Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

Nevertheless, the message is quite clear – unrestrained female sexuality constitutes
a danger. Not only to the male but to the system of signification itself. Woman is
“the ruin of representation”. (Doane 1991:103)
The author states at this point that Gilda stands as a good example in this respect of
an “object for the gaze” and therefore the parallelism between visibility and the knowable,
or “the image does not lie”; the fascination of the film rests upon the continual flirtation
with perception, as Doane suggests above. Women like Gilda seem to have come to
symbolise America’s “stylised” vision of itself, and a distorted rendering of the new social
role for women. They became a cultural expression of the mental disturbance the country
was going through at a time of uncertainties and sociological changes. By using their
sexual allure and feminine wiles, these deadly women came to battle male stereotyping
(they actually replace an irrationally positive stereotype with an irrationally negative one).
They contradict the idea that “a woman with a gun is like a man with a knitting needle”; 53
in short, in ascribing to them the “male” power (represented figuratively, for example, in
the obvious phallic metaphor of guns in Gun Crazy), screenwriters, often working for the
hard-boiled school, made them a captivating and powerful representative of a new type of
American woman.
In conclusion, female narrative agency indicates a variety of female roles in the noir
crime thriller that extends beyond the merciless femme fatale and the passive, domestic
figure. Moreover, “the figure’s enigmatic qualities stimulate the central narrative drive,
which comes from the desire to understand her motivations and thereby to reassert the
rational control of the male ego, an impossible project” (Spicer 2002:91). It could be
argued that all the above socio-cultural contexts allow different perspectives on these noir
productions, especially in terms of their multiple contexts, sources and influences and
characters. These contexts set down new questions of noir’s Zeitgeist mentioned earlier, its
gender relations, and particularly its angle on women.
53 Said by Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) in Out of the Past.
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