Narrative "confidence games": Framing the blonde spectacle in gentlemen prefer blondes (1925) and nights at the circus (1984)

Frontiers

Volumn 25, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 47-62

  Cella, Laurie J C ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 12144258149     PISSN: 01609009     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (21)

1. Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes But Gentlemen Marry Brunettes (1925; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1998), 32. Subsequent references to the reprint edition are indicated by in-text citations.
2. Christina Britzolakis argues that viewing the female spectacle as redemptive from a feminist standpoint is naïve at best: "Theatricalism is the language of the female 'parvenue' whose critique of the establishment must always be conducted in the mode of a greedy and more or less fetishistic taking possession of its cultural properties, and which remains partly mortgaged to the heritage which it travesties." "Angela Carter's Fetishism," Textual Practice 9 (1995): 470.
3. In her assessment of Anita Loos's novel in the 1998 Penguin edition of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Regina Barreca notes that the construction of Lorelei's character has a decidedly feminist aim: "Lorelei's garter is flung down like a gauntlet as a challenge to the system that would confine her to the hideously dull realm of the appropriately feminine." "Introduction," in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, xii. Moreover, Barreca notes that this challenge to traditional femininity becomes more powerful through parody. "[Dorothy and Lorelei] embrace, and thereby simultaneously parody and undermine, the rituals of the powerful" (xiii). In this essay, I extend Barreca's assessment of Lorelei's parodic performances as self-reflexive feminist constructions.
4. In The Female Grotesque, Mary Russo explains that her scholarly interest in the female body stems (in part) from a childhood fascination with the feminine spectacle; she remembers her mother and aunts describing the horror of a woman attracting inappropriate attention as a shameful "spectacle." Russo writes, "For a woman, making a spectacle out of herself had more to do with a kind of inadvertency and loss of boundaries"(53). To reclaim the female body as a site of spectacular extremity, Russo set out to transform the derogatory notions of transgressive feminine behavior into a launching pad for further discussion of objectification, commodification, and visual pleasure. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1994).
5. Susan Hegeman, "Taking Blondes Seriously," American Literary History 7, no. 3 (1995): 525.
6. This is not the only instance when Lorelei omits key pieces of her narrative puzzle. Indeed, when Lorelei has successfully charmed a hard-headed attorney, she keeps his secrets out of her diary: "So it seems that Uncle Sam wants some new aeroplanes that everybody else seems to want, especially England, and Uncle Sam has quite a clever way to get them which is to [sic] long to put in my diary" (Loos, 31; emphasis mine). In this passage, it is clear that Lorelei is aware of the importance of this piece of information and thus withholds her "very, very great secret" on purpose. In this way, Loos emphasizes Lorelei's awareness of her own rhetorical power as she constructs her "encyclopediac" diary.
7. Dorothy Parker, Complete Stories (1929; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1995), 106.
8. Barecca, "Introduction," ix.
9. Rhonda Pettit, "Material Girls in the Jazz Age: Dorothy Parker's 'Big Blonde' as an Answer to Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," Kentucky Philological Review 12 (March 1997): 53.
10. Parker, Complete Stories, 105.
11. I b i d.
12. I b i d.
13. Parker, Complete Stories, 121.
14. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, directed by Howard Hawks (1953; Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, May 29, 2001).
15. Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 33.
16. Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca, "Pretext and Text in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," in Erens, Issues in Feminist Criticism, 116.
17. Barecca, "Introduction," xvii.
18. Jane Russell may have been the first, but she certainly will not be the last - imitating Monroe's "animal magnetism" has become a camp and drag show tradition, reflecting the need to redefine and re-commodify feminine beauty in another marginalized population. According to Pamela Robertson's recent analysis of Mae West's ability to inspire imitations and parodies of her persona, "camp" can be defined "as a structural activity [that] has an affinity with feminist constructions of gender construction, performance, and enactment; and that, as such, we can examine a form of camp as feminist practice." "'The Kinda Comedy That Imitates Me': Mae West's Identification with the Feminist Camp," Cinema Journal 32, no. 2 (Winter 1993): 57. From this perspective, the transgendered nature of feminine "imitation" reflects the multifaceted nature of the "confidence game" and its myriad of purposes.
19. Arbuthnot and Seneca, "Pretext and Text in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes," 118.
20. I b i d.
21. Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus (New York: Penguin, 1984), 7-8. Subsequent references to this edition are indicated by in-text citations.