We are presented with
three extremely strong female stars for this weeks readings: Marilyn Monroe,
Grace Kelly & Audrey Hepburn. IT was interesting to see the stark
differences between these influential women as well as the similar way in which
they all came to fame. While Audrey Hepburn’s used her own international and
rough familial background to help with publicity campaigns, producers
emphasized Grace Kellys’ family’s “adherence to the good life” to boost her
image. How Monroe and Kelly showed up as popular images was fairly similar, however,
Kelly’s role as an lady-like but independent and determined starkly contrasted
Monroe’s representation of the ideal playmate upon which the male gaze would become
fixated. It is also interesting to look at Audrey Hepburn here in terms of
being an “event” compared to Marilyn Monroe and Grace Kelly. William Brown
claims that Hepburn is an event primarily due to her emergence out of nowhere
and the wholesome, full-grown character she already embodied from the start.
By the end of his
chapter on “Monroe and Sexuality” Richard Dyer finally expressed the
realization about Marilyn Monroe that I found most compelling. He states that
“my mind kept slipping between seeing her as embodying notions of sexual
(vaginal) fulfillment and as grasping after a sexual fulfillment that
constantly eludes her, her mouth always ready but with no signs of
satisfaction” (page 62). While she herself flaunts her stardom as a symbol of
female sexuality and female sexual desire, this desire she so hopes to release
to the public is never actually fulfilled. Monroe, as Dyer tells us, wanted to
be a playboy. I like to think that above
else that came with her stardom, she
wanted her explicit sexuality to be accepted as a normal aspect of femininity,
rather than as a danger or menace to society. Unfortunately, her role also
exemplified the way in which female desire was reliant on male sexual desire
and gave no promise of female sexual fulfillment. She didn’t express the
message of how, why and in what ways females were in desire of sex, but rather
expressed that females wanted and were open vessels for sex. It is hard to
understand, and I think for anyone to state what Monroe’s intentions truly were
in the 1950s as she emerged into the expressive and womanly, yet victim-like
object of every American male’s desire. Was she aware of the way in which
companies such as Playboy was exploiting her body as a spectacle for the male
gaze and thought that she was at least making some sort of difference by
portraying any sort of female sexual desire?
While I think that
Monroe was exceptional in her own ways although she played into the male
consumer culture, I think that Audrey Hepburn was more of an actual advocate
for a changing and possibly more androgynous role for women. She was cast as an
“in-betweener” in seemingly every way throughout her career. She exemplified
both masculine and feminine characteristics, and did this not only on screen
but off screen as well. She did not just play the androgynous part, she was the
androgynous girl in reality. It is intriguing to look at the parallels between
Hepburn’s actual self and her “virtual” self within the media and entertainment
industry. It seems that the impact of her individualistic female characters
would not have been as powerful, if not the same at all, without the alignment
of that subtype with her actual life.
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