She Done Him Wrong: Spectacle and Narrative

"THE UNRULY WOMAN GENDER and the GENRES OF LAUGHTER" 里关于 Mae West 在 “She Done Him Wrong”表演的选摘。

The plot isn’t the major interest in the film, however, but merely a backdrop for West’s performance—as “Lou” and as actress/author/unruly woman “Mae West.” That performance displays a number of motifs traditionally associated with the unruly woman: a carnivalesque openness toward sexuality; an ironic attitude toward romance; the presentation of her self, especially her gendered self, as visual construct or image, created through a performance of femininity that exaggerates its attributes and thus denaturalizes it; and a comic gender inversion that reduces men to interchangeable sexual objects while acknowledging, as Lou does, that men make the rules of the game (“I’m just smart enough to play it their way,” she says). West’s famous invitation —“Why don’t you come up and see me?”—mocks not only Puritan attitudes toward sex but Victorian ideals of female delicacy and sentimentality.

According to Berger, business in early capitalism was often conducted in rooms lined with paintings of passive female nudes, whose display of sexual difference and availability reassured the businessmen of their own power. In this case, however, West turns the tables on the men, asserting both her power over—and desire for—them. She draws on what Gaylyn Studlar describes as the masochistic pleasure men may experience in giving themselves over to the image of a female who evokes the all-powerful mother. Lou displays her savvy manipulation of her image and her ability to actively control the maze gaze in an early scene with Dan and the crooked couple, Serge and Rita.

In her own career, West brought elements of burlesque into the more middle-class performance form of vaudeville. She alludes to the connection in She Done Him Wrong, when a chorus line of bare-legged women introduces Lou’s singing act. The film, in fact, is set during the heyday of burlesque, when, as its opening titles remind us, “legs were confidential.”

West was unique, however, both in her control of her image and in its impact. As she explains in her autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do With It, “I became a writer by the accident of needing material and having no place to get it. At least not the kind of writing I wanted for my stage appearance... . Yes, I had to create myself, and to create the fully mature image, I had to write it out to begin with” (72). That image took on a life of its own, she noted:

Few people knew that I didn’t always walk around with a hand on one hip, or pushing at my hairdress and talking low and husky. I had created a kind of Twentieth Century Sex Goddess that mocked and delighted all victims and soldiers of the great war between men and women. I was their banner, their figurehead, an articulate image, and I certainly enjoyed the work. (163)

Furthermore, the image she did create was multivalent and powerful, consistent with the topos of female unruliness. While some reviewers praised her skills as a comedian and her appeal as an entertainer, Variety reviewed her act in terms of the grotesque: “She is one of the many freak persons on the vaudeville stage where freakishness often carries more weight than talent.”