© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Screen. All rights reserved
Dorothy Arzner's Wife: heterosexual sets, homosexual scenes
 |
Abstract |
|---|
In 1936, at the height of her career in the Hollywood studio system, Dorothy Arzner directed Craig's Wife, a domestic melodrama featuring Rosalind Russell as Harriet Craig, a house-obsessed wife who drives her adoring husband away through her preoccupation with maintaining perfect control over the immaculate interior of their marital home. Frequently credited as the vehicle that lifts Russell from bit-player to star, Craig's Wife is equally significant in marking the eclipse of another acting career, that of William Haines. Nowhere seen except in the interior sets he designed, Haines's uncredited contribution to Craig's Wife completed his transformation from leading man to interior designer, a professional role in which open knowledge of his homosexuality would prove less of a career impediment. Confirmed by the look of the film, Haines's talent for interior design secures his offscreen position as a celebrity designer whose gayness is a foregone conclusion. In stark contrast to this biographical narrative of sexual notoriety and professional success, the fictional Harriet Craig's talent for interior design, also confirmed by the look of the film, spells the end of her middle-class marriage and leads to her ultimate isolation within the empty family home. The suggestion that homosexuality and heterosexuality have different relations to the spatial and narrative co-ordinates of domesticity and publicity is not a new one but the particular combination of elements evidenced in Craig's Wife – lesbian director, gay designer, heterosexual mise en scene – invites critical inquiry because it has the potential to break open a number of accepted truths around sexuality and space as they pertain to Hollywood melodrama.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?