Commodification and Female Agency in Possessed and Stella Dallas
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Many woman’s films in 1930s Hollywood suggest a connection between women and commodities. This is especially true of fallen woman films, in which the woman’s fall nearly always involves her being commodified as an object of male desire, a process during which female agency is eliminated. In this article, however, I examine two fallen woman films of the 1930s that portray their women protagonists’ commodification not as a loss of agency but rather as a way of exerting agency, allowing them to manipulate their commodification as a means of enacting their own will. This dynamic appears prominently in two archetypical fallen woman films of the era, Clarence Brown’s Possessed (1931) and King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937). I argue that the protagonists from each of these films exert agency by masquerading in their commodified roles, which ultimately results in the reverse effect of liberating these women from their continuous commodification. My argument centers on the analysis of the acts of sacrificial masquerade the two women protagonists perform, in which they transcend their commodified labels by appropriating and performing those labels.
Abstract
Many woman’s films in 1930s Hollywood suggest a connection between women and commodities. This is especially true of fallen woman films, in which the woman’s fall nearly always involves her being commodified as an object of male desire, a process during which female agency is eliminated. In this article, however, I examine two fallen woman films of the 1930s that portray their women protagonists’ commodification not as a loss of agency but rather as a way of exerting agency, allowing them to manipulate their commodification as a means of enacting their own will. This dynamic appears prominently in two archetypical fallen woman films of the era, Clarence Brown’s Possessed (1931) and King Vidor’s Stella Dallas (1937). I argue that the protagonists from each of these films exert agency by masquerading in their commodified roles, which ultimately results in the reverse effect of liberating these women from their continuous commodification. My argument centers on the analysis of the acts of sacrificial masquerade the two women protagonists perform, in which they transcend their commodified labels by appropriating and performing those labels.
참고문헌 (19)
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