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Ely identifies and examines how public perceptions are shaped by the poetic language of Walt Whitman's couplet, "The Untold Want," from "Passage to India," how these are mediated and changed by the novelistic conventions of Olive Higgins Prouty's popular 1941 novel, "Now, Voyager," and how these alphabetic texts are transformed into cinematic images in the 1942 Warner Brothers film of the same title.

In Walt Whitman's 1871 Passage to India, the poet claims to celebrate the related themes of scientific and technological achievement and spiritual transformation, the former physical "passages" making possible the latter "passage to primal thought"-the "Passage to more than India!" Whitman represents America's greatest challenge: spiritual metamorphosis. In this paper, I identify and examine how public perceptions are shaped by the poetic language of Whitman's couplet, "The Untold Want," from Passage to India, how these are mediated and changed by the novelistic conventions of Olive Higgins Prouty's popular 1941 novel, Now, Voyager, and, finally (and most critically), how these alphabetic texts are transformed into cinematic images in the 1942 Warner Brothers film of the same title. My paper examines the way in which Warner Brothers (through producer Hal Wallis and director Irving Rapper) takes up the poet's and novelist's theme of metamorphosis and uses it in this melodramatic film to resolve sexual and political tensions, portraying a woman liberated from one stagnating relationship only to be trapped within another, while at the same time the film seemingly ignores the World War II effort celebrated in such films as Casablanca, a film sharing sets with Now, Voyager on the same Warner Brothers lot in the same year, 1942.

Finally, I analyze how Whitman's transformative poetic metaphor in "Untold Want" is not realized in this film, just as its hopeful message failed during Whitman's lifetime. Even as the film apparently attempts to articulate through images a triumphant process of selfdiscovery, there remains untold want. For the filmic voyager, psychic and physical satisfaction ("health," as Whitman might say) must at last be sacrificed to higher moral purpose. In fact, I would argue that the film, issued to a World War II audience of lonely American women, encourages such housewives and sweethearts to forebear, and, to quote Charlotte's famous closing line, to not "ask for the moon" when they "have the stars." Thus the final message of the film, in many ways, trivializes Whitman's expansive project. Women are quite explicitly not to venture forth "to seek and find," as the poet counsels; motion becomes immobility. Ultimately, only through imagination can the untold want be granted.

James E. Miller, Jr. accepts, in a conservative way, Whitman's own self-representation, writing that during the poet's "final" poetic phase (roughly, the period following the Civil War), Whitman's concern shifted from creating the physical prototype of the New World Democratic personality to "bring[ing] to the fore the vague presence heretofore hovering in the background, the body's spiritual counterpart, the soul" (32). In Whitman's own words as he writes in the preface to the 1876 Centennial Edition, he seeks finally to "spiritualize" Leaves of Grass at this phase, "mak[ing] a type-portrait for living, active, worldly, healthy personality, objective as well as subjective, joyful and potent, and modern and free, distinctively for the United States, male and female, through the long future" (Prose Works 470).

Presumably, this personality could thus benefit from America's material marvels-the Atlantic cable, the transcontinental railroad, the Suez Canal, for example-while, at the same time, enjoying the spiritual fulfillment Whitman represented as the ultimate consequence of American progress.

Even so, for Whitman the political element of American character underpins physical well-being and spiritual transformation, and even as he becomes increasingly disillusioned by party politics and corruption, he stresses the crucial democratic character of the American body politic. He outlines his often pessimistic vision for America's future in the essay Democratic Vistas published in its final form in 1871, just as he publishes the annex Passage to India. In order to realize the great possibilities Whitman envisions for the future, democracy must become a way of life for American men and women, a means of "interaction," not just an activity reserved "only for elections, for politics, and for a party name" (Prose Works 389).

Finally, then, for the Whitman of the 1870s, the American of the future, imbued with possibility, may realize this possibility only when these political, physical, and spiritual elements combine and are balanced. Yet, as John Lovell, Jr. has pointed out, "[f]rom all available evidence the same Whitman who conceived and wrote the caustic, devastating Democratic Vistas conceived and wrote what some call the optimistic `Passage to India"' (140). Thus readers should remember that even as Whitman (or Miller) stresses the spiritual element that pervades these works, Passage to India is essentially a hymn to political progress, and while the psychic voyage is proffered as the controlling metaphor, technological development and expansion remain foremost. Together, then, these two contemporary works illustrate Whitman's awareness "of democracy's weakness and hypocrisy and incongruity and slow progress toward a great ideal," while at the same time they "urge the reader not to lose his vision" and hope for fulfillment (Lovell 140).

For her 1941 novel, Prouty, popular author of the women's novel Stella Dallas, lifted the couplet quoted above, "Untold Want," from Whitman's Passage to India and produced the work, Now, Voyager. As she writes in her autobiography Pencil Shavings, the story is one of a "spinster [Charlotte Vale] who finally finds escape from the dominations of her mother through doors opened by a nervous breakdown" (qtd. in Allen 15). Her "escape" and subsequent transformation are accomplished during a Caribbean cruise, when she has a passionate affair with a married man, Jerry Durrance. Yet because of his marriage, their love can never be legitimized, and Vale settles instead for the role of surrogate mother to his emotionally needy daughter, Tina-a child much like the girl Vale had once been.

Warner Brothers studio, seizing upon the popularity of Stella Dallas (enjoyed not only in novel form but also as a silent film, a Broadway play, an MGM talkie starring Barbara Stanwyck, and a popular radio show that ran from 1938 until 1953), optioned the movie rights for $20,000 and quickly turned out a film bearing the same title and starring their most powerful female box office draw, Bette Davis, as Charlotte Vale. Her co-stars were Paul Henreid as Jerry Durrance, Claude Rains as Dr. Jaquith, Vale's psychotherapist, and Gladys Cooper as Charlotte's domineering mother. The film became a tour de force for Davis, a favorite actress among women audiences. She was nominated as best actress for the fourth year in a row, having won Oscars for Dangerous (1935) and Jezebel (1938). Also nominated were Cooper and composer Max Steiner, who won for best original score. The film was Warner Brothers' fourth-highest top grossing film of 1942 (Allen 27).

The most explicit action of Now, Voyager depends on the distinct physical changes marking Charlotte Vale's transformation. This metamorphosis occurs in three identifiable stages as spinster becomes fashion plate and as fashion plate becomes matron. In his autobiography, Starmaker, Hal Wallis explains the importance of this visual process to the success of the film, and while Bette Davis was his last choice for the part, once hired, the appropriate designer was required to outfit the star. Wallis writes: "I told Orry-Kelly [one of Davis's favorite and most successful designers] to design extremely simple, beautiful, timeless clothes for Bette to wear after her transformation" (106). Further, he was to create a very special hat "for Bette to wear in the first scene after her metamorphosis. The hat was to shade her face to indicate that she was still shy, despite her emergence as an attractive woman, and was deliberately designed for this effect" (107). In many ways, this and other wide-brimmed and/or veiled hats serve to replace the unnecessary glasses she wears throughout her early life at the behest of her mother. As Stanley Cavell points out, the hat, "once filmed, lends the woman a kind of protection that allows her to let herself be perceived as an erotic being" (219). Its delicate veil further provides such protection for Charlotte while this new creature masquerades as "Camille Beauchamp," a composite identity made up of Jerry's pet name for her, "Camille," and Beauchamp, the last name of her friend, Renee, who lent her many of the articles she wears during the cruise.

Another key wardrobe feature is Charlotte's shoes. In the opening sequence, viewers first see Charlotte as she descends the staircase of her mother's Boston mansion. Wallis dictates that Irving Rapper, the director, shoot Charlotte's entrance so that the camera first focuses on her feet clad in heavy oxfords, the continuous shot traveling "up her thick, shapeless legs to her fat figure and plain face" (107). Capitalizing on this same technique, after Charlotte's transformation, the first frame is filled with a close-up of her fashionable spectator pumps and newly trim ankles as she stands at the top of the ship's ramp. Traveling upward, the camera reveals a stylish figure in a classic dark suit, impeccably made-up and topped off with the specially designed, wide-brimmed white hat noted earlier.

The theme of metamorphosis is especially enhanced by a garment Charlotte calls her "borrowed wings," as she appears for her first dinner with Jerry outfitted in an elegant evening cape ornamented with a sequined butterfly pattern. Like the emerging chrysalis, Charlotte is resplendent in her new configuration. Her change from the overweight spinster dressed in old fashioned shapeless garments in the opening sequence could not be more unmistakable. Viewers are struck by her newly acquired presence as she is momentarily framed in the doorway of the ship's dining room; the object of the camera is no longer fragmented, a foot or a face, but is whole-viewers may now recognize Charlotte as whole.

A final step not often noted by critics is Charlotte's equally visible change from ultrafashionable socialite to matron. This transformation occurs after she returns to her mother's home in Boston and takes her place as dutiful-if recalcitrant-daughter, and as she briefly considers the proposal of wealthy and respectable widower, Elliot Livingston (John Loder). Her wardrobe, while still a great improvement over her spinster attire, is more subdued and traditional. Viewers should see her at this stage as quite "normal" as she turns to well-cut dresses and coordinating skirts and blouses for daywear. Charlotte is recognized, then, not as the voyager/adventuress but rather as a settled matron, a figure much more akin to the women who filled movie theatres, someone with whom they could identify closely. One might well wonder at this point why a butterfly would voluntarily return to its cocoon.

Cavell examines Charlotte's process of metamorphosis in Now, Voyager and characterizes such transformative film texts, also including Letter from an Unknown Woman, Gaslight, and Stella Dallas, as melodramas of the unknown woman. This genre not only "declar[es] the (new) existence of the woman" but also "trac[es] her (new) identity" without a man/husband (226). He agrees that "ft]here is surely a sense of sacrifice in this group of films," and further that these women need not merely be interpreted as "sacrificing themselves to the sad necessities of a world they are forced to accept" (226). He suggests that, instead, "the women are claiming the right to judge a world as second-rate that enforces this sacrifice; to refuse, transcend, its proposal of second-rate sadness" (227). While I concur with this assumption, again, I would add that this state of "second-rate sadness" (of returning to the cocoon) greatly diminishes Whitman's original expansive and transformative poetic vision in Passage to India and "Untold Want."

Clearly, however, readers familiar with Whitman's body of work might argue that his vision for women is not altogether expansive. Jimmie Killingsworth notes Whitman's tendency toward compromise articulated in Democratic Vistas: "[Tlhe work of literature [through the poet] ends in `insuring to the States a strong and sweet Female Race, a race of perfect mothers.' Not only has he surrendered to the productivity principle-applying it to art as well as to the maternal function-but he also indulges in the great deficiency he has located in American culture; that is, he can see no farther than the material progress for women" (159). This point is well taken, for Whitman, finally, shared the Victorian position that motherhood is woman's most important role (after that of wife); he did not transcend the restrictive belief of the time in which he lived and worked. Yet, I would point out that "Untold Want" is not addressed to either male or female exclusively, but rather to all voyagers who seek physical and psychic fulfillment, then and (especially) in America's hopeful future, and as such is adopted for re-presentation by Prouty and then Warner Brothers, used by each to implement very different requirements. Prouty's vision explicitly represents a woman who triumphs over stifling maternal influence, and who then chooses her own path for the future, filling "untold want" with surrogate motherhood and moral certitude. Her representation of Charlotte Vale's transformation is thus intended as positive; even as, like Whitman's, it is marred by the circumscription of contemporary customs. The -studio (via producer Hal Wallis and director Irving Rapper), however, offers viewers a cinematic woman, who, even as she questions her lot as an unknown woman, continues to suggest to her flesh and blood viewers that life can and should go on in this condition of sacrifice and selfdenial. Warner Brothers can be understood as responsible for this carefully crafted message-a message meant to influence audiences made up primarily of lonely women.

In fact, as Cass Warner Sperling and Cork Millner write in Hollywood Be Thy Name: The Warner Brothers Story, even before Pearl Harbor and certainly throughout America's involvement in World War II, Harry Warner "put the great resources of the studio at the disposal of the country" (240).2 Not only did he agree to produce "from four to five hundred reels of training pictures in the coming year [ 1942]" without profit, the studio made a series of short films (one-and two-reelers) designed to "`ma[k]e Americans proud to be Americans,"' including such pieces as March On, Marines, The Tanks Are Coming, Meet the Fleet, Wings of Steel, and Here Comes the Cavalry (240, 245). Further, a New York Times review "commended" the Warner Brothers Studio for "combining good citizenship with good picture making" (qtd. 245). Of course, as director Hal Wallis points out, magnifying the brothers' patriotic sentiments was the edict of the Office of War Information that "asked" the studio to focus on six central categories: "the enemy, our allies, the armed forces, the production front, the home front, and the issues" (79). Harry Warner effectively covers the "home front" in this particularly revealing statement that underlines the fact that the studio's patriotism was not confined to training films and shorts but extended also into feature films:

The glamour era has vanished .... The days of swimming pools and fast cars and bathingsuited cubes chasing rich young men into honorable marriage have been wrenched away from us and I, for one, am grateful for it. The cubes, if any, are in overalls these days, standing over airplane parts, or welding and riveting. Or they are living quietly in a small room existing on a soldier's pay and thinking night and day in terms of how to win and win quickly .... We [as filmmakers] must have the courage and the wisdom to make pictures that are forthright, revealing and entertaining, pertinent to the hour and the unpredictable future. [my emphasis] (qtd. in Sperling and Millner 245-46)

The "cubes" to whom Warner refers here make up the majority of his wartime audiences, and it is this lonely female audience, during this "pertinent" moment, toward which he pitches such films as the Oscar-winning anti-fascist Casablanca (Best Picture in 1942, Best Director for Michael Curtiz, Best Screenplay). Studio writer Howard Koch later said that Casablanca "was a picture the world audience needed. What it said was `there are values that are worth making sacrifices for ..... If Casablanca had ended, in my opinion, with Bogart going off with Bergman-the romantic ending-this wouldn't have happened. There wouldn't have been a Casablanca" [my emphasis] (qtd. in Sperling and Millner 249). Thus, even while Now, Voyager, made on the same lot, during the same year, using the same leading men (Rains and Henreid), seems almost out of time in its ostensible lack of attention to the war effort, the two films share a common goal: to entertain packed audiences of World War II wives and sweethearts, former "cubes," encouraging not their romantic impulses but rather implicitly representing womanly virtue as patriotic abstinence and selfsacrifice. In these women's imaginations-sparked by Bergman's valorous beauty or Davis's glittering metamorphosis-as they sit in the magical darkness of movie theatres, they, too, contribute (however unconsciously) to the Warner Brothers' war effort.

The psychological reprogramming undergone by Charlotte (and other such "troubled" women) is an integral element to both the novel and the film. The element is autobiographical, as Jeanne Thomas Allen notes in her introduction to Now, Voyager, the Warner Brothers screenplay. Prouty "experienced a nervous breakdown two years after the death of her fourth and last child who was a year and a half old and the second of her children to die. Her breakdown was regarded as a weakness of character by her husband as by so many others" (15). Prouty's cure seems dependent upon the vision of her own therapist, Dr. Riggs of the Riggs Foundation at Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a figure who closely parallels that of Dr. Jaquith in the novel. Dr. Riggs "secured permission from her husband [for Prouty] to have a place to write outside of her home," thereby acknowledging her professional status as a writer, one already proven not only through earnings but also by the acclaim of both her reading public and the critical community (15). As Virginia Woolf has written, a woman writer needs a room of her own to continue her craft successfully. This "place outside of her home," combined with financial security, allows just that for Prouty, giving a much needed boost to her emotional health. Her favorable portrayal of psychiatric practices in the novel Now, Voyager revolves around this series of experiences.

According to Krin and Glen Gabbard in Psychiatry and the Cinema, novels such as Now, Voyager were "still the major source for movie plots with psychiatrists in the 1940s," a period of "upheaval" when "the problem of identity" was faced by many women (61). Further, the film "Now, Voyager did a great deal to domesticate and demystify the image of the psychiatrist in America" without "confronting" the "technical aspects of psychiatry," as 11 mental illness is presented as overexposure to an unsympathetic parent, and the cure is a cruise on a luxury liner and a new boyfriend" (60-61). Such "simple, commonsense advice is also frequently depicted as essential to psychotherapeutic technique" in the absence of the techniques of actual psychotherapy (41). In many ways, the role of Dr. Jaquith (Claude Rains) emblematizes the film as a whole, as each seeks to conceptualize complex social and psychological problems and offers somewhat superficial counseling to effect a "cure."

As Naomi Scheman asserts, Charlotte's cure in the film is contingent upon her escape from "her mother's imperious refusal to let her go" (97). Charlotte's role, then, may be defined as one of renunciation: early in the film, she is seen to renounce even the most wholesome of heterosexual pleasures, culminating with a flashback of her forbidden but innocent first love experience with Leslie Trotter (Charles Drake), aboard her first cruise in the company of her mother. After this traumatic episode, she encloses herself within the cocoon of enforced spinsterhood, where we find her during the film's opening sequence. She is her mother's "well-loved daughter" born during Mrs. Vale's middle years, and whose function in life it is to remain with and to care for her aging mother. In a way, their roles will be reversed, as Charlotte becomes the care-giver, filling the role that Mrs. Vale, in fact, has performed so poorly. The daughter rightly believes she will never have "a home of her own, a man of her own, or a child of her own."

Charlotte's struggle to escape Mrs. Vale's formative influence is represented most effectively in the film by a key double exposure shot of the two women intercut strategically after Charlotte's first appearance following her metamorphosis and before her first sequence alone with Jerry. The blurring and unstable effect of the double exposure, fading to a clearly focused and carefully composed image of the transformed Charlotte, leads viewers to the understanding that order has been fashioned from disorder, that Charlotte's new situation is the superior one. In this moment of definition, she becomes visually understood as having effectively escaped the overpowering influence of her mother; the daughter emerges from the imposition of the mother and becomes an individual.

Two subsequent shot sequences are especially crucial to the audience's visual interpretation of Charlotte's emergent individuality; they immediately follow her return to her mother's home after the cruise. She has been ordered by Mrs. Vale to move downstairs and "occupy [her] father's room [adjoining her mother's] from now on." In fact, her furniture and many of her belongings have already been relocated there from her old room. Mrs. Vale is careful to inform a blushing Charlotte that, during the move, she has discovered her daughter's hidden collection of forbidden books-"shocking" works like Boccaccio's Decameron and the novels of Fielding and Trollope, stacked carefully behind Ralph Waldo Emerson and Washington Irving. Charlotte enters her new room and sits in dejection on the bed, clutching an out-of-style black and white foulard dress her mother has had "altered" by a seamstress to fit her daughter's trimmer frame. At this moment, the maid (Hilda) enters with a florist's small express box: "This just came. Air Express from New York." Swathed carefully within the cotton batting, Charlotte uncovers a corsage of pure white camellias-a variety of flower favored by Jerry and that continues a tradition begun on shipboard. It appears to viewers that, at the very moment when she needs him most, Jerry's wordless message reaches out to her, bolstering her courage.

Noteworthy here is a seemingly slight but critically important change occurring between novel, official script, and film. Prouty consistently writes that the camellias Jerry gives to Charlotte are red, as does Casey Robinson in his screenplay, but clearly, the corsage removed so lovingly from its box by Charlotte is white. Who, in fact, makes the final change is relatively unimportant when compared to the subtle but powerful symbolic difference effected/affected on viewers. While white traditionally denotes purity, the color red represents passion. For the purposes of this film (recorded already in black-and-white), Charlotte, symbolically, has now been drained of color. Visually, the emblematic heat of her passion (sexuality) has been extinguished by (Irving Rapper's?) snow white camellias. Her future barrenness is suggested.

Charlotte's resolve is clearly renewed by this gift, and, during the second of these sequences, she is back in her own room, and she confronts her mother: she will not be moving into her father's old suite, nor will she wear her old clothes, even though they have been fitted to her slimmer figure: "I shan't need them anymore," she has announced to Hilda. Emerging from behind a wall, viewers hear Charlotte's voice asserting her newly discovered authority: "Mother, I don't want to be unkind or disagreeable. I've come home to live with you again.... But it can't be in the same way. I've been living my own life, making my own decisions for a long while now.... Mother, from now on you must give me complete freedom-including deciding where I sleep, what I read, what I wear" (Allen 148). During this speech, we first see a frontal full shot of Mrs. Vale reflected in a large mirror. She is dressed elegantly and jeweled richly for the dinner party she has arranged to welcome home her wayward child. Her reaction to the combination of Charlotte's words and her daughter's appearance as she emerges from behind the wall, clad in a very smart and daringly cut evening dress, is manifested clearly as the camera focuses on her unsmiling blanched countenance and on the agitated drumming of her index finger as her hand rests on the ornate bedpost. A brief verbal exchange occurs between these two as they face one another's reflection in the large mirror. An over-the-shoulder shot of Mrs. Vale follows, focusing on a segment of her upper form (her head, neck, shoulder, and uplifted left arm and hand), finger still registering frustration, as Charlotte's outwardly unruffled aspect is framed carefully within the bend of her arm at the center of a triangle completed by the top of the frame. Just as in the double exposure shot noted earlier, Charlotte's force of personality overcomes the tension inherent in the rise en scene. Viewers recognize Charlotte, represented as confronting verbally and visually the causes of turmoil in her life, as the victor in this compelling series of two shots-even as they consume quietly the implicit symbology of the white camellias.

While Charlotte's escape from Mrs. Vale's perverse influence is depicted as triumphant, we should question the significance of the manner in which motherhood and womanhood are represented throughout these texts, novel and film. As Lea Jacobs points out, "Charlotte's desire remains unsatisfied (at the beginning she can't love a man, at the end she can't have one), but there remains a pleasure in the movement of the fiction itself, in the fact that Charlotte will have, or has had, a story at all .... This opens into the contradictory position of the female spectator ... one derives pleasure from the woman's picture, from finally seeing a woman's story at all, even if it passes by way of a man [Dr. Jaquith] (95).

As a female spectator, I concur with Jacobs's position, one situated at the heart of my thesis that the film endorses a woman's need to sacrifice her own psychic and physical well being for some greater good. Female viewers of Now, VoYager-then and even now-are so gratified to see Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) prevail over her domineering mother, to shed her spinster's unflattering attire for the wings of the beautiful butterfly, to become the subject, as it were, of her own story, we forget (as Warner Brothers intended) that her narrative end is, in fact, little improved from her beginning. We engage in the illusory enterprise of the film medium; our emotions are so enthralled by the cinematic transformation enacted early in the film that we understand all subsequent action as positive. We naively applaud not only the stunning visual transformation but also its more subtle reversion.

Nicola Chiaromonte affirms that, as movie audiences, we lend the "persuasive power of words to the suggestive force of images, justifying the belief of ordinary people in the reality of their mirages" (42). Further she indicates the inevitable result of this empowerment of the image: filmmakers and studio executives "begin to think of film as a kind of novel or poem, and by the same token begin to consider themselves writers, or even sociologists, moralists, and reformers" [my emphasis] (42). From this position of omnipotence, the Breen office erases Charlotte's most critical transformation.3 Hal Wallis writes that the elimination of Charlotte's loss of virginity in the cabin in Brazil "was very serious, but there was nothing we could do about it" (106). Visually, "it must be made clear that they [Charlotte and Jerry] are under separate blankets .... [and] if the lovers were covered by only one blanket he [Breen] will not permit the picture to be released" (106). This omission trivializes Paul Henreid's character, Jerry Durrance, while at the same time it leaves out a crucial element of Charlotte's story. It should be noted that Prouty shares the Breen office's sense of delicacy, for while the scene is much more sensual in her novel, the act of sexual intercourse itself remains implicit. And while one might also note here Whitman's remonstrations against expurgation-that if you leave sex out, you might as well leave everything out-we should further recall that even Whitman was sometimes persuaded by editors to omit just such overtly sexual material. For example, in preparation for the important first British edition of Leaves of Grass, poet and editor William Michael Rossetti omits even "Song of Myself." In his recent cultural biography of Whitman, David S. Reynolds asserts, however, that "Rossetti's scrubbed, polite Whitman" did much to pave the way "among many British literary figures upon whom he would often depend for support for the rest of his life" (462). Even so, there is a powerful effect inherent in these moralistic changes and omissions. Sex is excised, and the value of female sexuality, an element integral to both psychic and physical health, is denied.

We should recognize also the powerful effect of Bette Davis, again, one of Warner Brothers' greatest and most popular female stars, in the role of Charlotte Vale. As Cavell has correctly stated, "[s]he is the one who can deliver a line-who has the voice, the contained irony, the walk, the gaze, and the glance away, to lay down a line-such as 'I am the fat lady with the heavy brows and all the hair"' (226). Thus not only is she one of Hollywood's most popular box office draws, she is further one of the most effective/affective, "theatrical," of female actresses endowed with ability (not a mere "function" of their beauty) and personal "magnetism": "There is an odd moment in Now, Voyager of explicit confirmation that the quality of stardom or magnetism exercised by the women of the melodramas is not what is called their personal beauty but lies in their declaration of distinctness and freedom, of human existence" (228).

Davis's star power and ability do, in this case, contribute to her enactment of a woman who discards her "distinctness and freedom," symbolized most effectively by the butterfly cape, and exchanges them for ambiguity. Charlotte is represented in this film as occupying, finally, a most uncertain position somewhere outside the realms of lover, wife, or mother-- outside desire. Lea Jacobs agrees, writing: "It is not that Now, Voyager openly subverts the conventions of romantic love but rather that in examining a woman's place within those conventions the narrative, even the film's syntax, becomes deformed. The question of how, and through whom, Charlotte Vale's desire will express itself engenders a dizzying chain of displacement and counter-displacement which never comes to rest" (103). Thus even while, in the closing sequence, Jerry performs for the last time his much noted double-cigarettelighting ritual repeated throughout the film, there is in fact an absence of closure; the story's ending remains narratively unresolved. Women viewers hover somewhere between moon, stars, and earth, with none of these as either practical or desirable locations of habitation. While romantic conventions may not be openly subverted, Whitman's democratic vision of sexual and psychic promise in "Untold Want" is.

For Whitman, even given his Victorian predilections, offers sympathy to women who are too often doomed to observe while men act, to imagine while men realize. In section eleven of "Song of Myself," the "twenty-ninth bather," the poet describes a woman much like Charlotte; she has social position, her own home, yet she remains a prisoner of untold want:

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,

Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;

Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.

She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,

She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.

Which of the young men does she like the best?

Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.

Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,

You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.

Dancing and laughing along the beach comes the twenty-ninth bather,

The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glisten'd with wet, it ran from their long hair,

Little streams pass'd all over their bodies.

An unseen hand also pass'd over their bodies,

It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.

The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun, they do not ask who

seizes fast to them,

They do not know who puffs and declines with pendent and bending arch,

They do not think whom they souse with spray. (Whitman, Leaves 38-39)

Whitman's image of physical separation, the window veiled by blinds, mirrors the cinematic imagery defining Charlotte, who is often seen framed on the inside of a draperied window looking out. She is not depicted in this classic Hollywood film as a functioning sexual being; instead, she is a woman who understands that her sexuality must be controlled, and like the twenty-ninth bather, her lovemaking may be enacted only through imagination as erotic daydreams. And while Whitman's poem is explicitly autoerotic, films of the 1940s certainly could not (would not) offer any such alternative to women viewers. Writing about the twenty-ninth bather passage, Killingsworth again confirms Whitman's engagement, even in this highly erotic vignette, in a "number of Victorian male attitudes.... A woman is 'incomplete' without a man. A woman has `denied the best of herself' when she denies her sexuality. But, most important, a woman left alone is subject to an active fantasy life that may lead to 'folly' or `sin... (33). Embedded in these lines is the male "bourgeois dilemma": even if women are "locked away in that sexually sterile haven, the home, unless the castle is closely guarded, sexual infiltration is possible" (33). Only through imagination are such women free.

Charlotte is bound by male convention just as is the twenty-ninth bather. Even though she is "handsome" and financially secure, she is unable to join in the play. She does not have a degree in psychology, thus she cannot call herself a counselor. Indeed, Dr. Jaquith makes it clear that she is only an inexperienced amateur, one who must "promise to behave [her]self' if she is to continue her relationship with Tina, Jerry's disturbed daughter. "You are only on probation! Remember what it says in the Bible: `The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,"' he admonishes her, and it is made clear that Dr. Jaquith holds the position of Lord. Thus she is represented both in the novel and in the film as a woman trapped within a male system; she cannot even return to her role as nursemaid to her mother (who is now dead), nor can she hope to advance, for conventional morality forbids her continued liaison with another woman's husband, even as it restricts her from finding someone else with whom she might have a family of her own.

In the contexts of Olive Higgins Prouty's 1941 novel and Warner Brothers' 1942 film Now, Voyager, Whitman's transformative poetic metaphor in "Untold Want" in constricted; so that, the voyager, Charlotte Vale (emblematic of all female readers and viewers), is doomed never to find that which is lacking. In both the novel and the film, she replaces lonely spinsterhood for lonely surrogate motherhood. Like the twenty-ninth bather, she may be financially independent, but she will never have a "man of her own" nor a "child of her own," and she is explicitly not searching elsewhere for fulfillment. Charlotte will not "ask for the moon," since she can "have the stars"-she can only imagine (as so many other women do) what walking on the moon might be like. Thus she represents, finally, not the transformed voyager but rather the untold want, choosing instead of physical and psychic fulfillment the public approbation of her personal sacrifice.