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
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’.
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.