The Unique Portrayal of Heroines in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife

782 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Analysis of hollywood romance films

Heroines in traditional romantic comedies generally show their female charm dominated by the heroes, and docile. However, in Romantic Comedy vs. Screwball Comedy Gehring depicts the screwball comedy as “dripping with eccentrics starting with the archetype zany heroines.” Also, Gerhing says, “heroines assisted by the fact that only she knows a courtship is occurring. ” In other words, he means that heroines in screwball comedies always show their unique nuttiness and try to pursue what they desire as long as they realized that was something they want, which is quite different from the customary docile female in other romantic comedies. These traits are detailed in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife; heroines Lucy and Ellen pursue their happiness with apparently daffy behavior, encouragement and their love.

Heroines in screwball comedies always had much more positive reaction in the process of pursuing what they desired to, like “female catalyst.” For instance, in My Favorite Wife, Ellen rushed to the airport and tried to save her marriage with an old- fashioned dress, which is even tittered by others, as long as she was told that her husband Arden was about to spend a sweet moon with his new wife Bianca in the same hotel as they had. Both in Leo McCarey’s The Awful Truth (1937), out of suspicious, Lucy decided to divorce with her husband Jerry; however, after Lucy saw Jerry’s fantastic series of behavior on Mr. Duvall’s private concert, she realized that she was still in love with Jerry. As a result, Lucy claimed as Jerry’s sister and tricked him and his new girlfriend on Barbara’s appointment to debunk Jerry’s falsehood and to lower the impression formed by Barbara’s family. For sure, both Ellen and Lucy get their husbands or...

... middle of paper ...

...d the bangle he gave the girl as a token of love, even a wonderful marriage with the girl. I can’t deny that the girl loves Tom deeply. Only she took out some encouragement, and she would get a happy ending.

To sum up, the anti-heroines show encouragement and nuttiness on the screen, which is only a way that they express their love, not the solemn pledge of love, no apparent declaration of love. No matter how eccentrics the beginning comes, as long as the heroines realized their love with their husbands was still remain, they would try to protect their marriage, to care more of their husbands’ feelings, and even to make troubles between their husbands and their rival in love. Just like Lucy’s lawyer told Lucy on the phone in The Awful Truth, “Marriage is always a beautiful thing.” All zany behavior taken by heroines was all about the love, to show and to pursue.

Show More
Related

  • Comparing Stories: The Astronomers Wife & The Chrysanthemums

    866 Words  | 2 Pages

    Mrs. Ames from “The Astronomer’s Wife” and Elisa Allen from “The Chrysanthemums”, two women in their best ages, did share similar lives. They were loyal wives, of decent beauty and good manners. They were married for some time, without any children and they were fighting the dullness of their marriages. At first, it looked like they were just caught in marriage monotony, but after the surface has been scratched deeper, it was clear that these two women were crying for attention: but they had different reasons.

    Read More

  • The Great Gatsby American Dream Quotes

    648 Words  | 2 Pages

    "I suppose the latest thing is to sit back and let Mr. Nobody from Nowhere make love to your wife. Well, if that's the idea you can count me out”(229) Tom isn't just going to stand around while gatsby tries to steal his wife from him even though he cheats on her almost every night. Tom actually loves her deep inside even though he cheats on her “He nodded sagely. "And what's more, I love Daisy too. Once in awhile I go off on a spree and make a fool of myself, but I always come back, and in my heart I love her all the time." (252)

    Read More

  • Film Noir Analysis

    1737 Words  | 4 Pages

    A female in film noir is typically portrayed in one of two ways; she’s either a dependable, trustworthy, devoted, and loving woman, or she’s a manipulative, predatory, double crossing, and unloving temptress. Noir labels the cold hearted and ruthless woman archetype as a Femme Fatale. A femme fatale is walking trouble, and she’s aware of it. This woman is gorgeous, refined, eloquent, and commands the attention of any room she’s in. When the femme fatale desires something, she pursues it. If there’s an obstacle in her way, she overcomes it. If she can’t handle it herself, all she needs to do it bat her eyelashes and the nearest man is all too willing to take care of it for her. In essence, the most dangerous thing about the femme fatale is her

    Read More

  • Summer of Wealth, Dreams and Desires in The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

    736 Words  | 2 Pages

    Tom is perhaps the most vain and inhuman of the characters, always lusting after more of the forbidden fruit, never having his full share. Even when the knowledge of it reaches his wife, Tom still returns to his cuckolding ways. Early in the book when Daisy explains how unhappy her life truly is, she describes the feeling she had after the birth of her first daughter saying, “Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling...” (31). In that moment readers are finally privy to the ugly, greedy, truth that is Tom, out philandering for pleasures purely his own, while his wife gives birth to their child.

    Read More

  • Trifles and A Dollhouse

    855 Words  | 2 Pages

    To begin, in both plays the men dismiss the women as trivial. In Trifles, when Mrs. Wright is being held in jail for the alleged murder of her husband, she worries about the cold weather and whether it will cause her fruit to freeze which will burst the jars. After the women come across a shattered jar of canned fruit, they converse about Mrs. Wright’s concern about the matter. Mrs. Peters states, “She said the fire’d go out and her jars would break” (Glaspell 918). The women here identify with Mrs. Wright’s concern, because they understand the hard work that goes into canning as part of the demanding responsibilities women endure as housewives. The Sheriff’s reply is “Held for murder and worryin’ about her preserves” (Glaspell 918). In other words, the men perceive the event as insignificant; they clearly see women as a subservient group whose concerns hold little importance. Likewise, the reader can relate to this treatment in A Dollhouse, when Torvald complains to Nora about spending Christmas time the previous year making frivolous ornaments instead of devoting it to family. Torvald says, “It was the dullest three weeks that I ever spent!” (Ibsen 1207). He believes her role i...

    Read More

  • Compare And Contrast Transcendentalism And Dark Romantics

    753 Words  | 2 Pages

    When he told her, she wasn’t content that he turned it down because they could’ve had money. So the following day she went out to the forest to go look for the devil. He waited to full day to go look for her because she took the pots and pans with her when she went to go meet up with the devil. He didn’t want to find her because he missed her. He wanted to find her because she had the pots that he could sell and make money off of. When he was walking in the forest on the look for her, he saw that her check apron was hanging on the branch of the tree. “Let us get hold of the property and we will endeavor to do without the woman”( Irving 158). When he took the apron off of the branch, he saw that nothing was in it but his wife’s heart and liver tied up in it. The point of this section is that Tom’s wife meant nothing to him because instead of being worried about her,

    Read More

  • F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

    705 Words  | 2 Pages

    Tom functions under the illusion that Daisy not only loves him now, but has always loved him and been completely devoted to him. Daisy does admit that she once loved him, but he was not her first choice; Gatsby was. Tom is also under the illusion that Daisy will never leave him. He has an ongoing, almost public affair with Myrtle but still wants to be devoted to Daisy and demands her devotion to him. Tom feels as if he will never lose anything: his money, Daisy, or his social status.

    Read More

  • Gender Roles in The Yellow Wallpaper and A Streetcar Named Desire

    1527 Words  | 4 Pages

    Many different depictions of gender roles exist in all times throughout the history of American culture and society. Some are well received and some are not. When pitted against each other for all intents and purposes of opposition, the portrayal of the aspects and common traits of masculinity and femininity are separated in a normal manner. However, when one gender expects the other to do its part and they are not satisfied with the results and demand more, things can shift from normal to extreme fairly quickly. This demand is more commonly attributed by the men within literary works. Examples of this can be seen in Tennessee Williams' “A Streetcar Named Desire”, where Stella is constantly being pushed around and being abused by her drunken husband Stanley, and also in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper”, where the female narrator is claimed unfit by her husband as she suffers from a sort of depression, and is generally looked down on for other reasons.

    Read More

  • The Deception of Trifles: Gender Roles in the Play by Glaspell

    1559 Words  | 4 Pages

    In the 19th Century, women had different roles and treated differently compared to today’s women in American society. In the past, men expected women to carry out the duties of a homemaker, which consisted of cleaning and cooking. In earlier years, men did not allow women to have opinions or carry on a job outside of the household. As today’s societies, women leave the house to carry on jobs that allow them to speak their minds and carry on roles that men carried out in earlier years. In the 19th Century, men stereotyped women to be insignificant, not think with their minds about issues outside of the kitchen or home. In the play Trifles, written by Susan Glaspell, the writer portrays how women in earlier years have no rights and men treat women like dirt. Trifles is based on real life events of a murder that Susan Glaspell covered during her work as a newspaper reporter in Des Moines and the play is based off of Susan Glaspell’s earlier writing, “A Jury of Her Peers”. The play is about a wife of a farmer that appears to be cold and filled with silence. After many years of the husband treating the wife terrible, the farmer’s wife snaps and murders her husband. In addition, the play portrays how men and women may stick together in same sex roles in certain situations. The men in the play are busy looking for evidence of proof to show Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. As for the women in the play, they stick together by hiding evidence to prove Mrs. Wright murdered her husband. Although men felt they were smarter than women in the earlier days, the play describes how women are expected of too much in their roles, which could cause a woman to emotionally snap, but leads to women banding together to prove that women can be...

    Read More

  • The Role of Women in Screwball Comedy Films

    4993 Words  | 10 Pages

    Comedy often allows for a subversion of the status quo that is not tolerated in more serious genres. Beginning in the 1930s, the subgenre of screwball comedy presented female characters who were active and desiring, without evoking negative characterizations as "unfeminine" or "trampish." Screwball comedies represent a specific form of romantic comedy that features a complicated situation--or more often a series of complications--centered around a strong-willed, unpredictable female. The comedy is generally physical as well as verbal. Screwball and other forms of romantic comedy do not just reverse the masculine/active, feminine/passive paradigm--which as E. Ann Kaplan notes accomplishes little in terms of change--but instead strengthens the female and weakens the male just enough to put them on more equal footing.

    Read More

  • The Maturation of Tom Sawyer

    516 Words  | 2 Pages

    Tom's acts in love are childish and immature. At first, Tom's love for Becky Thatcher is just a crush. He tells Becky about his "marriage" to Amy and it starts a fight. After that, they both play a game of "hard to get". After this, Tom is too proud to apologize. Also, Tom makes good decisions. First, when Becky accidentally rips Mr. Dobbins' book a, Tom takes the blame, and this ends their feud. Another mature event takes place in McDougal's cave. When Tom and Becky are in the cave, they become lost. Then Tom takes responsibility for himself and Becky's life. These events are part of becoming a young man.

    Read More

  • Comparing the Roles of Women in Arcadia, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Look Back in Anger

    1829 Words  | 4 Pages

    In Oscar Wilde’s drama The Importance of Being Earnest, he uses light-hearted tones and humor to poke fun at British high society while handling the serious theme of truth and the true identity of who is really “Earnest.” Truth as theme is most significantly portrayed through the women characters, Gwendolen and Cecily but to present serious themes comically, Wilde portrays women to be the weaker sex of society, despite the seriousness of the subject—the identity of the men they want to marry.

    Read More

  • Similarities Between As You Like It And Twelfth Night

    1373 Words  | 3 Pages

    It is well known that Shakespeare’s comedies contain many marriages, some arranged, some spontaneous. During Queen Elizabeth's time, it was considered foolish to marry for love. However, in Shakespeare’s plays, people often marry for love. With a closer look into two of his most famous plays As You Like It and Twelfth Night or What You Will, I found that while marriages are defined and approached differently in these two plays, Shakespeare’s attitudes toward love in both plays share similarities. The marriages in As You Like It’s conform to social expectation, while the marriages are more rebellious in Twelfth Night. Love, in both plays, was defined as

    Read More

  • The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

    1518 Words  | 4 Pages

    As punishment for skipping school to go swimming, Aunt Polly assigns Tom the chore of whitewashing the fence surrounding the house. In a brilliant scheme, Tom is able to con the neighborhood boys into completing the chore for him, managing to convince them of the joys of whitewashing. At school, Tom is equally as flamboyant, and attracts attention by chasing other boys, yelling, and running around. With his usual antics, Tom attempts to catch the eye of one girl in particular: Becky Thatcher, the Judge's daughter. When he first sees her, Tom immediately falls in love with Becky. After winning her over, Tom suggests that they "get engaged." But when Tom accidentally blurts that he has been engaged before to Amy Lawrence, he ruins his relationship with Becky and becomes heartbroken.

    Read More

  • Romance Movies Essay

    865 Words  | 2 Pages

    There are many ideas in this world that you can turn into separate categories. Examples are types of teachers, types of books, and more. In this essay the reader will be able to learn the differences between three types of movies. These types of movies include, romance, horror, and comedy. Now, there are many upon many romance movies but how do we distinguish them from one another? Is it the sex scenes, the lovey dovey affections we see between the characters? We cannot know for sure. Horror movies are downright the best (just kidding, people prefer other types rather than horror), yet again, how do we distinguish these movies from others? Blood and gore? Or simply a mental beat up that the audience gets? Finally, it’s the same way with comedy

    Read More

More about The Unique Portrayal of Heroines in The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife

Open Document