Raving about Things that Won't Solve: Marylee Hadley in Written on the Wind
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.26754/ojs_misc/mj.200011219Keywords:
Melodrama, Douglas Sirk, Written on the Wind, Gender issues, The familyAbstract
The contemporary feminist vindication of classical Hollywood melodrama has attempted to identify the conflicting views on gender and the family that constituted the raw material for this genre. The aim of this paper is to identify these clashing discourses on femininity and female sexuality within the framework provided by Douglas Sirk's popular film Written on the Wind (1956). I will try to demonstrate how the workings of ideology, which usually culminate in the ideologically correct traditional "happy ending", are subverted through the imposition of an arbitrary and quite implausible resolution. From here, I shall attempt to read the ending of the film against the grain of received "ideological correctness" in order to vindicate the role of the marginal characters in the story, and that of Marylee Hadley in particular.
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