Go West, Young Women! - Hilary Hallett

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with no stars to one defined by them—was a century in the making. Many of the early American film industry’s most notable actresses translated, with the distinct accent of their age, the customs and conventions handed down by their theatrical foremothers on the antebellum stage. To stress the importance of theatrical aesthetics and practices on the democratization of fame, this chapter begins by historicizing and gendering the celebrity of Pickford’s most important foremother: Charlotte Cushman, the first American female star. Cushman’s fame developed in the 1840s—precisely the moment when both the words “celebrity” and “personality” appeared to denote individuals often of ordinary birth whose idiosyncrasies, accomplishments, and glamour made them such a topic of speculation and appeal that the public sought the kind of knowledge, provided through modern media, that made such people into “intimate strangers.” For Cushman to achieve this status, it was necessary to reinvent the actress as a figure of professional influence, artistic triumph, and personal virtue rather than of moral corruption, the latter a particularly acute association in Anglo-American culture.6

      Charlotte Cushman’s embodiment of “Success and her sister Fortune” in the 1850s revealed how the celebrity culture that supported her rise restaged gender as performance rather than essence, thereby aiding the breakdown of the belief that a woman’s moral character was immutably encoded in her appearance and distance from the tumult of public life. Put differently, celebrity culture’s development reveals how advertising an actress as a model worthy of emulation demanded different strategies of representation than those used to publicize great men. As used by film scholars, the term “persona,” which views the star as a text whose complications create ambiguities that can appeal to diverse fans, provides insight into the different dynamics that publicized famous women.7 Promoting female stars like Cushman required modern publicity to convey information about their private lives that could confound the flouting of respectability that their public performances entailed. New rituals of celebrity, like autobiographical writing in women’s magazines, explained this hidden self, offering access to truths that complicated how the actress appeared on stage. Such descriptions stressed how often women’s natures might accommodate qualities and characteristics of both sexes. Indeed, Cushman cut such an original figure in her milieu that her 1876 obituary still attributed her acclaim to her merging of seemingly irreconcilable traits. Her persona “manifested to the last the two leading peculiarities of her nature, the tenderness of a woman and the firmness of a Spartan man.” In this way, the fame of actresses was not a seamless expression of inner virtues—as had long been the case with men—but a multilayered performance that signaled the crumbling of sexual difference’s ability to define individual achievement and desire.8

      Picturing the actress this way begins to explain what made Hollywood’s social imaginary so provocative when it first emerged after the Great War. Like no other industry of its day, the early American film industry publicized the accomplishments of its many successful women workers, including actresses, screenwriters, directors, producers, journalists, and publicists. But without question, the most celebrated of these figures were the first movie stars, women like Pickford, Florence Lawrence, and Pearl White. As with Cushman in the century before, these women’s fame dramatized their ability to exercise qualities long reserved for heroic men. But unlike Cushman, these “girls,” to use the parlance of the day, also displayed qualities that marketed them as romantic, desiring young women who were emblematic of the new sexual freedoms their sex sought to explore. The fame such actresses incarnated explains why so many girls, as well as their elders, came to consider the actress a personage of serious consequence around the world.

      I

      When viewed through the lens of gender, the nineteenth-century stage appears as a kind of bellwether for women’s entrance into territories that once spelled ruin for the respectable. With the sexual integration of leisure spaces that began with women’s participation as audience members of the so-called legitimate stage, women began to stake out new public spaces for socialization. At this theater, women tested old limits as to what they might show and tell in public, including how much the female star could project the type of authority and appetites long reserved for men. By midcentury, Charlotte Cushman’s fame displayed how a celebrity culture once sharply segmented by sex and respectability had become mostly ordered by gender and class. This development made room for the celebration of an actress who could act like both a respectable lady and a heroic man.9

      Before Charlotte Cushman’s rise in the 1840s signaled the reconfiguration of the theater, women’s appearance “in the play or at the playhouse” took place “under a moral cloud.” Through the 1820s the theater was a part social, part political event controlled by elite white men. Men occupied the vast majority of seats in the nation’s few stock company theaters, and social class explained where they sat in the typical theater’s tripartite seating arrangement: the ground-floor pit for the “middling” sorts, the boxes above for the elite, and the third tier for those with the fewest financial resources, including the prostitutes who paraded their wares along its balcony. Local gentry enjoyed the same repertoire time and again: versions of Shakespeare that made the tragedies less tragic and “fairy tale” melodramas predominated. These plays often turned on the threat posed to a helpless heroine’s virtue and her eventual restoration “to the bosom of her home, her father, and her God,” offering women little to do but hope for rescue from their travails. All players in this era, male and female, were a morally suspect caste with no social standing. Forsaking womanly modesty and a home to earn a living strutting before strange men, the era’s few actresses attracted special censure. The conflation of actresses with prostitutes, the era’s other “public women,” in the language of the day, was well founded by the standards of the respectable. The more elastic sexual norms of the working-class milieu from which most actresses emerged, their initially low wages, and the desire to accrue the publicity that might follow from attracting well-placed paramours all discouraged a moralistic view of sex. Moreover, the presence of alcohol and prostitutes, as well as the celebration of sensuous display and illusion, made the theater virtually synonymous with corrupt aristocratic tastes, earning it a reputation as the enemy of the middle-class family as that class’s “cult of domesticity” took hold. A flat prohibition by the Protestant church followed. Legal scholars consider the special regulation of theatrical exhibitions an anomaly of English law reflecting the conviction of this rising middle class that the play house debased audiences, particularly vulnerable female ones. White men could ignore the church and partake of the play house’s pleasures with little consequence, but women who wished to remain ladies could not. Thus, through performance and space, this theater communicated the same message about women’s place in public: left alone without male protection women moved outside the moral order, inviting the surveillance of strangers that led to sexual exchanges and ruin.10

      As the nation’s capitalist expansion sent ever more people scuttling toward markets in cities and towns, leisure assumed more industrialized forms in which the star system and its celebrity culture played an increasingly central role. A theater manager in Philadelphia bemoaned how “a spirit of locomotiveness hitherto unexampled” erupted during “a commercial season of great excess,” making “the system of stars the order of 1835.”11 A set of emerging business practices tied to consumer capitalism’s growth, the star system offered the best means to fill the era’s larger and more numerous play houses. The theatrical entrepreneurs who sped the star system’s development jettisoned the elite man as the theater’s most important protagonist and patron. Instead, they publicized a more diverse set of players in different kinds of melodramatic plays that aimed to attract larger and more specific segments of the public.12 In this way, the star system encouraged the theater’s splintering along lines of class and gender.

      Inside and outside these more plentiful theaters, a commercial culture of print and performance resounding with melodramatic expression offered an aesthetic register to express the democratization of fame. Faith in the principle of poetic justice and the possibility of self-transformation for those long excluded from the heroic role distinguished melodrama’s form from the start. For this reason, some critics contend that melodrama’s roots share the same soil that produced fairy tales and ballads. Wherever its origins, the melodramatic form dominated the commercialized popular culture of the nineteenth century created by the spread of literacy,

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