A woman - so what?
| When commentators turn their attention to Dorothy Fields, they suddenly discover there are two species of lyricist : the male and the female. Dorothy is "the greatest female lyricist". She is "not alone as a woman and a lyric writer.. but she is way out in front". |
| It's always there, and it's ALWAYS in the first sentence. That's understandable. As human beings, we strive to interpret the world through categorisation, and a primary categorisation of people is the lovely, simply one of gender; people tend to fall so neatly into one or the other. |
| Is gender relevant in Dorothy Fields' case? She's certainly not a feminist writer; she was never particularly concerned with social issues in her writing, and is not prized by feminists. Mark Steyn writes : "� Dorothy Fields � as far as I'm concerned, the greatest woman writer of the twentieth century, though unlikely ever to be anthologised by Virago with an introduction by Victoria Glendinning." |
| If her writing does not specifically concentrate on women, does it have � terrible phrase � a female sensibility? Some do find this. Fred Ebb : "I think she had a particularly feminine voice, and the reason is that I cannot imagine a man writing some of the lyrics for which she is most famous, that is, Make the Man Love Me, Pink Taffeta Sample Size 10, Nobody Does It Like Me. I don't know why this is so � and it could be because when I hear these songs, I know she wrote them � but to me, they sound particularly feminine." Deborah Grace Winer finds in Remind Me a strongly feminine voice. Confusingly Betty Comden has said "I don't think there is a female voice there � those songs could have been written by either a man or a woman" but has also written of "a uniquely feminine perspective". |
| Where would we expect to find this feminine perspective? Not in her choice of the characters singing and their situations; Dorothy wrote no more for women than any other Tin Pan Alley and Broadway songwriter, and the situation was normally that required by a plot. It would be rather in the feelings expressed, and the words chosen. Many male songwriters wrote superbly for women characters � Frank Loesser and Lorenz Hart did so, and more recent writers such as Craig Carnelia and Richard Maltby Jnr. I can listen to Fields lyrics all day long, without hearing the sound of a specially female voice and experience. Except for one lyric, and unfortunately for my feminist credentials, it's on a stereotypically "girlie" subject. It's in the aforementioned Pink Taffeta Sample Size 10, cut from Sweet Charity. The song is a reminiscence of childhood from the daughter of a travelling salesman who let his little girl try on the dresses of which he carried samples. The detail in this short lyric is superb. The excitement in the hurried, tripping phrases "It was copied from an import", "It was real Parisienne", "And the skirt spread like a fan" is touching and real. You think "a woman wrote this; a woman felt this." But not a feminist woman. |