@article{1477574,
      recid = {1477574},
      author = {Sabine, Maureen, },
      title = {Veiled Desires : Intimate Portrayals of Nuns in Postwar  Anglo-American Film /},
      pages = {1 online resource (352 p.)},
      abstract = {Ingrid Bergman's engaging screen performance as Sister  Mary Benedict in The Bells of St. Mary's made the film nun  a star and her character a shining standard of comparison.  She represented the religious life as the happy and  rewarding choice of a modern woman who had a "complete  understanding" of both erotic and spiritual desire. How did  this vibrant and mature nun figure come to be viewed as  girlish and naïve? Why have she and her cinematic sisters  in postwar popular film so often been stereotyped or  selectively analyzed, so seldom been seen as women and  religious? In Veiled Desires-a unique full-length, in-depth  look at nuns in film-Maureen Sabine explores these  questions in a groundbreaking interdisciplinary study  covering more than sixty years of cinema. She looks at an  impressive breadth of films in which the nun features as an  ardent lead character, including The Bells of St. Mary's  (1945), Black Narcissus (1947), Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison  (1957), Sea Wife (1957), The Nun's Story (1959), The Sound  of Music (1965), Change of Habit (1969), In This House of  Brede (1975), Agnes of God (1985), Dead Man Walking (1995),  and Doubt (2008). Veiled Desires considers how the  beautiful and charismatic stars who play chaste nuns, from  Ingrid Bergman and Audrey Hepburn to Susan Sarandon and  Meryl Streep, call attention to desires that the veil  concealed and the habit was thought to stifle. In a  theologically and psychoanalytically informed argument,  Sabine responds to the critics who have pigeonholed the  film nun as the obedient daughter and religious handmaiden  of a patriarchal church, and the respectful audience who  revered her as an icon of spiritual perfection. Sabine  provides a framework for a more complex and holistic  picture of nuns onscreen by showing how the films dramatize  these women's Christian call to serve, sacrifice, and  dedicate themselves to God, and their erotic desire for  intimacy, agency, achievement, and fulfillment.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1477574},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823252121},
}