Vera Caspary

Vera Caspary warrants more scrutiny in film, cultural, and literary studies. Her novels and screenplays of the 40s and 50s (Laura, Les Girls, Letter to Three Wives) were important popular reformulations of the modernist strategy of utilizing multiple voices as a way to undermine narrational authority. Caspary's Laura is told in four voices--a strategy that is not as overt in Preminger's 1944 film version of Laura as it is in the film version of Les Girls. However, Preminger's subtle and interesting use of acousmatic and radiophonic voices is not a dismissal but cinematically takes up Caspary's critique of the power of the voice.

In both versions, the untrustworthy voices that create the illusion of Laura are foregrounded, as if there is a real woman at issue in this fictional account. This niggling sense of a reality of the woman behind the multiple misrecognitions of men attests to Caspary's significant reworking of the Galatea myth, a reworking both feminist and postmodern. Laura is a self-made woman, decidedly practical; her mythical aura is created by the fantasies of the men around her. Galatea is "under erasure," as they say. Instead of man creating woman, there is a network of relations between cultural producers within which Laura forms herself, even as she is formed by others (all in a drama of disinformation.)