Items related to I'm No Angel: The Blonde in Fiction And Film (Cultural...
Have you ever wondered why there are so many "dumb blonde" jokes―always about women? Or how Ivanhoe's childhood love, the"flaxen Saxon" Rowena, morphed into Marilyn Monroe? Between that season in 1847 when readers encountered Becky Sharp playing the vengeful Clytemnestra―about to plunge a dagger into Agamemnon―and the sunny moment in 1932 when moviegoers watched Clark Gable plunge Jean Harlow's platinum-tressed head into a rain barrel, the playing field for women and men had leveled considerably. But how did the fairy-tale blonde, that placid, pliant girl, become the "tomato upstair," as Monroe styled herself in The Seven Year Itch?
In I'm No Angel: The Blonde in Fiction and Film, Ellen Tremper shows how, at its roots, the image of the blonde was remodeled by women writers in the nineteenth century and actors in the twentieth to keep pace with the changes in real women's lives. As she demonstrates, through these novels and performances, fair hair and its traditional attributes―patience, pliancy, endurance, and innocence―suffered a deliberate alienation, which both reflected and enhanced women's personal and social freedoms essential to the evolution of modernity. From fiction to film, the active, desiring, and sometimes difficult women who disobeyed, manipulated, and thwarted their fellow characters mimicked and furthered women's growing power in the world. The author concludes with an overview of the various roles of the blonde in film from the 1960s to the present and speculates about the possible end of blond dominance.
An engaging and lively read, I'm No Angel will appeal to a general audience interested in literary and cinematic representations of the blonde, as well as to scholars in Victorian, women's, and film studies.
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About the Author:
From Publishers Weekly:
Ellen Tremper is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, The City University of New York, and the author of "Who Lived at Alfoxton?": Virginia Woolf and English Romanticism.
Tremper's authoritative treatise on the role of the blonde in modern fiction and early film is as fascinating as it is dense. The author of the Virginia Woolf biography "Who Lived at Alfoxton?" shows how the blonde evolved radically over two centuries. In fairy tale lore, she was the angelic and passive Rapunzel, who could be saved from imprisonment only by an all-powerful prince. But by the mid-1800s, romance got ahold of her—Thackeray's Becky Sharp is an example—and the blonde became a bombshell in the truest sense: a pre-Raphaelite siren rocketing through the patriarchy. When the blondes of the silver screen—Harlow, Dietrich, Monroe—hit big, the blonde had become iconic and transgressive: she was a catalyst of sexual and social disorder, particularly when she left comedy and went to film noir. As her hair—dyed an impossible shade—lit up screens and pages, the blonde ignited social mores with her brassy independence. Tremper's thesis wanders in places, as she equates the blonde with other transgressive characters (people of color, Jews), and at times the sheer volume of her scholarship overwhelms. Nevertheless, the work explores a complex character with thoroughness and verve. Photos. (Mar.)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
- PublisherUniv of Virginia Pr
- Publication date2006
- ISBN 10 0813925215
- ISBN 13 9780813925219
- BindingHardcover
- Number of pages288
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