The Philadelphia Story

The Philadelphia Story centers on the moral transformation of Tracy. When I say ‘moral transformation’ I mean that she moves toward a higher, better self – and she does this by becoming herself more fully, i.e., by truly being herself, or, as Dexter puts it, by behaving naturally. This does not mean that she was, previously, bad, although I fear that this is what the idea of a moral transformation brings to mind for many people: one was bad and then, through a transformative process, one becomes good. I don’t think that most moral transformations are of that sort. Rather, I’m willing to think that most (or at least many) people are basically decent (as are Wiesler and Adam and Seth and Torvald and Nora) but are perhaps misguided or ignorant of something crucial; then, once they receive guidance or the crucial experience that enables them to see things more fully, they become better. And while they are better than they were before, this does not mean that their work is done: new crises will likely need to be faced, and even better selves are waiting to be brought into existence – into actuality, i.e., into acts.

 

Tracy in interesting in that she is not like Amanda – she is, in a sense, not yet a full human being (as she herself notes near the end of the film), whereas Amanda is. However, she is also not quite like Nora, insofar as no one is holding her back. She is not constrained as Nora is. In fact, she is, with her concern for proper appearances, control, and the scolding of others, more like Wiesler or Torvald or Seth’s father. She already gets to be like a man, which is something for which Nora can only wish. Yet even though she gets the privileges and liberties that a man does, there is an important sense in which she is not yet fully human. If this is so, then the (very Millian and Aristotelian) implication is that most of us who have liberty are not doing anything with it – we are not yet fully human, not yet making our own choices, and are instead ignorant of and/or indifferent to ourselves (to our true being, whether that be our preferences (Mill) or our intellect (the term Aristotle uses for our capacities to reason (practically and speculatively) and to choose).

 

Amanda, like Tracy, is the equal of any man, but unlike Tracy, she has, in Beauvoir’s phrasing, already completed the struggle to become a human being and is, when we meet her, struggling to be a creator (714). The closest we got to a creator in this film is Dexter (and perhaps Mike), and this is worth thinking about, but it is also a different point and so I’ll set it aside for now.

 

With respect to Tracy’s transformation, there are a number of ways in which the final scenes and stages of that transformation echo some of the key ideas of our course. I’m skipping many things here, but these are the moments I want to pull out at present (and all of them occur as Tracy talks to her friends the next morning). First, she says “my eyes are opened.” A bit later she says “I don’t know anything any more” (a condition that Dexter, echoing Socrates, praises). She has her final exchange with George in the company of people she calls “my friends,” who get to stay precisely because they are her true friends (and George is not – and it seems important that they be able to contemplate her rejection of George, which is a beautiful (kalos) act insofar as she freely negates something (in this case the desire to marry him) that is not her and not true to her). She is unable to explain her behavior from the night before, which she grants is something difficult to understand (just as Augustine grants that it’s difficult to understand that an act of free will has no source). The need to go “haywire” and “behave naturally” is affirmed by Liz and Dexter respectively. And there is the notion of different classes of people based not on economics or birth but on spirit, intellect, and authenticity (a very Nietzschean idea). And there is Tracy finally feeling content and happy – in harmony with herself, a harmony that is visibly evident – because she is finally human (and not a goddess or a statue). And two of the things that most fully drove her to that state are (a) being forced to see herself – to confront herself as she is – and (b) being able to see what others imagine her to be when she is not present, such that they have faith in her better self, as Dexter does, or they do not, as George does not … and note that George was given the choice to think the best or the worst of Tracy, and he first claims that he cannot think anything else but then affirms that he’ll decide for himself how he’ll imagine Tracy. Why, you might ask, does George choose to think the worst?