The combination of proper Massachusetts ladies Ruth Elizabeth Davis and Olive Higgins Prouty—the author of Now, Voyager, the third in a popular series about the Vales—results in a deeply satisfying, sometimes harrowing portrait of female capacity (white, New England, bourgeois) and how it is thwarted, symbolized by the butterfly’s short life span and seen in the world’s inability to recognize the heroine’s qualities of discernment and passion. But not the viewer’s inability, for the particular depth of this film is how it entrusts us with aspects of the character’s interiority that no one in the film—neither Charlotte’s seeming soul mate Jerry nor the beneficent Dr. Jaquith—can access. This is achieved through moments of reverie that recall the book’s prose (“I was thinking about my mother . . .”) and narrative focalization. For example, an early flashback functions as a primal scene of maternal prohibition; the teenage Charlotte is ordered to give up a shipboard dalliance. Later, catching a glimpse of her glamorous reflection, Charlotte says aloud: “He wishes he understood me!” implying that the more pressing enigma is knowing herself. The ferocity of this character’s inner life melds perfectly with the conviction of Davis’s performance.



Filmed in 1942 on and off the Warner Bros. lot, Now, Voyager is among the best loved of the many classical Hollywood films featuring female stars, adapted from popular women’s fiction, and aimed at female audiences. Studio-era Hollywood always recognized the significance of the female box office, targeting women viewers with fanzines, fashion, and flamboyant emotion. The “woman’s picture” rose to prominence during the Depression—often telling stories of class rise, as in the Barbara Stanwyck classic Stella Dallas (1937), also adapted from a Prouty novel. During World War II, the industry aimed its product even more squarely at the women on the home front, with stories whose conventional setups—thwarted romance, maternal sacrifice, career women chucking it all for love—gave vent to some uncommonly strong feelings of gender injustice.



With its memorable closing line, in which Charlotte discloses that she can, in effect, do better than Jerry (“Don’t let’s ask for the moon; we have the stars!”); its makeover story arc, in which Davis goes from fat pads and unibrow to cosmopolitan chic; and its painful depiction of mother-daughter dynamics and resultant female emotional precarity, Now, Voyager is for many the quintessential woman’s film. A poignant train-platform farewell during which a camellia corsage wilts in real time; prophylactic smoking—two cigarettes lit at the same time in the gesture for which the movie is best known—on a balcony with Rio’s Sugarloaf Mountain rear-projected; a mother’s sudden death after quarreling and a daughter’s declaration: “I did it.” These are a few of Now, Voyager’s gasp- and groan-worthy highlights. Stanley Cavell puts the film at the heart of his genre study Contesting Tears, in which he links the “melodrama of the unknown woman” to the philosophies of Emerson and Thoreau. If anyone lives up to the term self-reliance, it’s Davis, and Charlotte is unimaginable without the actress’s animating spirit.

To be sure, Now, Voyager has received its share of disapprobation and damnation-with-faint-praise from the critical establishment over the years. The contemporary New York Times review concludes: “Although Now, Voyager starts out bravely, it ends exactly where it started—and after two lachrymose hours.” Pauline Kael later called Prouty a “genius of kitsch,” and Carol Burnett aimed her wicked parody at the business with the cigarettes. Dismissals, accompanied in certain cases by grudging acknowledgments of how well this film pulls it all off, remain typical responses to “women’s genres.”

Later feminist critics like Jeanne Allen, Maria LaPlace, and Tania Modleski have turned their attention to such taste hierarchies, revisiting Now, Voyager and the genre as a whole. Like most melodramas, the film presents a feminist conundrum. Mrs. Vale is vilified, consistent with Philip Wylie’s vitriolic indictment of American “momism” in Generation of Vipers, which, as E. Ann Kaplan points out, also came out in 1942. And Now, Voyager’s ending, in which Charlotte selflessly promises to raise Jerry’s daughter, Tina (Janis Wilson), is pathetic, in the word’s true sense (another woman’s picture might tell the story of Jerry’s wife, Isabelle). But the film’s final gesture can also be taken as a feminist statement and even as queer world-building—rejecting Jerry and men in general, our heroine treats an unwanted girl-child with the respect and companionability lacking in the relationship with her own mother. What does the moon have over the stars, anyway? In real life, Prouty was a benefactor to a young Sylvia Plath; at the very least, the story can be credited with legitimating women’s mental health as a subject of public concern.

