‘’Mid Pleasures and Palaces’: Domestic Life and Re-imagining Modernity in British 1940s Film.

Abstract

This thesis investigates the aesthetic construction of domestic life in British feature films made and released in the 1940s. It situates the depiction of domesticity in a selection of films as a re-imagining of interwar modernity: at a time of social upheaval during the war and in the immediate postwar years, images of the home onscreen both looked back to prewar peace and forward to the future. Developing a methodology which examines both film aesthetics and cultural context, I contend that the modes of address used to construct domestic life in 1940s films can be resituated in a wider cultural construction of modernity in the interwar years, evidenced in magazines including Picture Post, Ideal Home and Modern Woman, furniture catalogues, advertisements, colour-books and the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition. This thesis considers a range of films from different genres: Love on the Dole, It Always Rains on Sunday, This Happy Breed, The Captive Heart, Spring in Park Lane, The Glass Mountain and The Small Back Room. I reassess four modes of address used to depict domesticity in these films: realism and romance, pastoralism and preservation, escapism and restraint, and modernism and melodrama. In doing so, I propose that the pictorial composition of domestic life in this selection of films is characterised by a sense of compromise or balance, and therefore that these constructions create visual narratives demonstrating a middlebrow engagement with modernity in the 1940s.