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A Journal of Women Studies.
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WHATDOES MAE WEST HAVE THAT ALL THE MEN WANT?
Linda Williams
Recent articles about the films of Mae West have placed her in
the vanguard of feminist heroes. Molly Haskell, Joan Mellen, and
Marjorie Rosen have all noted the sexual freedom and bravado of
the West persona which ironically transforms men into soft, quiv-
ering sex objects. Much of this new appreciation has been valuable
in that it has gone beyond a low-level understanding of West's
bawdiness to a deeper understanding of how she uses sexual rela-
tions to assert her independence. Yet it is a mistake to construe
the West persona to be a champion of women's liberation as we now
understand it. To do so is to miss the broader import of her
cynical assessment of the world's vanity and to find fault with
the very things that she does best.
For example: Joan Mellen, perhaps the most militant of the
new feminist film critics, takes the West persona to task for its
failure to project beyond the mere reversal of sex roles to a more
enlightened liberation.' Yet there is a rhetorical hollowness to
Mellen's criticism, for it is obvious that if Mae West had pro-
jected such an enlightened liberation, the wonderful irony of her
character would be replaced by a much less interesting, though
exemplary, piety. Piety, in any form, could only destroy the
worldly cynicism and tongue-in-cheek humor that constitutes the
essence of the West character.
At the other extreme of Mae West criticism is Parker Tyler,2
one of the first critics to appreciate West's camp value. Tyler
goes so far as to deny her a fundamentally feminine identity.
His fascination with the West phenomenon lies in her sexual ambiv-
alence, the fact that she seems less a woman than a caricature of
a woman, "the white Goddess in metaphysically transsexual drag
a female impersonator who is, after all, a woman."3
S..
Though it is hard to agree entirely with Tyler's specifically
homosexual interpretation, he should be credited for noting a very
important element in the West character that more recent commen-
tators have tended to ignore--the element of parody. Mae West is
119
Williams
other men are thinking, cannot enjoy. This pleasure is what the
songs are all about. "I Likes a Guy What Takes His Time" is a
bold and good-humored assertion of her sexual enjoyment, which is
the real source of West's superiority over men. It is also the
only way she is able to project a faint glimmer of the "enlightened
liberation" that her latter-day feminist critics demand. But this
liberation is severely circumscribed by the world she is given, a
world in which truly equal relationships of mutual respect are
simply out of the question.
Again and again, West's films demonstrate that the only possi-
ble relationship between the sexes is that of triumph or defeat,
dominance or submission. In She Done Him Wrong, there is the won-
derfully incongruous scene in which Lou struts down the corridor of
the local penitentiary greeted by row after row of admiring prison-
ers. The implication that they have landed behind bars in the ef-
fort to win her more diamonds is appropriately symbolic. It is a
spectacle of weak, pathetic lovers whose real imprisonment lies in
their fascination with each other's desires rather than their own.
Lou, on the other hand, has no need for the approval of her peers
to determine the kind of man she desires. She will never be im-
prisoned as they are. Even the humble Salvation Army man, Cary
Grant in disguise, intrigues her.
At the end of the film, when Grant hustles her off in a cab
rather than a paddy wagon, claiming that from now on he will be her
jailer in marriage, Lou shrewdly replies, "I always knew you could
be had," and in fact, he has been had. Lou beats the rap and gets
the man she has coveted all along; it is clear that marriage will
not cramp her style. She already has said that Grant was the kind
of guy a woman would have to marry to get rid of. His modest con-
tribution to her store of diamonds is but one more token of her
triumph.
But if Mae West manages to triumph, it is because, unlike the
men in her films, she doesn't fool herself about the loyalty or
justice of the world she inhabits. It is a tough world, devoid of
all warmth--only her ironical good humor gives it luster.
In her attempts to cast West in the feminist heroic mold,
Joan Mellen has argued that West is often the champion of the just
cause, the defender of the innocent and helpless.5 Though this
may be the case in some of her weaker, post-Production Code films,
it is not true in the better films of her early, uncensored period.
And it is certainly not the case in She Done Him Wrong--the one
film over which West had the most control, and the film which
helped to precipitate the censorship to come. In She Done Him
Wrong, Lou is only technically innocent of the white slave trade
carried on by her associates. Appropriately, the advice she gives
the young girl whom she unwittingly leads down the primrose path--
"When women go wrong men go right after them"--is the kind of hard-
nosed advice the girl really can use. It is not surprising, then,
that Lou hardly blinks an eye when she does learn of the girl's
hard fate.
120
Williams
Thus, it would seem that the best feminist reading of the West
persona is a reading that emphasizes her acute awareness of the
function of vanity. Unlike the men in her films, West satisfies
her own vanity without becoming its slave. Within the limits of
this vain world, she is a tremendous success. But she does not use
her shrewd understanding as the worldly champion of innocent woman-
hood. Innocence is really beyond the power of her understanding.
To construe Mae West as a crusading precursor of the women's libera-
tion movement is to obscure her real contribution to the liberation
of women: her ability to expose and ridicule the pathetic feeble-
ness of a masculine desire which cannot choose its object without
first considering what the "other fellows" will think.
NOTES
1
Joan Mellen, "The Mae West Nobody Knows," in Women and their
Sexuality in the New Film (New York: Horizon Press, 1973).
3
3Lbid., p. 2, p. 15.
Mellen,
5Mellen, 234-238.
pp. 234-238.
pp.
121