The grotesque--the monstrous--are what give us our reference of normality. In society, our understanding of what makes the monster provides us with the ability to know who is genuine, holding of an authentic self. Yet in The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West builds a narrative full of grotesques, misconstrued representatives of humanity, suggesting that the authentic self may not exist. West explores the aspects of the 1930s culture and the influence of film on the masses, presenting the absence of authenticity in the face of pure commodity. Originally titled The Cheaters and the Cheated, the clichéd representations of individuals in B-movie productions distort the reality of individual characteristics and life experiences. These films created false anticipations for the masses of glamor and the Hollywood lifestyle, creating the culture of violence in response to feeling cheated out of what they believed was reality.

A novel that employs surrealist techniques, The Day of the Locust shows the decay of the authentic self as clichés dominate their culture. As characters lose their awareness, they drown from the lack of reference with no distance from the subjects of the films. The characters of West’s novel are grotesque in their internalization of the clichéd personalities in an attempt to obtain the power and prestige they observe in the movies. Unable to achieve the lives they witness in the films, they turn to violence in response to the feeling of being cheated. Characters also turn violence through their understanding of how they should act by their clichés or through their inability to complete their desires, both sexual and otherwise. West exhibits several forms of clichés through characters such as Abe or Miguel, but Faye stands as the greatest of the grotesques, the femme fatale.

The 1930s is often referred to as the “Golden Age” of Hollywood and labels an era of mass productions of film. West’s suggestion of no individual beyond the cultural references seems possible when considering the sheer numbers and influence of Hollywood in the first half of the 20th century. Even more so, his argument of the cheaters and cheated is proven further when considering the risks consumers took in film culture. Producers and studios had to calculate the risk they believed consumers would take with their money with the level of production required to make them return to the cinemas again in the future. Despite the game of balancing the risk and reward, consumers understood the risk but still chose to participate. Not only was the industry booming, attending films constituted “annually over 80% of the value of all admissions to spectator amusements during the decade” (Sedgwick and Pokorny 75). Studies showed that despite the uncertainty of the pleasures that filmgoing produced, consumers continuously poured money into the industry, fueling the explosion of commodity culture and allowing for the suggestions West makes about the inability to live without the cliches.

Veitch describes the attempts at living in the clichés as a result of the saturation of commodity culture that characterized the 1930s. There are no interactions apart from Hollywood’s influence on individuals false personalities in West’s novel, to the point where in true surrealist nature, “they overwhelm subjectivity itself and pervert nearly every human relationship” (Veitch 114). He argues that almost all the characters are a representation of the readymades produced by society and the commodity culture, noting even Homer’s character as a production of the influential culture from which he came. Veitch also explores the intense violence that Tod experiences and witnesses in the final moments of the story during the mob scene, but fails to explore how this relates to the violence Tod also experiences while imagining rape fantasies of Faye. His connections to the mural and the mob are necessary notes of the violence the cheated default to, but Veitch lacks the connections to the violence concerning Tod and his interaction with the femme fatale.

Traditionally, the femme fatale is depicted as a highly sexualized woman who uses her sexuality to gain power and money, mainly through violence toward men or through a man’s violent actions towards her. Boozer describes her as a character with intense ties to “sexual, social and ideological unrest,” particularly in response to the traditional gender roles of women (Boozer 20). They are a contradiction of male authority but are also portrayed as the fetishized sexual ideal for men, an irony that seems lost in West’s novel. As we are only shown Faye’s characteristics through Homer’s and Tod’s experiences with her, the latter of the two features dominates the novel.

The mentality and actions of the femme fatale, especially as a sexual idea for men, is also influenced by the persona she pursues. A study about the connection between sexual coercion and narcissism explored the personas used to gain power over the opposite sex and found that “The results indicate that sexual coercion in males relates to more socially desirable aspects of narcissism, whereas in females, these strategies are associated with socially toxic components of the construct” (Blinkhorn 221). These socially toxic components included entitlement and exploitativeness, two characteristics true to both Faye and the cliché of the femme fatale. In partnership with these characteristics, Bronfen argues that “She entertains a narcissistic pleasure at the deployment of her own ability to dupe the men who fall for her, even as she is merciless in manipulating them for her own ends” (Bronfen 106). The femme fatale chooses to use her sexuality as a means of power over men, usually in the field of financial gain or social stance (Boozer 21). Just as Faye manipulates the other cliché, she expects them to act in response to her as other characters in the B-movies, ceding her their money and sexual desires, producing her as just another cliché herself.

While Faye may be the foreboding femme fatale, she is introduced with a full cast of clichéd grotesques, all of which are internalizations of the b-movie personas that flood their culture. Abe, Earle, and Miguel each represent a manufactured and clichéd persona that embodies them. Abe lives as a gangster or mobster, one who objectifies women and thrives on money and gambling. His language hints at this personification, such as “A lallapalooza--all slut and a yard wide” (West 63), but his obsession with the chicken fight furthers this persona. His attempts at controlling the situation and in managing of the cockfight portray his understanding of the cliché as being a gambler, one who should win in the face of competition. Earle’s cliché is as the stony Western cowboy. He lives and breathes what he understands a cowboy should be. While he has lived the cowboy life in Arizona, he instead has chosen to take the entire personality to the next level, letting it permeate all his actions. When Tod attempts to mock his persona, Earle responds in seriousness, proving his inability to detach himself as an authentic cowboy from the facade that is shown through the films (West 110).

Miguel is also a cliché as the Latino lover. The looks that Miguel and Faye's exchange are the first clue of their chemistry, to the point where Tod is uncomfortable and jealous (West 115-116). Incredibly handsome, mysterious, and foreign, he is the personification of the Latin lover that is shown throughout the b-movies, culminating with their sexual interactions at the end. While all three are different clichés, they all exist primarily within the outlined personas and seem to have no authentic self beyond the acts they live within.

While Claude Estee, Homer, and Adore are not products of b-movies directly, their characteristics are still products of the commodity culture. Claude, as a screenwriter, would be assumed to have some distance from the facades he is part of portraying in the films. However, he is shown as the exact opposite in his imitation of the wealthy Southern plantation. He has a servant, just as plantation owners would; yet his servant is Chinese, not black as the Southern narrative dictates. With this variation, he compensates, attempting to maintain the narrative by calling his servant a “black rascal” (West 69).

In contrast, Homer is the character with the weakest connection to Hollywood as he comes from the oppressive Bible Belt of the Midwest. Homer is the most highly repressed character of the novel, a character with sexual experience and no outward sexual desire for the most sexualized woman in Faye. The deviation from Hollywood’s power, however, does not exempt him from the commodity culture and the pressures of culture as a whole. When Homer is lonely, he begins to sin the Star Spangled Banner as it is the only song he knows. The song choice suggests that he is a product of the Americana and Christian patriotic culture of the Midwest. His limited exposure to the Hollywood personas does not exempt him from the clichés but instead leaves him unprepared with how to react to the personas when he encounters them, as seen with Faye, especially in her sexuality.

Adore is the third character that is not explicitly exposed to the Hollywood clichés but is still heavily influenced by them. His mother projects her anticipations of his Hollywood stardom onto the boy, resulting in a hypersexualized child. A true grotesque, the scene of him singing and dancing leaves discomfort at the fact that he is intentionally sexualized, especially by his mother who even describes him as being “just a baby” (West 140-141). The result is a child whose life has been so dominated by the expectations of glamour and Hollywood that he has lost his true identity as a child: innocence in the face of sexuality.

The star of the grotesque cast, Faye stands as the femme fatale, the dangerously coercive woman whose looks could kill, nearly literally in Tod’s understanding. Her effect on both Tod and Homer--one sexually and one financially--shows her categorization as the deadly woman. She refuses to break from the persona, and continuously uses language and acts within the framework the femme fatale presents. The first suggestion of this persona is in Tod’s description of her near the beginning of the novel: “Her invitation wasn’t to pleasure, but to struggle, hard and sharp, closer to murder than to love. If you threw yourself on her, it would be like throwing yourself from the parapet of a skyscraper. You would do it with a scream” (West 68). The description is of Faye playing an extra in a film, but it applies to Tod’s continuous feelings of raping her. He understands her danger, the pure violence she envokes--something crucial to the femme fatale persona. Her looks and beauty tempt of the romance but promise the sadomasochistic result should anyone try. He follows the description up with her reasoning: “She didn’t love him and he couldn’t further her career” (West 68). As Booker describes, the femme fatale finds the man she coerces by identifying the value he brings to her, either by money or sexuality. As Tod does neither for Faye, she chooses to pursue others, only fueling Tod’s violent reactions more in the face of incompletion of his sexual desires.

The cliché continues as Faye uses her power to coerce Homer into helping fund her Hollywood endeavors. In contrast to her brief stint at the “sporting house” where she used her looks for sexuality and money, the choice to be with Homer is one where she uses her looks for power and money. In both cases, she uses her sexuality as the driving force for gaining financial stability and independence. However, being with Homer is more of a business contract, one that she notes is an “arrangement [that] was a business one” and “To make it absolutely legal, they were going to have a lawyer draw up a contract” (West 135). Another characteristic of the femme fatale, she chooses to make the partnership for her personal benefit and to gain agency in spaces where she may not have had it before the coercive behaviors.

Homer’s choice to help pay for Faye’s expenses furthers his weakness to the commodity culture through falling to the femme fatale. However, while he is intrigued and hypnotized by her persona, he is not aware of how to act or react within the characterizations as he is not directly a cliché from the b-movie films. The scene in the Cinderella Bar is key to showcasing Faye’s persona and her own anticipations of gender roles within the structure of the femme fatale. According to the b-movie culture, the femme fatale should be desired sexually and praised for her sexuality. Faye anticipates all men to fall under her sexual coercion, a sign of the narcissistic behavioral tendencies with manipulation that contributes to her role as a dangerous woman.

In the Cinderella Bar, she is forced to confront her assumptions of gender roles through the drag queen show. The question of what is gender and what is an act subverts Faye’s expectations of how men and women she exist within gender roles. As the drag queen seems to have a greater sense of self during the song, the opposite occurs after and it seems surviving as a man is what is the real act. The ambiguity suggests the potential of the b-movie clichés to have limited reach and do not influence every single individual. In response to the uncomfortable subversion of her views on gender roles, she projects the frustration from the performance onto Homer and his inability to see her as a sexually powerful woman within the part of the femme fatale.

A culminating point of Faye’s femme fatale is her sexual interaction with Miguel and the primal scene’s impact on Homer. His lack of sexual interaction gives him a childlike innocence. Reflecting Freud’s theory of the primal scene where a child’s first sexual exposure is seeing his parents have sex, Homer walking in on Faye and Miguel is a version of this primal scene and just as it would cause psychological struggles for a child, it does for Homer. He is described as: “Some inner force of nerve and muscle was straining to make the ball tighter and still tighter. He was like a steel spring which has been freed of its function in a machine and allowed to use all its strength centripetally” (West 171). Something snaps inside Homer when his image of Faye has shattered, leaving him in a downward spiral. He reverts to the fetal position, a position that is known for protecting oneself. The irony is his protection of himself in response to the shattered image leads to an outburst of extreme violence towards Adore later on, furthering the machine-like description of springs being pushed to their limit and then rocketing out of control. The spiral suggests that Faye is indeed a femme fatale, one whose image is the driving force in shattering Homer’s identity and perspective.

Homer’s spiral and decision to attack Adore is a result of his subverted expectations and lack of completion on his expectation is part of a running theme throughout the novel, one that continously plays to the cheated reacting in violence to the cheaters. A major connection of the lack of completion and a turn to violence is Tod’s rape fantasies of Faye. For each time he imagines the fantasy, his thoughts turn to his violent painting, a cathartic result of coping with the lack of completion for pure desire.

Two distinct occasions, besides the final scene, occur where Tod envisions raping Faye and then turns his thoughts to the painting. The first occasion is during their discussion of the stories Faye wants Tod to create for her. His attempts at physical and sexual contact with her are shown in their interaction when he leaves: “She kissed him willingly enough, but when he tried to extend the caress, she tore free. ‘Whoa there, palsy-walsy,’ she laughed. ‘Mama spank’” (West 107). Her use of the phrase “palsy-walsy” plays to her persona of the femme fatale as she uses language common in b-movies. Another characteristic of the femme fatale is her sexual teasing with Tod, specifically in how she opens the small possibility of a sexual encounter via the kiss, but shuts down any further sexuality with him beyond the small window. His mind turns to “The Burning of Los Angeles,” specifically a version with a naked form of Faye about to be hit by a stone. The incompletion of his sexual desire causes Tod to turn to another outlet to express his overpowering desire for Faye.

The second occasion is during the dinner out in the mountains with Miguel and Earle. He attempts to catch her after she flees the fight between Earle and Miguel: “If he caught her now, she wouldn’t escape….Already he could feel how it would be when he pulled her to the ground” (West 117). Tod comes closer to the actual rape in this scene than he does in the one previously where the kiss. He is fully focused on the violence of raping her, but again he is unable to complete his fantasy. And again, his mind turns to his painting. He thinks of painting it “to appear almost gay” but wonders if he is “exaggerating the importance of the people who come to California to die” (West 118). The irony here is Tod feels cheated by the sexual completion he desires with Faye but is never able to complete and therefore wants to become violent. In a similar vein, the people who come to California to die are part of the mob as a result of being cheated by the promises of California presented by Hollywood.

The anger and violence of the mob are showcased in the final scene of the story. Before the final scene, Tod has a full imagining of the rape fantasy while sitting in the restaurant. Again, even in his imagination, he is unable to complete the fantasy due to the waiter’s interruptions. The fantasy includes extreme violence as he plans to hit her with a glass bottle and then complete the rape. His desires for her sexually and to dominate her with physical violence and power showcases both his understanding and her portrayal of the femme fatale. From there, the next scene is the mass mob in the streets.

For the mob in the streets, they are reacting in response to the feeling of being cheated by Hollywood for their inability to deliver on their promises of glamor and the high lifestyle. The violence response is their only viable reaction to the incompletion that was unanticipated, as with the other moments that lack climax throughout the novel. Tod has now become a part of the painting, a part of the mob he imagined resulting from the feeling of being cheated and not receiving what they all desire, despite trying every tactic possible to gain the result--even taking on the b-movie personifications they strive to embody. Even within the brutal mob, rape and assault are attempted to control the sexual energy and sadomasochistic tendencies the b-movies promoted. The women’s responses to the attempted assaults, such as “Hey, you, I ain’t no pillow” and “Lay off that” but said good-naturedly further the broad ideology of the b-movies in the commodity culture (West 183). It is beyond the cast of grotesques we see throughout the novel: it’s deeper, more ingrained in the culture as consumerism and commodity became popular.

The grotesque of each character, the influence of culture in comparison to their lack of authentic self, suggests that with no real referent, that no authentic self can exist due to these pressures. The turning towards violence in reaction to the lack of completion promotes these postmodernist tendencies, particularly in Tod’s anti-epiphany. In the exact moment when he should have an epiphany with a deeper understanding of those who come to California to die, he himself becomes a grotesque, an imitation of the siren with no awareness of his internal self. The surrealist use of art--or the films--and the lack of the referent show how the characters have no inner and authentic self. They are merely replicas, skeletons of the cookie-cutter personalities their culture has fed them. In the face of no real self, they become the grotesques, the monsters who demonstrate the dangers of a purely commodified culture that is rooted in violence and despair.

Works Cited:

Blinkhorn, Victoria, et al. “The Ultimate Femme Fatale? Narcissism Predicts Serious and Aggressive Sexually Coercive Behaviour in Females.” Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 87, 2015, pp. 219–223., doi:10.1016/j.paid.2015.08.001.

BOOZER, JACK. “THE LETHAL FEMME FATALE IN THE NOIR TRADITION.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 51, no. 3/4, 1999, pp. 20–35. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20688218.

Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Femme Fatale: Negotiations of Tragic Desire.” New Literary History, vol. 35, no. 1, 2004, pp. 103–116. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20057823.

Sedgwick, John, and Michael Pokorny. “Consumers as Risk Takers: Evidence from the Film Industry during the 1930s.” Business History, vol. 52, no. 1, 2010, pp. 74–99., doi:10.1080/00076790903469620.

“The Cliches Are Having a Ball.” American Superrealism: Nathanael West and the Politics of Representation in the 1930s, by Jonathan Veitch, University of Wisconsin Press, 1997, pp. 113–131.

“The Day of the Locust.” Miss Lonelyhearts ; &, the Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West, New Directions, 2009, pp. 59–185.

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