Street Was Mine : White Masculinity in Hardboiled Fiction and Film Noir

Author:MEGAN E. ABBOTT [ABBOTT, MEGAN E.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2007-04-16T06:54:17+00:00

Male whiteness is no guarantee of hermeticism, but is a defensive position against the threat of the Other. Female whiteness is a mask, a trick. Even morally sound white woman Anne Riordan in Farewell, My Lovely presents a white female trap: into domesticity, luring Marlowe into paterfamilias.

For Cain’s characters, too, whiteness has different meanings for men and women. Male whiteness is intertwined with physical masculinity, Frank exiling Nick Papadakis to ethnic femininity at every turn. Two options exist within the structure of male whiteness: first, hobo freedom, which runs the risk of feminization at the hands of an employer or, worse yet, an immigrant employer; second, the normative father/husband/businessman role, much like the one Marlowe associates with Anne Riordan. The second option is not necessarily feminizing in Cain (though it is in Chandler), but it is blocked heavily by bodily desires and class immobility. Likewise, female whiteness is entrenched in The Postman Always Rings Twice with class ascen-sion, with success. Cora embraces alterity, the hellcat role, to achieve her chance at the American dream, but it is precisely that alterity that dooms her: she is narratively punished for her bodily passions, for her dreams of class ascent. For Cain, then, whiteness is but a self-destructive weapon by which the working class divides itself and dooms itself. Whiteness is up for grabs without power, and is guaranteed through power, but lacks any materiality, any meaning; it is an illusion one can wear successfully with the cloak of power, financial and social. Whiteness is a class prerogative in Cain—no less slippery in Chandler where whiteness is a trick of gender, a pasteboard front women may use, suggesting, dangerously, that it is a pasteboard front no matter who uses it. Marlowe can only cling to racial stereotypes and laments about racial degeneration to assure himself of a whiteness that does not seem truly to exist.

Interestingly, however—and perhaps crucially—what we find in the cases of Cain and Chandler is that any threat posed by the anxious and deeply mitigated consolidation of whiteness and of masculinity disappears when the texts moved to the screen. Sexually complex Philip Marlowe, as embodied by impeccably tough Humphrey Bogart and reconfigured by Howard Hawks’s signature gender stylings, becomes far less of a threat, far more of an icon of white masculine potency. Cain’s working-class adulterers no longer need bemoan their lack of racial prerogative amid intensifying and threatening racial diversity. Whiteness is assured by Hollywood’s silvery gaze.

Anxiety over race or gender privileges fades in the face of the impeccable power of the studios, cinema’s glowing celluloid promise, the stars and the myth-making apparatus so firmly in place.

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C h a p t e r F i v e

“ N o t h i n g Yo u C a n ’ t F i x ”

Hardboiled Fiction’s Hollywood Makeover

“But pictures and books are different, naturally.”

—Raymond Chandler in a letter to Dale Warren1

The Woman in White: Redux

The first image of the famed 1946 film version of James M.

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