One of the perplexing aspects of Stanley Cavell's Contesting Tears is the exclusion of The Heiress (William Wyler, 1949) from what he calls the melodrama of the unknown woman. Derived from the comedies of remarriage, in which conversation becomes a means of mutual recognition between a man and a woman, the melodrama of the unknown woman negates marriage as a route to recognition. Women find their voice and their freedom instead in the transcendence of marriage. As Cavell puts it, in these melodramas, the woman's answer to the “possibility of friendship is an unreserved, No.” The Heiress certainly concludes with a more unreversed No to marriage than the four films that integrate the genre: Stella Dallas (King Vidor, 1937), Now, Voyager (Irving Rapper, 1942), Gaslight (George Cukor, 1944), and Letter from an Unknown Woman (Max Ophüls, 1948).

Dan Shaw has recently speculated that Cavell did not include the film because, unlike the other heroines of the genre, Catherine (Olivia de Havilland), the protagonist in The Heiress, has not freed herself from resentment. According to Shaw, Catherine's transformation, tinted by revenge, “does not seem to have led to a satisfying independent life of her own.” This explanation remains unconvincing for two reasons: first, Catherine does seem satisfied with her independent life and, second, Cavell does not exclude revenge from the genre. Cavell understands the images of Lisa (Joan Fontaine) assaulting Stephan (Louis Jordan) in Letter from an Unknown Woman as a fantasy of revenge. He also characterizes Paula's (Ingrid Bergman’s) final spectacle of madness in Gaslight as an “aria of revenge” against Gregory (Charles Boyer).

Rather than speculating why Cavell did not include the film, I explain how the inclusion of The Heiress reconfigures the genre itself. In his own understanding of genre, Cavell has argued that a genre is not “a form characterized by features, as an object by its properties.” Rather than sharing features, members of a genre share a story or a myth. He writes, “The members of a genre will be interpretations of it, … revisions of it, which will also make them interpretations of one another.”