Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Archive

Volume 3 Number 1, April 2002

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DiBattista, Maria. Fast-talking Dames. London: Yale University Press, 2001.  365pp.,   IBSN 0-300-98815-9, $27.95 / £19.95 (Hbk).

Reviewed by

Trisha Rhodes

       Maria DiBattista’s book, Fast-Talking Dames, traces the arrival and departure of a uniquely American phenomenon. For two decades, DiBattista suggests, the fast-talking dame dominated the American screwball comedy and this book is a celebration of that reign. Not only did the fast-talking dame speak the language of an emerging era, she was also instrumental in inventing that language – ‘the language that was to become the American idiom’. Making herself mistress of slang, with all its democratising potential, she deserves to be celebrated, not just as a ‘sexual ideal but as an icon of American individualism’.

         With the arrival of the “talkies”, it was no longer enough to have a beautiful face; a girl’s most attractive feature was brains and what better way to show off this attribute than to be able to ‘snap ’em back’; to speak with wit, verve and energy, to give as good as she gets, to call the shots and reinvent and determine, not only herself and her future, but the men in her life.

       DiBattista traces the origins of the term, dame, from Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, through pantomime to its gangster associations. The term is tainted, she suggests, and arouses suspicions of ‘moral as well as verbal laxity’. In all its senses, the term speaks of open mockery of ‘traditional notions of respectable femininity’ and, perhaps more to the point, arouses sexual anxiety through connotations of licence and sexual role reversal. For the same reasons, it exerts a ‘strong erotic pull’. But comedy allows for such flirtations with the boundaries of respectability in order to ‘show us the difference between irreversible moral collapse and the happy fall…by which young lovers lose false pride in themselves and gain a true understanding of what they are worth to each other’.

     It is through her mastery of language and verbal dexterity that the heroine of American comedy films of the 30s and 40s provides an alternative to that ‘distinctly American genre’, the western. The inarticulate male as signifier of masculinity of the western is countered by the verbal challenge of the screwball comedy that not only provides another ‘version of the manly’, but ‘paved the way to a new order of womanhood’. That new womanhood, however, shows traces of a comic heritage. While her physical agility finds its original in the slapstick ‘girl heroes’ of the silent film era, her linguistic virtuosity is derived from a more literary tradition; those talkative women of English stage comedy, from Shakespeare through Restoration drama to Shaw, Wilde and Coward (the Irish contribution seems to have been co-opted). Despite this, DiBattista sees her subject as a singularly 20^th century American prodigy if only for their attachment to that peculiarly American phenomenon; slang. And it is through her appreciation and appropriation of the flexibility and creativity of language that the fast-talking dame comes to express the ‘fluid and unstable character of American society in an era of drastic change’. Inevitably, we are brought to conclude, such self-determined females had to give way to the changing social pressures of post-war America – goodbye smoothed-tongued dames with brains, hello witless babes with bodies, a.k.a. Marilyn Monroe.

        Such is the central contention of DiBattista’s argument which she follows up with some straightforward textual analysis of a number of classic films of the period: It Happened One Night, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday to name but three. There is nothing wrong with that, in fact, if nothing else, this book did make me want to go back (yet again) to see the films all over. Not with any desire to re-examine my views on the roles of the women, however, simply to enjoy the films. Her descriptions (and it has to be acknowledged that one of the most difficult things to describe effectively and successfully is the nature of comedy) are extremely effective in conjuring up the energy and ‘feel’ of the event and one of the great strengths of the book is DiBattista’s extensive and encyclopaedic knowledge of the material. But that in itself seemed to be a problem. There were times when it was difficult to keep track of who and what was being discussed. Examination of one film or actress was so often derailed by seemingly endless asides and parentheses - all brimming with interesting insights - but which were, nonetheless, distractions from the main purpose. Textual examination never fully authenticates the theoretical proposition and that is a huge disappointment.

     A further difficulty is the way in which, while tracing the career of a particular actress  - an idiosyncrasy of this book was the way actresses were grouped by hair colour – each performance is treated as an extension of the last so that, for example, Irene Dunne is seen as the ‘fast-talking dame most in peril of succumbing to the soft-spoken lady’ over the course of a series of films. Roles are not seen as discrete interpretations of character. On the contrary, actresses somehow seem to acquire fast-talking status for their characters by a process of recapitulation and development of previous roles. A great deal has been written about the nature of star performance and reception which might endorse this perspective but rather than examining the significance of that process, here it is merely taken for granted as a fact of star performance.

     This book promised to be a major alternative to the seemingly endless accounts of the patriarchal domination of mainstream cinema that have bedevilled film analysis for so long; a welcome and much needed reminder that there is a wealth of filmic material that demands a less myopic feminist account. However, Fast-Talking Dames succeeds at the level of documenting a particular genre and its characteristics, rather than offering a new approach to cinematic representation and gender.