Gentlemen Prefer Blondes Research Articles

Neither typist nor genius: Hollywood as workplace in the John Emerson and Anita Loos how-to guides

ABSTRACT In the 1920s screenwriting duo Anita Loos and John Emerson wrote two how-to guides that offered advice for launching a Hollywood career, How to Write Photoplays (1921) and Breaking into the Movies (1922). Rather than emphasizing genius, the guides focus on Hollywood as an egalitarian workplace where writers become professionals through training and experience. This article argues that the guides thus functioned to distinguish Loos as a professional writer, a strategic identity opposed to both the male modernist genius and the female typist. Contra readings of Loos as ambivalent to professionalism that have been based on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925), by focusing on her screenwriting career, this article argues that Loos deployed an identity as a professional writer to avoid being pigeonholed by gendered ideas about writing.

The “Thingness” of the American Middlebrow:

In this paper, I examine the ways in which Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby both critique and engage with materialism and consumerism as middlebrow texts. Bill Brown’s discussion of the power and meaning of “things” of literature (2003; 16-17) serves as a framework through which I analyze the double “thingness” of the middlebrow as depicted in these novels—that is, the simultaneous investment in and critique of consumer objects. To that end, I analyze both the print culture histories and content of Blondes (which is widely considered a middlebrow text in academic scholarship) in conversation with Gatsby (which is not always thought of as a middlebrow text). I argue that, rather than view middlebrow within a high/low brow paradigm, we should instead consider the ways in which the middlebrow operates with and within mass consumer culture as well as provides a critique of that culture. Because the American middlebrow has a distinct socioeconomic history, I demonstrate how these novels also grapple with the “thingness” of American identity and the Americanness of “things” by centering the protagonists’ engagement with material objects in the construction of their identities. Gatsby and Blondes demonstrate the middlebrow American quality of things through their narrative content, and the novels’ histories as print objects reflect their circulation as commercial things themselves. This article challenges understandings of the “middlebrow” as a genre unto itself by examining the historical situatedness of the term and its evolving definitions. This article also invites renewed conversation around the middlebrow by proposing a new perspective and an alternative approach to the understanding of middlebrow literature. I argue that these novels present an ideal re-entry into discussion of the middlebrow because of their disparate print culture histories and the cultural capital (or lack thereof) they signify in the present day. This article thus traces the print histories of these two novels alongside analyses of their reception histories and critiques the concept of a middlebrow literature, turning again to contradictory definitions of the term to suggest a more fluid understanding of the middlebrow in scholarship should be able to account both for the continuing appeal of early twentieth-century middlebrow literature and the ways in which the middlebrow itself as an aspirational aesthetic and consumerist ethic has evolved and is ubiquitous in the twenty-first century.

A Girl Like We: Narrative Doubling and the Politics of Femininity in Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

A Girl Like We: Narrative Doubling and the Politics of Femininity in Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the “Colyumn”: Sophistication, Publicity, and Jazz Journalism

ABSTRACT This article considers how Anita Loos’s frequent column writing and close ties to the newspaper industry shed light on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. If these contexts sharpen our understanding of protagonist Lorelei Lee’s (and American culture’s) obsession with publicity and sophistication, Blondes likewise hones our understanding of a curious periodical genre known as the “colyumn.” Defining this genre prompts questions about what it would mean to think of Blondes, a text often treated as a novel, as a “colyumn.” As this article will show, Loos’s Jazz Age classic both depends on and extends the generic conventions of the “colyumn.”

Empowerment narratives, Marilyn Monroe, and “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend”: a survey

ABSTRACT This article follows adaptations of Marilyn Monroe’s musical number “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend” in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), to reveal whether or not the adaptations allow us a critical discourse of empowerment. Most often adaptations entangle themselves in Monroe’s image, but some drift away in order to focus on their own visions. In the end, the key to empowering adaptations seems to be Monroe herself. The article suggests the tighter adaptations clasp to an imagined (and false) persona of Monroe, the further their narratives seem to drift from empowerment.

Modern Sentimentalism: Affect, Irony, and Female Authorship in Interwar America

Modern Sentimentalism: Affect, Irony, and Female Authorship in Interwar America

Thoughts on Marilyn Monroe: emblem and allegory

This essay has emerged out of my own recent ‘turn’ towards Hollywood, which has been largely inspired by rewatching its old films with the possibility, characteristic of digital spectatorship, of pausing and repeating, as discussed in my 2006 book Death 24x a Second.1 This was really a ‘return’ rather than a ‘turn’; Hollywood had been for me, as for so many others, the origin of my love of cinema. This recent return, however, took me back, above all, to the last years of the studio system, the Hollywood of the 1950s, the decade of its decline. While the studios battled against the rise of television, upheavals in the industry as well as demographic and social change, Hollywood cinema experienced an amazing last flowering. My thoughts on Marilyn Monroe have recently become intertwined with this history. Some years ago I made a ‘remix’ of thirty seconds taken from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (Howard Hawks, 1953) in order to analyse Monroe’s performance and its particular significances and fascinations. In the process I began to think again about the emblematic nature of her image. I had begun to be interested in its enigmatic qualities in the context of my 1996 book Fetishism and Curiosity;2 interested that is, in the way that the ‘Marilyn’ figuration, in its very excess, seemed to conceal an unnamable repressed, emblematic of commodity fetishism but also implying an underneath, another side, to 1950s American prosperity and investment in sexual display. But in the context of my more recent return, I have come to see Monroe’s emblematic qualities in relation to the crisis in the Hollywood studio system and its decline. Not only was she the last, and probably the greatest, female superstar but her struggles with Twentieth Century-Fox were symptomatic of the changes taking place in the industry and their implications for Hollywood’s eroticization of the female star spectacle.

Allure of the Abroad: Tiffany & Co., Its Cultural Influence, and Consumers

Allure of the Abroad: Tiffany & Co., Its Cultural Influence, and Consumers

Gatsby: The Cultural History of the Great American Novel Beyond Gatsby: How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures

Gatsby: <i>The Cultural History of the Great American Novel</i> <i>Beyond</i> Gatsby: <i>How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture</i> <i>So We Read On: How</i> The Great Gatsby <i>Came to Be and Why It Endures</i>

Gatsby:The Cultural History of the Great American NovelBeyondGatsby:How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American CultureSo We Read On: HowThe Great GatsbyCame to Be and Why It Endures

Gatsby:<i>The Cultural History of the Great American Novel</i><i>Beyond</i>Gatsby:<i>How Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Writers of the 1920s Shaped American Culture</i><i>So We Read On: How</i>The Great Gatsby<i>Came to Be and Why It Endures</i>

Gentlemen Prefer Adaptations: Addressing Industry and Gender in Adaptation Studies

Adaptation studies’ dominant mode has tended to focus on textual analysis. Such an approach neglects the processes of production, a lacuna that works to mask underlying systems of industry and capital. The absence of attention to industry has resulted in an occluding of the ways in which gender in for-profit entertainment has been represented and shaped. This essay intervenes in adaptation and gender studies through a detailed historical analysis of the interrelationships of industries affecting 1920s print, stage, and film versions of Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes . Through this analysis, the essay demonstrates the efficacy of a more broadly configured form of adaptation in examining the interrelated industrial complex affecting representations of gender in commercial entertainment. It explores individual interventions in the process of constructing gender in adaptations.

Anita Loos: The Soubrette of Satire

Anita Loos:The Soubrette of Satire Kristine Somerville and Speer Morgan Click for larger view View full resolution Anita Loos, courtesy of the George Eastman House Motion Picture Document Collection [End Page 87] Work is more fun than fun. —Noël Coward F. Scott Fitzgerald became the spokesman of the 1920s, but it could have been Anita Loos if she had been game for the role. Her novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a story of a beautiful gold-digger’s antics, is just as evocative of the bathtub-gin era of American history as Fitzgerald’s early work, This Side of Paradise. Perhaps the mantle went to Fitzgerald and not Loos because of her special affection for the demimonde—shady ladies, con men and charlatans all-around—rather than spritely flappers and their coiffed beaux of the Ivy League. Maybe it was the rakish company she kept—hustlers, tarnished ladies and the occasional con artist, along with Hollywood’s working class of writers and actors. Or perhaps she was simply too old when the jazz age was ushered in; she was nearly forty when Blondes was published in 1925. When asked if she was a flapper, she characteristically replied, “The only thing I ever flapped was the pages of a yellow legal pad.” Like Fitzgerald’s, her first novel became an instant best seller, selling out in a day. The book sardonically depicts the underbelly of jazz-age frivolity, a theme Fitzgerald would later tackle with high seriousness in The Great Gatsby. Truth be told, Loos was simply too busy working to care about her cultural ranking or place on the best-seller list. She liked having a hit on her hands, but the work was its own reward. After the fuss over Gentlemen Prefer Blondes had settled and she’d had her fill of being a fêted author, she returned to Hollywood in 1931 to resume her screenwriting career. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had offered her $1,000 a week to join its stable of writers. One of her coworkers was Fitzgerald, whose literary star had fallen hard. One of her first jobs for Irving Thalberg, the head of the studio, was to rewrite his adaptation of Katharine Brush’s novel Red-Headed Woman, about a trollop’s progress from secretary to wife of an aristocrat. It was comfortable territory for Loos—questionable class climbers were her specialty. Corinne Anita Loos was born in 1888 in Sissons, California. Her father, R. Beers Loos, noticed right away that little “Nita,” the runt of the family with a mischievous demeanor and soulful, luminous eyes, was a natural performer. He became a stage father. His connections in the San Francisco theater world got five-year-old Anita cast in A Doll’s House, [End Page 88] followed by the leading role in David Belasco’s production of Little Lord Fauntleroy. Anita’s parents were unhappily married: “My mother was an earth-bound angel and Pop was a scamp.” She preferred her father’s company, though she resented being the family’s main source of financial support when he failed to keep various theater managing jobs. At sixteen, shy of five feet tall and with a boyish figure, she looked the baby vamp. Her youthful appearance, mature personality and versatile acting ability kept her center stage. Her father lent her to the Empire in exchange for pirated scripts that came from cribbing Broadway shows and then selling them for a fraction of the cost of royalties. For a time, Anita did double duty. Outfitted in a blond wig and billed as Cleopatra Fairbrother, she performed at the Empire while acting at the Lyceum under her own name. Despite her stage charisma, Loos didn’t fit in at school. The girls thought actresses little better than prostitutes, while her childlike looks didn’t appeal to the boys. She later recalled that she knew she was destined to be an outsider, largely commenting on life rather than participating. She also knew that she hated acting; the profession was full of “numbskulls and narcissists.” Anita Loos wanted to be a writer. She spent hours reading at the San Diego library and in her dressing room at the...

Fashionable Females: Women, Clothes, and Culture in New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2010 ‘American Woman: Fashioning a National Identity’ exhibition explored the evolution of female fashion from 1890–1940, a period when the role of women in society developed rapidly. This article examines two of the cultural roles that fashion helped to define: the heiress figure of the 1890s, and the 1920s flapper. Both types of fashion identity had a distinctive look, such as the corseted waist and moulded silhouette of the 1890s dresses, and the shorter skirts and dropped waist of the later flapper fashions. Focusing on these two models of womanhood, the article explores the idea of fashion more generally in two novels that discuss these figures: the heiress in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and the flapper in Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1925).

Performing gender in the studio and postmodern musical

This essay explores two distinct historical periods in the Hollywood musical through a Butlerian reading of gender as a performance. The two example films from the studio era, Howard Hawks’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and the restored version of George Cukor’s A Star is Born (1954), are contextualised not only within the studio system but through the constructed star personae of their leads—Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland. Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Rob Marshall’s Chicago (2002), the two example films from the twenty first century, are contextualised within a Jamesonian post-modern aesthetic and as examples of the non-studio, non-star filmic text as act of nostalgia. In contrasting these historical periods, the essay posits that the studio musical was, in fact, always already “post-modern” in its fragmentation of narrative in favour of the star performance, which constructs the gendered persona of the star. In addition, it is suggested that the sub-textual subversion of traditional female roles within the studio star performance is in many ways more effectively critical of gender conventions than the intentionally parodic aesthetics of Luhrmann and Marshall.

Blondes Have More Fun : Anita Loos and the Language of Silent Cinema

Alongside the well-known controversy about the coming of sound, the history of early cinema also includes a debate about titling: words printed on the silent screen. Anita Loos, a screenwriter and author of the best-selling 1925 novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes , developed a mode of writing in which literature and cinema unmoored the conventional relationship of the image to the word. Taken together, Loos’s titles and her novel show a cross-genre relationship of exchange that has the effect of reconceiving language and image. At a transitional moment when literary institutions were changing and the cinema was being born, Loos invents new forms of vernacular pleasure: the literary cinema, and the cinematic novel.

From Vernacular Humor to Middlebrow Modernism: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the Creation of Literary Value

From Vernacular Humor to Middlebrow Modernism: Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and the Creation of Literary Value Daniel Tracy (bio) So then we saw a jewelry store and we saw some jewelry in the window and it really seemed to be a very very great bargain but the price marks all had francs on them and Dorothy and I do not seem to be mathematical enough to tell how much francs is in money. —Lorelei Lee, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes When the editors of Harper’s Bazar published Anita Loos’s serial novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes over six months in 1925, they were asking a question that parallels, in terms of aesthetic value, Lorelei’s more humorous problem with money: how much modernism is in literature and art?1 How do you begin to acknowledge it, and thus reap the rewards of knowing it? How do you make modernism pay, not for experimental writers themselves but for Harper’s Bazar readers? Frankly hostile to experimental literature and art in the nineteen teens, the magazine had only recently, with hesitation, begun to treat aesthetic modernism as potentially legitimate as high culture. In the nineteen teens, while the more modernist-friendly Vanity Fair’s art reviews tried to accommodate the aesthetic visions of both modernists and their antagonists in the Academy of Arts and Design, Harper’s Bazar printed an anti-modernist screed by the Academy’s secretary.2 In addition, a regular columnist known as “The Bachelor” frequently found time to deride experimentation in art as so much rubbish. In the early twenties, Bazar writers just began treating modernism as something their readers [End Page 115] might need to know about in a more-than-dismissive fashion.3 One article examining expressionist drama noted, noncommittally, “One approves or disapproves—and vigorously, too,” which suggests the ambivalence over taking a clear position on modernism that haunted the magazine (Hatton and Hatton). As most critics of Loos’s novel have noted, the obsession with refinement as cultural capital drives both the plot of Blondes and its publication in a middlebrow magazine—that is, one devoted to teaching its readers the contents of high culture (Rubin, Radway). The heroine of Blondes, Lorelei Lee, pursues men, and more importantly their money, by convincing others and herself that she is “refined,” a state that begins as intellectual and literary, but ends up moral (she marries a “Prespyterian” censor [77]). While late in Blondes Lorelei proves herself to her future husband by pretending to reform her friend Dorothy, in earlier chapters she reads (that is, she has her maid read) novels and biographies and embarks on a career as an “authoress” by beginning her diary, all to impress the men around her who financially support her for the purpose—they claim and she accepts—of educating her (4). So when Lorelei writes that she does not know “how much francs is in money,” she is both humorous in her misunderstanding and revealing of her nonrecognition of national difference, and both of those undercut her claims to the cultural capital she wishes to exchange by writing about her experience (far more so than not actually knowing the franc to dollar conversion rate). And the Ralph Barton illustration accompanying this passage ironizes her textual representation yet further by calling into question Lorelei’s claim that Dorothy shares her problem—while a confused Lorelei holds out a limp, crumpled franc note to the jeweler as if it were a piece of trash from the floor, Dorothy looks at her with a wide-eyed smile of amusement. To turn Lorelei’s verbal dross into the gold of real sophistication, Loos adds layers of irony to Lorelei’s narration and Barton adds visual commentary that often enhances the identification of the reader with Dorothy rather than the heroine. Harper’s Bazar readers capitalize on Lorelei’s mistakes, then, by recognizing in themselves the valued culture that she lacks even as they might enjoy her ability to take advantage of men—a split in the novel’s tone I discuss as a key effect of its appropriation of nineteenth-century vernacular humor. [End Page 116] Yet the dilemma faced by Bazar’s editors, I think, ought...

Re-reading B. S. Johnson by Philip Tew, Glyn White

MLR, 104.2, 2009 563 reviews as well as poetry, drama, and fiction, and managed to inject these genres with a recognizable style, vision, and voice that extend their narrow frame. For writers such as Dorothy Parker and Anita Loos, for instance, fashion captions and silent film scripts provided themwith early training in finding thewitty mot juste thatwould serve themwell when they tackled poetry and fiction. Hammill structures her book around case studies, and each chapter features one author and the major works (sometimes a single one) on which her fame and popularity rested at the time of publication. While women such asMae West and Margaret Kennedy may seem to belong to opposite universes on the surface, Hammill succeeds in foregrounding theways inwhich each author in her study developed a distinct literarypersona. Each section not only portrays the context fromwhich their texts emerged, it also documents the sometimes tumultuous or controversial reception of theworks and traces the impact of this reception on the authors subsequent efforts. While each chapter could be read separately according to one's interest in a particular figure, the cumulative effectof reading about these women and their struggle to achieve critical acceptance and respect despite their financial success highlights striking continuities between theirvarying experiences. At the same time,Hammill neatly draws the individual circumstances, style, and voice of each writer, and the fact thatmost of her authors wrote in comic modes (one-liners, satire, parody) provides her with a wealth of entertaining sources to analyse. Perhaps themost important effectof reading Hammill's study is the interest itgenerates for the sources themselves. Ifher book brings more readers to Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm, for example, it would more than justify its publication. In and of itself,Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture between theWars amply rewards both the common reader look ing for a glimpse into a fascinating period inwomen's literature and the scholar ofmodernity seeking new areas of research or simply confirmation that studying inter-war literaturebywomen is indeed aworthwhile and richly rewarding pursuit. University of Portland Genevieve Brassard Re-reading B. S. Johnson. Ed. by Philip Tew and Glyn White. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. xviii+246 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-0-230-52492-7. In his prefatory essay to this new collection of essays on thework of B. S. Johnson, Jonathan Coe tells of finding a note in Johnson's papers for his last, unfinished trilogy,House Mother Normal. Apparently the worst possible outcome Johnson could imagine for thework was that 'some academic cuntwill produce a study on if (p. xvi)?a typical outburst from theman pithily described by one of his contempo raries as being continually wracked by self-certainties'. An awareness of its subject's would-have-been resistance to itsproject pervades this study of the late Johnson, his work, and the critical field that has latterly sprung up around him, and its edi tors acknowledge the book's own part in creating a field of Johnson 'studies'. This collection thus rather self-consciously takes on themantle of crowning a period of rediscovery ofhis work, one largely instigated byCoe's justlypraised 2004 biography 564 Reviews of Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story ofB. S. Johnson (London: Picador). This rediscovery of his work is inseparable from the idea that Johnson is somehow more suited to our critical landscape than he was to his own: Johnson's work was un dervalued in his own era, for reasons the editors of this collection make clear: In the 1960s and 70s literary criticism, like the nation, was less diverse, lesswilling to countenance difference, and B. S. Johnson's work offered a strong challenge to this cultural hegemony (p. 4). As such, Johnson's reputation needed rescuing from the literary establishment that had sought tomarginalize him, a marginalization that came about in no small part because of his resistance to neat categorization, and because of his unrepentant, alienating refusal to compromise his experimentalism. The aim, then, is explicit: rereadings are needed of his work partly due to a desire to pay him the belated respect of taking him seriously, of repaying a debt that the critical establishment has long owed...

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes: The Evolution of Mate Preference among Strategically Allocated Males

Male mate selection during polygyny traditionally has been eclipsed in the literature by its female counterpart. Existing models that have studied male mate choice have concluded that males with genetically inherited preferences for females exhibiting particular traits are often less fit than males without such a preference, leading to preference loss. In this article, we explore the consequences of a fundamental difference between male and female mate choice, the way in which the opposite sex acts as a resource during mating. By incorporating a strategic process at the ecological level, we show that if males are allowed to actively adjust the distribution of their courtship efforts over the available classes of females, male preference can be maintained as a polymorphism. Further, the resulting coexistence induces a reproductive segregation within the population that, when coupled with genetic control of female traits, can lead to strong linkage disequilibrium between the alleles for trait and preference. These processes can cause complete assortative mating to emerge in the model.

Whose Dixie? Erskine Caldwell's Challenge to Gone with the Wind and Dialectical Realism

Whose Dixie?Erskine Caldwell's Challenge to Gone with the Wind and Dialectical Realism Chris Vials In September 1936 Margaret Mitchell responded to a letter from an admiring fan regarding her recently published novel, Gone with the Wind. The fan, a doctor from Ohio, had apparently asked her if she was familiar with the work of the other famous Southern writer at the time, Erskine Caldwell. "I did not see 'Tobacco Road' but I read the book," she replied, referring to Caldwell's famous Broadway play and novel: "When I read it I thought it was intended for a grand parody on the gloomy Russian novelists and I laughed almost as much as I did over 'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.' Shortly afterwards, I learned it was supposed to be stark realism and must admit I was somewhat bewildered!"1 The exact contents of the original letter from Ohio have been lost, but the fan's reference to Caldwell suggests a narrative of the South circulating on the national stage in direct competition with Gone with the Wind at that particular historical moment. Mitchell and Caldwell, to be sure, wrote from within diametrically opposed political constellations in the 1930s and 1940s, and their political positions deeply informed each of their portraits of the region. Mitchell's flippant response to Caldwell's claim to realism hints at these constellations, and more. Pitting "stark realism" against popular entertainment, Mitchell's response points to how the label of realism was necessary to authorize any ontological claims among her generation of writers. Further, she implicitly makes what I consider an accurate observation of left aesthetics; despite the recurrent advocacy of realism by the 1930s left as the only valid mode of representation, they did not always practice what they preached. Mitchell had good reason to be flippant. Her novel and its cinematic counterpart had already begun to cement a familiar image of the South and its history [End Page 69] in the national imagination during the 1930s and 1940s—one of bucolic plantations and fertile cotton fields, charming planters and docile slaves. Gone with the Wind was number one on the best-seller list in 1936 and 1937 and would sell more than 8.6 million copies to become one of the best sellers of the twentieth century.2 Its film adaptation was perhaps even more of a critical and popular success—in 1939 it won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, and is still hailed as a cinematic classic. To this day, Gone with the Wind (hereafter, GWTW) has been held as the epic narrative of the South and its history among many people both inside and outside the region. As someone raised in Texas and Alabama, I remember a relative watching the film and crying when I was a child. It is the only movie I recall bringing her to tears. It would be easy to conclude from all of this that the representation of the South put forward by GWTW achieved complete hegemony in U.S. popular culture, and further, has been hegemonic for quite some time. But the matter is much more complicated. While the popular diffusion of GWTW is widely acknowledged, much less known is that the novel was outsold for quite some time by a rival narrative of the region that has been largely forgotten: Caldwell's God's Little Acre. Published in 1933, Caldwell's story of poor white Georgia farmers and mill hands sold more than eight million copies, making it not only the most commercially successful novel on the South through the 1960s, but also the third best-selling work of fiction in the United States for the first seventy years of the twentieth century. By 1965 God's Little Acre had still outsold GWTW, and Mitchell's novel only surpassed Caldwell's sales a decade later (and only slightly at that).3 Compared to GWTW, however, the transition of God's Little Acre from page to cinematic stage proved much less remarkable. Released in 1958, the success of the film adaptation among both critics and audiences was limited at best. The challenge God's Little Acre (hereafter, GLA) posed to GWTW is significant, for despite the...

Love and Death in Goethe: 'One and Double' by Ellis Dye

882 Reviews available. Carrdus then includes verses by Kuntsch's female relatives and friends (re ligious and occasional poetry) arranged by author (pp. 229-3I3), then a section of documents (Kuntsch's autobiography and letters as well as epicedia and funeral ser mons concerning Kuntsch and her circle). The commentary section (pp. 33 5-406) is rich and detailed; the individual biographies (pp. 407-26) are concise and helpful. A concluding bibliography and index help us to understand and appreciate these texts. Anna Carrdus has done a tremendous amount of archival research, organization, and thinking for this edition. It belongs in every research library. OHIO STATEUNIVERSITY BARBARA BECKER-CANTARINO Love and Death in Goethe: 'One and Double'. By ELLIS DYE. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics and Culture) Rochester, NY: Camden House. 2004. xiv + 333 PP. $75; ?50. ISBN I-57I I3-300-3. Against a backdrop of interwoven notions of love and death in European literature and culture from theMiddle Ages to the present day, Ellis Dye sets out to look speci fically at Goethe's use of the Liebestod as topos in the immediate context of German Romanticism. Leaping back and forth in cultural history with sometimes alarming agility, Dye makes connections from Gottfried's Tristan through Grimmelshausen to Wuthering Heights, Wedekind, and Marilyn Monroe's role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The reader will need towork to keep up. The notion of something 'one and double' (like the gingko leaf) recurs throughout the textual analyses: the paradoxical coincidence of individuality and union, sameness and difference, death and life/love in human relations; 'Stirb und werde!'. An entire chapter is devoted to the paradoxical mysteries of 'Selige Sehnsucht', and Dye gives a rich, fluid, associative reading of the poem. He also looks at poems that touch, often uncomfortably, on the coexistence of pain and love, such as 'Heidenroslein', 'Das Veilchen', Gretchen's song 'Der Konig in Thule', and 'Ganymed'. Dye's reading of 'Heidenroslein' as a poem about rape is not new, but it leads him tomake an interesting connection between Heidenroslein's fate and the destruction of Adelheid von Walldorf by awould-be lover, inGotz von Berlichingen. The love-death theme, Dye argues, isparticularly at home in the ballads; although he declines to say why ('why love and death find a home in the ballad, in particular, is a question we won't answer here', p. 53). Why not? In a chapter on portrayals of women that draw on the medieval and early modern idea of Frau Welt, Dye shows us how thewill to anchor fear of sex and fear of death in woman apparently never goes out of fashion, from Grimmelshausen's Courasche via Goethe's Adelheid and Wedekind's Lulu toMarlene Dietrich. Unusual here is not the recognition of the pattern, but the inclusion of Goethe among the list of writers in thrall to it:Goethe is so often excluded, as if he alone were immune to cultural beliefs. As well as tackling Adelheid, Dye gives an interesting analysis ofWerther's Lotte as a femme fatale, and takes another look atGoethe's perilously seductive water women: the new Melusine and the nixie in 'Der Fischer'. A chapter on the Lehrjahre that focuses onWilhelm's identification with Hamlet never quite seems to fit the love-and-death argument, although identity and difference are brought into play as part of the 'one and double' theme. It is followed, however, by a really excellent chapter exploring the dialectic of separation (death) and union (love) inDie Wahlverwandtschaften-here Dye's focus fits effortlessly, and really contributes to his reading of the work. A chapter on love and death, irony, and the Romantic in Faust is also interesting, but less coherent (like Faust itself, perhaps). Overall, the reader will have to accept that coherence is probably not part of Dye's project. He states on several occasions that he isno fan of over-tidy or forced readings, MLR, 101.3, 2oo6 883 and could not be accused of producing them. The downside of this is a sense of chaos in the work: analyses are rarely followed by clear conclusions. The upside is that there is a sense of movement throughout the work...