By Gerry Boyle '78

Margaret McFadden

When most people watch Fred Astaire glide across the dance floor they see, well, Fred Astaire gliding across the dance floor. Margaret McFadden sees a symptom of America's wounded manhood, a reaction to the country's economic woes in the 1930s. With more than 20 percent of men unemployed in Depression-era America, the message from the debonair Astaire characters was that it was okay to be a man with neither a job nor prospects. The subliminal message from movie makers: men didn't need money to be considered drop-dead sexy. "I think they were trying to remedy a real crisis in men's identity," McFadden said.

Welcome to America as seen through McFadden's consciousness-raising 3-D glasses. As assistant professor of American studies at Colby, McFadden has spent the past three years removing the cultural cataracts from students' eyes. Her point, one sometimes made with the help of Jack Benny and Mae West, is that popular culture both reflects and shapes the way we live, that "this really is stuff that matters and we should pay attention to it."

McFadden has been paying attention to this period in American culture since she was a child growing up in Queens. "My father (then with the U.S. State Department) was one of the funniest people I've ever met," she said. "I think in truth part of my interest in comedy comes from the fact that he was so funny. Other kids came into the city and went to museums. My parents took me to Marx Brothers marathons." At all those showings of The Cocoanuts a seed was planted.

After graduation in 1983 from Wells College in New York, where she majored in philosophy and women's studies, McFadden went on to earn her master's degree in philosophy at Duke University. She then worked as a park ranger at the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, N.Y., until she traded her ranger duties for Yale, where she wrote her doctoral dissertation: "`Anything Goes': Gender and Knowledge in the Comic Popular Culture of the 1930s."

After teaching at the University of Virginia, McFadden came to Colby, where her study of the world of 1930s comedy-and its reflection of gender relations-has continued. She has presented papers on Astaire-Rogers dance musicals as New Deal allegories, gender and economic crisis in 1930s musical comedy and the cultural force of the Jack Benny program. Now on sabbatical, she is writing a book on gender and class in 1930s comedy. McFadden has concluded that comedy is one place where it is culturally safe to turn social order upside down. "It gives you a kind of plausible deniability," she said. "If you name a character `Mr. Parasite' (as Jack Benny once did), you can say it was just a joke."

The subject is no joke for McFadden. She has spent weeks in the Warner Bros. collection at the University of Wisconsin and in the Jack Benny Collection at UCLA. She has listened to hours of radio programs and watched hundreds of movies in theaters, on video and on classic-movie cable channels. "I tried to turn myself into a Thirties person," McFadden said. "I found myself saying things like, `That's swell.' I said, `Oh, my god. I sound like Ruby Keeler.'"

But her study is about more than mimicry. McFadden has identified "the big tropes" or metaphors in 1930s comedy and asked what they say about American culture at that time. Why did so many movies include a character McFadden calls "the big sissy"? She says it was a response to a male identity crisis caused by the Depression. In order to reaffirm their masculinity, men needed a sissified foil.

And what of the golddiggers, the dizzy dames? The answers will be included in a McFadden book to be published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2001. In the meantime, she will continue to teach her students to decode the messages in popular culture. "I love it when a student says, `My friends won't watch movies with me anymore. They say I'm always analyzing things.' That's really the goal," said McFadden.

And after the 1930s comedy? McFadden said she might turn her attention to another cultural wave: disco. She heard of a stunt at Comisky Park that involved mass destruction of disco records and eight-track tapes. The disco-hating crowd became so impassioned there nearly was a riot. "My question is, `Why?'" McFadden said.

Fortunately for Colby students, with McFadden the question just keeps coming up.

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