And, she does! Bette Davis, as Charlotte Vale, after the transformation Vehemently, her mother forced her to wear unattractive glasses! Charlotte Vale takes a stand and realizes that she must voyage, seek, and find. Formerly, her mother, had always looked at her disdainfully, and forced her to live a staid life. Previously, all of her desires for love and for adventure had always been discouraged, and she had no access to romance and to life. She sets sail to seek and to find all that her mother had heretofore denied her. After the near completion of her treatment, she takes a trip that results in her character blossoming and transforming into the person that she longs to become. She, with the help of a psychiatrist, is treated away from her home and from her family. Irving Rapper, the director, interprets Whitman’s poem through the illustration of Charlotte Vale. Rapper, through this film, shows us how life can be dampened when one is not allowed the freedom of self-expression, self-actualization, and when one is made to feel like an ugly goose. After one seeks and finds, what shall she do? Bette Davis, as Charlotte Vale, before the transformation As he says in “ABOARD at a Ship’s Helm, “O ship of the body-ship of the soul-voyaging, voyaging, voyaging,” we must always be sailing to seek and to find new things as well as our true selves.
Depicted in this work of poetry, Whitman realizes the importance for people to both grow and develop without constraints, and that their lives should be allowed to sail, to go places, and to experience life. Whitman, in this poem and in others in Leaves of Grass, uses ships metaphorically to illustrate that life was meant to sail. This film is Bette Davis at her best! (I also love The Letter, and Jezebel as well). Through her sister’s intervention, she receives help and reaches new heights, and is no longer recognizable to either her family or to her family’s friends. Charlotte Vale dresses dowdily, she wears unflattering glasses, she is called fat, she is discouraged from achieving pulchritude, she is prohibited from relationships with men, and her mother censors her books. Now Voyager, is a film in which a young woman’s truculent mother, for many decades, hinders her from both self-actualization and self-expression. Bette Davis, in Now, Voyager plays Charlotte Vale, a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, in this beautifully interpreted film based on Whitman’s two-line poem. Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s magnum opus in which he allows the reader entrance into his thoughts on life and on sensuality.
Whitman, in his epic masterpiece, composed of over 400 individual poems, writes “The untold want, by life and land ne’er granted,/ Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek and find.” This poem is number 289 in this epic work. The title of the film comes from Walt Whitman’s “The Untold Want,” published in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Now Voyager, a 1942 film directed by Irving Rapper, stars Bette Davis.
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