Who is Emeline Gurney? Or is it Emmeline Mosher? Is she the adolescent daughter who tries to help support her destitute family only to be seduced and disgraced by her factory manager? Is she the tormented woman who finally finds, then loses, love? Is she the recluse shunned by her straight-laced New England neighbors? Is she victim, vixen, victor? A melodrama, a memory, a legend, or a dream? Is her story fiction, fact, or fantasy?
This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach towards answering these questions. Dominic LaCapra's discussion of the archival, rhetorical, and dialogic models of history are utilized along with work by Hulser, Leab, O'Connor, and Rosenstone on visual history and Nichols, Plantinga and Williams on documentary theory. The purpose is not to determine the historical veracity of the film, but rather to explore, through textual analysis, ways in which nonfiction film can utilize the lack of visual evidence so often encountered in the history of women, minorities, and the working class to enlarge viewers notions of what constitutes a visual record.
Emeline Guerney is the central character in Sins of Our Mothers, which aired on PBS in 1988. That PBS promoted the film as "a Gothic tale about sin and redemption in 19th century New England" and that Emeline's story was dramatized by novelist Judith Rossner and bears thematic similarities to William Defoe's Moll Flanders suggest the difficulties producer David Hoffinan and writer Matthew Collins faced in marshaling the few archival sources available on the historical Emeline to create a historical documentary and avoid reducing abstract social and political complexity into an archetypal conflict of good and evil. This paper focuses on their interweaving of archival materials with other categories of evidence. Shots of birth records and marriage licenses are juxtaposed with interviews of those who had known Emeline or were familiar with her legend. These interviews are filmed in living-rooms where soap operas are seen and heard as a back-drop to the tale of the thirteen-year-old sent to work in the textile mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, who later bore a child out of wedlock, a child whom she later unwittingly married. This paper analyzes the ways in which the film encourages viewers to engage in a critique of historical representation, to attend to distinctions between fact and fiction, to avoid privileging personal reminiscence and popular memory or, for that matter, official history.
Unlike better know historical documentaries, especially those by Ken Burns, which make extensive use of archival photographs and artifacts as privileged visual evidence, Sins of Our Mothers juxtaposes visual artifacts with more contemporary visual evidence--renderings of Emeline's nineteenth century village with contemporary footage of her hometown, a town which has kept her legend alive, first as gossip whispered among adult females, later as town folklore. Footage of Lowell, MA, today is paired with historians' interviews, the commentary of novelist Judith Rossner, photographs of the nineteenth century mills and their young female workers, and MA residents whose ancestors worked in the mills and passed on stories about what went on there. The result of that juxtapositioning is a challenge to what Dominic LaCapra has called the archival model of history. "Who is Emeline?" leads to another question, "what is history," especially as it is shaped by what we see in historical documentary.