Stella Dallas

In the soot-dusted periphery of a Massachusetts mill town, Stella Martin—a woman of effervescent but unrefined vitality—engineers a social ascent by wedlock to Stephen Dallas, a disenfranchised aristocrat reeling from his father’s financial disgrace. The union, however, is a brittle artifice; Stella’s garish sensibilities and penchant for the gaudy clash violently with Stephen’s innate, albeit subdued, elitism. Following the arrival of their daughter, Laurel, the domestic friction becomes an insurmountable chasm, prompting Stephen to retreat to the sophisticated embrace of New York and his former paramour, Helen Dane. Stella, left to cultivate Laurel’s upbringing in a vacuum of bourgeois aspiration, eventually confronts the agonizing realization that her own presence is a terminal anchor dragging her daughter away from the echelons of the cultural elite. In a final, devastating act of self-immolation, Stella feigns a vulgar indifference to drive Laurel into the arms of the Dallas lineage, culminating in a legendary tableau of maternal martyrdom where she stands, an anonymous spectator in the drenching rain, watching through a window as her daughter joins the upper-crust through marriage.