Traditional Heterosexual and Gender Roles by Dorothy Arzner

As soon as she has broken the world's speed altitude record, she crashes her plane purposefully and commits suicide. shorthorn (2001) argues that Cynthia's dress, career and suicide are contradictory of prevailing patriarchic attitudes toward straight person and sex activity roles in the era, "Cynthia's profession threatens the stability of handed-d witness gender roles; and her record-breaking flight, though suicidal, leaves the central conflict amongst the woman's career and her sexuality unresolved" (63).

Houston (1994) maintains that in a image of Arzner's films including Christopher Strong, Honor Among Lovers, Craig's Wife, and Dance, Girl, Dance, Arzner's women resist conventional notions of sex difference and try with "a will toward subjectivehood, an insistence on initiating and carrying out her ingest projects and pursuing her own inclinations, rather than taking her place as part of the projects of men and as object of their desires" (p. 273). From Claudette Colbert refusing the advances of Frederick March in Honor Among Lovers to Cynthia Darrington preferring to pursue "male" careers, Arzner's film turn heterosexual and gender role conventions upside down.

The women in Arzner's films try to emit their authentic selves in the midst of confining social constructions, typically male constructions, of heterosexual and gender roles. As Cousins (1995) writes, "Arzner depicts women struggling to set up themselves, in their own terms, within a patriarchal high society t

Arzner's portrayal of such gainsay females ostracized her from many in the Hollywood filmmaking community, primarily a good-old-boys electronic network of the highest order in which tough and challenging females were unwelcome. To these kinds of men women care Cynthia or Harriet Craig are a total threat to their own socially constructed notions of masculinity. Arzner's films often portrayed some of these elements of her own dispute against the patriarchy and its lack of willingness to view women as anything other than objectified and wormlike to the will of men. We see this when Nana attends a bar by herself in Nana.

Women of the era were thought to be common or gaudy who patronized drinking establishments on their own. In one reciprocation between Nana and a drunken soldier, we see this double-standard against women but we as well see Nana's dismissal of demeaning male assumptions about women:

In her film version of Emile Zola's Nana, Arzner once more provides us with a heroine who contests to express her own identity and authenticity against patriarchal subjugation in the character of Nana. Nana is portrayed as a evil female that is hell bent on succeeding where her niggle Gervaise failed. She sees her dead mother as a victim of socially constructed heterosexual and gender roles imposed by males on females. As Nana tells us in Arzner's version, "My mother was not bad, she was weak. It's men who illuminate women whatever they are. I don't know what I'll be, but I won't be weak and I won't be poor" (Cousins, 1995, p. 211).

The films of Dorothy Arzner show the director's desire to provide her own meaning on heterosexual and gender roles in contradiction to traditional heterosexual and gender roles of her era. Her women struggle for identity expression and au
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