What Does Mae West Have That All the Men Want?

Abstract

Recent articles about films of Mae West have placed her in vanguard of feminist heroes. Molly Haskell, Joan Mellen, and Marjorie Rosen have all noted sexual freedom and bravado of West persona which ironically transforms men into soft, quivering sex objects. Much of this new appreciation has been valuable in that it has gone beyond a low-level understanding of West's bawdiness to a deeper understanding of how she uses sexual relations to assert her independence. Yet it is a mistake to construe West persona to be a champion of women's liberation as we now understand it. To do so is to miss broader import of her cynical assessment of world's vanity and to find fault with very things that she does best. For example: Joan Mellen, perhaps most militant of new feminist film critics, takes West persona to task for its failure to project beyond mere reversal of sex roles to a more enlightened liberation.' Yet there is a rhetorical hollowness to Mellen's criticism, for it is obvious that if Mae West had projected such an enlightened liberation, wonderful irony of her character would be replaced by a much less interesting, though exemplary, piety. Piety, in any form, could only destroy worldly cynicism and tongue-in-cheek humor that constitutes essence of West character. At other extreme of Mae West criticism is Parker Tyler,2 one of first critics to appreciate West's camp value. Tyler goes so far as to deny her a fundamentally feminine identity. His fascination with West phenomenon lies in her sexual ambivalence, fact that she seems less a woman than a caricature of a woman, the white Goddess in metaphysically transsexual drag S. . a female impersonator who is, after all, a woman.3 Though it is hard to agree entirely with Tyler's specifically homosexual interpretation, he should be credited for noting a very important element in West character that more recent commentators have tended to ignore--the element of parody. Mae West is