As a playwright and iconic literary figure of the twentieth century, Tennessee Williams consistently garners academic attention. Yet scholarship exploring Williams’s work within melodrama-not to mention that genre’s frequently invoked subject matter, motherhood- remains scarce, with absences unavoidably affecting ways maternity is understood in Williams’s work. An early critical and commercial success, his autobiographical The Glass Menagerie gave audiences one of the most memorable, if unlikable constructions of motherhood to inhabit stage or screen. As with similar monster-mother constructs, Amanda Wingfield is marked by a domineering intrusiveness into her unhappy children’s lives. This maternity-coded-as-pathology was an increasingly common trope for mid-century audiences of melodrama who, as E. Ann Kaplan points out, were tiring of the selfsacrificing martyrs associated with maternal melodramas that preceded them.1 Although we might safely categorize Menagerie as a “Maternal Melodrama,” a tradition of fictional maternity consistent throughout prewar American film, the text does not meet the parameters of the more resistant form, a genre Kaplan identifies as the “Maternal Woman’s Film.”2 Unlike the less resistant films categorized as Maternal Melodramas (which usually focus on mother-son relationships, as does Menagerie) the Maternal Woman’s Film underscores mother-daughter relationships; questions or opposes dominant ideologies; and addresses specifically female spectators who might actually identify with the protagonist. In other words, this genre often transvalues patriarchally constructed spheres of public and private life and potentially reveals the Mother figure as strong/transgressive within a male public order that is corrupt or inadequate (Kaplan 126). While Menagerie’s Amanda easily exists as Williams’s most infamous mother, a monstrous archetype imitated and exploited in popular culture for decades to come, this paper interrogates a later but no less memorable maternal construct, one which I argue exists in the more transgressive form of the Maternal Woman’s Film.

The Tony-award winning play The Rose Tattoo (1951) and Daniel Mann’s film adaptation four years later present a mother figure who is neither the sadist nor the martyr more typical of this period.3 Solely driving the action of the narrative, Anna Magnani’s Serafina represents a depiction of motherhood that supersedes the more typically reductive examples of cold war maternity.4 While critics such as Kaplan and Linda Williams provide useful analysis of what typically comprises this figure described as the melodramatic mother character, Williams’s play and Mann’s film posit a construction of the maternal that, while certainly melodramatic, exists as uniquely resistant if not revolutionary in her unapologetic sexuality and entrepreneurial acumen. And when we further take into account what if any meaning is generated in the casting of Magnani as the film’s star, an actor who was known internationally as the grande dame of Italian Neorealism, the result is a unique and potentially revolutionary model of feminine and maternal subjectivity deployed on the screen.

Relying briefly on Kaplan’s discussion of early literary melodrama and its long running effects on films of that genre, I will consider how Mann’s adaptation of Williams’s play can be viewed as a Maternal Woman’s Film, but one that also transcends the genre. With the text(s) and consequent meanings created via Magnani’s celebrity persona, Serafina Delle Rose emerges as a melodramatic heroine who surpasses the melodramatic trope of “articulate[ing] women’s deepest unconscious fears and fantasies about their Iives in patriarchy” (Kaplan 117). In her consistent resistance to The Cult of True Womanhood, a tenet regulating women’s behavior dating back to earliest melodramas, and when contextualized within the historically specific public persona Magnani brings, Serafma generates a gendered subject not defined strictly by binaried, mutually exclusive difference. Instead, we might locate a subject who inhabits transient and conflicting moments of power and who surfaces, if inconsistently, as a revolutionary alternative.

After the unexpected death of her banana-truck-delivery husband within Tattoo’s first ten minutes, Serafina Delle Rose spins into a tailspin of hysterical grief. Despite efforts by her small Sicilian community, not to mention unrelenting cajoling from the family priest and her daughter Rosa, the widow steadfastly refuses to do anything but grieve, half-

Williams’s protagonist is remarkable, but for reasons beyond her already significant deviations from chastity, proper hygiene, and models of conspicuous consumption that define the rigid gender roles of mid-century America. Serafina’s digressions from paradigms of femininity nearly always emerge out of broader contexts, specifically maternity. As with all texts prominently featuring mother constructs, but especially within melodrama, the articulation of and adherence to gender-specific virtue (or in this case, a subject’s refusal of it) can reveal as much about maternal/gender ideologies as it does broader issues of power. During the first half of the twentieth century Hollywood films succeeded as the dominant popular form through which themes of maternal sacrifice and any resisting discourse emerged, a pattern significantly analogous to the way ideas of domestic feminism inspired a discourse of resistance in nineteenth-century novels for women. This relationship between earlier popular fiction marked as melodrama and later melodramatic film is instructive since it is within the novel that articulations of The Cult of True Womanhood-a paradigm of gender/motherhood with long-lasting reverberations- initially surface. As Kaplan points out, the moment occurring around the turn of the century is crucial to our understanding of melodrama and cinema, as the visual spectacle of film starts to supplant the appeal of women’s popular novels: