LITMIR.BIZ

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counterparts and often visibly doubled in the brass by taking their shows on the road, the stage offered a singular arena for exhibiting a woman’s ability to openly compete and best a man.⁴³

      The mounting centrality of women as consumers and producers of American popular culture continued to create variations in the melodramatic aesthetic that subsequently shaped the development of motion pictures during the 1910s. Variously labeled immoral, problem, and of the emotional hydraulic school, female characters frequently drove the action of these plays, many of which were written, adapted, or commissioned by women.⁴⁴ Displaying innovations in stock characters and plot devices, these plays often featured active, independent heroines in stories in which chance and responsibility factored into judgments about women’s character.⁴⁵ As the publicity about Cushman’s private life prefigured, threats to a loved one often justified the exercise of these protagonists’ wills. A heroine, not a hero, executed the first hair’s-breadth rescue of a victim strapped to railroad tracks. As she batters through a train station door with an axe, her helpless beloved shouts “Courage!” and “That’s a true woman!”⁴⁶

      Other players in so-called immoral melodramas tackled the sexual double standard that judged chastity as central to a woman’s worth and meaningless to a man’s.⁴⁷ This was the subject of La dame aux camellias (1852), an adaptation of the popular novel by Alexandre Dumas fils. After its 1854 American debut, Camille; or, The Fate of a Coquette, as it was often called, became not just one of the two most popular plays performed in the United States but also the signature part of the late nineteenth century’s greatest international star, the French actress Sarah Bernhardt.⁴⁸ Repeated revivals never wanted for an audience, since, following Bernhardt’s example, every great actress demanded to assail Camille’s lead, Marguerite, the courtesan whose self-sacrifice for her lover demonstrated that even a “fallen woman” could be more than she appeared. After seeing Bernhardt in the role, the great Italian actress Eleanora Duse called the older star’s performance “an emancipation.” As Duse recalled, “She played, she triumphed, she took possession of us all, she went away . . . and for a long time the atmosphere she brought with her remained in the old theater. A woman had achieved all that!”⁴⁹ Like Cushman, Bernhardt displayed qualities associated with both sexes. But in contrast to the Anglo-American context, in Bernhardt’s day the French accepted, indeed expected, overt displays of actresses’ sexuality, including motherhood without marriage.⁵⁰ Yet even the more tepid version of Camille performed in the Anglophone world prompted alarm among early critics who called it a “deification of prostitution.”⁵¹ Indeed, the play’s popularity with women audiences and actresses spawned a host of imitators exploring the erring woman’s relationship to society.⁵² The trend prompted escalating concern over how the “morbid fictions” of a “herd” of female playwrights threatened to force Shakespeare, Scott, and Dickens to the margins of the American theater.⁵³ Such views indicated why Camille sounded an early note in the swelling cacophony over how women’s entrance into masculine preserves threatened to disrupt the nation’s fragile cultural standards and social stability.

      Indeed, by 1900 many cultural custodians linked the nation’s advanced state of democratization and industrialization to its production of an emancipated type of modern woman whose influence had debased American culture. Considered a “quintessentially American” type, the modern woman was one of the first national exports that presaged the reversal in the direction of cultural influence across the Atlantic that Hollywood later intensified.⁵⁴ Hugo Munsterberg was one of many leading public intellectuals who predicted that cultural deterioration would follow women having come to “dominate the entire life of America,” in the words of his German compatriot Albert Einstein. A specialist in visual perception who taught at Harvard from 1892 until his death in 1916, Munsterberg developed a keen interest in film late in life, creating one of the first theories of film spectatorship.⁵⁵ In his guise as a successful popular writer, Munsterberg set about explaining how his foreign perspective offered particular insight into American culture, in writing that often displayed “the strikingly misogynist” tone that characterized much of this commentary. According to Munsterberg, American women’s influence spun “a web of triviality and misconception over the whole culture.”⁵⁶ In 1901 Munsterberg worried that the theater’s female audience had placed it under the control of patrons who could not “discriminate between the superficial and the profound.” “The whole situation militates against the home and the masculine control of high culture,” he lamented, warning, “if the whole national civilization should receive the feminine stamp, it would become powerless and without decisive influence on the world’s progress.” Munsterberg’s estimates were supported by a 1910 survey of theatrical producers and critics that claimed women composed between two-thirds and three-quarters of the audience for performances even at night.⁵⁷ The next year Clayton Hamilton, a drama critic at Columbia University, summed up the results of this reality: “Every student of the contemporary theater knows that the destiny of our drama has lain for a long time in the hands of women. Shakespeare wrote for an audience made up mainly of men and boys,” but “Ibsen and Pinero have written for an audience made up mainly of women,” making the theater “the one great public institution in which ‘votes for women’ is the rule, and men are overwhelmingly outvoted.”⁵⁸ And given that Ibsen and Pinero were renowned for controversial female protagonists who blew up the constraints of true womanhood, the fame of these playwrights suggested that women wanted to see actresses who refused to remain trapped in “a doll’s house” (the title of Ibsen’s 1879 play).⁵⁹

      II

      By 1900 actresses in vaudeville and on the legitimate stage displayed how a girl might act “the Daddy of the Family,” as Mary Pickford’s early publicity described her, while still exhibiting a specifically feminine allure. This meant that actresses like Pickford made the ambition to achieve renown compatible with femininity itself. As the first film stars made the transition from stage to screen during the 1910s, many of the most successful occupied a terrain in which the exhibition of feminine charm and public authority coexisted. Not long after her theatrical debut in 1900, Pickford and her now avowedly “stage-minded” mother, Charlotte, met one successful example of the type: the thirteen-year-old vaudeville sensation Elsie Janis. Pickford recalled how Janis earned the “unbelievable salary of seventy-five dollars a week” for her “magnificent imitation” of the Ziegfeld showgirl Anna Held and renditions of songs like “Oh, I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave!” Pickford and Charlotte asked Janis and her mother how little Gladys might emulate the older girl’s “brilliant career.”⁶⁰ “ ‘Take her to see the finest plays and artists,’ ” Mrs. Janis advised, but “first, and above all . . . let her be herself.” Evoking the modern artist’s edict to explore and express the self, the advice registered how the theater nurtured a type of individuality in girls that encouraged them to seek out some kind of happiness for themselves. Pickford made the counsel an axiom, and the four became lifelong friends, the first in a series of mother-daughter teams whose success they first imitated and then supported. “Hollywood was a matriarchy,” observed Adela Rogers St. Johns, the journalist who became “Mother Confessor” to the first movie stars. “No more wise, wonderful and remarkable women than Charlotte Pickford, Mrs. Gish, Peg Talmadge, Phyllis Daniels ever lived.”⁶¹ Indeed, the prevalence of female-headed households among those who became the greatest actresses of their day suggests that the stereotype of the stage mother who prostitutes her tender charge might be better viewed as a family survival strategy that required tossing norms of feminine decorum into the breach. Not just Cushman, Bernhardt, and Pickford but also Florence Lawrence, Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Norma and Constance Talmadge, Pearl White, Ruth Roland, Pola Negri, and Gloria Swanson were all reared without fathers. Beyond the powerful economic impetus such circumstances engendered, the absence of intimate patriarchal control in childhood may have improved their chances of reinventing how to act like a girl.

      FIGURE 3. The two parts of Pickford’s persona: motion picture magnate Mary Pickford keeping track of “Little Mary,” c. 1920. Courtesy of Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills.

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