The Cinderella Princess and the Instrument of Evil: Surveying the Limits of Female Transgression in Two Postwar Hollywood Scandals
1995; University of Texas Press; Volume: 34; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2307/1225744
ISSN1527-2087
Autores Tópico(s)Shakespeare, Adaptation, and Literary Criticism
ResumoWhat do we talk about when we talk about Hollywood scandal? What is a scandal-an event, or the expected or unexpected response to its revelation in public discourse? How does Hollywood itself generate, manage, and manipulate scandal? Is Hollywood afraid of scandal? One television documentary about famous star scandals has gone so far as to compare the effect of scandal (Dare one whisper the word?) on a Hollywood mogul to sunlight's effect on Dracula, despite the remarkable number of careers it examines which were obviously enhanced by transgressive behavior.1 Because most histories of star scandal in Hollywood merely recount in greater or lesser detail who did what to whom and why, often drawing selectively only on one or two contemporary journalistic accounts produced ex post facto (sometimes by Hollywood itself) to exploit the scandal, we really don't know much about why scandals are what they are why they could be for some, yet not for others, profitable rather than ruinous.2 This essay is an examination of two famous scandals of the postwar years, the extramarital affairs of Rita Hayworth and Ingrid Bergman with, respectively, Aly Khan and Roberto Rossellini. The scandals are often linked because they occurred nearly simultaneously and had similar narrative features: both involved married women who consorted with men who were not their husbands by whom they became pregnant. But more important, the twin scandals have acquired a specific function in the lore of and about Hollywood. Their apparently different outcomes Bergman's career was ostensibly badly damaged, Hayworth's enhancedare often presented as evidence that scandal affects careers in direct proportion to the compatibility of the transgressive activity with the star's textual and extratextual image as promulgated in popular discourse.3 The following, for example, is a standard rendering of this point of view: Ingrid's career was ruined in America, and she was even denounced on the Floor of Congress as an 'instrument of evil,' because she wasn't behaving as the public expected; she was supposed to be like Joan of Arc, which she had just played on the screen. But Rita Hayworth's career only grew bigger; she was the movies' Gilda after all; she was supposed to be a vamp.4
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