Book Review

Canada and the United States

Mae West, the woman who lost her reputation and never missed it, has lately acquired another kind of reputation as a trendy topic in cultural studies. No wonder: a giant of twentieth-century popular entertainment, she was also a self-made, not man-made, woman, a charismatic actor-playwright-entrepreneur who marketed sex with the zeal of a true believer. In an age in which female stars were more likely to be vessels for male desire or meal tickets for scoundrels, West was always her own woman, her own best creation.	1
If the sacred trinity of cultural studies is race, class, and gender, Jill Watts seeks to score a kind of scholarly trifecta by casting West as a working-class woman who, whatever her actual bloodlines, was African American under the skin. "Was Mae West passing?" asks the author, perhaps a bit too eagerly. "It is hard to determine. But it is clear that the character she would create, her fictionalized persona, certainly was" (p. 15). Inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the entertainer as a malleable shape shifter, she reads West as a "trickster," a cultural con artist playing an elaborate shell game with identity: "By rejecting the divisions between black and white, man and woman, rich and poor, self and other, she continues to challenge a society than thrives on fixity and certainty" (p. 317). In Watts's sympathetic reading, West emerges as a defender of "the weak, the disenfranchised, and oppressed," equal parts Diamond Lil and Emma Goldman.	2
The hammer of postmodernist criticism on the anvil of traditional biography creates an odd amalgam. Though commandingly researched and frequently enlightening, the book is also marred by jargon-laden prose and special pleading. Watts is at her best conjuring the rich brew of multicultural ingredients that fueled fin-de siècle amusements on the cusp of the mass communications revolutions of the twentieth century, with West serving as a bridge from the mauve decade to the roaring 1920s and dirty 1930s. In tracking West's movement from vaudeville music halls, to triumph and controversy on the Broadway stage, to superstardom status in film and radio, and, finally, to iconic status in American popular culture, Watts provides a lucid account of the rise of the woman who showed that the wages of sin can mean not death but a fat paycheck.	3
Watts is less persuasive when pounding home her critical line and wedging her subject into the corset of postmodernist polemics ("there was an immutability in her immutability"; p. 318) Given West's aggressive sexuality and her all-embracing zeal for the pleasure principle, it is perhaps inevitable that she should be resurrected as a poster girl for all that is trangressive and subversive. Yet West's cards were always on the table, turned face up for all to see. Even in her prime, the ironic, code-breaking persona hardly needed arcane critical exegesis to detect the cheeky rebellion in her gendered posture. Besides, sex as commerce is as American as cherry pie.	4
Nonetheless, the author makes a strong case for the African-American rhythms in West's voice and hips. Unlike Al Jolson, who donned blackface, West packaged her black roots under a peroxide blonde mask. Adding a dose of Jewish-flavored dialogue, she upset the natural WASP order in transparently named plays such as Diamond Lil, Sex, The Pleasure Man, and The Drag. Moral guardians shuddered, but Jazz Age audiences swooned. In 1928, as cops busted up a performance of The Pleasure Man, rowdy patrons yelled "Shame! Shame!"	. . .