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When Bad Things Happen To Good Mothers: Rethinking Motherhood Through The Single Mother Image In American Films From The 1930s To The 1970s, Tanna Alice Mancini
When Bad Things Happen To Good Mothers: Rethinking Motherhood Through The Single Mother Image In American Films From The 1930s To The 1970s, Tanna Alice Mancini
USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations
ABSTRACT
The single-mother figure shows up in myriad American film genres, and my thesis explores three of these genres, maternal melodrama, film noir, and horror. I argue there is a melodramatic mode that carries over from maternal melodrama to film noir and horror. This mode emphasizes emotional excess. In maternal melodrama, the emotional excess is pity. For film noir, the emotion is anxiety, and in horror, it is repulsion. Even though each genre has its own emotional excess, maternal melodrama still speaks to these other genres through its maternal sacrifice, non-heteronormative families and misreading of proper gender performances. For this …