Trollope's Material Girl

Abstract

The Madonna Phenomenon In her recent book, Postfeminisms, Ann Brooks argues that many current feminist debates over popular culture's potential as a site of `political and representational contestation' can be seen to coalesce `around Madonna as a popular cultural icon'. (1) That is, from the moment she first exploded on the international music scene in the early 1980s with her chart-topping debut album, Madonna has positioned herself centrally and controversially at the cultural intersection between sexual politics and consumerism, at the intersection, in other words, of what represents a strategic site for feminism's ongoing intervention into the arena of cultural politics. As such, both Madonna herself and the body of her work have attracted intense scrutiny from feminist thinkers. But as Ann Brooks rightly points out, `the relationship between Madonna's representational politics and feminist theory is a complicated one' (p. 149). It is a relationship that is problematized in large part by the way Madonna has appeared simultaneously to subvert and revive dominant patriarchal constructions of feminine identity and sexuality in a mass-media consumer world. And it is precisely because Madonna, as an iconic figure, projects images of herself that fluctuate wildly and ambiguously between reinventing and reinscribing the feminine that the question of whether Madonna's oeuvre can be interpreted confidently, as John Fiske does, in terms of a consistent `feminist ideology-critique' remains hotly contested. (2) Still, it is clear that over the years Madonna's material has consistently contested and transgressed sexual, social, and political boundaries, even if her representational politics resist stable alignment with those of recent feminist theory. The way that Madonna positions herself centrally yet controversially at the cultural intersection between sexual politics and consumerism is exemplified by one of her earliest hit singles, `Material Girl' (1984). (3) At one level, the song seems to embrace women's place in the consumer culture of late capitalism. It appears to celebrate the consumer power that women exercise in today's material world, while recognizing and affirming the way in which that power essentially extends from the commodification of feminine identity and sexuality. In particular, the song's chorus (`You know that we are living in a material world and I am a material girl') offers an embracement of consumer culture's materialist ethos. Lines such as `the boy with the cold hard cash is always Mr Right' and `if they don't give me proper credit I just walk away' in turn attest to the song's mercenary sexual complexion. They plainly reveal a calculated complicity with the values and practices of materialism. Such a reading of the song is further strengthened if we take into account its accompanying music video. Right down to the choreography, scenery, wardrobe, make-up, platinum-blonde hair, and diamond jewellery, Madonna's video re-enacts Marilyn Monroe's signature performance of the tellingly titled song `Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend' in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), an unapologetically sexist screen adaptation of Anita Loos's 1925 novel about how to `bag' a millionaire. Drawing upon reference points so firmly fixed in the popular imagination, the video's intertextuality openly invites us to align the figure of Madonna, as an embodiment of the `Material Girl', with that of Marilyn Monroe, and so with one of the twentieth century's most celebrated and commercialized sex icons. Though she does not break radically with established constructions of the feminine in `Material Girl', Madonna does not entirely endorse those constructions either. Rather, highlighting the artificiality of such constructions, she advocates their manipulation and exploitation as a powerful and pragmatic way to realize material desires. …