Appendix 3.1: Analytic methods - 6 films from 1954
The Million Pound Note and Mrs Croaker, the landlady in Doctor
in the House. In group 4, the most generalised group, about a
third of the characters are defined by occupation. Examples
are the nurses in Doctor in the House and the singers and
dancers in The Glenn Miller Story.
The second question about occupation concerns the range of
occupations represented: when women work, what do they do?
Apart from forms of domestic work such as cooking, ironing and
so on which, it is interesting to note, are represented quite
rarely, there are two main forms of work represented. One is
managing or participating in a business, such as Maggie's work
in Hobson's Choice. The other is still broadly domestic but in
the guise of paid employment outside the home: here there are
landlady, cleaner, maid, hotel staff and, the most frequently
occurring category, nurse. Apart from Edie Doyle in On the
Waterfront who is training to be a teacher but whom we never
actually see at work on the screen, the group 1 and 2
characters whose occupations are defined come into these two
categories. So does the majority of work done by the group 3
characters, the only exceptions being the female examiner and
the female medical students in Doctor in the House and the
absent Sisters in On the Waterfront all of whom could be
subsumed under the general term 'teacher∕student'. Apart from
these in group 4 there are one or two singers and dancers (The
Glenn Miller Story), one young girl milking a cow (Rob Roy),
and one street pedlar (Rob Roy).
Generally, therefore, I can say that on the basis of the forms
of work represented in this group of films women work in
shops, as nurses, as teachers and as performers - in addition
to various specialised forms of domestic work.
Class / Race / Nationality
The nuances of class distinction vary, clearly, between
different diegetic worlds. In recognising this mode of
character definition I am calling on the class oppositions set
up within the diegesis, such as that between Maggie and Will
Mossop in Hobson's Choice, and also on stereotypical
representations which refer to the extra-cinematic
experiential world of the audience such as the difference
between the Duke (representing the aristocracy) and Reddy the
hotel maid (representing the working class) in The Million
Pound Note. The point is that the character is offered to the
audience (partly) in terms of her social status, summarised by
her class position. The audience is made aware of the class
position of both of the characters in Group 1: both Maggie in
Hobson's Choice and Helen in The Glenn Miller Story are middle
class within the terms of their respective diegeses, as well
as conforming to stereotypical representations of the middle
class evident in other cultural forms. In group 2 we are aware
of the class position of six of the eight characters: of the
other two, one - Stella in Doctor in the House is 'foreign',
having an unspecified European accent in contemporary UK which
renders her class position unreadable; John Hill (Sex Class
and Realism 1986) references a similar effect in his
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