Mike Leigh’s film Vera Drake explores the moral complexities of ‘backroom abortions’ at a time when there was no affordable, legal alternative for working class women with unwanted pregnancies. The film also offers a tender evocation of post-war East End life, one that will resonate with those who lived through the privations and poverty of this era - but also its dense family life and networks of mutual support (as evoked rather sentimentally in O’Neill, 1999). As someone born in Canning Town in 1960, Leigh’s complex film sparked some deep feelings that I will use this paper to make some sense of. It depicts characters formed by an urban village moral economy which operated for the most part independently of official regulation and which was comprehensively undermined in the second half of the twentieth century by the forces of economic restructuring, scientific welfare, modernist town planning and bureaucratic rationalism. (Cohen, 1972)
My parents’ social mobility in the 1960s and 1970s placed both geographical and cultural distance between friends and extended family who remained in the East End. But the communal values and impulses represented in Vera Drake, maintained a residual presence, well beyond the dissolution of those forms of community, and they continued to shape my subjectivity in ways that I struggle to make sense of. But I do not completely trust the feelings of nostalgia that the film generated in me. This is partly because of the suspicion that those feelings might not be shared by many of my parents’ generation, particularly those who still live in the same places or who followed the common pattern of movement into the ‘white-flight’ enclaves on the edges of London.
But this mistrust is also based on my familiarity with critical theory – ideas that have engendered a sceptical disposition towards contemporary cultural texts, and a wariness of the emotional responses they elicit. Two fields of intellectual debate are particularly relevant here. Firstly, the literature on memory/popular memory highlights the importance of the past/ present connection in both public historical representations and in memory work or autobiographical narratives (Haug, 1987, Johnson et al 1982). All historical representations at some level engage in dialogue with contemporary concerns. Secondly, in the 1970s structuralist screen theory challenged the way conventional cinema simplified and resolved complex social and historical questions within the framework of the realist narrative (McCabe, 1981). These ideas suggest that even radical filmmakers like Leigh or Ken Loach use techniques and devices that work against active and critical spectatorship. I will discuss means by which Vera Drake produces affective engagement and critically analyse that engagement.
The official Vera Drake web page does not do the film justice. ‘The story of one woman,’ it proclaims portentously, ‘Who sacrificed everything. For what she believed in.’ (http://www.veradrake.com/)
But the eponymous central character is the very obverse of the trite liberal individualism to which Hollywood invariably resorts when dealing with ordinary people. The film grapples with large themes: the decline of working-class community, gender relations, the state and the regulation of reproduction. Leigh courageously excavates one of the dark corners of working class life without resorting to sentimentality or the stock formulae of the movie mainstream. He speaks the hitherto unspoken and broaches moral complexity without resorting to the crude polarities of good and evil.
Vera is represented as a salt-of-the-earth working woman. A voluntary carer, she visits the frail and bed-ridden living in the turnings, terraces and tenements. The shadow of war shrouds so many working class households, with men passing through middle age unable to speak of the horrors they’ve seen and with few social resources to help them address their physical and psychological injuries. The real narratives of warfare – not the bellicose Churchillian bombast – circulated only in private whispers. On the home front families were torn apart by random Blitz bombs. Vera, with her heart of gold, is a reassuring figure who seeks no payment for helping those stricken with injuries and awful memories. Instead she earns money cleaning the houses of the bourgeoisie. She conducts her tasks with a cheerful friendliness, not appearing to resent those whose banisters and brass she polishes. In one scene Vera attempts to make chatty overtures to one wealthy woman while she cleans the floor on her hands and knees. These efforts are met with cold indifference by the employer; the camera shows her only from the waist down.
Vera Drake represents local, extended-family life as both tender but complicated. We see the tensions between the traditional and the affluent worker represented in the difficulties that Vera and her husband Stan experience in dealing with Joyce, the beautiful but vacuous wife of Stan’s brother. Her materialistic and social-climbing ambitions, her desire to avoid contact with her poor relatives, stand in stark contrast to the cooperative ethics of the urban village. At a time when overcrowding and shortages of basic commodities meant that ordinary people struggled to make-do, Vera and Stan consider themselves blessed in spite of their poverty.
Vera rescues lost souls like Reg, a young local man whose mother had died in the Blitz and who was subsisting on bread and dripping. She invites him for dinner and thus gently brokers his romance with her homely daughter Ethel. The fumbling courtship scenes between Ethel and Reg, each mired in their own awkwardness and introspection, are both painful and poignant.
Vera’s son Sid, by contrast, is brash, charming and quick-witted (‘I hope you left your rifle at home’ he quips upon seeing the leopard-skin lining in his aunt’s coat). He works as a tailor and is shown as the epitome of the sharp respectable cockney lad: bartering nylons and fags with his friends, chatting up the girls at the Saturday night knees-up.
The contentment is shattered when Vera is arrested. Having ‘helped out’ local women who had ‘got themselves into a bit of trouble’, who ‘couldn’t manage’ a new baby, she is jolted out of her cheerful altruism when one of them suffers medical complications and nearly dies. Under police interrogation the patient’s mother reluctantly informs on Vera who is then hauled into a parallel universe and impaled by the formality and brutal patriarchal indifference of the Victorian legal system, robbed of identity, and demonised. The local esteem she enjoys counts for nothing. The moral economy of the urban village and the legal system are absolutely incommensurable. The latter transforms Vera from voluntary carer, to sinister abortionist.
Ironically Vera’s good nature deprives her of the resources of self-defence in the face of questioning. The lippy obstreperousness of the rough working class and the instinct to lie for self-preservation are not part of her repertoire. So she cooperates with the police spilling out the whole story with good-hearted honesty. The only semblance of resistance comes when Vera takes exception to the vocabulary her accusers use to describe her actions:
‘Abortion? That’s not what I do dear’.
Trapped in the chasm between incommensurable moral codes, she is asphyxiated by official discourse, hauled before a magistrate, charged, convicted and imprisoned. Vera is shown alone, helpless as a trapped animal, harried and quietly weeping in police station and dock
The film depicts the hypocrisy of the system that cast Vera as a criminal. In a parallel narrative a young woman from a wealthy family becomes pregnant but is able to afford to pay assorted medical and psychiatric specialists, and cover the one hundred guinea charge for the procedure itself. Those with the financial means and the willingness to endure the discourses of medicine and psychiatry are able to obtain officially-sanctioned, safe abortions, but those without such resources are forced to rely on illegal means. When Vera is charged none of her erstwhile employers would stand as character witness for her.
But this is a film about gender as much as class. There is grim irony in the fact that the entire official apparatus is completely male-dominated. Besides a kindly police constable who plies Vera with tea and reassurance, all of the others involved in policing women’s reproduction – doctors, psychiatrists, police, lawyers and judges – are men. So it is not just that Vera is unable to find the words to defend herself across a class divide, it is that she is a woman who has not been used to speaking of these things to men at all. Even the men in Vera’s life had no inkling of what she was doing. When Sid angrily confronts his father about whether he knew, Stan retorts ‘Of course I didn’t. If I had known, don’t you think I’d have put a stop to it?’ It falls to the prospective son-in-law to break through the pall of confused humiliation, frustrated respectability and dark pensive silence that grips the household. With a bolt of common sense Reg declares:
Don’t seem fair. If you’re rich you can pay for it. But if you’re poor, well… my Mum had six of us and if you can’t feed ‘em you can’t love ‘em can you?
But Vera’s son is mired in frustrated respectability and squirming discomfiture: ‘What did she do it for? – it’s DIRTY’. He has little understanding of ‘women’s issues’ and he finds it hard to forgive his mother. Vera Drake shows how working-class men’s understanding of women’s reproduction was clouded by euphemism and taboo. The film reinforces this through its depiction of the accoutrements of Vera’s trade. The disinfectant, the Hinkson’s syringe, the carbolic soap, the cheese grater (to grate the carbolic soap), are pictured without explanation and left redolent of dark and squeamish suggestion.
It is not only character and narrative that gives the film verisimilitude. Vera Drake also exemplifies the director’s aesthetic skills. Leigh brings a painterly eye to his work composing screen tableaux with an almost Carravagian balance and poise: the fuggy confines of domestic interiors; the cold Benthamite order of police station and prison. In this respect his work is like that of Peter Greenaway, although in other ways it differs considerably. Greenaway usually dispenses with realist conventions in favour of fragmented and surreal forms and his subject matter invariably gestures to high culture, where most of Leigh’s work is concerned with working class lives. It is as if he is holding up a series of fading black and white photographs from the 1950s in front of our eyes, the kind that my mother kept stored in an old biscuit tin, and occasionally brought out to remind us of relatives and places we had long since lost touch with. These images evoke the confinements of the East End of London in an era when housing shortages forced extended family members to deal with each other at close quarters.
Though widely acclaimed, Vera Drake also received some robust criticism. Writing in The Guardian former midwife Jennifer Worth challenged the film’s accuracy (2005). Her memory of backroom abortions was of procedures that frequently went wrong. The film suggests that Vera’s work was largely routine and safe, but Worth’s account is different. She attacks Leigh for medical inaccuracy, suggesting that the technique that Vera uses – introducing large volumes of soapy water into the uterus – is neither as effective nor painless as the film suggests. In addition, she also suggests that local abortionists were invariably driven by financial reward and not, like Vera, by altruism. So, in Worth’s view, the hagiographic characterisation is misleading
But to understand the way we develop affective identifications with film texts it is important to look beyond questions of empirical accuracy. In the 1970s English and French structuralist screen theory – much of it published in the journals Screen and Cahiers de Cinema – offered a pointed critique of nostalgia in realist cinema. Colin McCabe, for example, argued that the conventions of cinema obscure the constructed nature of the narrative form (McCabe, 1981). The audience member is rarely able to see beyond the naturalism. The realist narrative in film and television cannot deal with contradiction. The appearance of realism in the screen text will guarantee a position of knowledge in the audience member over the subject matter being depicted: ‘narrative discourse simply allows reality to appear and denies its own status as articulation’ (McCabe, 1981, p.218). In McCabe’s view this observation applies whatever the political sympathies of the director and the message of the film. The forms of closure that are embedded in realist narrative forms prevent the emergence of critical audience readings. Structuralist and post-structuralist theorists advocated that film-makers should break with realism and embrace a fractured and unresolved forms, perhaps involving the combination of documentary and drama without narrative closure.
The central problem with structuralist criticism is that it conceived of film spectatorship in purely abstract terms. Our point of view is determined by forms of cinematic realism and there is little scope for understanding spectatorship as an active process. Other cultural theorists have argued that meaning is negotiated rather than textually determined (Hall, 1980). In contrast with communication theory in which audience members are viewed largely as individual consumers, the characteristic cultural studies approach involves recognising the collective dimensions of spectatorship (Gledhill, 1994). Audiences are both historically-situated (Staiger, 1992) and differentiated, and the meanings they make are shaped by these social and temporal locations. Feminist theorists for example, have argued that screen pleasures are gender differentiated but that it is not possible to understand the way women produce meaning without researching the audience (Ang, 1985, Stacey, 1994). Spectators will often ‘read against the grain’, decode cultural materials in ways unanticipated by directors or critics. If structuralist film theory saw the social meaning as determined primarily by the narrative and aesthetic operations inscribed in the text, late twentieth century cultural theory, shifted emphasis towards the interface of text and socially-situated spectators.
For historical drama to achieve popular appeal it must have the ability to engage with the collective memory. But the active spectator is more than simply a member of a social category - class, age cohort, ethnic group, gender etc. S/he is also engaged in making narrative sense of biographical experiences. Theorists of memory work have argued, that such narratives involve much more than the empirical representation of past events (Haug, 1987 Radstone, 2000). Like public historical representations they are present-centred constructions that project particular forms of desire and are implicated in processes of identity formation (Kuhn, 2000 and 2005). Somewhere in the space between public historical representations and biographical narratives, new meanings are made: a complex transaction between the personal, the collective and the public (Passerini, 1987). Why do we invest in particular public narrative forms? How do they resonate with our inner lives, with the stories we tell about ourselves? Cultural texts are most effective when they excavate something of these personal/familial/communal narratives. This may trigger and affirm something that has long been dormant, perhaps something that has existed only in private whispered innuendos, hushed into the shadows of respectable taboos.
In what remains I will reflect, both autobiographically on my responses to Vera Drake and the processes that it depicts, and reflect sociologically about its appeal. This is not just idiosyncratic. The forms of identification are rooted in social and historical experiences of many whose family origins are similar to those depicted in the film but particularly those who have experienced upward mobility and who might be expected to form a part of the largely art-house audience. For I suspect that Leigh’s work appeals much more to middle class than to working class people.
Vera Drake has particular resonance for those of us whose lives were shaped by the transitions associated with social advancement in the second half of the twentieth century, when, for the first time it was possible for working-class children to move beyond their roots. Unlike the pre-war generation, for people like my parents, born in the East End in the late thirties, a life of labour and poverty was not predestined. Whether by virtue of small business prosperity or wider access to higher education (both of which shaped the fate of my family) in the fifties and sixties, there were unprecedented opportunities for social mobility. This often meant leaving home – especially for those who went to university, because the award of study grants was conditional upon recipients living at least fifty miles away from parents. The emergence of cultural studies in universities in Britain was largely the initiative of ‘scholarship boys’ (like Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart) who, belittled by stuffy Oxbridge elitism, demanded that ordinary lives and vernacular culture become a legitimate focus for intellectual work.
These people, and many others who took different routes, wrestled with the complexities of mobility, seeking to reconcile the pieces of our lives, to build a coherent narrative of self that is not based upon naive individualism. Like migrants settling in new lands, many of us who have joined the middle class become committed patriots of a lost country, adherents to the memory of traditions that are themselves the products of nostalgic yearnings. We did not live through the gradual erosion of the communal cultural forms that are the raw material of nostalgia, and lament their passing. We contrast the superficial relations of modernity with our collective memory of an era when we were poor but satisfied, sustained by the networks of mutual support and tied in to obligations to extended kin, before the nuclear (and now post-nuclear) family became the norm. Those who remained behind, who saw the slow shifting of the sands, are perhaps less inclined to romanticise the past, less enamoured with the memories of poverty. Vera Drake engages with the social climber’s sense of loss. It implicitly contrasts local communal altruism with the avaricious individualism and social indifference of the contemporary world.
Vera Drake’s indictment of official power also strikes a chord. The film depicts the painful passage from communitarianism to the bureaucratic intrusion into working class life that accompanied the emergence of the post-war welfare state. If this transition involved the greater provision of social support, in particular through the National Health system (including the eventual availability of safe, free medical abortions), it was also associated with official invigilation of aspects of private life, with the obligation to provide new forms of personal accountability to the state and to endure official evaluation of circumstances. The popular reaction to the impersonal and socially-fragmenting consequences of rational processes of allocating social support underpinned the emergence of both elements of Thatcherism (Hall and Jacques, 1983), and later some of the discourses of ‘community’ control that are at the heart of ‘third way’ politics. Vera Drake engages with the vague suspicion that, for working people, the post-war social democratic settlement was a double-edged sword which, while providing for greater material security, was also an accomplice in the dissolution of traditional community.
The role of the police in Leigh’s film is particularly interesting. They are shown as being caught between the dissolving local culture and the emerging rationalist discourses of post-war social democracy. Hobbs has show how ‘old-school’ law-enforcement involved the police occasionally turning a blind eye to minor transgressions (even participating in them) and observing the moral economy of the urban village (Hobbs, 1988). They relied for their effectiveness on a measure of local trust and some access to informal networks. Vera Drake thus shows the contradictions associated with the implacable official position on backroom abortionists, as the police, agents for distant moral regulation, appear profoundly ambivalent about charging Vera. Leigh certainly does not demonise them. He represents them as compromised and leads us to suspect that many share the values for which Vera stands and believe in the need for local people to deal with problems through informal means. The film thus confirms a sense that objective and remotely formulated official policies can have invidious consequences, and lends support to a communitarian sensibility.
In evoking the circumstances of unofficial abortion Vera Drake also engages with a widespread middle class disillusion with conventional medical science (and modernist rationality more generally), and the popularity of complementary and folk alternatives. While in no sense does the film romanticise the circumstances of Vera’s work, it does disparage the cold patriarchal power exercised by male doctors over women’s reproduction. Vera is a folk medic, a local healer, a throwback to the time before patriarchal regulation of women’s bodies and their subjection to the professional discourses. She provides a communal solution to an intractable social problem. Worth’s criticism (cited above) of the historical accuracy of Leigh’s depiction might well be valid. But the film’s depiction of women providing self-managed solutions to unwanted pregnancies doubtless has appeal to those who have experienced medical humiliation or other forms of mistreatment.
In describing Vera Drake, Mike Leigh spoke of his desire to represent the complexity of the issues the film deals with and to avoid simplistic moral resolutions:
I've tried to find a way of using dramatic language through which to express something about good and evil and morality, which confront the audience with the question rather than simply bludgeon the audience with a polemic.
(quoted in Kaufmann, 2007)
Structuralist film theorists suggest that such complexity and openness is unachievable within conventional realist narrative forms, that the spectator’s point of view is determined by these forms. In this paper I’ve suggested that in order to decode the social meaning of a film we need to understand much more than the text and the abstract spectator. Historical dramas are also framed by the collective memories of the audience members. Like the personal narratives of those who can identify with the setting and the period depicted in such dramas, they involve transactions with the present. Nostalgia is not so much a generalised fondness for a lost era as the active construction of historical representations based on a sense of what is lacking in the present. I have endeavoured here to critically interrogate my own nostalgic pleasure in Vera Drake and to locate it in the context of the social mobility experienced by some of those who grew up in the old urban villages in the post-war decades.
The film embodies a sense of loss: of the institutions of mutual support; of the capacity for independent local moral regulation (even though such regulation could be suffocating); of the practical wisdom of women and their ability to deal with problems before professional or state support was realistically available to them. Such feelings of loss are particularly acute amongst those who originate in the sort of setting depicted in Vera Drake, but who have undergone some degree of social and cultural distancing.
Implicit in this reading is a critique of the ways public authorities intervened in aspects of working class life. For although the introduction of health and social welfare reforms were undoubtedly beneficial, they were also accompanied by the decline of autonomous practices that formed part of the fabric of working class life. Ironically, the social democratic state that was responsible for introducing new rationalist bureaucratic forms of regulation also generated the social mobility that has made the particular nostalgic readings of Vera Drake described here possible.
George Morgan is senior lecturer at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney
© 2009
The credit crisis is symptomatic of deeper, structural problems facing the UK and Western economies; and these underlying problems are unlikely to be addressed in Britain by current government priorities.
Gavin Poynter
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