Jezebel (1938)

Rae English

The 1938 Warner Brothers movie Jezebel stars Bette Davis as Julie Marsden, Henry Fonda as Preston “Pres” Dillard, and George Brent as Buck Cantrell, with Bette Davis getting top billing. (Davis won the Academy Award in 1939 for Best Actress in a Leading Role.) Set in New Orleans, 1852, Jezebel is the story of an exuberant and spirited young woman, Julie, who bucks the limitations of her Southern customs and ultimately faces the serious consequences for doing so. The movie shows Julie’s early offenses as minor infractions (being late to her engagement party because she’s out riding an equally determined horse and teaching “him his manners right now” or he’s ruined) to establish her as merely an uninhibited, unchecked girl whose antics provide gossip for the idle Southern women. Julie’s social group anticipates that once married, her fiancé, banker Preston Dillard, will rein in the animated Julie and she’ll settle down into a proper Southern woman. Julie, like every girl in the movies who tries to resist socially oppressive customs—and every savvy girl who tries to use them to her advantage—must accept her lot or die. First, however, Julie must progress into deeper transgressions that teach her valuable lessons, cost men their lives, and perhaps even cost Julie her own. The ending of the movie allows no certainty for the audience, but does provide a dramatic exit with the reformed Julie holding a feverish Pres on the brink of expiration from yellow fever. They ride off to the island of the condemned with the poor southerners and slaves—the others who’ve rejected social customs or been rejected by them. Though their exit is accompanied by triumphant music, the last scene of the indomitable Julie is more indicative of a funeral pyre than a victory ride.

Tino Balio characterizes Jezebel as “Warners’ answer to Selznick’s Gone with the Wind” (151). While the two films share similar plot devices and lead female characters, Davis’s Julie is a more sympathetic character. Unlike Scarlett, Julie actually has the capacity to love without necessarily compromising the spunkiness that audience is induced to admire in her. Even when Julie’s plans go terribly awry, she shows fear at the consequences and attempts to intervene. However, Southern customs cannot neither be sacrificed nor compromised no matter the motive and punishment must be meted out.

The title, Jezebel, plays on the biblical myth of a heathen queen who famously disregards the customs of the culture into which she marries. The movie is ultimately about the spaces by which humans are constrained. The scenes support this examination of spaces by constantly moving between those of women (the house, the dressmaker’s shop, the woman’s bedroom), of men (the bar, the drawing room whiskey’s and political talk, the dueling field), and the collision of the two (the ballroom, the dinner table, the porch). Jezebel examines the spaces by which men, women, and cultures are constrained, the ones by which they are united, the benefits and the detriments they provide.