![]() She lingers in her dead son’s room, and Lincoln seeks her out. A darker side of her maternal nature is exhibited in a scene just prior to a White House reception. Mary Lincoln displays her motherly side in a scene where she greets Robbie, returned from law school, with admonitions that he is not eating enough, and she sends Tad to fetch Lincoln for the reunion. Family and political life are intertwined spatially and Mary Lincoln is a pivotal figure in that connection. Lincoln interrupts meetings to discuss Tad’s problems. Mary and son Robbie have a reunion in that same hallway. Young Tad Lincoln rides a goat cart through a corridor filled with political petitioners. The White House itself is a liminal area with its public and personal (family, private) areas blurred together. Once near the film’s end, she and Lincoln take a carriage drive in a park, but otherwise, she is seen indoors. Lincoln, she is not located in nature but primarily in interiors, this time in the White House and in two other scenes, in the visitors’ gallery of the House of Representatives. Are all of these dimensions outside the phallogocentric? Typically we associate political activity and analysis with reasoned argument, with power, thereby placing it into the phallic realm. She interprets an accident as an assassination attempt while Lincoln dismisses that notion. ![]() The dialogue here leaves Mary balanced between the world of dreams, hysterical illness (her headaches), soothsaying and the world of political and personal observation. ![]() She refers to her awful headaches that are a result of a carriage accident, an event she considers to have been an assassination attempt on Lincoln. “useless woman…a soothsayer, not to be trusted.” He rebukes himself for bothering her and she answers that she does not want to be spared a thing. Our first glimpse of Mary in this film comes near the beginning in the Lincolns’ bedroom where she is getting ready for bed and listening to Abe recount a dream where he was alone on a ship. Lincoln, she is external to Nature itself and does not evoke the realm of the pastoral. This maternal aspect constitutes the central portion of Mary’s relation to “Nature,” but like Mary Todd in Young Mr. Lincoln presents a version of Mary as a wife who can parse her husband’s dreams, a political person who takes on the House of Representatives over the renovation budget of the public White House, a private political advisor who urges Lincoln to use his political capital on something other than the Thirteenth Amendment, a mother who is highly overprotective to some sons and indifferent to the youngest, and finally a woman who is labeled “selfish” and “crazy” due to her intemperate and lengthy period of active grieving over their dead son Willie. Stevens and Lydia Smith reading the 13th Amendment. Stevens looking back at balcony when making his statement that he does not believe in full equality for Negroes. Keckly and Mary Lincoln in the reverse shot. Keckley being seated in the balcony prior to the vote on the 13th Amendment. Mary collapses at Abe’s feet during the argument. Mary tells Abe to go ahead and put her in the madhouse. Tad Lincoln rides a goat cart in the White House corridor. Male fantasies and male theories in films about Lincoln, p.
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