On Being Fashionably Incorrect: Woman’s Film, Fashion, and Stella Dallas

Abstract

Despite the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, the decade of the 1930s in America was an unprecedentedly productive time for Hollywood, and the woman’s film, which depicts the life of an adult female protagonist and is designed to appeal mostly to female spectators, was one of the flourishing genres that survived the Great Depression. While scholars have viewed classical Hollywood cinema as an ideological apparatus, representing dominant ways of seeing the world and reinforcing hegemonic views, this essay proposes Hollywood films as a version of modernism that is not exclusive, arcane, and anti-modern, but inclusive, mass-produced, and highly susceptible to the experience of modernity. Drawing on Miriam Hansen’s notion of vernacular modernism marked by texts’ susceptibility to reflect and confront the constitutive ambivalence of modernity, this essay focuses on the woman’s film and fashion in tandem and examines how in the woman’s film fashion is represented through the female protagonists’ costumes and circulated in the form of a discourse. This essay argues that the woman’s film of the 1930s tends to associate the heroine’s experiences of modernity involving fashion and glamour with the themes of class rise and acquiring manners, and that in case of maternal melodrama, as manifested in King Vidor’s 1937 film On Being Fashionably Incorrect: Woman’s Film, Fashion, and Stella Dallas 117 Stella Dallas, the pattern is inverted. That is, the heroine’s sartorial practices do not necessarily lead to her class rise, but bespeaks her subversive individuality immune from ideological views on fashion.