The Poetics of Color in William Wyler's Jezebel

Julia Stern reads "The Poetics of Color in William Wyler's Jezebel, " the film for which Bette Davis won her first Oscar.  Premiering one year before David Selznick's Gone With The Wind, William Wyler's 1938 Jezebel resets... [ view full abstract ]

Julia Stern reads "The Poetics of Color in William Wyler's Jezebel, " the film for which Bette Davis won her first Oscar.  Premiering one year before David Selznick's Gone With The Wind, William Wyler's 1938 Jezebel resets the Civil War's crises over sectionalism and slavery in 1853 yellow fever-ridden New Orleans. Plague stands in for battle, as massive fever casualties create social chaos in a city highly stratified by race, class, and language of origin. The film is remembered for Bette Davis's Oscar-winning performance as impulsive, autocratic JulIe, the young heiress who scandalizes her elite community by donning a red dress rather than requisite debutante's white for the Olympus Ball; equally well-known is Wyler's famous tableau of Davis and finance Henry Fonda being shunned by every single couple dancing in the ballroom; Julee's red-draped gown literally parts and repels the sea of white organza and formal dress. Seen from above, and intercut with shots of this social concussion as it unfolds  from the floor, the visual choreography of Julee's  rejection  rehearses in miniature the physical dynamics of contagion, isolation, and expatriation that will mark the yellow fever epidemic occupying the film's final reels.  Under martial law, dying victims come to be expelled to Lazarette Island, once New Orleans' leper colony.  This paper will read Jezebel's color palette of white and red, yellow and brown to suggest that the second skin of costume (the red dress actually was bronze!) encodes important cultural fantasies about the circulation and occasional fungiblity of whiteness, liberty, slavery and disease in the decade running up to the nation's most portentous, transformative conflict.