Steel Magnolias: Cultural Discourses of Femininity
Steel Magnolias promotes motherhood, beauty attainment, and self-sacrifice as the cultural discourse of femininity. This is film that chronicles five southern women’s relationships, and through their friendship, they find the support and love needed that they lack elsewhere in their lives. The film also suggests the ulitmate route to happiness for a woman is through motherhood. While Steel Magnolias emphasizes the relationships and interconnectedness that only women can share, it provides a limited view of women as it situates femininity in the reproductive ability of women’s bodies, the constant quest for beauty, and the “natural” selflessness and nurturing capacity women possess.
First, it is vital for the film to be set in the south as it adds a level of nuance that further designates the importance of limited appeal of tradition. Southerners are known to revel in the fact they celebrate and maintain elements of high culture. As Steel Magnolias shows with the quick-witted character Truvy (Dolly Parton), the southern female experience is to have straightforwardly phrased tidbits of knowledge that decent down-home southerners, “real” women, can relate. This constructs a southern female as a character who represents women’s subjective experience as a form of knowledge. Truvy seems to be the omniscient narrator through which her experience of being a beautician serves others’ emotional needs. Her beauty salon serves as a site of initiation into womanhood through the telling and listening of stories of female experience. However, she nullifies her professional status of a woman possessing “specialized knowledge” by overcompensating the emotional part of the consumer’s experience. As Grimlin suggests in “The Hair Salon,” the beauticians are “more susceptible to the ‘beauty myth’ than the clients” (47). Truvy repeatedly uses language to create a professional reality. At one moment she reminds Annelle (Darryl Hannah) she is no “beautician” but rather a “glamour technician.” She must “stay abreast of trends” in order to serve as the pinnacle of the beauty hierarchy. Overall, she reminds viewers femininity is constructed through the interpersonal experience of listening and offering suggestions and harsh realities of attaining beauty through cosmetic services.
Moreover, the film begins and ends with a mother’s prospective. M’Lynn (Sally Field) offers up a constant worriful and self-sacrificing image of the mother as natural and celebratory. It is through her character that femininity is also constructed. The film offers the mother-child relationship as a redeeming motif to the lack of fulfillment provided by marriage. As the film ascertains, motherhood, especially between a mother and daughter, provides a level of contentment for women. This story illustrates the familiar cultural discourse of femininity as a woman proceeds through limited highlights of her life: marriage and children. M’Lynn, however, provides duality to that image. She has lived experienced marriage and children, but it is only through protection of her daughter that she finds security in her role. Thus, her portrayal restricts womanhood to the self-sacrificing mother to her children. M’Lynn is provided immense amounts of attention for caring for her sick daughter.
Furthermore, we see that beauty is an ongoing quest for women. Truvy’s hair salon provides a site of female engagement. The female characters in the film constantly talk about how certain styles relate certain identity elements. For example, Shelby (wants a style that represents she is more of a mother instead of a woman seeking a husband, so she asks Truvy to cut her hair short. Shelby is exercising her belief of “reflected appraisals” (Marshall 166). She exhibits internalizing social feedback, that is “our imagination of our appearances, our imagination of others’ judgments or appraisals of our appearance, and the emergence of self-feeling” (Marshall 166). The character of Shelby illustrates femininity is in constant flux but always aware or external judgment. In fact, a woman’s identity encompasses such external influences as “the way things are.” Women are judged by hair, as the film illustrates. Hair plays a vital role in film. It is portrayed as a crucial element of identity formation for women. For example, when M’Lynn is reading to Shelby in the hospital, she reads, “we know where you can get a top of the line hairstyle” out of a magazine as a suggestion to reinvent one’s female identity. Furthermore, the film highlights Shelby’s death as she is a “guardian angel…where she’ll always be young, always be beautiful.” Shelby seems to be immortalized as a thing of beauty everlasting.
In the end, the film frames motherhood as an image of beauty as well. For it begins with M’Lynn reluctantly “giving” her daughter away to the realities of marriage and ending with images of fields of children at an Easter egg hunt. Motherhood is a discourse offered to make sense of something horrible, from the perspective of a mother experiencing a child’s death. Within this discourse of motherhood, contexts of beauty and self-sacrifice are woven. But it is only through this narrative of motherhood that a woman can redeem her social status as well as her internal sense of importance as motherhood is given most cultural significance. However, these women in the film also provide a narrative of relationships between women that highlight is it also the nurturing and self-sacrificing relationship offered to other women that place a value on being female.
All in all, it seems appearance management is the motivating factor in being feminine, be it appearing as a loving mother, daughter, or friend. However, the narrative cleverly disguises the means of being self-sacrificing, for it ends with little Jackson running to M’Lynn after being scared. It is with this final image that seals the validity of motherhood. She gets to serve as mother again thereby stipulating motherhood is the only constant to a woman’s identity. Steel Magnolias also illustrates how beauty and outside appearance plays an integral role in the construction of femininity. The inclusion of a beauty parlor as the setting of most of the story relegates how image is closely knit to womanhood. Likewise, how M’Lynn’s motherhood role included the immense selflessness of body, even to the extent of giving her daughter a kidney, further constructs femininity on axis of generosity. Upon viewing Steel Magnolias viewers have the opportunity to ”interact with” and “compare themselves to the people whose lives enter their living rooms,” thus providing “an opportunity for viewers to increase their own sense of self-worth, by leading them to realize how fortunate they are” (Marshall 561).
Works Cited
“The Hair Salon,” in Debra Gimland, Body Work.
“Female Kin: Functions of the Meta-Identification of Womanhood,” by Judith B. Rosenberger in The Mother –Daughter Relationship edited by Gerd H. Fenchel.
“Pregnancy and the Professional, Woman: The Psychological Transition,” by Amy A Tyson and ”Constructing a Feminine Identity without Motherhood,” by Mardy S. Ireland in Dilemmas of a Double Life by Nancy B. Kaltreider.
“Our Bodies, Ourselves: Why We Should Add Old fashioned Empirical Phenomenology to the New Theories of the Body,” by Helen Marshall in Feminist Th
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