Look at me, I'm Sandra Dee

Frontiers, 2001 by Scheiner, Georganne

Although she has become synonymous with sexual prudery, in fact Dee's film characterizations are often quite erotic, and her virginity is a source of great anguish and ambivalence in her film roles. Dee actually became a recognizable new "type" in the late fifties, a teenage girl conflicted about her emerging sexuality. Somehow that evolved into the "goody two shoes" image of today. In some way this image can be traced to what Dyer refers to as the 11 continuities of iconography" - the way she was dressed, coiffed, lit, photographed, and placed in the frame.15 Fan magazines also helped to create the girl-next-door image. Her iconic value as America's virgin can also be traced to a superficial reading of some of her most famous film roles because, upon deeper inspection, rarely was she portrayed as an unproblematized teen in her fifties roles. Indeed, by the sixties, Dee usually played a nymphet or a sexual tease as in Take Her She's Mine (1962) or If a Man Answers (1962), although popular memory of Dee as a fresh-faced teen is tied to her Tammy films, Tammy Tell Me True (1961) and Tammy and the Doctor (1963).16 These films really represent an aberration for Dee and are hardly representative of most of her film characterizations of that decade.

The apparent contradiction between our polarized images of Dee, Day, and Monroe can be situated in the larger context of the dialectic between the dominant discourse about female sexuality in the fifties and the conflicting messages of popular motion pictures. There is not a dichotomy between the Dee and Monroe tropes; they are two sides of the same sexual continuum. In the fifties, women and girls were bombarded with deeply contradictory messages about sex. On the one hand, erotic depictions of romance were pervasive in popular media sources, and on the other existed what Wini Breines has called "a cultural obsession with virginity."17 As Benita Eisler remembers about coming of age in the fifties, "Incessantly we'd grappled with the conflicting signals of sex as forbidden, dirty, dangerous, to be denied, and lied about, but also romantic, exciting and glamorous." One sociologist underscored the dilemma of adolescent girls, "It seems that half the time of our adolescent girls is spent trying to meet their new responsibilities to be sexy, glamorous and attractive, while the other half is spent meeting their responsibility to be virtuous by holding off the advances which testify to their success.""8 It was a delicate balancing act at best.

Susan Douglas posits that one legacy of popular culture in the fifties was the erosion of the unified self. That is, "presented with an array of media archetypes, and given morality tales in which we identify first with one type, then another... women have grown accustomed to compartmentalizing ourselves into a whole host of personas, which we occupy simultaneously."19 The fact that both Sandra Dee and Marilyn Monroe are sexual icons of the fifties underscores the sexual ambivalence of the period.