Afterword
This section offers a detailed conclusion to the volume as a whole suggesting that the case studies within reveal the centrality of processes of negotiation, or ‘offsetting’ in women’s encounters with cinema culture. Again and again in short stories, novels, criticism and serialisations, both cinemagoing characters and the creators of film fictions use cinema-going as a vehicle for working through a variety of pressures and conflicts in women’s interwar experience. The pleasures of popular culture are offset against the problematic and restrictive representations that this culture contained. Equally, the social and physical freedoms that cinemas as public leisure spaces offered women are offset against the ways in which cinema-going conversely regulated their movement, made their public presence spectacular and produced new pressures to conform to standardized modes of gendered, class-inflected and regional subjectivities. The afterword draws these ideas together, suggesting new directions in further research into interwar literary cultures of cinemagoing.