The Nance

[deliasherman]

I started this last week, but it's still pretty much accurate--including not quite being unpacked.  The piano's gone, however, and I now have 25 square feet of living room space I didn't have before, which is a good thing.  Anyway, finishing it now, and hoping to Be More Timely in the Future.  (Ha

Comments

[deliasherman]

You are so right about that article, which I read yesterday and loved. There will always be people who write complicated, nuanced, thorny, active, ambiguous female characters (my own dear wife among them), but they are not necessarily going to be the people who make the cover of The New York Times Sunday Book Review or the best seller lists. Because popular culture tends to self-perpetuate, as all powerful systems do, and change course v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y, if at all.

Yet, Ellen and I watched She Done Him Wrong last night, and Mae West sure had the complicated and full of agency female down pat. Outside of the lush curves and the diamonds, Lou functions more as a man than a woman in that movie, and a criminal at that, self-centered and single-minded, in quest of diamonds, physical satisfaction, and respect. She is neither more nor less a victim of society than the men who desire and want to own her, and neither more nor less admirable in her actions than they are. Not to say that She Done Him Wrong is exactly a good movie, or feminist, or socially enlightened (the black maid and the Jewish peddler are both pretty hair-raising, not to mention the Russian gigolo). But it is an interesting movie, in just this context.