Week 5

Films like Les Vampires and The Perils of Pauline challenge gender roles in quite a few ways. The first example of what Shelly Stamp described to be a female heroine struck me in the beginning of Les Vampires, where a woman is portrayed to be extravagantly wealthy and capable of buying an estate on her own.

Similar to this, in The Perils of Pauline, Pauline is presented as an incredibly headstrong and confident woman, capable of convincing men to lean to her will. While Pauline overcomes the efforts to cause her death, she returns to the hands of men beaten down and exhausted, seemingly in great regret of the choices she had made to be free.

I feel as though this creates a sense in audiences that the demise of the “free” woman is actually more closely linked to that of evil men, than to an inability to exist on her own. Watching films like this overtime can create a narrative convention that women are hindered not by their femininity but by the meddling of power-hungry men, establishing a code that the plight of womanhood during this time has quite a lot going on beneath the surface.