ABSTRACT
Inevitably, the 1929 Depression had an indirect effect on mother representations, just as did the Second World War (see Chapter 6). As an historical event, an irruption of the “real” into the delicate balance between the Lacanian Imaginary and Symbolic, the Depression jostled those terrains even if it could not be represented directly. As in all moments of disturbance, there are reactionary formations: thus the conscious-rational, more socially conscious 1920s films represented in the select examples studied in Chapter 7 give way to a plethora of films repeating a straight version of the East Lynne paradigm that one might have thought would be waning in film as in theatre.
