Glamour Girls: An Examination of the Female Spectacle within Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Gigi (2012)

Undergraduate: Sarah Morris

Faculty Advisor: Inger Brodey
Department: Comparative Literature

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This project applies Laura Mulvey’s theory of the relationship between the male gaze and female spectacle to Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos and Gigi by Colette and their respective stage and film adaptations. The essential dynamic hinges on the powerful male gaze establishing and imposing codes of female performance that propagate male pleasure. From there it examines ways in which the structure of the texts and the female characters within them subvert, resist, or reinforce this dynamic through tools such as satire and female camaraderie, domestication and fetishization, Because the timeline of these texts are concurrent and the authors were colleagues and collaborators, I propose that changes within the adaptations reflect three major elements: necessities of form, contemporary reactions to and authorial experience with performing women. I tie together the two novellas-turned-plays-turned-musical-films by theme in order to ultimately comment on essential elements of male-female relationships—money, power, marriage, and happiness—as they apply to the specific dynamic of male spectator and female spectacle. In this task, the thesis utilizes the six primary texts, biographies of the authors, directors, and major actors, as well as a great amount of critical scholarship on each work and its historical period.