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New Wave Women: Paying Attention to Brenda and Doreen in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Price, Hollie

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Abstract

Scholarship in British film history has tended to suggest that the female characters in New Wave films are marginalised, dismissively associated with the trappings of consumer culture, and responsible for the ultimate containment of their ‘Angry Young Men’ protagonists. In Sex, Class and Realism, which was first published 1986), John Hill situates the New Wave in relation to broader socio-economic and cultural changes in postwar Britain, including women’s shifting relationships with work, motherhood, family life and patterns of consumption. However, he concludes that the cycle failed to register women’s changing lives in the late 1950s and identifies the ‘dramatic and thematic subordination of female characters’ and a ‘streak of misogyny’ running through the cycle. Revisiting the treatment of women in the British New Wave, this article focuses on the characters Brenda and Doreen in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and instead explores how Rachel Roberts and Shirley Anne Field’s performances offer potent expressions of women’s changing lives in this period. Poised between representing individual desires, confidence and autonomy, and feelings of frustration, reserve and uncertainty, their performances vividly convey their characters’ experiences and expectations in ways that chimed with mobilities and new constructions of selfhood that were increasingly being practised by a ‘transition’ generation of young women in postwar Britain. I argue that Roberts and Field’s performances evoke the feelings of two different, working-class women, for whom expressions of assertiveness, sexuality and aspiration are shaped by contradictions, anxieties and feelings of vulnerability. In doing so, the article foregrounds and re-contextualises Roberts and Field’s contributions to the New Wave, recognising their representation of contemporary femininities in flux; and explores the promotion and critical reception of their roles, highlighting the tensions between social realism and glamour that shaped their New Wave stardom.

Citation

Price, H. (2024). New Wave Women: Paying Attention to Brenda and Doreen in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. Journal of British Cinema and Television, 21(3), 316-336. https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2024.0724

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 23, 2024
Publication Date 2024-06
Deposit Date May 6, 2024
Publicly Available Date May 7, 2024
Journal Journal of British Cinema and Television
Print ISSN 1743-4521
Electronic ISSN 1755-1714
Publisher Edinburgh University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 21
Issue 3
Pages 316-336
DOI https://doi.org/10.3366/jbctv.2024.0724
Keywords Saturday Night and Sunday Morning; working-class women; Rachel Roberts; New Wave; Albert Finney; Shirley Anne Field; Karel Reisz; performance
Public URL https://keele-repository.worktribe.com/output/824724
Publisher URL https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/jbctv.2024.0724

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