Friday, October 3, 2008

The trouble with Ouiser Boudreaux...

I enjoyed reading Stella Bruzzi's explication of androgyny even though I haven't seen Orlando as yet. It made me wonder about the ways in which one sees figures as well as moments of androgyny in a film like Steel Magnolias. Here I am thinking in particular of the characters of Ouiser Boudreaux and Clairee Belcher and the ways in which they inhabit their bodies as well as adorn them. As much as this film deals with the importance of feminine homosociality, as often an important counterpoint to the family, the space of the beauty parlour (Truvy's) also make the bodily surfaces, their 'realities' and their transformations especially charged ones. Bruzzi's references to the myriad kinds of innovative play with gender codes of embodiment and sexuality by fashion designers in the post-second world war context, in particular, those to Ralph Lauren's designs for Diane Keaton which would heighten femininity through its 'loss', reminded me of the ways in which the character of Ouiser is marked with a kind of androgyny. At one level there seems to be a temporal explanation for her androgyny, whereby, she seems to be rejecting, in an almost militant fashion, the masculine as an object for sexual attraction, as well as the ideal of heterosexual marital bliss, because of her disillusioning experiences with multiple marriages to men. But the way she is represented also seems to evoke one of Bruzzi's formulation of androgyny as an attempted fusion, or bringing together of the masculine and the feminine while retaining both resonances. While she is the one woman who is shown to routinely display some degree of ('unfeminine') physical prowess by having to pull around her gigantic and unruly dog, she is also shown to be using various services offered by Truvy's. Her later, evasively shown coupling with an earlier sweetheart evokes comparisons with the 'reciprocal bonding' of Jo and Tinman in The Ballad of Little Jo, as discussed by Bruzzi. What acts as a further complication is the fact that Ouiser's presence Truvy's also generates comic relief with Annelle bungling each time she has to perform any kind of treatment upon her. The beauty salon as a space in itself, constantly demonstrates visually the 'process' of beauty-creation. The climactic scene of the film however, performs a further reversal which, in my mind, confirms the location of a certain kind of androgyny within the character of Ouiser and troubling the apparently univalent gender identities of some of the others. Following the funeral service for Shelby, M'Lynn's outburst, especially her desire for a violent rejection of the way things have turned out can be read as both a rupturing as well as heightening of her role as the nurturing, adapting mother and model of femininity. This outburst is followed by Clairee's apparent acquiescence to M'Lynn's destructive desire, inviting her to hit Ouiser. This invitation can also be seen as a veiled and channelized expression of lesbian sexual desire. And completing the triad of surprises, is Ouiser's own response with fear at the threat of being actually assaulted. This seems to disturb her representation so far as the 'manly woman'. However, as before, this also becomes the moment of crucial diffusion of melodramatic emotional excess with the use of humor, of which Ouiser is both the butt as well as fond object.
Pam Cook's chapter on the British costume melodrama propelled me to think of the ways in which Gone with the Wind plays with the idea of masquerade as being - necessary to the embodiment of femininity (Scarlett at the beginning of the film) or femininity as always being a put-on. Later in the film, the masquerade of feminine frailty or nonchalance or frigidity becomes crucial for a woman to survive in war-times. The film shows costume as being crucial to this playing at femininity. Costume also takes on the force of a resistant feminine practice that refuses the frugalities and deprivations of the masculinist and disorderly enterprise of war. The film, invoking the distinctions between true selfless femininity ( as embodied by Melanie) and its feigned, begrudging forms (Scarlett), asserting the value of the first, but also offering to the viewer, the pleasure of repeatedly chafing against it, the pleasure of a kind of amorality and desire for survival at any cost through the character of Scarlett. The duality of the viewer's engagement with Scarlett - enjoying her easy self-justifications and opportunism while seeing her penalization as being justified - is reminiscent of the kind of double audience engagement Stella Dallas seemed to elicit.
I also wanted to think about the ways in which the costume dramas can be read when placed in a colonial context. The ones that Cook looks at are necessarily ones which involved fellow imperial-powers and which located the cultural wars within European precincts. I wonder whether her argument that these dramas were less instances of cultural stereotyping, and more interrogations of British national identity during wartime, would sustain an exploration of representations of the colonial other(s) in these films.

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