Wait Till after Dark -- Mimetic Theory and Literary Study

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Date Posted: 19:32:47 03/31/08 Mon
Author: Betsy Peters
Subject: Wait Till after Dark

Over the weekend, I watched the Audrey Hepburn film, Wait till After Dark. Amidst the underlying drama of the movie, a recently blinded woman begins to suspect that her husband is cheating on her with another woman whom he met in an airport and who randomly gave him a doll. As one of the villains in the movie describes this woman to blind Susie (Hepburn), immediately Susie expresses her panic at her inability, as a blind woman, to compete with this rival. She is intensely jealous of her. The greatest part of this expression of rivalry, however, comes in the way the villain describes her husband's airport meeting: the woman "supposedly gave him the doll, telling him that she had bought it for one daughter and wanted to make sure that the other daughter did not see it and become jealous of her sister." While this story is entirely fabricated, it poignantly expresses the imagined mimetic rivalry between Susie and this other woman. Just like mother's fear of rivalry between her daughter with the doll in the airport, so now the doll stands as the object of Susie's imitated desire. Interestingly, the appearance of the doll actually has nothing to do with the husband's affections one way or the other; the heroine-filled doll participates in a separate drama and is, therefore, entirely arbitrary object.

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