COMEDY

GENDER AND SEXUALITY 65that Bruce Babington and Peter William Evans see at work in this film,Monroe represents ‘overflowing female excess’ (Babington and Evans,1989:227–228), a figure of hyperbolic femininity that Molly Haskelldescribes as being ‘as much in “drag’” as Joe and Jerry (quoted inSikov, 1994:142). During the song, which tells of passive availabilityand urges the lover to approach, so much is made of Monroe’s bosomthat rather than guaranteeing hers as an authentic female body amongstthe fakes, she appears as an unrealistic construct and a product of‘glamour’, Hollywood, and girlie magazines. As Ed Sikov writes, ‘If thefilm has a central deficiency, it is Wilder’s inability to move Monroe’scharacter beyond a sort of paralysed observation of her own image’(Sikov, 1994:143). Even ‘real’ women seem to lack substance beyondthe trappings of their gender.Structurally, Some Like It Hot and As You Like It are close. Bothfeature the removal from the hostile and dangerous city: inShakespeare’s play it is the court under the tyrannical Duke Frederick,in Wilder’s film a violent Chicago of gangsters, prohibition,unemployment, and hunger. Both the Forest of Arden and Miami Beachrepresent liberation from danger and the opportunity to explorealternative identities and the fermentation of romantic relationships.Both locations are associated with holidays and respite from economicdemands, as Rosalind says to Orlando, ‘There’s/no clock in the forest’(Shakespeare, 1989:3.2.294–295). It seems both film and play insistthat the fluctuation of playful identities is only a temporary measure,necessary to reconfirm heterosexual norms which Majorie Garber seesas fundamentally unchanged by the period of cross-dressing:The ideological patterns of this implication are clear: crossdressingcan be ‘fun’ or ‘functional’ so long as it occupies aliminal space and a temporary time period; after thiscarnivalization, however…the crossdresser is expected to resumelife as he or she was, having, presumably, recognized the touch of‘femininity’ or ‘masculinity’ in her or his otherwise ‘male’ or‘female’ self.(Garber, 1992:70)When we look at the endings of both narratives, however, we can seethat they refuse to relinquish their hold on the carnival worldabsolutely, and that more than a ‘touch’ of the freer desiringrelationships and gender identifications they have discovered remainsafter the narrative ends. In the epilogue to As You Like It, the actor