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3 - Hannah and Her Father: Decoding the Eternal Feminine

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2022

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Summary

Abstract

The late nineteenth-century concept of the ‘eternal feminine’ denotes a sexist denial of the legitimacy of complex female psychology. The ‘emancipation of women’ confounded many thinkers of this epoch, including Nietzsche, who failed to comprehend why women would ‘emphatically and loquaciously dissuade man from the idea that [she] must be preserved, cared for, protected, and indulged like some delicate, strangely wild and often pleasant domestic animal’. Using Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex as a theoretical framework, this study problematizes the title character of Hannah and Her Sisters, seeking to decode them as perpetuations of the Eternal Feminine or destabilizing forces that overturn the opressive myth.

Keywords: feminism, philosophy, Nietzsche

Julia Kristeva proclaimed that every text is an intertext that borrows discourse and themes from previously crafted works. She, more than anyone, can make such an assertion, as Kristeva herself crafted her theory of intertextuality out of Mikhail Bakhtin's exhaustive articulation of dialogism (Lesic-Thomas 2005: 1). Woody Allen is an undeniable master of intertextuality, who for decades has woven literary strands into cohesive cinematic works. In a number of his films, narrative threads are drawn from a Strindberg play, such as Match Point (2006) and Another Woman (1988) (Wynter: 139). At the heart of Hannah and Her Sisters (1986) – one of his most enduring and beloved films with its themes of family, purpose, infidelity and creativity – lies an unlikely Strindberg hypotext: the strident, misogynistic handwringer The Father (1887). Hannah and Her Sisters andThe Father share to varying degrees an ambivalence regarding the subject of a woman's place in the world. The flames of this debate were fanned unwittingly by Goethe in the early nineteenth century, when he introduced the Eternal Feminine (Eternal Womanly, arch.), a conceptual object that inspired the self-actualization of men before devolving into a tool used to legitimize the denial of complex female psychology (Kofman and Dobie 1995: 177; Egan 2019: 186). Through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, this study decodes the manifestations of the Eternal Feminine in Hannah and Her Sisters, which can be seen as Allen's appropriation of The Father, Strindberg's counterargument to the Women's Movement.

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Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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