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This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The representation of nurses in American, British and Italian feature films Babini, Elisabetta Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 28. Sep. 2021 THE REPRESENTATION OF NURSES IN AMERICAN, BRITISH AND ITALIAN FEATURE FILMS. Elisabetta Babini Ph.D. in Film Studies This thesis has benefited from the financial support of the Wellcome Trust grant as part of a strategic award in medical humanities to establish the Centre for the Humanities and Health at King’s College, London. It forms part of the nursing strand of a programme of work in The Boundaries of Illness. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author, and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without paper acknowledgement. 2 ABSTRACT The female nurse’s image has been associated historically with a range of diverse and often contradictory values in popular imagery. Evidence of this is amplified in film. This thesis examines the representation of nurses in a corpus of over 250 feature films, from silent to contemporary cinema. Its foundational question is interrogating why these professional women have come to embody such varied and contrasting modes of femininity, to such an extent that they have become a particularly rich case study for the study of female stereotypes – and, accordingly, for the representation of gender, class and race issues. Building on existing scholarly work on the topic – especially that of Beatrice and Philip Kalisch, Julia Hallam and David Stanley – my study concentrates on (North) American, British and Italian cinemas, and focuses on the cinematic genres which have offered the most prolific depictions of nurses: biopics, melodrama, the thriller and comedy – and on how the prevalence of these genres has changed over time. Film Studies and Nursing mark its interdisciplinary nature; feminist film theory informs the textual analysis, and cultural and gender studies underpin areas in my comparative analysis. Besides expanding knowledge and the corpus of studies on its specific subject, the thesis makes a contribution to the medical humanities. The cross- cultural character of my research adds the Italian context, and expands the current scholarly debate on the representation of nurses to the influence that different national contexts have exerted on the depiction of these professional women as characters in feature films. 3 Table of Contents Abstract 3 Table of Contents 4 Table of Illustrations 5 Acknowledgments 7 INTRODUCTION 8 PART ONE 50 1. Nurses in Biopics 51 2. Nurses in Melodramas 123 PART TWO 214 3. Nurses in Thrillers 219 4. Nurses in Comedies 287 CONCLUSION 375 Bibliography 389 Appendix 428 4 Table of Illustrations Figures 1.1-2 Nurse Edith Cavell Figures 1.3-6 The Lady with a Lamp Figures 1.7-17 Nurse Edith Cavell Figures 1.18-21 The Lady with a Lamp Figures 1.22-25 Nurse Edith Cavell Figures 1.26-31 The Lady with a Lamp Figures 1.32-33 Nurse Edith Cavell Figure 1.34 The Lady with a Lamp Figure 1.35 Madonna of the Harpies (A. del Sarto, 1517) Figures 1.36-39 Nurse Edith Cavell Figures 1.40-43 The Lady with a Lamp Figures 2.1-10 Anna Figures 2.11-16 The Nun's Story Figures 2.17-20 Four Girls in White Figures 2.21-26 The Feminine Touch Figures 2.27-28 Four Girls in White Figure 2.29 The Feminine Touch Figure 2.30-32 Four Girls in White Figure 2.33 The Feminine Touch Figure 2.34 Four Girls in White Figure 2.35 The Feminine Touch Figure 2.36 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest Figure 2.37 Atonement Figures 3.1-8 Night Nurse 5 Figures 3.9-21 Calling Doctor Death Figures 3.22-30 Kiss the Blood off My Hands Figures 3.31-32 Valley of the Zombies Figures 3.33-34 I tre volti della paura Figures 4.1-10 Nurse on Wheels Figures 4.11-14 Carry On Nurse Figures 4.15-16 Carry On Doctor Figures 4.17-19 Carry On Matron Figures 4.20-23 Carry On Doctor Figures 4.24-25 Carry On Nurse Figures 4.26-28 Carry On Matron Figures 4.29-31 Carry On Doctor Figures 4.32-33 Carry On Matron Figures 4.34-42 L'infermiera di notte 6 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It would not have been possible to write this thesis without the guidance and help of many people. First, I would like to thank the Wellcome Trust for its financial support. I am exceptionally grateful to my supervisors, Professor Ginette Vincendeau and Professor Anne Marie Rafferty. I would not have been able to complete this thesis without their illuminating advice, constant encouragement and endless patience. I also wish to thank Professor Brian Hurwitz, for his interdisciplinary counsel and kindness. I am very thankful to my colleagues, in particular Dr Louis Bayman, Dr Silvia Camporesi, Dr Rosemary Wall, and Dr Maria Vaccarella. My gratitude also goes to my fellow companions at Cambridge University: Dr Elisabetta Spigone, Dr Alessandro Rossi and Dr Carlo Sias, who encouraged me to apply for this doctoral grant. I wish to thank Duygu and Carla, my flat-mates, for their immense patience; and my dear and exemplary friend Mila. More than ever, I am grateful to my family, for their continuous support. This thesis is dedicated to “The Babinis”. 7 INTRODUCTION My thesis examines the representation of female nurses in feature films (while I recognise there are male nurses in real life and, occasionally, on screen, the vast majority of cinematic nurses are female – just as the vast majority of their patients are male, as will be discussed where relevant). An iconic figure in popular culture, embodying often contrasting and contradictory modes of femininity, the nurse appealed to me as a particularly rich female figure to study in terms of race, class and gender issues. I am interested in exploring the different ways in which film engages with nurses (as important characters in the fiction) – the roles they play in the narratives, the facets of their professional, emotional, or sexual characteristics that are foregrounded rather than others; the ideological ends to which they are put at different times, in different genres and in different countries. Except for the notable work of Beatrice and Philip Kalisch (1982, 1987) and Julia Hallam (2000), scholars have paid slight attention to nurses’ screen depiction to date. My study aims at expanding these existing studies, using textual analysis as the main vehicle, and through theoretical frameworks that I detail below. I shall do so by examining nurses’ cinematic portrayals that, in large part, still appear as underexplored, belonging either to neglected cinematic genres or national cinemas, or to films that are excluded from the works mentioned above, including some examples from the last decade. My investigation focuses on (North) American, British and Italian cinemas. The reasons for this combine history, culture and generic categories. My thesis’s subject matter has made Britain, first of all, a compelling reference point as “the mother of modern nursing”, Florence Nightingale, and other famous and 8 historically important nurses, like Edith Cavell, were British, and – in Nightingale’s case especially – contributed to the development of nursing both in the country and, as models, abroad. Nightingale has been invoked as the source of a set of universal and defining values for nursing worldwide, and remains the profession’s dominant icon, even for cultures remote from Britain, such as Japan (See Takahashi 2004). The US, my second national focus, not only drew from Nightingale’s tradition historically, through the importation of leading figures she had trained (e.g. Alice Fisher at the Philadelphia General Hospital) to begin its own training traditions, but reinterpreted that tradition in the context of its own cultures of practice and training trajectories (See D’Antonio 2010). The second major reason for my US focus is its film industry’s powerful, influential and internationally widespread reach. Given the above, America and Britain are also, unsurprisingly, the major western producers of films about nurses (Stanley 2008). A further comparative advantage in focusing on the Anglo-American axis is that nurses’ cinematic portrayals not only provide a lens literally into the representational politics of these professional women and the relative shifts in the profession’s positions in terms of global influence and leadership (See Rafferty 1995); they also highlight how such female roles and images are in turn shaped by broader cultural trends in the representation of race, class and gender.