ABSTRACT
In Laura Mulvey's essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, female depictions of famous icons of Hollywood's star system are based on long-established schemes that privilege the spectatorial position of the masculine gaze. By emphasizing a dynamics oscillating between the passivity of the female image and the active control of the male viewer, cinema reproduces situations in which actresses are seen only as fetishes from the perspective of the voyeuristic man. This chapter analyzes the novel Estrella de día (Day Star), by Jaime Torres Bodet, as a text that represents a recurrent theme in Latin American narrative of the 1920s and 1930s, namely, the fascination that male viewers experienced when touched by the magnetism of Hollywood female stars. In the novel, Enrique falls in love with the cinematic image of Piedad Santelmo—a character allegedly inspired by Dolores del Río—who is portrayed as a young Mexican woman who had achieved diva status in Hollywood. In Mulvey's terms, Piedad is configured as an object tailored to the male gaze. This mechanism emphasizes how films from that era reproduce the traditional expectation that women were seen as objects, conveying characteristics of what may be labeled as “to-be-looked-at-ness”, subjected to men's erotic pleasure.
