Publication details
Chandler’s Spider Women – Female Criminality from Page to Screen
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This article focuses on the female criminality presented in Raymond Chandler's novels The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely and their subsequent screen adaptations of two different eras – The Big Sleep (1946 and 1978), Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Farewell, My Lovely (1975). Here I try to prove that Chandler's presentation of female criminality has been simplified and schematized in these films, the films that were influenced by the social climate of the era they were shot in. Chandler's portrayal and exposure of crime committed by women – homicide, nymphomania, prostitution, pornography, blackmail, and calculated deceit – is in these films either completely erased or altered, thus adding a different dimension to the meaning proposed in the novel. Chandler's approach to the criminal/femme fatale(s) is his/Marlowe's obvious compassion towards the woman and moreover he does not pigeon-hole this character. Chandler avoids an implication that the femme fatale(s) are purely evil, manipulative and egoistical women whose desire for more and better is the driving force that causes men around them die in violent death. The article ascertains how and why these films added new dimensions, overlooked and simplified the representation of women and their crimes when compared to their literary source and concludes that all four films reassure the male population of the 1940s and the 1970s America that their masculinity will be never suppressed by women, and simultaneously teach the female population not to 'swim against the stream', it is not worth it. |