which are frequently shot outdoors, most woman's films are set in the domestic sphere, which defines the lives and roles of the female protagonist. Whereas the events in woman's films – weddings, proms, births – are socially defined by nature and society, the action in male films – chasing criminals, participating in a fight – is story-driven. The themes in woman's and male-oriented films are often diametrically opposed: fear of separation from loved ones, emphasis on emotions, and human attachment in women's films, as opposed to fear of intimacy, repressed emotionality, and individuality in male-oriented movies. The plot conventions of woman's films revolve around several basic themes: love triangles, unwed motherhood, illicit affairs, the rise to power, and mother-daughter relationships. The narrative pattern depends on the activity engaged in by the heroine and commonly includes sacrifice, affliction, choice, and competition. The maternal melodrama, the career woman comedy, and the paranoid woman's film, a subgenre based on suspicion and distrust, are the most frequent subgenres. Female madness, depression, hysteria, and amnesia were frequent plot elements in Hollywood's woman's films of the 1940s. This trend took place when Hollywood tried to incorporate aspects of psychoanalysis. In the medical discourse in films like Now, Voyager (1942), Possessed (1947) and Johnny Belinda (1948), mental health is visually represented by beauty and mental illness by an unkept appearance; health was restored if the female protagonist improved her appearance. Friendship among women was fairly common, although the treatment was superficial and focused more on women's dedication to men and female-male relationships than on their friendships with each other. The woman's films that were produced in the 1930s during the Great Depression have a strong thematic focus on class issues and questions of economic survival whereas the 1940s woman's film places its protagonists in a middle- or upper-middle-class world and is more concerned with the characters' emotional, sexual, and psychological experiences. The female protagonist is portrayed as either good or bad. Haskell distinguishes three types of women that are particularly common to woman's films: the extraordinary, ordinary and the "ordinary woman who becomes extraordinary". The extraordinary women are characters like Scarlett O'Hara and Jezebel who are played by equally extraordinary actresses like Vivien Leigh and Bette Davis. They are independent and emancipated "aristocrats of their sex" who transcend the limitations of their sexual identities. The ordinary women, in contrast, are characters like Lara Antipova, who are bound