ABSTRACT
It has been said that not everyone is quite comfortable with Stanley Cavell as a philosopher. In Cavell’s work, comedy is mostly, though not always, implicit; it is, at any rate, always there, lingering, adjacent to whatever the matter at hand may be—including the Hollywood film genre Cavell calls the Hollywood melodrama of the unknown woman. As William Rothman points out, “it is a claim central to Contesting Tears that the genre therein called the melodrama of the unknown woman is derived from the remarriage comedy by the mechanism of negation,” that the genres of remarriage and the unknown woman are companions. Cavell had, between the years of 1989 and 1991, presented to incredulous university audiences his views of Stella Dallas. As Cavell recalled later, many in the audience wished “to go over what is quite straightforward evidence for my counteraccount of Stella’s behavior and her power of consciousness in the film” and did so with much suspicion.
