The Anti-Heroine: Women and the Hollywood Fantasy Role

During the Thirties and Forties, actresses dominated the Hollywood film industry. Famous leading men existed, but they were leading men who were paired with leading women. The buddy-buddy pictures, a phenomenon of the seventies, were generally unthinkable then. The satisfaction one received from a film like Red Dust (1932) came from the bickering romantic interplay between Gable and Harlow. In a modern film like The Sting (1974), the closest comparable thrill comes from watching Redford and Newman winking at each other. In the past, an actress could be the lead in a film; today an actress is either the victim or the victim's best friend. The era of Katharine Hepburn has given way to the screams of Jamie Lee Curtis.

This is not to imply that the era of the actress was also an age of liberation. Far from it, the actress films of the Thirties and Forties operated with a double system. In a film like Christopher Strong (1933), Katharine Hepburn could be assertive, aggressive, and masculine in behavior but she still had to commit suicide when the man she loved was unattainable. The 1939 film The Women excludes the male entirely, yet the unseen men are the total objects of the women's lives, and with their compulsive scheming and backstabbing, the women of the film are in need of more than mere consciousness raising. Sub­jugation, and not liberation, was the moral of these films. Barbara Stanwyck died repeatedly for being more masculine than the men in her films, and Hepburn always gave way in the end to Tracy's male chauvinism. Hollywood drew the bottom line and an actress either cooked or died.

Unlike their male counterparts, the anti-heroine was never allowed to ride off into the sunset. The anti-hero was given mythic respect; the anti-heroine was merely an unnatural competitor in the male dominion. The anti-hero was allowed total individuality; the anti-heroine was expected to marry and conform. The anti-hero needed no one and preferred his isolation; the anti-heroine needed both her man and the trappings of society. Freedom was fought for by men; the anti-heroine waited to surrender to Mr. Right.

A critical key to this double standard was the Hollywood view of feminine sexuality. Excess or suppression were the two forms of sexuality, leaving women with a choice between nymphomania and frigidity. In the 1946 film Gilda, Rita Hayworth avoids frigidity with great success. When Hayworth announces that "If I'd have been a ranch, they'd have named me: 'The Bar Nothing'," her character is neatly slotted into a masculine view of women. The divinity of the Divine Rita was largely based on her sexual availability, and the psychology of Gilda, her most famous role, has the same level of sophistication as Norman Mailer analyzing Marilyn Monroe, for Gilda is a man's notion of female behavior. This is not to imply that Gilda is not a good film, quite the opposite is true. It does achieve what it sets out to do, which is the final-reel suppression of the very impulses which it has had a lot of torrid fun.

Traditionally, filmmakers have been much more comfortable with frigidity. The woman who succeeds in a man's world cannot be normal, according to such films as Lady in the Dark (1944). Ginger Rogers' character may be a successful magazine editor, but that doesn't mean that she's emotionally stable. Her father-complex drives her toward men with equally large mother-complexes, creating incompatibility and an emergency trip to the psychiatrist's couch. A woman must be like a man in order to succeed in business, according to Lady in the Dark, and thereby lose her place as a woman. Her need for fulfillment is only achievable through fantasy, as the outrageous excessiveness of the film takes her through the Dali-like dream scape of the subconscious.

If the business woman had to overcome frigidity, Hollywood also sug­gested that the housewife had to acquire it. Proclaiming that "Love is a liability in marriage," Dorothy Arzner's 1936 production of Craig's Wife arguably delivers a double message. Rosalind Russell's obsessive concern with maintaining the perfect household is the societal image of woman pushed to its most alarming extreme. Her house becomes an extension of her per­sonality, and both are cold and austere. The Hollywood housewife is supposed to be concerned with dust balls under the cabinet, but Arzner takes it to the point of neurosis, and thereby questions the social structure which has created the problem in the first place. While Arzner does not necessarily have a feminist viewpoint, she does successfully raise questions often avoided in early Hollywood films.

Perhaps one of the best expressions of this contradictory view of woman is contained in the 1945 film Mildred Pierce. The film was made at that crucial period at the end of World War Two when returning servicemen discovered that their wives and girl-friends were now competing with them in the work force. With a shortage of male workers during the war, a woman's place became the assembly line, and after the war many women were not ready to turn their jobs back to men. The threat of women invading male territory became frighteningly real and men had to quickly regroup to meet the home front challenge. Mildred was not just a woman, she was a potential front line soldier.

Mildred Pierce splits the attack in half by allowing Joan Crawford to be redeemable through her repeated acts of self-sacrifice, while her daughter Veda takes on an increasingly monstrous and despicable form. With the persona split in two, Mildred can ultimately become an acceptable woman who can finally make the "right" compromise, while Veda can take the contempt and moral outrage. A rule in any battle is to divide and conquer.