I'm No Angel: The Blonde in Fiction and Film (review)

In I'm No Angel, Ellen Tremper sets out to chronicle alterations in the way blonde characters have been presented in fiction and film from the Victorian era to the present. Using a term oddly taken from horror literature, Tremper sees the blonde as a shape-shifter who changed with real women's evolution to modernity. Tremper sets out to historicize blonde characters by showing that they might represent either progressive or anti-progressive ideas popular at the time of their portrayal. This rather sweeping suggestion suits Tremper's wide-ranging examination of diverse works from the 1900s to the 1960s. In fact, I'm No Angel strikes me as a bit too sweeping in its content. I should also preface this review by saying that I am not sympathetic to authors who spend a great deal of time presenting plot summaries of novels and films, and in my opinion, Tremper devotes far too much of her book to doing just that.

Tremper begins by looking at selected works of Victorian fiction. She concludes that Becky Sharpe in Vanity Fair embodies Thackeray's attack on Victorian materialism and that the Brontes and George Eliot create friendships between blondes and brunettes at odds with previous representations of female rivalry. She also proposes that blondes in these novels contribute to "restoring sexuality and personhood to representations of all women" (77). Unfortunately, she never fully explains why we are to see characters like Rosamond in Middlemarch, whom Tremper describes as a victim of her culture's emphasis on wealth and social standing, as restoring personhood to anyone.

Tremper goes on to examine the dark side of blonde characters by looking at literary representations of the femme fatale. I was somewhat dismayed when Tremper moved from Thackeray to the Brontes and Eliot without any real explanation. Do their works contain the only blondes in Victorian literature? In the chapter on the femme fatale, this jumping turns into quantum leaping from Rossetti and Swinburne's poetry to the fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Louisa May Alcott, Bram Stoker, and Kate Chopin. This is just too much leaping back and forth across the ocean for me, and all we seem to be jumping from is one plot summary to another. What little analysis there is seems rather superficial. For instance, Tremper characterizes Lucy Westerna in Dracula as Stoker's illustration of the damage done to women liberated from the domestic sphere by suffragists. But Lucy does not represent female liberation. She is an attractive young woman preoccupied with the rites of courtship, who in no way seeks to move out of the domestic realm; rather, she seems anxious to move into it. Mina Harker, on the other hand, is a much more liberated woman. It is she who acts as the central intelligence behind the men's quest to eliminate the vampire and who courageously helps to lure him out of his castle to be destroyed. If there is a feminist figure in Dracula, Mina is surely she, but Tremper describes her only as an "embodiment of the self-sacrifice and stoicism of the idealized Victorian mater familias" (109). Admittedly, Mina becomes a mother at the novel's end, but this does not deprive her of her status as a strong, capable woman.

After discussing nineteenth century novels, Tremper inexplicably moves to a discussion of cinema. Again I found the leap here enormous. From reading about Kate Chopin, we suddenly jump to D.W. Griffith. For Tremper, the blonde heroines of silent films were all "stalwart defenders of a sexless, self-denying domestic ideology" (122). This seems way too simplistic. To me, Lillian Gish gives her characters much more complexity than Tremper suggests. When Gish's character Anna reveals the identity of her seducer in Way Down East, she is far from sexless, self-denying or domestic. She is so courageous and forceful that one wants to stand up and cheer. Yes, at the film's end she is saved from...