The Postfeminist Historical Woman in Sylvia

Abstract

In his recent Whose Lives Are They Anyway? Dennis Bingham concludes, ‘madness, hysteria, sexual dependency, the male gaze, and a patriarchal authorship: that is the classical female biopic’ (2010: 310). He suggests that the conventions of the classical female biopic, of failure, suffering and victimisation exemplified by films such as The Lady With the Lamp (Herbert Wilcox, 1951), I’ll Cry Tomorrow (Daniel Mann, 1955) and more recently Factory Girl (George Hickenlooper, 2006), ‘have proved much more intractable than those of the male biopic. This is due to the culture’s difficulty with the very issue of women in the public sphere’ (2010: 23). The contemporary female biopic, Bingham implies, has remained unchanged despite the interventions of second-wave feminists in the 1970s and 1980s who interrogated the limited conception of women historically and advocated the ‘re-vision’ of history to include the achievements and distinctive histories of women (Rich, 1972).