What Does Mae West Have That All the Men Want?

Author(s): Linda Williams

Source: Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn, 1975), pp. 118-121
Published by: University of Nebraska Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3346422
Accessed: 21/11/2010 07:40

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=unp.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

University of Nebraska Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Frontiers:
A Journal of Women Studies.

http://www.jstor.org
 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

Linda Williams is a graduate student in Comparative Literature

at the University of Colorado. She is currently studying film
theory on a Fulbright at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in
Paris.
 Williams

not, by anybody's standards, a particularly beautiful, nor a

sexually desirable woman. Yet the men in her films are crazy about
her. With her ripe, over-corseted corpulence; her gleaming, slight-
ly bucked teeth; her swaggering walk, the hefty shoulders rhythmi-
cally hunching to shift vast expanses of mammary flesh, she is a
grotesque parody of an already strange entity--the stereotypical
"ideal" woman. Everything about her is exaggerated to such an ab-
surd degree that it is worth asking why the men in her movies
fall for her at all. For it is clear that what we (today's audi-
ence) appreciate in Mae West--her wisecracks (which the men never
seem to hear), her ironic triumph over their blind stupidity--is
not what they appreciate.
What the men in Mae West's movies get excited about is neither
beauty nor sexual desirability, but a rather abstract idea of both
these things which they think they should share with her other ad-
mirers. In She Done Him Wrong (1933) the best of her pre-Production
Code films based on her own Broadway play, Diamond Lil, West plays
a Gay Nineties saloon entertainer named Lady Lou. Early in the
film, there is a revealing exchange of lines. Lady Lou's current
lover-protector, Gus, is asked how it feels to have Lou in his
possession. He answers with surprising candor, "It's kinda nice
havin' a gal all the fellows want, makes a guy feel important."
Lou, on the other hand, when asked how she likes having her nude
portrait hung over the bar as a token of Gus's esteem, replies with
similar candor that she likes it fine, "But I wish he hadn't hung
it over the free lunch." Both replies, Gus's naive one, and Lou's
cynical one, comment on the nature of West's desirability. They
hint that it is neither her beauty nor her personality that is
coveted, but the conventional assessment of that beauty and person-
ality as determined on the open market.
These comments reveal a crucial distinction in all Mae West's
films--films which are never about love and always about this
specifically socialized form of desire. Gus determines Lou's
value on the simple basis of the jealousy aroused in the other
"fellows," whom he correctly regards as his potential rivals.4
Like all the men in Mae West's films, he is weak, incapable of
desiring her on the strength of his own impulses. Lou, for her
part, simply makes sure that we all understand the process by
which her value is determined when she objects that her portrait
has been associated with the free lunch--a commodity assessed at
so low a value that it is given away.
In She Done Him Wrong, diamonds are the tangible evidence of
the value men place on Lou. She never misses an opportunity to
shine a few in their faces, taunting them, in good-humored fashion,
with their blind stupidity. In similar fashion, all Mae West's
films are about the stupidity of men who can be conned into de-
siring an "objectively" undesirable woman. In this magnificent
con game, she is doubly triumphant: not only does she get the
diamonds, but also she delights in the sexual pleasure that the
men, so wrapped up in their jealous fascination with what the

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).

2parker Tyler, Screening the Sexes: Homosexuality in the

Movies (New York: Anchor Books, 1973).

3
3Lbid., p. 2, p. 15.

41n Deceit, Desire and the Novel, the French structuralist

critic Rene Girard has noted the predominance of this form of
mediated desire in the bourgeois novel. The great novels of this
period, Girard asserts, reveal the inner mechanism of a desire
whose impulse towards the object is ultimately an impulse towards
a mediator (a potential rival) whose desire the original subject
imitates. Girard's point is that mediated desire is a debasing
and feeble form of desire compared to the direct desire for an
object.

Mellen,
5Mellen, 234-238.
pp. 234-238.
pp.

121