To Have and to Hold: The Possessive Spectator, the Spinster Narrative, and Katharine Hepburn in David Lean's Summertime (1955)

"There were two love affairs [in Summertime]; one was mine with Rossano Brazzi in the story, and the other, David's with Venice."

—Katharine Hepburn¹

Introduction

in 2011 melanie notkin, a contributor to the online site HuffPost, wrote an opinion piece titled "Is 'Career Woman' the New 'Spinster'?" In it she recounts a conversation with a man who explained her singleness (more to himself than to her) as a function of her being a career woman. "Why are we 'career women' but you're just a guy who hasn't been lucky in love?" she asks him. "I'm not a 'career woman,'" she declares. "I'm looking for love." Surprising (and somewhat depressing) for its implicit recapitulation of the stereotype of the lonely career woman whose occupation is a poor substitute for a man, the title of Notkin's brief op-ed nevertheless anticipates the recent trend to rehabilitate the term "spinster" and repurpose it for feminist studies and post-feminism. Kate Bolick's Spinster: Making a Life of One's Own (2015), an examination of her own and other women's single lives, made The New York Times best-seller list, and Briallen Hopper's Hard to Love: Essays and Confessions (2019) explores and reclaims the spinster in ways that demolish heterosexual romance and marriage as the standard by which women lead and assess their lives.

That the term's negative connotations of dowdiness, lack of sexual appeal, and illegitimacy as a woman persist into the twenty-first century is due in no small measure to the role that classical Hollywood film in particular played in perpetuating these stereotypes in the popular imagination. Yet as this examination of David Lean's 1955 film Summertime suggests, as a kind of test case, some mid-century spinster narratives contain within them the seeds of their own reclamation, particularly when watched anew from the vantage point of the twenty-first century. Informed by a history of the film's production and reception, yet also enabled by current-day digital viewing practices, this case study asserts that multiple gazes in and at Summertime dovetail with Katharine Hepburn star discourses to produce a possessive feminist spectator more than sixty-five years after the film's original release. A present-day viewing of the under-studied Summertime with new media technologies leads to modes of meaning production in the course of the film's consumption in ways that have not been previously explored in earlier spinster narratives or in classical Holly-wood cinema generally, and it is these dynamics that this case study ultimately explores.

Film theorist Laura Mulvey has dubbed cinema "death 24x a times a second," a reference to the standard projection speed of twenty-four frames per second for analogue sound film. The phrase comes from the title of her 2006 book in which she meditates upon the nature of cinema and, among other things, the impact of new media delivery systems resulting in "mechanisms of delay" that produce a possessive spectator (Mulvey, Death). She defines that spectator as a fan and cinephile, in love with film's images (particularly those of the film star, or "idol") unfolding in and across time, wanting to have and to hold them even as they wind their way inexorably through the projector, defying the viewer who longs to possess them. But with the advent of new technologies and new ways of viewing, that longing can be at least partially satisfied:

Since the cinematic experience is so ephemeral, it has always been difficult to hold on to its precious moments, images and, most particularly, its idols . . . . the desire to possess and hold the elusive image led to repeated viewing, a return to the cinema to watch the same film over and over again . . . . With electronic or digital viewing, the nature of cinematic repetition compulsion changes. As the film is delayed and thus fragmented from linear narrative into favorite moments or scenes, the spectator is able to hold on to, to possess, the previously elusive image.

(Mulvey, Death...