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Dissertation Information for Victoria Sturtevant

NAME:
- Victoria Sturtevant

DEGREE:
- Ph.D.

DISCIPLINE:
- Women's Studies

SCHOOL:
- Emory University (USA) (2002)

ADVISORS:
- Matthew H. Bernstein

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
- Martine Watson Brownley
- David A. Cook

MPACT Status: Fully Complete

Title: Domestic Disorder: Women in American Film Comedy, 1930--1940

Abstract: This study is an investigation of how comediennes and comic actresses used and influenced the language of film during the American Great Depression, when our nation's eyes were turned toward our domestic affairs with an attention that was both intense and uneasy. Exploring the idea that the Depression was a feminizing moment for an America mired in "domestic" woes, this project argues that it was also a moment in which our cinematic representations of those problems necessarily centralized female figures in the process of clarifying, mocking, and solving domestic issues. In analyzing how the films of this era locate the passive comforts of the celluloid image in such diverse, challenging, and often unexpected figures as Marie Dressler, Mae West, Shirley Temple, and Lupe Vélez, I show how Depression comedies offer compelling models of female subjectivity and rebellion within a comic frame.

Chapter one, Cinema of Regression , analyzes Broadway-trained comedienne Marie Dressler. This chapter discusses her late career as a startling moment in the history of American screen comedy, when motherhood was relieved of its function as a sentimentalized pillar of patriarchy and given a centrally defining place, in comic narrative and in the formation of the utopian communities that comedy strives for. Chapter two, Come Up and See Me Sometime deals with two films, She Done Him Wrong and It Happened One Night . I trace out how these films construct a narrative discourse on censorship and gendered visual power. Chapter three, It's Just that We Look Dumber , traces the cultural fetishization of blonde hair articulated in comedies of the 1930's. Chapter four, Spitfire , is an investigation of Mexican-born comic actress Lupe Vélez. I argue that her outrageously stereotyped star persona represents spoke to American anxieties about not just the exotic or foreign Other, but more specifically the immigrant.

By casting female figures as both "unruly women," who openly defy patriarchal codes of conduct through comic reversals, and as "tricksters," who exercise covert power in feminine guises, Depression comedies challenge traditional gender roles, opening them up to revision, scrutiny, and play.

MPACT Scores for Victoria Sturtevant

A = 0
C = 0
A+C = 0
T = 0
G = 0
W = 0
TD = 0
TA = 0
calculated 2008-02-03 00:56:21

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