LAURA MULVEY AFTERTHOUGHTS ON"VEUAL PLEASURE AND NARRATIVE CINEMA Liberty valance. But anse and Tom(which considerably emasculated by the loss of the Westerns accoutrements and its ict over Law and history)is given a crain of violence. (The fact that Stella is a mother, and that her relationsh er, and represent different sides of her desire and as pirat acquire meanumgna aught between the two men, their alternative attribut ntral drama, undermines a possible sexual relation- ship with Ed. He does retain residual traces of Western iconography. His split in Pearl, not a split in the concept of hero, as argued previously for Liberty tributes are mapped through associations with horses and betting, the racing based on' having fun, most explicitly in the episode in which they spread itching merges,Jesse (attributes: books, dark suit, legal skills, love of learning an owder among the respectable occupants of a train carriage. In Stella Dallas, rure, destined to be Governor of the State, money, and )si jects (ver I have been tryin Lewt(attributes: guns, horses, skill with horses, Western get-up, contempt for nat illuminate, but also show shifts in, Oedipal nostalgia. The"personification destined to die an outlaw, personal strength and personal power)offers actual oographical attributes do not relate ro parental figures or reactivat ivalry and play. With Lewt, Pearl can be lation of desire, which lies dormant, waiting to bepleasured'in stories of ooting). Thus the Oedipal dimension persists, but now illuminates the sexual his kind. Perhaps the fascination of the classic Western, in particular, lies in its alence it represents for femininity ther raw touching on this nerve. However, for the female spectator the the last resort there is oom for Pearl in Lewt,s world of misogynist tuation is more complicated and goes beyond simple mourning for a los ntasy of omnipote masculine identification, in its phallic aspec reactivates for her a fantasy ofaction'that be repressed. The fa masculinity, Both in the language used by Freud and in the male personifications a doo that was stable and meaningful, Pearl is unable to settle or find a 'femininity'in hich she and the male world can meet. In this sense, although the mal a strait-jacket, becoming itself an indicator, a litmus paper, of the problems characters personify Pearls dilemma, it is their terms that make and finally tably activated by any attempt to represent the feminine in patriarcha ak her. Once the narrative drama dooms ciety. The memory of the '' phase has its own romantic attraction, a regressive resistance to the symbolic Lewt, Pearl's masculine side, drops ou ce, in which the power of masculinity can be used as he social order. Pearl's masculinity gives her the wherewithal to ac postponement against the power of patriarchy. Thus Freuds comments heroism and kill the villain. The lovers shoot each other and die in each other's illuminate both the position of the female spectator and the image of oscillation ms. Perhaps, in Duel, the erotic relationship between Pearl and Lewt represented by Pearl and Stella in the course of some womens lives there is a repeated In Duel in the Sun, Pearl's inability to become a between periods in which femininity and masculinity gain the upper hand tihat the perfect iady appears, like a phantasmagoria of PearI's failed aspirat (the phallic phase).. then succumbs to the momentous process of her and her rights ften been shown, that determines the fortune sees that she represents the'correctroad In an earlier film by King Vidor, S womens femininity. bove make the dramatic meaning of the film although it is not a We ty, her inability to flanked on each side by a male personification of her macho world on the other. Her husband ctive'phase, Rather than dramatising the success of masculine identificati Pearl brings out its sadness. Her tomboy pleasures, her sexuality, are not fully monstrates all the attributes associated with Jesse, with no problems eneric shift, Ed Munn, representing Stella's regressive 'masculine'side, is wt, except in death. So, too, is the female spectator's fantasy of masculinisation at cross-purposes with itself, restless in its transvestite clothes