Jezebel

The setting of New Orleans and Louisiana is more vividly delineated in Jezebel than is the setting of Georgia and Atlanta in Gone with the Wind (GWTW). The opening scene involves a shot that tracks behind a series of booths where people are selling food, crafts, preserved animals, etc. This scene gives a clear sense of the mixed cultural heritages—Cajun, French, Native American, African, European—that make up the area. Beyond these figures you see the more conventional façade of New Orleans—buildings and men and women driving past on carriages.

This is a very uneven film. Good scenes are followed by ones that make no sense. Bette Davis’ acting is excellent but monochromatic, and her motivations sometimes aren’t clear or logical. The same is true for other characters such as Preston Dillard as played by Henry Fonda.

Bette Davis’s character Julia Marsden is similar to Scarlett in GWTW. Both flaunt propriety, social conventions, and codes. Both experience a kind of insight at the end, and Bette Davis’s character is even redeemed though in a way that doesn’t make sense entirely. This film is often linked with GWTW because the Julie Marsden role is said to have been offered to Davis as compensation for her failure to win the part of Scarlett. There are many superficial similarities between the films. Both films show families that have homes in the country as well as in town. Both have high-toned, “moral” gentlemanly characters in Dillard and in Ashley Wilkes. Both have characters who are blackguards and rakes (Rhett Butler, as portrayed by Clark Gable, and Buck Cantrell, as portrayed by George Brent). Jezebel has a Melanie-like character in the Northern woman Amy Bradford who marries Preston—though the association is not that close. Both have scenes in which the main character’s flaunting of social convention is the focus—at the benefit, while Scarlett is still in mourning for her first husband’s death, she dances with Rhett Butler, creating a scandal, while Julia wears a scarlet-colored dress to her engagement ball. The reasons for these acts of rebellion are different, of course.

In tone Jezebel is a more traditional and old-fashioned film than Gone with the Wind. Both films make clear that their heroines are battling masculine traditions and social structures. Bette Davis’s sacrifice at the end is reminiscent of that at the end of A Tale of Two Cities (1935). This film in a sense doesn’t come to a proper ending—will Preston really die? Will Julia become ill herself and die? Will they recover and escape, and if so what happens with the woman whom Preston really married? The film implies a bad ending for both of them, which is one argument for regarding Julia’s sacrifice as genuine. No one escapes Yellow Jack.

There is a pernicious and malignant quality to Julia Marsden. She is not just impetuous. She is self-destructive and destructive of others. This is most evident in the cotillion scene, when she insists on wearing the scarlet gown despite the warnings of her aunt and uncle and of her fiancé. She is more interested in resisting Preston than she is in public opinion. The situation is complicated by her awareness that before the dance Preston came to her room with a cane, ready to beat her into submission. Wearing the scarlet gown is her act of violent rebellion, but it is one that goes wrong. Rather than refusing to go to the dance with her, Preston insists that she dance before the stares and disapproving gazes of everyone in the room. When she attempts to make conversation, people turn away from her. Preston insists that she dance anyway to assert his authority over her, humiliate and punish her for her behavior. Then he escorts her home and ends their engagement. It is clear that Julia did not fully comprehend the consequences of wearing the scarlet dress. It is also clear that Preston is a stubborn, prideful, willful man unwilling to attempt a conversation with Julia about the dress and interesting only in the successful assertion of male authority. From a modern point of view, the problem between Preston and Julia is in part an issue of communication. From the film’s point of view, more important than that failure is Julia’s attempt to flaunt social custom and to resist the authority of the male to whom she is betrothed.

Julie suffers immeasurably for her transgression. She is emotionally distraught for at least a year after the ball, obsessed with house cleaning and declining to socialize with her old friends. When she discovers that Preston has married and that he will not submit to her entreaties, she joins the slaves in an orgiastic and frenzied singing that is the strangest scene not only in the film but in any film of the 1930s in general (even stranger than the prolonged dance and sing celebration of the Marx Brothers with the slaves at the end of A Day at the Races--1937). When Julia is discovered to have lied about advances made on her by Preston (a lie that leads to the death of Buck Cantrell), her family disowns her and make to return to the city. When they find themselves trapped at the plantation, she condescendingly and icily welcomes them into her house. Her ultimate act of self-destructiveness is, of course, her decision to go to the island with Preston, where she intends to nurse him while being exposed to the worst of contagions.

Scarlett is not intentionally self-destructive. Her goal is always self-aggrandizement. She’s willing to sacrifice her public reputation if the result is more money or getting the man she loves. She also has a considerable array of talents that Bette Davis’s character lacks—she has business skills, for instance, financial acumen, and an ability to flirt, dissemble, and deceive which she uses to achieve her ends. She also has a strong attachment to family and place and to her nation, all of which Bette Davis’s character for the most part seems to lack. In comparison, Bette Davis’s character is two-dimensional and weak. Part of the difference stems from changing goals. Bette Davis’s goal remains fairly monolithic. Scarlett’s goal expands from winning Ashley Wilkes’s love to protecting her family and saving Tara. This is why GWTW can claim to be an epic, because Scarlett’s struggle is linked to the affairs of her nation, the Confederacy (and by extension, in 1938, to the struggle of Americans to survive the Depression). Scarlett ‘s character really does aspire to epical, heroic status, while Julia’s does not.

Both Scarlett and Julia bear names associated with their rebellious character and with their willingness to flaunt male-centered traditions and hierarchies. Scarlett ostensibly bears a name associated with the color both of love and of lust as well as of adultery. Julia’s aunt calls her a Jezebel, ascribing to her the characteristics of murder and lust associated with the Old Testament character but also of rebelliousness against male authority.

In GWTW the North is generally associated with the forces of money and abolitionism that oppose the South. In war, the North is the enemy, and Northern soldiers tend to be portrayed as predatory looters. They surround themselves with freed slaves and carpetbaggers who have come down to the South to charge exorbitant prices and to otherwise exploit the prostrate South.

In Jezebel it is interesting that Preston is a banker. This is not a position typically associated with the Old South, though it is clear that bankers were necessary and that there were plenty of them in the Old South. But Preston’s occupation helps explain his willingness to spend time in the North and to marry a Northern woman. Northerners are clearly shown as people who may not understand the South, and about whom Southerners feel suspicious, but they are not so overwhelmingly the Enemy. The same is true in the 1935 film Mississippi, where Bing Crosby plays a character from the North whose main sin is one of ignorance of Southern ways—the entire film more or less revolves around Crosby’s indifference to the Southern code of honor, which leads him to decline a challenge to a duel because he doesn’t understand why he should shoot at a man whom he doesn’t know and who has done him no wrong. Mississippi expresses a clearly skeptical view of the Southern code of honor and suggests that Southerners blindly adhere to it without understanding its destructive effects. It also portrays a Southern belle, engaged to Crosby, who automatically turns against him when he declines the challenge—she says she has been humiliated. Her younger sister is not so bound by traditions and codes of honor. In Jezebel, the code of honor is mainly portrayed as a convention that Julia can manipulate as she attempts to find revenge against Preston. GWTW often invokes the concept of honor, but it mentions dueling only once, in passing—we are told that Rhett Butler killed a man in a duel. The only time the film even comes close to the issues associated with a code of honor is when Ashley and other men of the Atlanta house go out to the freedman’s town to confront those who attempted to rape Scarlett. They do this to protect Southern womanhood, and also Southern racial codes of white superiority.