Tale of Two Women in Blue Jasmine and The Invisible Woman: An Object Relations Perspective

Since my two early Routledge books on well-known female writers and artists, The Compulsion to Create: A Psychoanalytic Study of Women Artists (1993) and The Creative Mystique: From Red Shoes Frenzy to Love and Creativity (1996), were published, I have been looking at a developmental divide in the psyche of women that affects the dimension of their lives, their creative potentials and creative work, as well as their capacities to use creative work to mourn and heal themselves psychologically. The two contrasting female film characters will be discussed below.

Blue Jasmine

In Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine (2013), we see a woman, Jasmine (played by Cate Blanchett), who was brought up by adoptive parents to be the “special gifted child,” in contrast to her adopted sister, who is less glamorous but much more relatable and authentic. Insubstantial and ungrounded, Jasmine lives a life of
images, designer labels, and pretentious “do good” charity work, while shuttling from the upper East side of Manhattan to the summer home in the Hamptons. She is unprepared for “the real world” when her prominent real estate businessman husband turns out to be a psychopathic narcissist whose grandiose self-dimensions far exceed any image performance of the naïve “Blanche Dubois”-type Jasmine.

The man who provided Jasmine with the material for her image performance turns out to be a lying and cheating husband,

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who has been seducing all Jasmine’s friends behind her back. When he finally jilts her and announces he is leaving her for a young nanny, Jasmine reacts with an act of rage that is her first
attempt to escape the yoke of her husband’s suppression of any authentic emotional expression and communication on her part, especially when that expression would communicate anger at him. Jasmine is unprepared for what is to follow, but in the shock of her abandonment, she reacts to her rage rather than confronting it. She manages to pick up the phone and call the FBI, reporting her husband to the authorities for all his illegal business activities.

Having denied all her husband’s deceptions and betrayals for years, when he finally abandons her, Jasmine appears to revert to an undeveloped internal child self. She tries to reinforce a contrived adult self with the contemptuous attitude of someone who wishes to convince all others that she is somehow superior to them. At the beginning of the movie, Jasmine is shown to be speaking non-stop about herself with no momentary break to see who she is talking to. Jasmine’s self-revealing babbling is about how she gave up her life and education to marry an older man who seemed to offer her everything on a silver platter without any need for her to find her own agency in creating a life on her own. She never needed to find an authentic education, career, intellectual or creative pursuit, or bother discovering her sexual or creative self. Jasmine rants that she learned everything from being the sexual complement and Prada-wearing wife of the same man. When she met “the man” who matched her narcissistic image addiction to an idealized male image, she never needed to think of finding her own way again. She thought she had it all.

Jasmine quickly gives up on any attempt to develop her own life. She once more succumbs to the image game of becoming what a man might desire her to be when another man approaches her, drawn to her through his own narcissistic images. Even if he is a man of more honesty, integrity, and genuine intention than her former husband, this doesn’t work either, as she is caught in lies about her past by the new man, even though he was ready to provide her with a glamorous public life and a lifelong fantasy
romance of living through the applauded images of others.

In a brilliant performance, Jasmine is seen faking her life in front of her sister Ginger and Ginger’s boyfriend after being found out and left by her new man. To keep up the image self, while actually feeling like a piece of dirty garbage thrown away, Jasmine

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proclaims she will be going to Vienna with the man who just left her. Her lies only carry her to a park bench as she has nowhere to go. Jasmine talks incessantly to herself, and a woman on the bench flees to escape her. She is mirroring herself in a state of perpetual delusion now. We assume the police will be coming soon to pick her up and hospitalize her.

Jasmine is a woman who could not mourn. Knowing developmental theory as I do, I would speculate that the woman who poses as a glamorous “Jasmine” had not yet internalized an authentic related other who could allow her to mourn the loss of the early authentic mother and father that she never had. Without a therapeutic holding environment or an empathic and confrontational other, Jasmine cannot face the degree of loss in her life, which she inadvertently manufactured as she continues to desperately cling to living through a false narcissistic self rather than from any authentic evolution. She has no mother to cling to.

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The Invisible Woman

In contrast to Jasmine in Blue Jasmine is Nelly (played by Felicity Jones) in Abi Morgan’s The Invisible Woman (2013), based on a true love story of Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan. As a woman opposed to societal norms of the 19^th century, Nelly becomes “invisible” to the world, but she remains a whole person with an authentic sense of self-agency, self-expression, and autonomy. We are shown Nelly’s mother in the movie, Mrs. Frances Ternan. She is an actress with three daughters, and she is shown to be a caring mother. This implies the internalization of “good enough” mothering in the manifest personality of Nelly, Charles Dickens’ true paramour. Here we see artists, not compromised by narcissism or any other internal pathology, but rather by the norms of Victorian British society.

Charles Dickens is in love with Nelly and her comprehension of his inner self through his work, but in Victorian society, he is not free to openly love, divorce, and remarry, especially with his many children. So Nelly is sacrificed to the role of a mistress (until Charles Dickens’ death), despite her extreme moral scruples about such a status, which make her choose invisibility over public exposure. This is her only choice because she is in love with Dickens. Dickens runs away with Nelly and tries to create an intimate life with the decades younger virginal woman. Dickens and Nelly finally have their feast of true lovemaking as Dickens brings Nelly into the world of sexuality.

Dickens is being sought after across Paris and London to continue his usual public readings and lectures across the continent. Despite his desire to stay exclusively with Nelly, she pushes him to go on tour repeatedly. This in itself is a sign of the maturity and feminine strength in this woman, who’s internalized her nurturing mother as her nurturance overcomes her own libidinal needs and wishes. She supports Dickens’ authentic literary self-expression, along with his narcissism, without anything to gain from her denied narcissistic glory. So the ending of their retreat is near, and its tragic end is a shocking surprise! The hope of a baby that has united the hearts of Nelly and Charles in their daily country companionship is aborted as a fully-formed baby leaves Nelly’s womb in a bloody and deceased state. Dickens must sign a death certificate in his phony name for the body to be buried. Nelly becomes mute with rage as he tries unsuccessfully to engage her to speak.

Re-entering society brings the necessity for new lies. When

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Nelly is thrown from her seat on the train to the grass and dirt on the road by the railroad tracks, Dickens is not free to attend to her rescue. Nelly revives. Charles finds a home for Nelly in the suburbs of the towns of London. Dickens visits her and provides for Nelly’s physical comforts, but her psyche is left uncared for as Nelly’s status as the invisible woman is now set in concrete, for good, until Charles Dickens’ dies. Nelly was only 18 when she met Dickens and 31 when he died, so she will have another life. But inside of her is the invisible woman who still yearns for Dickens after he leaves her through death. She has not mourned yet, but she will show she has the capacity.

Nelly enrolls in productions of the plays of Charles Dickens, and everyone is told that Nelly “knew Charles Dickens as a child.” They all envy this and see her as an authority on Dickens’ work. But Nelly keeps wandering off, walking “at quite a pace,” as she tells the preacher when he protests her refusals to accompany her on these walks. Only the preacher sees the signs of Nelly’s inner torments and distractions, and when Nelly does succumb to the preacher’s empathic concern and confirms his suspicion of her being Dickens’ paramour in the past, Nelly finds a rather dramatic and immediate release. She can return to her home, husband, and son with a new readiness to be present. When her husband finds her in the library near the cherished volumes of Charles Dickens’ texts, for the first time, Nelly looks directly in the eyes and says, “I am Here! I am Here now!” In the meantime, Nelly understands that her husband, although a “good man,” is psychologically naïve and cannot be the intimate other in the mourning of her memories. The preacher becomes the full personality that plays a transitional object role in hearing Nelly’s confession, similar to how a psychoanalyst being a witness would.

Nelly’s character shows us a fully whole person (object in the language of psychoanalysis), a woman with full-blown feminine desire, subjectivity, and intersubjectivity. How different her developmental level reveals itself to be than that of Woody Allen’s preoedipal developmentally arrested Jasmine, who manifests her incapacity to mourn the tragic losses of her past because of her narcissistic pathology.

The contrast between the two women in these two films relates directly to the differences between developmentally arrested creative women, who couldn’t mourn and heal in their work, and developmentally advanced oedipal level women, who have the psy-

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chological maturity to mourn, which you see in both my books on brilliant women writers.

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