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ScreenSite Books
TITLE: Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women: The Female Trickster in
American Culture
AUTHOR: Lori Landay
PUBLISHER: University of Pennsylvania Press
YEAR: 1998
SUMMARY:
Step right up and see for yourself! Women have been tricking
men for thousands of years, and female tricksters have been
appearing in classic and popular texts at least since the
Thousand and One Nights. While there are many studies of
tricksters, few have focused on the chicanery of women, and
none have dealt with the ways in which the female trickster
is constructed in American film and other aspects of
American culture.
Madcaps, Screwballs, and Con Women is the first study to
explore the cultural work performed by female tricksters in
the "new country" of American mass consumer culture.
Beginning with nineteenth-century novels such as The Hidden
Hand or, Capitola the Madcap and moving through
twentieth-century fiction, film, radio, and television,
Lori Landay looks at how popular heroines use craft and
deceit to circumvent the limitations of femininity. She
considers texts of the 1920s such as the silent film It
and Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; pre- and
post-Production Code Mae West films, depression-era
screwball comedy, and wartime comedy; the postwar television
series I Love Lucy; and such contemporary texts as The Mary
Tyler Moore Show, Thelma and Louise, House of Games, Batman Returns,
and Sister Act. In
addition, Landay explores the connections between these
texts and advertisements selling products that encourage
female deception and trickery. The 76 black and white
illustrations include production stills, frame enlargements, and
reproductions of advertisements.
When these texts are seen as a continuum, they tell a
powerful story about woman's place and women's power during
the sexual desegregation of American society.
Lori Landay teaches Film Studies and American literature at
Western Illinois University.
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