There is no doubt that Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are masculine. Their masculinity is aggressive, almost suffocating. They drink continuously throughout the day, go wherever they want to go whenever they want (even without a gun, if you’re Spade, because he is so manly he only needs to rely on his own fists), flirt with tons of beautiful women with figures they can admire, and avoid feminine products like “filter papers,” opting for the more masculine “course ground coffee” instead (Chandler 195). They make jaded comments like “[all women are the same] after the first nine,” but admit that they really “don’t know anything about women,” because women are an entirely different species all together (Chandler 225, Hammot 17).
Brigid O’Shaughnessy, Effie Perine, Anne Riordan, and Velma are undoubtably feminine. They flaunt their curves and use their sex to get what they want, depend upon men to give them protection, rush to aide and assist their suitors (especially Effie and Anne), and often act like children in need of a tissue to blow their nose into and a long nap. To be a woman, according to noir novels, is to be beautiful, but weak and afraid.
A woman’s fear is dangerous. Velma kills Malloy because “she was afraid of him,” as did Brigid, frightened by the interest these men gave them. A woman’s fear (and its consequent outcomes) is hysterical, impulsive, and irreversible.
However, a man’s fear is different. In certain doses, it is acceptable—even desirable to make a man more relatable. Jameson argues that the reason why Humphrey Bogard “obviously stands for the hero” and was able to “[distinguish himself] from the other stars of his period” was in his very ability “to show fear” (20). Because Bogart admits that the dark and violent world around him is unpredictable and dangerous, he becomes powerful and attractive to watch on the screen. Philip Marlowe admits plainly that “[he’s] scared stiff” because up until then, he has remained relatively steely and decisive.
At a certain level, the heroic, smart, inherently masculine antihero accepting “feminine” qualities is appropriate. It makes the man even more of a man because he is able to admit his “feminine” faults while still remaining powerful and dominant, and while solving the mystery in the end. Noir reveals a realm in which gender stereotypes are blended together in such a way that the strength of man and the weakness of women are reinforced.
I really enjoyed the way you characterized the different portrays of fear between men and women. “Hysterical” is used to describe a woman, but “relatable” is used to describe a man. You also describe the woman in the books that we read acting like children, but I would look at that as nothing more than what it is. An act. I think that the man who wrote woman like this knew that women at the time knew how to weaponize their position in the patriarchy to survive. Just like how women knew that men would come to their aid if a jar of jam is hard to open. I mean why work hard if someone is willing to do the heavy lifting? If I had to act like a child with an innocent facade to prevent myself from being killed, I would. Of course in the case of Sam Spade not falling for Bridget’s tricks…a man wrote it so the man has to come out victorious. As girls reading Noir its easy to get annoyed at the portrayal of women from a man’s perspective, but the women back then are not that different from today. We are just doing what it takes to survive.
I found your points about the masculine anti-hero that takes on “feminine” qualities to be interesting. I feel like in modern society we tend to see the opposite. To be masculine would be to not show emotions, as they are signs of fear or weakness, yet I agree that in the Noir genre, the men are showing these emotions, but we do not see them as being any less masculine because of it. When you mentioned the point about Sam Spade being able to go wherever he wants, whenever he wants, it reminded me of just how much privilege Spade and characters like him have, and how he can get away with anything. Especially in a lot of scenes, these private detective characters are always talking back to the cops or almost getting framed for crimes they didn’t commit, yet the police are always very hesitant to pursue action against them. If they were minorities, or maybe not male, I don’t think they would get away with a lot of the things they do.
It is interesting that you use the word “hysterical” to express how dangerous a woman’s fear is considered to be in American noir; this is because this word has been used to classify women as biologically incapable of handling major stress and/or fear since the time of the ancient Greeks. In modern times it has been used to describe the actions of all people, yet the negative connotation of women’s inability to cope with the darkness of the world remains. This strikes me as the male protagonists of noir such as Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe are trusted due to their ability to show fear; it is an organ of perception and understanding that allows them to navigate the anarchy of the 1930s and 1940s. Although the men and women in these noir novels show fear in different ways, they are pigeonholed into roles that some wish to escape from.