Marilyn Monroe, Audrey Hepburn, and Staring at White Women (Core)

Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face proves an interesting contrast to Marilyn Monroe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. The movies actually share a great deal of similarities; in no particular order:

- they both involve a trip to Paris
- they are both musical rom coms about a woman who might not get the one man she loves
- they both feature a buddy element
- Monroe and Hepburn both play women who are social outliers
- both Hepburn and Monroe get a featured dance number
- both involve a song and dance to escape through a crowd (at a cafe in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and at the professor's house in Funny Face)
- they both tell the story of a woman who's true value is recognized and validated at the end via marriage

HOWEVER, despite being very similar films, the treatment of Monroe and Hepburn is night and day.

Hepburn's Jo is an intellectual. She is a quality girl (literally dubbed so in the film). She is classy, sophisticated, and unconcerned with materialism. She is presented in style as elegant, delicate, ladylike, high brow, etc.

Monroe's Lorelei is a dumb blonde showgirl. She is a quality-less girl--she grew up poor in Little Rock, she is alluded to having a shameful past (not a virgin), and her fiance's father is actively against her as a daughter-in-law. She is classless, unsophisticated, and a gold digger obsessed with diamonds. She is presented in style as voluptuous, sexy, flashy, immodest, etc.

When Monroe dances in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, it is all wiggles and T&A. In Funny Face Hepburn is given a cerebral, modern-style dance.

And in relation to our reading in Heavenly Bodies, Monroe's "vaginal" (57) body and dress are once again opposite to Hepburn's much more structured, contained wardrobed.

However, in this same reading, we can find the thing that links both characters:

"The smart woman will keep herself desireable. It is her duty to herself to be feminine and desirable at all times in the eyes of the opposite sex." (Heavenly Bodies, 42)

Both Lorelei Lee and Jo Stockton are on a quest to be viewed by their respective man as the ideal--the object to be desired. They both are literally put on stages as a showgirl and model respectively to be gazed upon. And they both succeed, in very different ways and on very different terms, in entrapping a man by having him look at her enough. 

In the reading the idea of being an object of men's gaze and of desire gets more specific in a way which I think can connect these characters further and even extend that connection to other representations of femininity in Hollywood and beyond. Heavenly Bodies describes how "the white woman is offered as the most highly prized possession of the white man, and the envy of all other races" (HB, 43). Certainly the platinum blonde Monroe and the British waif Hepburn are White Goddesses. We have seen the white goddess to some degree in all the films, but the most pronounced of all was in The Sheik. In that film, Lady Diana Mayo's whiteness attracts not only Valentino but every ethnic man in the desert! 

But this white goddess as the object of gaze has an even more unabashed example. The readings mentioned a quote from Bus Stop, "Look at her gleaming there so pale and white," which immediately reminded me of Oscar Wilde's Salome.

Salome may be the greatest example of a female character celebrated for her whiteness ("like a the shadow of a white rose in a mirror of silver") and existing only to be gazed upon by men (in this case Harod and The Young Syrian). But in Wilde's Salome, the young princess turns this around, and turns Iokanaan into her obsessive object of desire by gazing upon him and becoming enthralled with HIS whiteness ("I am amorous of thy body, Iokanaan! Thy body is white like the lilies of the field that the mower hath never mowed.") 

Of course, in the play, when Salome takes on the sexual authority to objectify a man, she then must have that man beheaded, make out with the severed head, and then be killed herself as "monstrous." So perhaps Jo, Lorelei, and Lady Diana were wise to quit while they were ahead...