, not itself resulting by evolution from
something else.) The dilemma thus created by the attempt to apply
the concept of evolution to the whole of Reality, is sufficient to show
that evolution itself is only thinkable as a characteristic of processes
which fall within the nature of a system which, as a whole, does not
evolve.
We may restate the same contention in the following form:—All
development means advance towards an end. But only that which is
as yet in imperfect possession of its end can advance towards it. For
that which already is all that it has it in its nature to be there can be
no advance, and hence no progressive development. Neither can
such a complete individual degenerate. For even in degenerating,
that which degenerates is gradually realising some feature of its own
nature which was previously only an unrealised potentiality. Thus
even degeneration implies the realisation of an end or interest, and
is itself a kind of advance[.] As the biologists tell us, the atrophy of an
organ, which we call degeneration, is itself a step in the progressive
adaptation of the organisation to new conditions of life, and, as the
moralists remind us, in the ethical sphere a “fall” is, in its way, an
upward step. Hence what cannot rise higher in the scale of existence
also cannot sink lower.
§ 6. Evolution is thus an inseparable characteristic of the life of
finite individuals, and of finite individuals only. And this consideration
gives us the clue to the metaphysical interpretation of the distinction,
so significant for all evolutionary theory, between the progressive
and retrogressive directions of the evolution process. To a large
extent it is, of course, a matter of convention what we shall regard as
progress and what as degeneration. So long as we are specially
interested in the attainment of any end or culminating result, we call
the line of development which leads up to that result progressive,
and the line which leads to its subsequent destruction degeneration.
And thus the same development may be viewed as progress or as
degeneration, according to the special character of the interests with
which we study it. Thus, for instance, the successive modifications of
the vertebrate structure which have resulted in the production of the
human skeleton are naturally thought of as progressive, because our
special interest in human intelligent life and character leads us to
regard the human type as superior to its predecessors in the line of
development. At the same time, many of these modifications consist
in the gradual loss of characteristics previously evolved, and are
therefore degenerative from the point of view of the anatomical
student, who is specially interested in the production of organs of
increasing complexity of structure, and therefore takes the
complexity of those structures as his standard in distinguishing
progress from retrogression.
But the distinction is not a purely conventional one. As we have
seen, degrees of individuality are also degrees of reality; what is
more completely individual is also a completer representative of the
ultimate structure of the infinite individual whole, and therefore more
completely real. Hence we may say that advance in individuality is
really, and not in a merely conventional sense, progress in
development; loss of individuality is real degeneration. Thus we get
at least the possibility of a true “objective” basis for distinction
between the directions of evolutionary progress. But we must
remember that it is only where we are able to know something of the
actual interests of finite experiencing beings that we have safe
grounds for judging whether those interests receive more adequate
embodiment in consequence of the changes of structure and habit
produced by evolution or not. Hence, while our insight into the inner
lives of ourselves and our animal congeners theoretically warrants
us in pronouncing the various developments in human social life to
be genuinely progressive or retrogressive, and again in regarding the
series of organic types which leads directly up to man as a true
“ascent,” our ignorance of the special character of the individual
experiences of which the inorganic physical order at large is the
phenomenal manifestation, makes it impossible for us to determine
whether an “evolution” outside these limits is really progressive or
not. We have to treat “cosmic evolution” in general, outside the
special line of animal development which leads up to man, as
indifferently a “progress” or a “degeneration” according to our own
arbitrary point of view, not because it is not “objectively” definitely the
one or the other, but because our insight is not sufficient to discern
which it is.
§ 7. One more point may be noted, which is of some importance in
view of certain metaphysical problems connected with the nature of
finite individuality. If evolution is more than an illusion, it seems
necessary to hold that it is a process in the course of which finite
individuals may disappear and new finite individuals originate. This
point is metaphysically significant, because it means that the fact of
evolution is irreconcilable with any of the philosophical theories of
ancient and modern times, which regard Reality as composed of a
plurality of ultimately independent finite individuals or
“personalities.”[158] If these philosophical theories are sound, the
course of the world’s history must be made up of the successive
transformations of finite individuals, who somehow remain
unaffected and unaltered in their character by the various external
disguises they assume. The individuals of such a philosophy would,
in fact, be as little modified by these changes as the actors on a
stage by their changes of costume, or the souls of the
“transmigration” hypothesis by the bodies into which they
successively enter. And thus development would not be even a
relatively genuine feature of the life of finite individuals; it would be a
mere illusion, inevitable indeed in the present condition of our
acquaintance with the detailed contents of existence, but
corresponding to no actual fact of inner experience.
On the other hand, if evolution is not a pure illusion, these
metaphysical constructions cannot be valid. For the whole essence
of the modern doctrine of evolution is contained in the principle that
radical differences in kind result from the accumulation of successive
modifications of individual structure, and once established continue
to be perpetuated as differences in kind. Now, such differences in
kind can only be interpreted metaphysically as radical differences in
the determining aims and interests of the experiencing subjects
constituting the physical order, and we have already seen that it is
precisely the character of these dominant unique interests which
forms the individuality of the individual. Thus the metaphysical
interpretation of the evolution process seems inevitably to resolve it
into a process of the development of fresh and disappearance of old
individual interests, and thus into a process of the origination and
disappearance of finite individuals within the one infinite individual
whole.
A conclusion of the same sort would be suggested by
consideration of those facts of our own individual development from
which the wider evolutionary theories have, in the last resort,
borrowed their ideas and their terminology. The mental growth of the
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