"Miss Big Fat Movie Star": Degradation of the Grande Dame

Project Abstract

The Grande Dame Guignol, a horror subgenre made popular in the early 1960s by films like Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? and Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte, foregrounds aging actresses cast in grotesque, psychologically unbalanced roles that reflect societal anxieties about female aging. This trend uniquely positions aging women as objects of revulsion, projecting various psychoses onto the caretaker figure in a deliberate subversion of traditional feminine archetypes to horrific effect. This weaponization of age itself, caricaturized as a state of resentment, depravity, and rage, likewise contributed to the real-world marginalization of actresses considered “past their prime,” as attitudes toward women were (and, to a large extent, still are) dependent on the expiration date culturally imposed upon them.

This paper posits that the Grande Dame Guignol operates as a paradoxical cinematic space: it provides seasoned actresses with psychologically & emotionally complex leading roles while simultaneously compounding the social prejudices they face. Focusing primarily on the career trajectories of Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, whose screen personas evolved alongside and soon became entwined with the genre, I trace how the tropes embodied in the Grande Dame were informed by earlier screen types (e.g., noir femmes fatales, maternal melodramas), and how these roles both echoed and exacerbated offscreen industry misogyny. Ultimately, this paper contends that the Grande Dame is not merely a genre curiosity; rather, she presents a compelling case study of Hollywood’s inequitable valuation of women, underscoring the kinds of social erasure still perpetuated in contemporary cinema.

Conference

Popular Culture / American Culture Association in the South Conference, 10/09/25-10/11/25, https://pcasacasconference.org/

Funding Type

Travel Grant

Academic College

College of Humanities and Fine Arts

Area/Major/Minor

English

Degree

Doctor of Arts in English Pedagogy and Technology

Classification

Graduate

Name

Andrew Black, PhD

Academic College

College of Humanities and Fine Arts

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