“Some things are proper, and some things are not”: forgotten men and disciplined women in My Man Godfrey

Abstract

ABSTRACT My Man Godfrey (Gregory La Cava, 1936) begins with a critique of Depression-era public relief efforts but then focuses for the remainder of the film on the attempts of one ‘forgotten man’ to restore patriarchal authority to a female-dominated household. In the substitution of disciplined women for politically resistant homeless men, the film maps the consent of the subject to sovereign rule onto the screwball comedy’s plot convention of female submission, thus naturalizing sovereignty, and feminizing the disciplined subject of the welfare state.