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A New Eroticism or Merely a New Woman? Cecil B. DeMille's Adaptation of Alice Duer Miller's \Manslaughter\
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A New Eroticism or Merely a New Woman? Cecil B. DeMille's Adaptation of Alice Duer Miller's \Manslaughter\
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Journal Article
A New Eroticism or Merely a New Woman? Cecil B. DeMille's Adaptation of Alice Duer Miller's \Manslaughter\
2010
Overview
The car accident that results in the death of the policeman whom she has previously bribed to ignore an earlier traffic violation arises from Lydia's haste to flee from an encounter with the sexually masterful Dan O'Bannon, and, the reader may surmise, may result from her rejection of all kinds of male authority, descending in a line from father; to O'Bannon, who is both suitor and district attorney; to Officer Drummond, whose task it is to interfere repeatedly in Lydia's pleasure in driving, which she is described as doing competently. In 1929, Stuart Chase noted that \"automobiling\" was more popular among girls than it was among boys,4 a popularity explained by the car's ability to remove young women from the supervision of their preceptors and render them as mobile as their male peers, offering them a kind of machine-assisted equality in the public sphere. While Miller clearly doubts that equality is a goal that women may reasonably expect to reach, since even Lydia is reluctantly aware that society is ordered in such a way that \"she herself was not the final judge of the rate at which she should drive,\" she remains interested in the question.28 Thus if O'Bannon's car is indeed the site of an important romantic passage with Lydia in the novel, the effect of the car there is often to flatten gender differences; a female driver is the equal of a male driver, and should, the novel suggests, suffer the same penalties when the law is violated. While Miller was herself in a taxi that injured a motorcyclist in 1918, the germ of Manslaughter appears to be the 1919 Edith Mortimer case, involving a well-bred young Long Island woman who killed a man while maneuvering at speed around an obstacle.39 Mortimer, unlike Lydia, was acquitted, although the prosecution (like O'Bannon) was particularly incensed at the class privilege on display, insisting that an acquittal would drive the disaffected workingman into the arms of Bolshevism.40 Given this spur to the creation of the narrative, I would argue that Miller explores two sets of illegitimate privileges associated with her heroine, those derived from wealth and those derived from gender. Because Lydia has always expected both class and gender to excuse her offenses, prison becomes the ideal means of replacing self-will with self-possession, an attitude that the feminist in Miller presumably endorsed by suggesting that privilege derived from gender is as offensive as privilege derived from wealth.
Publisher
Wayne State University Press
