Vital Movements: Feminist Aesthetics and Popular Culture 1920–1945

Home , A Peculiar Treasure, Heterodoxy (group), Miss Lulu Bett (play), Neith Boyce, Stage Door, Zona Gale

Jacqueline Rothstein

A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto

Vital Movements: Feminist Aesthetics and Popular Culture 1920–1945

Jacqueline Rothstein

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English University of Toronto

2019 Abstract

Vital Movements argues for the crucial importance of women’s physical movement to the aesthetics of American popular culture between 1920 and 1945. Tracking female bodies as they run up and down stairs, enter and exit rooms, and strut across spaces and places, my dissertation reveals an array of self-determining women, defiant in their mobility and their right to choose and take pleasure in a life outside the accepted roles of wife and mother. Aesthetic modernism’s institutionalization as the critical high-water mark of the period has largely rendered works that circulated in the commercial realms of Broadway,

Hollywood, and Book-of-the-Month Clubs devoid of substance. Further, critical emphasis on language and discourse, according to dance critics, has caused us to ignore the expressive capacities of the body in motion. I argue that sustained attention to embodied movement forces a reconsideration of popular realist texts by revealing other ways they tell their stories, ways that are complex and layered in their own right. This method of engagement restores agency to the texts, lost, as Rita Felski has argued, in the emphasis on historical context, by rendering their capacity to solicit our “affective attachments.” Combining insights from middlebrow studies, “physical cultures” of the period, philosophies of movement, dance studies, and spatial theory, each chapter applies

them to a different genre. Chapter one uses Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s play

Stage Door to establish women’s movement as the dissertation’s overall subject and to introduce the essential role played by work in the freedom and autonomy expressed by it.

Chapter two focuses on resistance to norms of feminine embodiment and their relation to social and economic mobility in Dorothy Arzner’s film Dance, Girl, Dance. Stage directions and the inherent visuality of film attune readers to moving bodies before encountering the narrative forms of chapters three and four, which, respectively, connect moving bodies to unarticulated thoughts and desires in Zona Gale’s novel Miss Lulu Bett, and to personal growth and fulfillment in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s autobiography, Intimate

Memories. Throughout bodies “speak” through movement, generating a realism richly attuned to the textures of women’s everyday lives.

iii

Acknowledgements

Research and writing of this dissertation was facilitated by various awards and fellowships: grants from, respectively, the Centre for the Study of the United States and the Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies at the University of Toronto which allowed me to travel to archives in New York City and Madison, Wisconsin; the Shiff

Graduate Enhancement Fund and the Earl and Renée Lyons Graduate Fund at the Anne

Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies; and a Doctoral Award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

I owe the Graduate English Department at the University of Toronto my appreciation for financial support in the form of a Viola Whitney Pratt Memorial

Scholarship and yearly fellowships, and for the encouragement and guidance I received from the administration throughout all stages of the doctoral process.

To the Wisconsin Historical Society my thanks for being so responsive and allowing me to quote from letters in the Zona Gale and Edna Ferber archives.

My sincerest gratitude to Professor Andrea Most for her encouragement and mentorship, from project conception to completion. I cannot imagine a supervisor more generous with her time and intellect.

I am also tremendously grateful to the other members of my thesis committee,

Professors Michael Cobb and Denise Cruz, who were unfailingly patient and supportive when I was not infrequently tangled in the weeds of my argument, and who always pointed me in just the right direction to find my own way out. My thanks also to

Professor Neal Dolan who provided counsel in the project’s early stages.

I am indebted to Marie Campbell and Mark Lipton who read the dissertation at key moments and gave me both invaluable feedback and confidence that I had something to say that others would find interesting. Thank you to my parents, my siblings, and their partners, who restrained for the most part from asking me when I was going to finish and who always felt confident in my ability to do so.

Last, but certainly not least, I thank my husband, Robert, and my sons, Ethan and

Roan, for accompanying me on this long road with love and understanding—and, most importantly, a sense of humour.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements iv

List of Figures vii

Introduction 1

1 The Ins and Outs (and Ups and Downs) of Work in Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s Stage Door 42

2 That Vital Oomph: Movement and Embodiment in Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance 84

3 Moving Towards Selfhood in Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett 134

4 The Feminist Movements of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Intimate Memories 172

Conclusion 226

Bibliography 234

List of Figures

1. First and second rehearsal scenes of the American Ballet Company in

Dance, Girl, Dance 131

2: Judy’s ballet steps and Bubbles’s “jitterbug” 131

3. Bubbles traverses the burlesque stage 131

4. Judy confronts the burlesque audience 132

5. Madame Basilova watches Judy dance and Judy watches the American Ballet

Company ballerina dance 132

6. Bubbles captures the attention of the talent scout 132

7. Jean watches Charles, and other women, through her pocket book mirror in

The Lady Eve. Jean puts out her foot to trip Charles 133

8. Charles falls while Jean glides 133

9. Villa Curonia, Florence 224

10. Yellow Salon, Villa Curonia 224

11. Interior, 23 Fifth Avenue, Greenwich Village 225

12. Los Gallos, Taos 225

vii

Introduction

It is an October evening, just before the dinner hour. The girls are coming home

from matinees, from job-hunting, they are up and down the stairs, and presently

they will be out again on dinner dates, playing the evening performances, seeing

a movie. (593; Act 1 Scene 1)

With these stage directions Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman establish the scene of their 1936 Broadway comedy Stage Door. “Home” is the Footlights Club, a boarding house for “girls of the stage” located in the “West Fifties” of New York City. The

Footlights Club is a space defined by the women who live there, their work, their desires, and as the above lines indicate, their movement. Coming home, they will soon be out again. The centrality of the stairs to the set establishes the women’s movements as substantive and significant. Not merely transitional, a way to reach the second “floor,” the stairs are a space in and of themselves, from and on which the women speak as well as move, as Susan Paige does when she utters the play’s first lines, a “quick Hi!,” before continuing “on up.” Material representations of energy and passion, the actresses’ movements express subjectivities built on the freedom to maneuver through their daily lives with relative autonomy due to the economic and domestic independence afforded by work and life on their own in the city. More than simply residents, the women who live at the Footlights Club form a community, evincing obvious comfort and pleasure in each other’s company as they celebrate roles cast, commiserate over their difficulty getting the

1 2 attention of producers, and lay about on a Sunday morning poring over newspapers, the remains of breakfast scattered around them.

I begin with Stage Door’s boarding house because it both introduces the kinds of texts in my purview and the framework for their analysis. Spanning an era of relative liberalization in gender norms, bookended by the Nineteenth Amendment that granted women the right to vote in 1920 and the post-Second-World-War “culture of containment” that pushed them back into the home, my dissertation argues for the reconsideration of women-authored and directed texts largely overlooked and undervalued because they circulated in the commercial realms of Broadway theatres, Hollywood movies, and Book-of-the-Month clubs. Tracing the movement of female bodies in the above-mentioned Stage Door, Dorothy Arzner’s 1940 film Dance, Girl, Dance, Zona

Gale’s 1920 novel Miss Lulu Bett, and Mabel Dodge Luhan’s four-volume autobiography, Intimate Memories, published between 1933 and 1937, I identify white female subjectivities germane to work, autonomy, and female community. Movement is central to our ability to perceive another’s “aliveness,” argues developmental psychologist Daniel Stern. “Without motion, we cannot read in or imagine mental activity underneath, or thoughts, emotion, or ‘will’” (10). Watched as they move, the women in my dissertation come “alive,” their aliveness functioning in turn as a measure of the

“aliveness” of the texts themselves to contemporary study.

Suspicions around unbridled mobility in women have often linked their mobility to promiscuity. “There is an ancient insistence in our culture that women ought to be pure and this involves not moving around,” Margaret Visser writes in The Way We Are (4).

Women who move around, she suggests, would presumably not be at home for “roving”

3 men to return to. This inherent bias against women is, in Visser’s account, how we come to the image of the swinging stewardess. More relevant to this dissertation, it is also how we come to Stephen Crane’s Maggie, “girl of the streets.” The modern figure of the flanêur roaming the streets was decidedly male. His female equivalent did not exist beyond the prostitute, who could not be said to stroll leisurely when a male gaze determined her every move (Hammergen, Corporealities 55). The women in the texts examined here actively resist such associations, asserting their movements as their own, and claiming them as part of their right to live, work, and participate in the life of the city. Lively, engaged, and self-determining, they are defiant in their mobility, insisting on their entitlement to adventure and experience, to choose and take pleasure in a life outside the accepted roles of wife and mother. If a Victorian woman’s virtue had been a function of her place in the home, the virtue of the women presented here lies in the vitality their mobility engenders.

Even after three decades of cultural studies, popular works by women are still largely seen as the cultural equivalent of Gertrude Stein’s Oakland, California: there’s “no there there.” I use Stein’s words purposefully because writers like her represent one of the primary reasons why the female creators I focus on were largely forgotten with the institutionalization of modernism as the critical high-water mark of the period. Aesthetic modernism’s equation of difficulty and experimentation with artistic weight has meant commercial works such as the ones I gather here, largely realist in form, have been dismissed for a presumed lack of heft. Mable Dodge Luhan’s volumes of autobiography, literal doorstoppers, would seem a concrete rebuttal to such an assessment. That being said, the materiality of texts is not the focus of my dissertation. Rather it is the material

4 dimension of the women’s lives on offer, specifically as expressed through the movement of their bodies. Paying attention to movement locates substance minimized in the cultural primacy of aesthetic modernism, which relegates their accessible form and syntax and their emphasis on women’s experiences into “sub” genres, either in terms of categorization (a “woman’s picture” or “domestic novel”) or quality (“sub-par”). My decision to include works across a number of media and genres reflects the outputs of the women themselves (presumably their aesthetics crossed generic boundaries as they did), while supporting a more essential intention to highlight genres that are feminized by their position in various binaries: comedy/drama; women’s film/film; middlebrow/“high” art; domestic vs. civic. Bodies speaking through their movements provide an important access point, I argue, for works and genres generally regarded as not “saying” anything.

While acknowledging the work of feminist scholars who have recovered the substance of commercial fiction by women by arguing for its seriousness of intent and cultural questioning,1 my primary aim is to reveal how the works under my purview, to paraphrase Rita Felski, might reach out across the decades to form new “attachments.”2

The method of cultural studies, Felski argues, does not always linger long enough on text

(as opposed to context) to make it “hospitable” to affective engagement. Applying a method rooted in both text and context, the pleasures and identifications through which affective attachments are formed begin to emerge. Embodied movement as an expression of will and desire to both make and take up space in the public realms of work and the city is significant for white women in the decades following the passing of the Nineteenth

1 See Middlebrow Moderns (2001) edited by Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith—especially relevant early in my research. 2 Felski refers to a text’s capacity to incite “attachments” throughout “Context Stinks!”, her 2011 article in New Literary History.

Amendment, but it resonates close to a century later as the urge to conform to acceptable ideas of femininity remains strong and the gains of feminism require constant reclaiming.

To think about movement in feminist terms is to position Betty Friedan’s

“problem without a name” as a malaise borne of immobility. Trapped in a domestic loop, moving out of duty rather than their own desires, Friedan’s suburban mothers may drive to get groceries or to pick up kids, but the market and school are extensions of a domestic sphere they rarely move beyond. The traditional timeline dividing the women’s movement into three distinct periods—suffragette, 1910s, and 1970s—gives the impression that it existed episodically, going underground for decades before reemerging after the publication of The Feminine Mystique in 1963.3 Building on the archive of popular feminism established by scholars such as Jaime Harker and Julia Ehrhardt, my dissertation likewise contends that far from going underground, feminism was in constant negotiation in the intervening decades not only in women’s magazines and popular novels but also in Broadway plays, Hollywood films, and life writing, and that evidence of that negotiation is present in an aesthetic preoccupation with the movement of women.

If the marches for the vote and for labour rights in the early decades of the twentieth century represent agitation performed via bodily movement or its cessation, my dissertation asks how might the movement of the women in these pages speak to the vitality of a seemingly absent feminist Movement? How might movement function in place of, or for, the Movement?

3 For example, June Schoen’s Movers and Shakers: American Women Thinkers and Activists 1910–1970 (1973). Nancy Cott has questioned this timeline in The Grounding of Modern Feminism (1987) but largely defines previously unseen activity in generally understood political terms, while I am interested in cultural expressions that do not present as activism.

Framing the Boarding House

Inspired by its central role in Stage Door and its popularity in the period as an alternative domestic space for women, I offer the boarding house as a framework in which to

“house” the above-mentioned texts by Ferber, Arzner, Gale, and Luhan within the pages of my dissertation. The boarding house proves generative as a locus of a multitude of spatial movements that are central to my investigations: from the country to the city, between domestic sphere and public sphere, between home and work, between house and street, and between spaces within a single home. Its materiality also emphasizes the importance of space to my analysis. It is a foundational edict of the “spatial turn” that space is not an empty backdrop to life but actively engaged in its production. Further, as feminist geographers have demonstrated, the social relations of space are experienced differently and variously interpreted depending on one’s gender (Massey 3). Running up and down the stairs and in and out the door of their home, the movement of the actresses in the Footlights Club must be understood in relation to the relative lack of movement they would have experienced in the homes they left behind, homes that, if they were like

Zona Gale’s heroine Lulu Bett, they rarely left. Confining women to the domestic sphere is a means both of spatial control and the control of identity. The moving bodies of the women “living” in my boarding house constitute a refusal to be fixed into socially constructed understandings of who they are and where they belong.

As residents of a boarding house, Ferber and Kaufman’s performers were common to early twentieth-century American cities when increased immigration and industrialization brought millions of new people into urban centres. For white women, the rise of consumerism, mass media, and entry-level white collar work meant opportunities

7 for jobs beyond teacher that would allow them to delay marriage and work outside the home—as secretaries, bookkeepers, and shopgirls, as well as writers, editors, actresses, and dancers.4 Boarding houses offered young women making their first moves away from immediate family affordable rooms to rent, along with the added attraction of kitchens and dining rooms for communal meal-taking (rooming houses, as the name suggests, offered strictly rooms). Located within easy distance of stores, restaurants, theatres, dance halls, and offices, boarding houses placed work, home, and recreation in close proximity. These locations and configurations, which also included shared bathrooms, would make them the target of urban reformers, but were central to their attraction for single working women.

Situated in an old brownstone, Stage Door’s Footlights Club corresponds to a common version of a commercial boarding house located in a twenty-five to forty-year- old house, with three or four stories, and originally built for a middle-income family

(Groth 92). Its name, although not its facilities, reflects the way some boarding houses operated as “clubs,” imitating the more exclusive residential clubs of the upper classes such as the University Club on West 54th Street and Fifth Avenue (Groth 44), which supplemented their small rooms with communal areas such as performance and rehearsal spaces, lounges, libraries, and athletic facilities.5 The interdisciplinary nature of the boarding house and its multiple significations in the lives of single women encourages and supports my correspondingly interdisciplinary method of investigation, formulated

4 Details about women and work were largely culled from Joanne Meyerovitz’s Women Adrift: Independent Wage Earners in Chicago, 1880-1930 (1991); Nan Enstad’s Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working Women, Popular Culture and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1999) and Alice Kessler-Harris’s Out to Work: A History of Wage Earning Women in the United States, (1982) and In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (2001). 5 Costs of facilities were offset at clubs by providing very small rooms. Each club typically had its own restaurant and cafeteria.

8 out of insights from middlebrow studies, critical dance theory, philosophies of movement, and histories of the physical culture movement of the period.

In 1915 New York City had fifty-four nonprofit lodgings for women housing between eleven to three hundred and twenty women, a number that continued to grow into the 1920s and 1930s.6 High demand for inexpensive housing for single women led to the construction of several large “residential hotels,” essentially larger boarding houses, distinguished by the number of rooms available for rent.7 Perhaps the most famous of these was the Barbizon at Lexington and 63rd streets with seven hundred rooms.

Immortalized by Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar, the Barbizon was home variously to Joan

Crawford, Grace Kelly, Joan Didion, Ali MacGraw, and Plath, among other notable women. As their first home away from home, boarding houses were the spaces from which many young women first negotiated their place in the modern world.

While in the nineteenth century women moved to the city largely because they needed to earn money so as not to be a burden to their families, after 1915 women began to identify a longing for adventure and travel or the lure of the city as a primary reason for leaving home (Meyerovitz 18). By 1923, one out of five employed young women in

America lived away from a family home.8 Their longing for adventure was fanned by stories written by newspaper women, whose freedom to move about the city as well as the sociability afforded by new communal living spaces such as boarding houses and shared apartments contributed to their feelings of satisfaction and vitality, even if

6 In the 1930 U.S, Census of Chicago, areas with large numbers of residential hotels showed about three women to every two men (Groth 63). 7 In Paul Groth’s Living Downtown: The History of Residential Hotels in the United States boarding houses sit on a continuum with hotels, differentiated by the number of rooms rented out. The absence of private kitchens separates hotels from apartments (Groth 5-7). 8 Once the home was no longer a production centre, daughters became a burden on their families, and without much opportunity in small towns many looked to the opportunities of the city for work.

9 professionally these reporters rarely moved from the “hen coop” to a permanent position in the City Room.9

Looked upon favourably throughout the nineteenth century, by the turn of the twentieth century, boarding houses had begun to be considered “forbidden” housing.

Historian Paul Groth attributes this shift to a change in the conception of the “ideal” city, which, prior to the 1880s, was based on the European mercantile model of “an urbane, densely congregated way of living with mixed income groups, adjacencies of housing, commerce, and workshops” (17). But by the end of the nineteenth century, analogous to the professionalization and specialization of the workplace, the ideal city separates into zones according to function, with an emphasis on maximum privacy for families.

Domestic spaces like boarding houses located in blatantly commercial zones became an affront to the mythology of home as ideologically separate from the business of the marketplace. However, single men and women living away from the “safeguards of a good home” had for some critics always been a problem (Gamber 104). This was especially true for women, who were additionally suspect for handing over their “natural” domestic duties of cooking and cleaning.

Though recent criticism has argued for the collapse of the private and public spheres, I use public and private in terms of the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres because this is the context in which the transgression represented by the boarding house is best understood; that is, in its violation of middle-class ideologies of one family, one home, where home is separate from the marketplace and women’s work is of the

9 This is the argument made by Alice Fahs in Out on Assignment: Newspaper Women and the Making of Public Space (2011).

10 domestic variety.10 At the same time, I recognize that women’s private lives are often public matters.

The boarding house becomes a transgressive space for American women between

1920 and 1945 on multiple counts: as a domestic space defined by alternate forms of kinship, by community rather than privacy, by work outside the home rather than domestic work inside it, and by an urban location that blurred the lines between home and work. As a departure from the ideal home encased within the separate spheres ideology, and housing women who themselves transgressed social norms by being there, the boarding house encourages an account of the feminist implications of women’s movements in all the works with which I engage; that is, to see their movements as transgressive in the terms by which boarding houses were so judged. To work and live on their own away from family represents a rejection of the cultural pressure to marry and have children, one that, historian Alice Kessler-Harris contends, “required conscious rebellion” (Out to Work 128).

As the primary reason women landed there in the first place, the boarding house also declares the importance of work to my discussion of movement: women move for work, move as work, or progressively move out of work they no longer want to be doing.

Most important is the assertion that they are “workers” on par with men. Marches for the right to vote ceased with the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, while demonstrations and strikes for worker’s rights were prevalent in the 1930s. The centrality of work to these texts suggests that for women in the period expressing their rights as women often involved expressing their rights as workers. This holds true in Nan Enstad’s cultural history of immigrant women Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Working

10 I refer in particular to the work of Lauren Berlant and her notion of an “intimate public sphere.”

Women, Popular Culture and Labor Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century (1999).

While labour leaders urged them to curtail consumerist tendencies regarded as frivolous distractions from rigorous political action, Enstad shows that these working women actually went on strike in large numbers, proving themselves to be both politically and culturally astute.11 Culturally encoded as consumers they were not legible either as workers or political actors.

Today, only ten women’s boardinghouses remain in New York City, but they have again become an attractive option for young women looking to live and work in the city, albeit with inflated notions of what counts as affordability. For “just $1,200 a month—a bargain by Upper West Side standards,” Catie L’Heureux writes about the

Brandon Residence for Women in “Why I Live in an All-Women’s Boarding House”

(2015), “you get a single furnished room (with a bed, desk, drawers, and closet), two cooked meals a day (of varying quality), weekly housekeeping, first-floor Wi-Fi, in- house laundry facilities, and the near impossibility of a room in Manhattan all to yourself.

Kind of.”12 L’Heureux moved to the city from the Midwest to get her “dream job” in magazines, a modern incarnation of Edna Ferber and Zona Gale, who arrived in New

York City from Wisconsin more than a century earlier to work at newspapers like the

New York Evening World. Not glamorous but affordable, the Brandon is, like earlier boarding house incarnations, a space defined by transition and transience, and by the community of women who live together while “waiting for the right time to set out on their own.”

11 The working class women who are Enstad’s concern were not included in labour histories because, as she writes, they did not fit with cultural ideas of “political actor” or “worker” (3). Enstad’s book demonstrates how their participation in commercial culture did not preclude activism, but was used to fashion themselves as “ladies” and workers (5, 7). 12 L’Heureux’s article appeared in the online publication “The Cut,” March 24, 2015. In it she refers to the 1937 film of Stage Door.

In exchange for safe, clean, and affordable rooms there are rules to follow at

L’Heureux’s boarding house, just as there were in its earlier incarnations. Managers of early-twentieth-century non-profit boarding houses often imposed curfews, lectured on morals, and enforced other house rules. Perhaps not surprisingly, many of these boarding houses were run by Christian organizations seeking to “protect” women from the city’s vices. Commercial boarding houses usually dropped such restrictions, recognizing them as the major complaint against the non-profits (Groth 102-103). However, consistent across the board, whether religious or secular, are rules about men, who are either not allowed or confined to designated salons. But even with rules, to women then and now, the benefits of living on one’s own away from parental supervision and in the company of other women often outweigh any restrictions. When asked by L’Heureux about a policy barring men at the Webster Apartments, its executive director dismisses the query out of hand: “This is not about boys. This is about women. You come in, we make sure that everybody gets fed well, and then you go off, you do your job, and you do what your life dream is. And it’s like your little family.” Movement (“coming in” and “going off”), female community, work in pursuit of a dream, whether for a specific career or simply economic freedom and personal autonomy, comprise the boarding house experience for women today as it did a century ago. The boarding house is a space defined by the women living in it, by the pleasures of living on their own with other women away from the restrictions of hometowns and family, made possible by the money earned from work they perform outside it.

Envisioning the texts in my dissertation (and at times their authors) through the framework of a boarding house supports the assumptions I make about why the women

13 are on stage, on screen, or on the pages of a novel or autobiography, and what is important to them: work, self-sufficiency, autonomy, and female community. It insists on their visibility as workers and as individuals rather than as objects of male desire or as the types they supposedly represent, whether survivor, gold digger, spinster, or muse. More important than their relations to men are their relationships to other women, and to themselves. And as a space defined by the everyday lives of the women who are its residents, the boarding house draws attention to seemingly rudimentary actions and gestures as crucial to narrative and formal substance.

If, as per the physical cultures popular in the period, proper breathing promotes health and vitality, living with other women in a boarding house produces a corresponding vitality by providing its residents metaphorical room to breathe—away from controlling parents, structures, and communities. As a framework, the boarding house offers similar breathing space for the works included here, allowing them to come to life within a broader discussion of twentieth-century American literature and culture.

Gendered Space, Gendered Genres

Bestselling novelists and Broadway playwrights Edna Ferber and Zona Gale have benefitted from attention paid in the past few decades to the category of fiction known as middlebrow.13 Nevertheless, studies of their creative outputs remain relatively slight—an essay in a collection, a chapter in books, a couple of book-length single-author studies.

Dorothy Arzner, despite her stature within the studio system, remains largely unknown outside of the feminist film circles in which she was first recovered, set off by her status as a director of the “women’s film.” And, despite the two-decades-long efforts of Lois

13 In particular, Botshon and Goldsmith’s Middlebrow Moderns.

Palken Rudnick, should Mable Dodge Luhan be remembered at all, it is as an historical appendage, famous for her Greenwich Village salon and her personal connections to the

American Moderns and the American Southwest rather than for any creative contributions of her own. Bringing these women together here for the first time under the same roof so to speak, my hope is to shift some of the (albeit limited) attention paid to

Gale and Ferber onto Luhan and Arzner, and in turn open up new doors through which to connect to Ferber and Gale by lifting off that roof to examine the structures and intersections of movement inside. In my metaphorical boarding house each woman (and her work) has her private moments in her room as well as moments she shares with others on a staircase or a stoop. Throughout, the boarding house functions as a microcosm for the movement in their own lives and the lives of their characters.

Though not a fan of the term middlebrow, I reference it here because it is the category in which realist work of the modernist period has largely been recovered, and because despite a decades-long understanding of the social construction of the “great divide” modernism’s aesthetic categories continue to cast a long shadow.14 Middlebrow, rather than Gordon Hutner’s preferred term of middle class, is also put into play as a term particularly marked by gender.15 As Anne E. Fernald argues in her introduction to a special issue of Modern Fiction Studies from 2013, gender is still important to the new modernist studies, under whose rubric this dissertation’s subject emerges, because not

14 I am not a fan because of the term’s racist underpinnings, and because the recovery of the works under this rubric has largely failed to significantly extend their readership, and for the most part comes with the question “but is it any good?” trailing behind it. I prefer the term vernacular as per Miriam Hansen (note 39), which avoids the overdetermination of “middlebrow” while emphasizing their colloquial nature. However, because this is a feminist project it is necessary to engage somewhat with a term so wrapped up in gender assumptions. 15 In What America Read (2009) Gordon Hutner replaces middlebrow with “middle class” for its “evocative power” rather than its “definitional value,” describing a milieu populated largely by those who make enough money “that they have the leisure to engage in questions of interiority as well as social appearances” (7). Commercial fiction, Hutner writes, “reveals the epic story of a nation’s self-invention as a modern society through the filter of middle class experience.”

15 only is gender “a constitutive category of modernism,” but it “played and continues to play an enormous part in defining social roles and economic opportunities” (229).16

In a number of articles over the last decade or so, Rita Felski has challenged the practice of critique for failing to account for the ways texts elicit, and even solicit, our attachments.17 The significance of a text, she argues, is not just what it says about social conditions but what it makes possible in the viewer or reader—what affective bonds it calls into being. With help from Bruno Latour, Felski suggests approaching texts as

“actors” to restore affective agency lost in their status as symptoms of a historical moment. As actors, she argues, texts have the capacity to draw us in, facilitating a return to matters of aesthetic form without invocations of timelessness. Exploring the networks in which past texts operate can help to explain what they have to say about “questions that matter to us” (“Context Stinks!” 580). Within my dissertation the boarding house is both a theoretical framework and a node in a network in which women’s cultural practices, feminism, women’s magazines, domestic fiction, women’s journalism,

Broadway, Hollywood, and New York City intersect,18 facilitating a discussion about movement that speaks equally to the concerns of white women in the first decades of the last century as it does today.

16 As Fernald points out, the constitutive role of gender in modernism has been argued for well over twenty years, as in Rita Felski’s The Gender of Modernity (1995) and Andreas Huyssen’s After The Great Divide (1986). The “vertical” expansion of modernist studies, first defined as “The New Modernist Studies” by Douglas Mao and Rebecca Walkowitz in a 2008 issue of PMLA, opened up the field to middlebrow works, but Fernald takes issue with the way the authors list gender as one of many pursuits, alongside narratology, affect, or science, rather than as a “defining piece of our experience of the world.” 17 See “Latour and Literary Studies” (2015), “Context Stinks!” (2011), “Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies: Reflections on Method” (2003). While this project more directly engages with Felski’s recent critical engagements, her Gender of Modernity is a crucial antecedent for its central argument that “dimensions of culture previously ignored, trivialized, or seen as regressive rather than authentically modern…gain dramatically in importance…” when looked at from the perspective of gender (22). My project also follows her model in exploring ways women artists “drew upon, contested, or reformulated dominant representations of gender and modernity in making sense of their own positions within society and history” (21). 18 In Dancing Class: Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Divisions in American Dance, 1890-1920 (1999), Linda Tomko distinguishes between “women’s cultural practices” and “women’s culture.” Woman’s cultural practices are “those activities by which women constructed their gender identity” (38).

As a representative transgressive space for women the boarding house is an appropriate framework in which to gather authors who though they wrote or directed in forms deemed conventional, in their personal lives were unconventional for their time:

Ferber never married, considering the institution not for her, and prided herself on being self-supporting, keeping a firm hand on the negotiation of screen rights to her fiction.19

Arzner lived with her partner Marion Morgan for forty years and was the only female director of note in the heyday of the studio era (largely the 1930s and early 1940s). Gale, who did not marry until her late fifties, after adopting a child on her own, was also a vocal pacifist, in addition to her activism on behalf of female suffrage. Luhan’s status as a wealthy woman insulated her from concerns over money that would keep another woman in an unhappy marriage, but three of her four marriages ended at a time when divorce was still relatively uncommon.

Further impetus for their temporary cohabitation in these pages is provided by the authors’ connections across various social and cultural networks. Though based in New

York, Ferber had a life in Hollywood by virtue of her many novels and plays adapted by the studios into prestige films. These adaptations show striking commonalities in their casting with Arzner’s films. Katharine Hepburn, the star of the 1937 film version of Stage

Door, was given her first starring role in Arzner’s film Christopher Strong (1933), while

Lucille Ball, a supporting player in Stage Door, is a star of Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance.

Both Gale and Luhan are mentioned in Ferber’s autobiography, the former when she appeared at the offices of the Milwaukee Journal, where both she and Ferber worked at the start of their careers; Luhan was a close enough friend to warrant a ten-day visit from

19 Ferber managed her own business transactions, such as selling rights to periodicals, except for Hollywood, as she writes: “There are limits to my business hardihood” (A Peculiar Treasure 173).

Ferber to her house in Taos in 1936 (A Peculiar Treasure 381).20 Gale was the “first real writer” Ferber had ever met and according to Ferber inspired her to imagine a writing career beyond reporting (A Peculiar Treasure 145). Gale, in turn, uses a quote from

Ferber’s Show Boat to illustrate a point in one of her essays on writing, “Implications,” in

Portage, Wisconsin and Other Essays (118). Both Gale and Ferber continued to publish journalism and commentary alongside their fiction, while Luhan wrote a syndicated advice column for Hearst Corporation in addition to writing for modernist magazines like

The Masses. Gale and Ferber also shared the same editor in Gertrude Lane, who published their short stories and serialized their novels in A Woman’s Home Companion.

Gale’s and Luhan’s advocacy of women’s issues overlap in their membership in

Heterodoxy, a women’s-only group active in suffrage and labour causes that met in

Greenwich Village for monthly lunches from the 1910s to 1940 (Susan Glaspell,

Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and choreographer Agnes de Mille were also members).

Ferber, although not as identified with feminist causes on the ground, expressed dismay in her second volume of autobiography, A Kind of Magic, that so many women had not taken their place as “citizens of the world”: “How can it be denied that the vast majority of women in the United States have failed to claim their legal rights; to use their inherent powers; and to fulfill in any degree at all their great potentialities” (283-4). Likewise, a recurrent strain of Arzner criticism is the director’s detailed, complex portraits of women as well as the conflict between romantic conventions of the Hollywood film and Arzner’s own feminist sensibility (Mayne 88). Ferber, Gale, Luhan, and Arzner were all invested in the status of women, personally and culturally.

20 Ferber presumably met Luhan through John Reed, Luhan’s lover during her Greenwich Village days, of whom Ferber writes very fondly in her autobiography.

Lodging their outputs in a framework of transgressive femininity has some basis in the archive of popular feminism recovered by Jaime Harker in America the

Middlebrow: Women’s Novels, Progressivism and Middlebrow Authorship between the

Wars, (2007) and Julia Ehrhardt in Writers of Conviction: The Personal Politics of Zona

Gale, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Rose Wilder Lane, and Josephine Herbst (2004). While

Harker does not look closely at any of the authors gathered here and, as her title indicates, only Gale is within Ehrhardt’s purview (and then only Gale’s Friendship Village stories, completed before Miss Lulu Bett), both critics ask us to take account of overlooked sites such as book-of-the-month clubs and magazines such as A Women’s Home Companion, whose politics are not as front-and-centre as those of a publication like Charlotte Perkins

Gilman’s Forerunner. A longtime supporter of women’s suffrage, A Women’s Home

Companion added a column for “new voters” and encouraged women to run for office after women were granted the right to vote. Unlike the Edward Bok-edited Ladies Home

Journal, which opposed giving women the right to vote (Harker 118). Lane’s progressive outlook extended to the kind of fiction she published. In 1921 Ferber finished writing a novel called The Girls about three generations of spinsters. The ending of the book, in which the middle sister returns home from her travels with a baby she plans to raise on her own, had been a barrier to its serialization in magazines. Only Lane agreed to publish it as written (Peculiar Treasure 264-265). The lives and work of each of these creators must be read with and against each other for the full scope and significance of the connections I make to emerge. Placed together in a boarding house I envision creators and characters continually intersecting in movement, on their way out to work or into the

19 dining room, climbing the stairs or waiting in line for the bathroom, sharing desires, successes, and frustrations in equal measure.

Harker’s and Ehrhardt’s arguments in support of the migration of their writers’ feminist politics into their commercial fiction represent another important influence on my project. Bodily movement as an expression of control over one’s body and one’s life may reflect a concern for personal autonomy rather than a more complete notion of political freedom, nevertheless all the texts included here display an admirable complexity as they negotiate issues of everyday concern to white women then and now: the rejection of middle class norms of femininity; the restrictions of marriage; the pleasures of work outside the home, along with its frustrations when men are the ultimate gatekeepers to their success or failure; and the material fact of a woman’s body in public spaces and the assumptions made thereof. No overt recipe of ills and solutions are on offer, but what is are women and places alive with life, along with the conditions that make it so. Crucial to the lives of the women and the places they inhabit is the capacity to move afforded them by working outside the home and earning their own money. In The

Practice of Everyday Life Michel De Certeau distinguishes between “strategies” (linked to institutions and structures of power) that predetermine correct ways of moving through and using space, and “tactics,” everyday practices such as walking, talking, reading, shopping, and cooking that despite the repressive aspects of modern society allow for acts of creative resistance. As he writes, “The place of the tactic belongs to the other” (xix). In their everyday movements, the women on view in my dissertation creatively resist and carefully strategize around the repressive aspects of a patriarchal society that

20 circumscribes correct ways for them to move and the appropriate spaces in which to do so, actively and insistently moving to the tune of their own desires.

Also foundational to my gendered framework is Deborah Lindsay Williams’s Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the Politics of Female

Authorship (2001) for its argument that Gale’s feminism is at the heart of her lack of renown relative to her friends and correspondents Willa Cather and Edith Wharton. Gale never made her politics a secret, actively supporting young writers in their careers, and celebrating community and collaboration while Cather and Wharton represented themselves publicly in the mold of the “isolated, independent, solitary artist,” denying associations with other female authors which, Williams argues, made them “safe” choices for early feminist recovery (4).21 In addition to rejecting “affiliative politics,” Cather and

Wharton were also “virtually silent” on the issue of female suffrage (7). I extend

Williams’s account of Gale’s relative obscurity to Ferber, Arzner, and Luhan who also do not easily conform to cultural definitions of the solitary artist figure: Ferber identified her writing with “work” and “purpose” rather than with any notion of the symbolic; although in charge, Arzner worked collaboratively with women and was unabashedly interested in women’s lives; and Luhan, despite her feminism, could never see herself as an artist, having assimilated cultural notions of male as creator and woman as muse. Gale’s mentoring and championing of other women finds a home in my boarding house as a space that encourages, supports, and celebrates women’s movements as expressions of their independence and interdependence, an understanding of which might be missed if not examined from the perspective of the people “living” in it.

21 Their self-fashioning was designed to resist being associated with the women William Dean Howells was referring to when he said that “American literature was being strangled by a petticoat” (Williams 4).

The Substance of Movement

My argument for movement as an aesthetic operating in commercial works builds on recent efforts to refute the presumed absence of aesthetics in middlebrow fiction. In his recent book-length rebuttal, The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction (2015), Tom Perrin wonders if middlebrow authors are not self-aware why is there so much talk about writing?22 To which I add, so much interest in theatricality and performance? In notions of freedom, both creative and embodied? Surely these questions are relevant to considerations of form as well as content when women creators like the ones assembled here are cognizant of their position as females in realms largely controlled by men, or by critical assessments that brand them negatively as artists because of their sales figures or genre affiliations. Ferber insists in her autobiography that she never set out to write bestsellers, and always proceeded from an underlying theme, even if usually overlooked by readers (A Peculiar Treasure 373). Likewise, when the play Gale wrote based on the novel Miss Lulu Bett was published, she insisted it include not only the Broadway version which she wrote after being pressured to give Lulu the “happy ending” of marriage, but also the original version in which Lulu leaves domestic servitude and town all on her own. Perrin’s interest in an identifiable aesthetics is part of his larger concern to insert middlebrow texts into a literary historical tradition. I am less interested in the middlebrow as a category of literary history and more in the aesthetics of popular works, so I place my texts in a new network, away from the institutions and aspirations of a status-

22 “…modernist authors often defined themselves by contrast with a middlebrow culture they thought of as lacking self- awareness and simplistically adhering to an outmoded realist aesthetics. Why then is the middlebrow genre of the social problem novel filled with writers thinking about writing?” (37). Perrin identifies the bildungsroman and the social problem novel as quintessentially middlebrow genres.

22 obsessed middle class towards one that encourages a more nuanced engagement with the methods used to approximate the textures of women’s everyday lives.

Like Perrin, in America the Middlebrow Harker questions the aesthetic and political “impoverishment” that has clung to the middlebrow since the germinal work of

Joan Shelley Rubin and Janice Radway23 by demonstrating the “literary liberalism” and

“pragmatist aesthetics” in fiction by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Jesse Fauset, Pearl Buck, and Josephine Herbst.24 In Modern Domestic Fiction: Popular Feminism, Mass-Market

Magazines, and Middle-class Culture, 1905-1925 (2012) Birte Christ argues that while not New Woman fiction, which framed marriage and motherhood as antithetical to self- actualization, fiction about wives and widows that appeared in women’s magazines still

“discuss[ed] and negotiate[d] the private and possible public roles for women in light of contemporary debates on the women’s question” (33). Catherine Keyser provides similar shading to the aesthetics of magazine writing in Playing Smart: New York Women

Writers and Modern Magazine Culture (2010), showing how Edna St. Vincent Millay,

Dorothy Parker, Jesse Fauset, and Dawn Powell used irony to negotiate both the opportunities and limitations for women in modern society. In their work, Keyser writes, the “quip” represents a kind of transgression. As an aesthetic in the works I examine, movement is similarly transgressive in its expression of resistance to accepted forms of feminine embodiment and to a woman’s right to move for herself and for her own fulfillment, rather than other’s expectations.

23 Radway’s A Feeling for Books: The Book-of the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (1997) and Rubin’s The Making of Middlebrow Culture (1992) first outlined the cultural work performed by the middlebrow. But while recovering the middlebrow, they nevertheless maintain the evaluative standards of aesthetic modernism. 24 Harker argues that middlebrow’s literary aesthetic focuses on the aesthetic experience of the reader rather than the formal skill of the writer (115). Harker also argues against the idea that domestic fiction was not political because its authors interpreted experience within models of personal relations, because, as she argues, a larger societal critique recognizes that changes in laws also require changes in attitudes.

Keyser’s account of the “double bind” of modernity for women writers (when

“smart” referred more often to their appearance than their minds) was an early influence on my project, as was Kathleen Rowe Karlan’s identification of the “unruly woman” of film and television comedy.25 While the transgressive male finds his home in the heroic genres of high drama such as tragedy, Rowe Karlan tells us, the transgressive woman finds hers in the “lower” forms of melodrama and romantic comedy (“Comedy,

Melodrama and Gender” 41). But where melodrama allows the transgressive woman to triumph only in her suffering,26 romantic comedy provides a “sympathetic place” for female resistance to authority, making fun of inflated notions of heroic masculinity, and allowing for the disruption of social hierarchies (The Unruly Woman 32). For Rowe

Karlan’s “unruly woman,” comedy offers structures for expressing anger through a

“strategy of danger” rather than the “strategy of purity” provided by melodrama, which elevates women in their victimhood (5). Taking a cue from Rowe Karlan, I envision the liberating and enlivening possibilities of movement as a kind of unruliness that defies idealized notions of white feminine embodiment based in order and refinement. In contrast to a strategy of purity that would keep them in their place as angels of the house, moving their bodies represents a strategy of danger that resists the restrictions on female movement that are at the core of ideologies of the separate spheres.

Given Rowe Karlan’s analysis it is not surprising that of all the works included here only the comedy, Stage Door, features an actual boarding house so prominently (as the setting for the entire play). As a transgressive domestic space, the boarding house is

25 Her notion of the “unruly woman” is itself borrowed from Mary Russo and her discussions of female grotesques at carnival. The female grotesque transgresses with her body in its defiance and excess of an idealized femininity. 26 Rowe Karlan writes that melodrama teaches that women’s lot under patriarchy is to suffer and that there is pleasure in that suffering.

24 the transgressive woman’s generic home. However, lodging all the works in my own boarding house by virtue of their overlapping interest in women, work, and movement, I am able to move beyond genre and category distinctions to identify comedy’s transgressive women in film drama, realist fiction, and memoir.27 More often than not, the moving woman is also the funny one.

This observation is borne out in Maria DiBattista’s Fast-Talking Dames (2001), which positions the garrulous women in comedies of the 1930s and 1940s alongside the emergence of slang as a vital form capable of telling stories and instilling energy into

American writing.28 In this context the “vitality of the modern American woman” becomes her facility with language: “quick on the uptake and hardly ever downbeat,” the fast-talking dame “always [seems] to know what to say and when to say it. They are never, except in extreme and exceptional moments at a loss for words” (ix).29 Clocking in at two hundred and fifty words per minute of film, that talk may flow too fast for audiences to capture every word but, as DiBattista argues, that is beside the point. It is the velocity of her speech as an outer manifestation of intelligence that is key to the fast- talking dame’s presentation of vitality. Revealingly, DiBattista observes that the “fast- talking dame” moves “to the same lively rhythm that regulates her speech” (27). In other words, she moves as fast as she talks.30 My analysis flips this analogy to see the fast-

27 While Rowe Karlan’s unruly woman encompasses a female “grotesque” in her corpulence and anger, that body functions more representationally in its transgression of normative embodiment. This is not irrelevant to my own discussion but more a matter of emphasis in that I am interested in what women’s bodies express in movement; bodies that do not move, that are restricted, is one way to describe normative bourgeois comportment. 28 Writers’ attempts to record the particular idioms and neologisms of American speech were being recognized as part of the “genius” of the native tongue—words were important to the formation of the national character (46). H.L. Mencken’s The American Language came out in 1919 (Di Battista 42). 29 In a period in which there was great interest in defining American culture, DiBattista notes the attempts to record American speech, its particular idioms and neologisms being recognized as part of the “genius” of the native tongue— Mencken’s American Language came out in 1919 (42). Words were important to the formation of the national character (46). 30 The movement of the fast-talking dame as DiBattista describes it is a descendant of the slapstick comedy of silent film.

25 talking-dame’s rapid-fire diction as a reflection of movement rather than her movement a reflection of her speech. The speed of her speech, as well as its ability to vault over heads and traverse multiple topics in quick succession, are aspects of a corporeal flexibility expressive of both vitality and modernity. Viewing her fast talk as an expression of movement rather than speech allows this modern and vital woman to migrate beyond the borders of her comedic home to register even in a heroine not prone to her verbal effusiveness.

In her cultural history of black female performance on urban variety stages,

Babylon Girls (2008), Jayna Brown writes that for black women whose bodies were defined by their “worth as exploitable labor,” their performances on stage showed there was something else to be produced by their sweat, effort, and tenacity (7). Brown does not recover these moments as “pure resistance to oppression” but rather as “a complex of oftentimes bald commercialism and a resilient striving for the body’s creative autonomy.”

African-American female artists, she argues, “reclaimed their bodies in, as well as from, the world of work” (7). While the semiotics of the free movement of black female bodies are vastly different from those of white women given a recent past in which black bodies were literally not their own, the movements of the women I feature express a similar striving for creative and personal autonomy, a reclaiming of their bodies, if not from their status as physical property, than from a confining domestic labour. And as Brown argues, and my discussion of Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance affirms, white women’s reclaiming their bodies and constituting them as modern often involved the adoption of racialized gestures and movements popularized on urban stages. It also frequently corresponded to restrictions on the movements of their racial others, like the African-American maid

Mattie in Stage Door whose residence in the transgressive sphere of the boarding house does not equate to her own freedom and autonomy, and the Pueblo peoples of Taos invested by Mabel Dodge Luhan with a primitivism that renders them out of time, unlike an always-moving nature with which they nevertheless live in harmony.

Like Brown I do not claim the movements of the women I present as acts of complete (or uncomplicated) resistance. The female grotesque at carnival, the basis for

Rowe Karlan’s unruly woman of comedy, is limited in her transgressive capacities when everything returns to “normal” at the end of the day. But, as Janet Wolff notes, the appearance of transgressive “images, practices and ideas” are important “for they render visible the suppressed” (89).

To turn-of-the-twentieth-century male authors such as Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, and William Dean Howells the city is a dangerous place, especially for women. But to some of its early single, working women the city is a place of freedom, education, and pleasure. Moving about the city while “out on assignment” generated feelings of immense personal satisfaction in female reporters because their work granted them access to public spaces and to knowledge of social problems previously barred to them (Fahs

86), and provided them with the social and economic freedom to run their lives on their own time (41). As Alice Fahs writes, these early female reporters saw themselves as

“urban explorers” making space for women in the city by their active participation in public life and the public space of print, and emphasized new forms of selfhood centred on freedom and independence (13-14).31 Like these reporters, the women in my

31 For these early female reporters making space for themselves in print was both material and metaphorical. The more space they occupied in the paper (in column inches), the more money they earned. Women were rarely salaried writers, paid according to “space rates” for their work; that is, payment in terms of column inches. With the women’s pages the

27 dissertation, imagined in their boarding house, are not “adrift” in the city. They do not rock in place like Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, but move with purpose and direction for work and pleasure, expressing their freedom and autonomy as well as their right to both literally and figuratively take up space.

The performative nature of these reporters’ lives is exemplified for Fahs in the

“hundreds” of bachelor girl articles that appeared in the early decades of the twentieth century celebrating women’s abilities to make a home of their own.32 The private spaces of their lives were a “theatrical realm that readers were invited over and over again to see for themselves…” offering a “new public domesticity that complemented newspaper women’s new public lives” (156, 136). The performance of gender in the writing of the early female reporters is also a feature of Jean Lutes’s Front Page Girls: Women

Journalists in American Culture and Fiction, 1880–1930 (2006) because their physical presence at events (at a jail, courthouse, or picket line) was as much a part of the news as the events they covered. Imagined together in a boarding house as single women, as working women, and as creative women, the women encountered in the pages of my dissertation are also always already performers, performing their gender whether in the

“private” or “public” sphere, at home, on the street, or in pursuit of their craft. The actresses of Stage Door and the dancers of Dance, Girl, Dance only make literal what is common to all women who imagined themselves in roles beyond wife and mother. They perform their gender in its transgression.

only space open to them, women reporters used them as a public forum “to establish and support new public roles for women” (62). 32 Bachelor girl articles offered “an important, if little known, counterpoint to stories of women adrift.” (Fahs 136). Rocking in her chair throughout Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), Carrie Meeber is the quintessential example of the woman “adrift.”

In At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture,

1850–1930 (2005), Betsy Klimasmith uses the spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre to read the urban fiction of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and others alongside architectural, sociological and photographic texts (for example, Jacob Riis’s How the Other Half Lives) to investigate how the “representative” spaces of planners and reformers, and the

“representational” spaces of the authors in question forged a modern, urban subjectivity.

Klimasmith’s analysis pivots around bourgeois domestic space and the challenges represented by new urban spaces such as tenements, boarding houses, and hotels to

Americans’ inhabitation and understanding of space. My boarding house framework takes this challenge for granted to focus more narrowly on a specific feature of

Lefebvre’s triad in the social production of space: “spatial practice.” Framing movement in terms of the coming and going of the boarding house, and the way some of its early residents, those female reporters, moved about the city and made it their own, I am able to find commonality with the comings and goings that mark the life of a woman like

Mabel Dodge Luhan who never lived in a boarding house, but whose homes are similarly characterized by movement, variety, and community in contrast to the idealized middle class home in which one family lives closed off from its neighbours and a woman’s movements are dictated almost exclusively by her domestic role within it.

The Vitality of Movement

Seeking to capture the materiality of bodies and bodily movements often “submerged” even in discussions of film and visual art, scholars have recently turned their attention to

29 the body in motion.33 Our culture’s longstanding emphasis on language and discourse, dance theorists argue, has rendered us unable to understand the “meaning in motion.”34

Scholarly focus on “bodily subjection, disciplining, appropriation, colonization, mobilization and agency” too often treats the body “as a mute event passed over hastily on the way to more concrete data or more abstract concepts” (Foster xi) .35 But, these dance critics maintain, the expressive capacities of the body are relevant to cultural studies because movement is a way of knowing, one that contains “ideas about life’s larger questions,” including the “crucial” one of what we value (Sklar 30). Following their lead my dissertation focuses on the way a body is constructed not through discourse, but through physical movement. Attending to movement renders visible substance in the form of everyday embodied experience that has remained invisible in western culture’s emphasis on language.

Emphasizing movement permits the body to speak for and as itself, not solely for a signified beyond its corporeal frame. Bodies “always gesture towards other fields of meaning,” acknowledge the authors of the introduction to Corporealities: Dancing

Knowledge Culture and Power (1996), but at the same time they “instantiate both physical mobility and articulability” (ix). Not purely vehicles for the expression of something else, bodies “develop choreographies of signs through which they discourse: they run (or lurch, or bound, or feint, or meander…) from premise to conclusion; they

33 This has not gone completely unnoticed by film scholars. With the emphasis on orality that comes with sound, bodily movement, more constitutively present in silent films, is lost in the move to “talkies” (Karnick 150). The expressive body, when it makes an appearance in writing about film, is usually confined to the overt physicality of slapstick. 34 This phrase is the title of a collection from 1997 edited by Jane Desmond, who writes in her own essay in that volume, “Even the now popular subfield of critical work on “the body” is focused more on representations of the body and/or its discursive policing than with its actions/movements as a ‘text’ themselves” (“Embodying Difference: Issues in Dance and Cultural Studies” 30). 35 Susan Foster writes in the same volume that critical writing on the body moves “quickly past arms, legs, torso, and head on their way to a theoretical agenda that requires something unknowable or unknown as an initial premise. The body remains mysterious and ephemeral, a convenient receptacle for their new theoretical positions” (“Dancing Bodies” 235).

30 turn (or pivot, or twist) through the process of reasoning; they confer with (or rub up against, or bump into) one another in narrating their own physical fate” (x). From the essays in Corporealities and Meaning in Motion: New Cultural Studies of Dance (1997),

I understand choreography as a “theorization of relationships between body and self, gender, desire, individuality, community and nationality,” and that the movements of our everyday lives are often as codified as those in a dance (Foster, Corporealities xii). The

“choreographic nature of everyday life” (Bryson 59) animates my discussion throughout the dissertation as I use the how and where of women’s movement to think through issues of female empowerment, autonomy, desire, and pleasure.36 Whether heading out to dinner, running to a train station, or standing still on stage, the moving and gesturing bodies of the women examined here are treated as statements about their lives and persons equal to their words. This does not mean I do not engage with those words, only that they are secondary, often ratifying what their movements have already declared.

The Labanian system of dance notation first published in 1926 and still in use today offers a technical model for engaging with “meaning-filled physicality” (Foster xii). Using a series of signs and symbols, Labanotation records which part of the body is moving, how it is moving, and where, underscoring how choreography is not simply a series of steps and patterns but the positioning of a body in space and the dynamic with which each movement and gesture is performed. Labanotation’s breakdown of movement in performance points my method in a similar direction as critical dance scholars’ insistence on the situatedness of embodied movement: bodies mean differently depending on who is moving, with whom, where and under what conditions (Desmond 32). The

36 Popular culture has been examined through movement, as the many works of Angela McRobbie attest, but McRobbie more specifically focuses on dance and contemporary popular culture while I look at movement in broader terms and works from the first half of the twentieth century, only one of which features literal dance to tell its story.

31 female bodies I watch as they move emerge at a specific time, between 1920 and 1945— after women are granted the right to vote and before they are sent back into the home following their mobilization as a workforce during the war—and are examined in relation to white middle-class ideologies of femininity and domesticity as well as to the “physical cultures” of the period, which advocated movement for white women to prepare their bodies and themselves for the new jobs and social roles that would accompany their enfranchisement.

Reading bodily movement as expressive vitality reflects the connections made across these physical cultures between movement and overall health and wellbeing, particularly for women. Delsartism, modern dance, the Alexander Technique, calisthenics, bodybuilding, and a general concern for diet and exercise together promoted free moving, healthy bodies as a remedy for the repetitive labours of the factory as well as bourgeois norms that dictated how to dress and speak, and how to spend time and energy (Ruyter xvi). As a corollary to the suffragette movement, nineteenth-century dress reform activists had protested restrictive clothing on the grounds that it inhibited women from moving freely in public space, while advocates of women’s health reform encouraged exercise and various movement systems to enhance wellbeing and self- actualization as preparation for their greater role in the public realm. In order to compete with men and “take part in the work of the world” advice manuals in the first decades of the twentieth century counselled women entering the work force to cultivate a “vigorous body and a clear brain” (Happy, Healthy Womanhood 3-4). For white middle- and upper- class women, raised from puberty to limit their movements so as “to preserve their energy for the work of reproduction,” physical cultures disabused them of the notion that

32 exercise was somehow unfeminine and harmful. This “energy theory” had kept them in their metaphorical and material place, and formed a central point around which attacks on behaviour considered unfeminine pivoted—essentially anything outside the home (Smith-

Rosenberg 187). Although health and exercise were key factors in both male and female

(em)powerment, moving their bodies for the benefit of their own spiritual and professional development was for white middle- and upper-class women a political choice (Ruyter xi).37

In the last decade scholars of modernism have begun to question the modern body’s formulation solely in terms of machine aesthetics, claiming influences from the physical culture movement and the history of performance, particularly those associated with women (white and African-American) largely overlooked in the gendered and racial construction of modernism’s great divide.38 As Robin Veder writes in The Living Line:

Modern Art and the Economy of Energy (2015), physical cultures “collectively crafted and visualized a modern body ready for work, play, and self expression” (819). Veder cautions us to resist seeing the relaxed, flexible, and individualized body associated with the “uncorseted and lounging avant-garde elite, the athletic new woman, and barefoot dancer” as automatically a site of liberation in opposition to the disciplinary efficiency of the Ziegfeld Follies and Tiller Girls (820), the latter providing Siegfried Kracauer with his shiny example of the “mass ornament.” Delsartism, while connected to “bodily improvisation,” and personal and spiritual development, she argues, still represents

37 Come puberty all activity was to be reduced until the ovaries “loosened their control” over a woman’s life; that is, in menopause, when women lost their capacity to perform their most important role as breeder (184). According to Smith- Rosenberg one doctor advised girls to take to their bed at the first sign of discharge until menstruation was firmly established, which could be months or years later (187). 38 Michael North’s Machine Age Comedy (2009) is an example of a text that sees the modern body in terms of machine aesthetics. Significantly, his critical targets are all men: Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Walt Disney (Mickey Mouse), Marcel Duchamp, Wyndham Lewis, Samuel Beckett, and David Foster Wallace.

33 rationalized movement and position similar to disciplinary forms like the Mensendieck exercise system, which were understood to have an expressive and emancipatory function, “a way of cultivating or maintaining agency” (830). This troubling of binaries and double binds (industrial vs. natural; discipline vs. emancipation) is crucial when considering works such as those comprising my project which coexist with but are widely considered outside the aesthetic realm of high modernism, against which they are generally understood to rest in easy opposition. Problematizing modernism’s equation with liberation (as free movement) and popular culture’s with discipline (as befits its role as mass deception) in order to revisit the formative influences on modern art, Veder makes room for the liberatory possibilities in the movement of women on the stages, pages, and screens of my dissertation, carving out critical space to assess the women as modern, even if not possessed of modernism’s languid body. Some of the bodies presented here are stiff, some slow, others move at a pace more clipped than smooth, but all are modern in their desire for and actualization of movement.

In her book It’s Up to You, published in 1931, Bess Mensendieck includes pictures of young women in the nude (retouched wearing bikinis to avoid censorship) performing activities such as standing, stooping, washing their face, reaching for an object, and leaning at a desk. Facing each photo is an analysis of the image and the specific mechanics of the bodily action, an arrangement designed to show the expressive power of everyday movements (Toepfer 40). Mensendieck’s system, and physical culture in general, encourages my dissertation’s preoccupation with the expressive and political power of movements, gestures, and postures easily overlooked as quotidian, rudimentary, or functional. Running up stairs or down a street, lying on or crawling across the floor,

34 strutting across a stage or standing still, the women’s movements I describe speak to the negotiation of gender roles, to the exercise of freedom and autonomy, and to the process of self-actualization for women still confined by ideologies of the separate spheres.

Carrie Preston’s identification of the “kinesthetics” of the “high” modernist novel proves instructive to my project’s “vernacular”39 ones for suggesting how a text “encodes the gestures and motions of characters, the bodies that produce words, and the movements required by speech” (“Joyce’s Reading Bodies” 233). Thus, in Stage Door stage directions encode its actresses’ movement, connecting it to work, to pleasure, and to place as the play’s subject, and in Dance, Girl, Dance a dancer achieves self-actualization by refusing to move only for the amusement of the men in a burlesque audience whose leering gazes have been “called out” in previous scenes through tight close ups. Likewise

Luhan’s refusal to dance at her “coming out” party is encoded in her memoir as one episode in a lifetime of movement in defiance of prescribed norms for women and in accordance with her own desires.

Underscoring movement’s claim to vitality are the theories of French philosopher

Henri Bergson, whose standing-room-only lectures in 1913 and 1917 provoked rapturous media attention along the Eastern United States. Omri Moses and Tom Quirk have explored the influence of Bergson’s vitalism on the works of American modernists,40 but

Bergson’s reach extended beyond their rarified circles to influence popular publishers like Bernarr Macfadden, especially his concept of élan vital, the life force animating all living things. Macfadden’s Physical Culture magazine extolled the benefits of movement, breath, and healthy eating to promote “vital power,” defined by Macfadden as “that

39 Film scholar Miriam Hansen refers to classical Hollywood film as “vernacular modernism” preferring vernacular over “popular” (60). 40 Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot.

35 superabundance of health which breeds an intense satisfaction with life and all living things (4).” 41 In Macfadden’s calculus, movement—like change in Bergson’s—is life.42

A more contemporary engagement with movement and vitalism is offered by Erin

Manning’s Relationscapes (2009), in which she mobilizes the Bergsonian concept of duration and Deleuzian notions of immanence to theorize movement as more than a displacement from point A to point B. Movement, she explains, happens virtually, before, within, and after displacement. As duration, movement may be “felt” before it is actualized in the “preacceleration” of a body’s turn towards another, or in movements that accrue in virtual relation to a body, present though past, folded into that body as possibilities for other movement (6). Just as movements are preaccelerated, so thoughts are “prearticulated” in movement; embodied movement expressing “thought in motion”

(5). Manning’s analysis is especially helpful to my reading of the overlooked Lulu Bett, who expresses, and progressively embodies, her virtual—and vital—self as she moves across the pages of Gale’s novel. While the movement of a mind is certainly not foreign to the study of literature, my dissertation approaches it differently by connecting the literal movement of bodies to the metaphorical movement of minds to show how a realist author like Zona Gale uses the movement of her protagonist Lulu’s body to tell the story of her emerging self when Lulu has yet to find the words to articulate exactly what she wants or where she is going.

Manning’s intertwining of body, mind, and movement also helps to deflect charges of essentialism in my focus on women expressing themselves through their bodies (rather than their minds). With Manning’s help I am able to demonstrate how the

41 Physical Culture magazine had a circulation in the hundreds of thousands in the 1920s. 42 “For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly” (Creative Evolution 7).

36 women who move here are more than their bodies. They may not always articulate what they are thinking in words, but they are not unthinking. They are thinking because and as they are moving. Analogously, just because a text does not contort itself out of its linearity does not mean it is not capable of saying something meaningful and worthwhile.

A focus on moving bodies permits an appreciation of the nuances of the seemingly matter of fact. At the same time, my feminist approach does represent a reclaiming of the female body, not in its biology but in its movement, to account for the feminist stance(s), material and philosophical, we take and make through our bodies.

Vital Directions

What began as an intention to explore the vitality expressed in the movement of female bodies has become a more complex mapping of the intersections between the movement of people, places, objects, and ideas. For a full picture of the vitality of the women featured in these pages to be appreciated their physical movements must be approached in relational terms: to the women in other chapters, to the objects that surround them, and to the places and spaces they occupy.43 As Mabel Dodge Luhan observes in her autobiography, physical movement on its own (as in the case of her mother) is not a guarantee of vitality.

Approaching movement relationally is central to the “mobilities paradigm” that emerged out of sociology departments in the United Kingdom, but which has its origins in various theoretical frameworks and disciplinary areas long concerned with

“differentiated mobilities,” among them migration studies, transportation studies, tourism studies, geography, feminism, and queer theory. All acknowledge that not only do people

43 This is David Bissell’s term, referenced in Allison Hui’s article, “Enthusiasm,” in The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities, 174. Bissell is also one of the book’s editors.

37 move through geographic space, but they are also “shaped by power relations of mobility and immobility, including rights to move, to enter, to dwell and to leave” (Adey et al 4).

Movement becomes “mobilities” with considerations of relative power. Movement also becomes mobilities by encompassing non-human movement; that is, objects, things, ideas, and affects (such as data, water, food and viruses). Mobilities studies does not apprehend movement as “an undifferentiated flow,” but breaks it down into “identifiable activities” (Adey et al 15). Built spaces are envisioned as “permeated by routes, conduits, and mobilities” rather than as “stable and static containers” (Hui 173).

Reading movement as an expression of power relations, of women relative to men and to normative expectations, is foundational to my dissertation. As is an approach to built spaces that sees them “permeated by routes [and] conduits,” beginning with the boarding house in Stage Door, in which characters rehearse while moving between rooms and up and down the stairs, and followed in subsequent chapters by a burlesque stage traversed from wings to centre stage and from apron to upstage, to examine the differing mobilities of Dance, Girl, Dance’s central characters, Bubbles and Judy; and by a middle class home entered through the back door as well as the front, punctured by internal routes from kitchen to living room, and from living room out the front door, to account for the “activities” that will lead to Lulu’s final exit in Miss Lulu Bett.

Feminism’s long engagement with women’s mobilities is one of the political and intellectual antecedents of the mobilities paradigm but, as Georgine Clarsen argues, it has not been exhausted. By way of example, Clarsen cites the association of dynamism with men, either through sport, exploration, or the flâneur (95-96). As an investigation into the vitality engendered by the movements made by its constituent women (characters,

38 creators, and feminized genres), my dissertation answers Clarsen’s call in its appreciation and celebration of female dynamism.

Vitality is an affect that—like the women themselves—moves. While emotions and feelings belong to subjects, affect exists in between objects and bodies as a “capacity to relate” (Hui 172), foregrounding “the motion of emotion.”44 Understood as an affect rather than a feeling, the vitality first encountered in the movements and conviviality of the Footlights Club in Stage Door travels across chapter breaks to attach to Bubbles’s strides and Judy’s stillness, to Lulu entering a living room lamp in hand, and to the people, objects, and ideas that cross paths in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s houses. Discussing enthusiasm and mobilities studies, Allison Hui explains that to explore “enthusiastic mobilities” is not to identify “how people move during emotional states of passion. It is about interrogating relationships where passion and inspiration are manifest in mobilities” (172-check). Like enthusiasm, to which vitality may be related as an enthusiasm for life, vital mobilities emerge as moments within vital relations. Hui defines three ways that enthusiasm characterizes mobilities: as an “affective atmosphere for mobilities within spaces, as a force pushing people through spaces, and as a lure pulling people to spaces” (173). Vitality similarly characterizes the mobilities within these pages: the freedom and camaraderie that characterize life at the Footlights Club provides the affective atmosphere that keeps the actresses motivated to head out to audition for parts they may not get and to visit the offices of producers who will likely refuse to see them; the vitality Lulu experiences as she moves and Judy as she dances eventually pushes Lulu out the Deacon front door, and ballet dancer Judy onto the apron of a burlesque stage.

44 The words are Deborah Thien’s, quoted in Hui. See also “Affective Economies” by Sara Ahmed (2004).

And it is the vitality of nature that eventually pulls Mabel Dodge Luhan to “take root” in

New Mexico.

Play texts provide stage directions that tell us where and how bodies move. Similarly, the visuality of film makes it easier to see bodies as they move on screen. Beginning with works of theatre and film in chapters one and two helps attune readers to bodies moving before encountering them in the narrative forms of chapters three and four.

Chapter one uses a discussion of Ferber and Kaufman’s Stage Door to establish women’s movement as a subject of all the works while also exploring the foundational difference between work and labour (domestic and industrial) crucial to reading the movement’s liberatory potential. As a work of theatre, Stage Door inherently foregrounds the body by virtue of that body’s direct participation on a stage.45 As a play about the lives of actresses, it makes that body female. The play’s conflation of work and performance also provides the groundwork for understanding how throughout my dissertation work is always already a performance of gender.

Chapter two expands the vocabulary of vital movement established in chapter one from one composed primarily of actions (coming and going from and to work, going up and down the stairs) into more specific gestures and embodiments to articulate a broader range of conditions, such as social and economic mobility and self-actualization, expressed by them. Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance is particularly appropriate to my discussion of movement on two fronts: as a film about women and dance, what we more readily think of when we think of bodies moving, and for placing its dancing bodies into a “motion” picture.

45 Direct participation of bodies on stage and spectating “in theatrical figuring constitutes an irreducible phenomenological dimension which exceeds signification” (Wallis 261).

The third chapter uses Gale’s novel to connect Lulu Bett’s moving body to the gradual movement of her mind and the articulation of her thoughts. Lulu is who the women in the first two chapters might have been before, or had they never left, home for the city, making the novel a kind of prequel to their stories and what they so forcefully move against. An exploited servant in her sister and brother-in-law’s home, Lulu’s movements increasingly connect her to internal desires for a life of her own, provoking other movements expressive of those desires rather than others’ expectations. The freedom to move as she chooses is a declaration made by the movements of all the women examined here at their most basic and essential level.

Born into a wealthy family, the subject of the fourth chapter, Mabel Dodge

Luhan, possessed the money that provided her with the freedom and autonomy Ferber,

Arzner, and Gale had to work for. But work is as yet a theme in her autobiography,

Intimate Memories, or rather the lack of it, without which, to her, the upper class woman has no real purpose. Luhan’s movements, which she charts between and within various homes, reflect a restlessness that is less a function of her wealth (as some categorize it) than a need to resist the confinements of her upper-class background particularly as they relate to women. In Intimate Memories, movement represents not dithering nor dilettantism but the mobility of a self and its propulsive drive for personal growth and fulfillment.

A final note. Vitalism has also emerged recently in a scholarly concern for

“vibrant matter,” one that encompasses Felski’s critical volley to approach texts as actors.

To call the women in these works vital is to resist reducing the texts in which they appear to trifles of popular culture, to guilty pleasures, and to activate that which has largely

41 been regarded as “inert” into vital, even “enchanting,” objects worthy of critical scrutiny.46

46 Vibrant Matter (2010) and The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001) are books by political philosopher Jane Bennett.

Chapter 1 The Ins and Outs (and Ups and Downs) of Work in Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman's Stage Door

In Act I, Scene II of Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s 1936 Broadway comedy

Stage Door, Jean Maitland bursts into the room she shares with Terry Randall at the

Footlights Club, a “club for girls of the stage” in New York City, to relate the exciting news that they have been offered contracts with a Hollywood studio. When she is told that the contract is for seven years, Terry rejects what others would regard as much- prized job security, especially during a depression, with “But what about the stage?

Suppose I wanted to act?” Taken aback by Terry’s suggestion that an actor does not act in film, Jean insists:

Well, what do you think this is! Juggling? Motion-picture acting is just as much

of an art as stage acting, only it’s cut up more. You only have to learn about a line

at a time, and they just keep on taking it until you get it right.

Terry dismisses Jean’s apologetics by comparing acting in film to labour performed in the city’s garment industry:

That isn’t acting; that’s piecework. You’re not a human being, you’re a thing in a

vacuum. Noise shut out, human response shut out. But in the theatre, when you

hear that lovely sound out there, then you know you’re right. It’s as though they’d

turned on an electric current that hit you here. And that’s how you learn to act.

(629; Act 1 Sc 2)

42 43

Film acting is not acting because it is not “live” in front of an audience. “You don’t even have to be alive to act in pictures,” Terry exclaims a few lines later. An actor’s performance is put in “a tin can—like Campbell’s soup. And if you die the next day it doesn’t matter a bit” (629). Not “live” in front of an audience, and therefore not “a-live,” acting in film within the ethics of the play does not constitute real “work.” This theatrical triad of liveness, aliveness, and work forms the foundation of the play’s vision of vitality, vitality the female residents of the Footlights Club demonstrate in their almost constant movement. Their vitality is the spark that enables the actresses not just to be but also to feel alive.

Although she benefited financially from the sale of the rights to many of her novels to film studios, Ferber makes clear in a letter written on a visit to California that she would never write for one: “…I should think that the work here, for a stretch of time, would be a nightmare. You are hemmed in by a thousand restrictions. The thing is manufactured, hammered, torn to bits, put together again. I’d go mad.”47 Kaufman did work for the studios but he too was not a fan,48 a view he shamelessly exposes throughout his work, but especially in Once in a Lifetime (1930), written with Moss Hart. In that play

Lawrence Vail, one of a “shipment of 16 playwrights” put on retainers at a Hollywood studio, suffers a breakdown from “underwork” and ends up in a sanitarium established by another playwright.49 The writer’s lot in Hollywood is played for farce as Vail makes repeated attempts to see a studio executive only to be told to sit and wait by a receptionist

47 From a letter dated July 20, 1935, when Ferber was in Hollywood during filming of the adaptation of her novel Come and Get it, directed by Howard Hawks and William Wyler. Ferber never wrote the screenplays adapted from her novels but would advise writers. 48 Kaufman adapted some of his theatrical work for film such as the Marx Brothers’ vehicle Animal Crackers. 49 Kaufman actually played Vale in the original production (Kaufman & Co. 857).

44 who looks at him each time he approaches her as if she has never seen him before. But therein lies the play’s indictment—in theatre, one writes and acts; in Hollywood, one sits.

Ferber and Kaufman were not alone in their assessment of film acting as a production process characterized by repetition and standardization. As more and more actors left for Hollywood, many of those who stayed behind dismissed the legitimacy of film acting as an art form.50 Terry’s “tin can” comment resonates with one made by actress Frances Starr in Theatre Magazine in 1924: “In the movies you have a splendid feast but it is canned cooking. In the theatre you have the real thing” (quoted in Holmes

29). What theatre offers, to the playwrights and to Starr, is not a representation of reality, but life itself—a meal made with fresh ingredients rather than out of a can. In ironic opposition to the historical prejudice that equates acting with lying, theatricality becomes

“real” in relation to the “fake” performance manufactured through the machine of the camera. This alleged superiority of theatre over film is crucial to Stage Door’s casting of the actresses’ movements as self-directed, in opposition to the programmed monotony of both factory and domestic labour.51 Live on stage the actress remains alive and embodied.

Maintaining control over their movements the residents of the Footlights Club achieve an autonomy disavowed by the restrictive realms of both the production line and the clothesline.

50 For most of the nineteenth century a wide variety of expressive forms enjoyed both high cultural status and mass popularity, as Michael Kammen writes in American Culture, American Tastes: Social Change in the Twentieth Century (1999), but in the early twentieth century, discrete spaces begin to be carved out for discrete audiences, leading to cultural categories “we’ve learned to accept as natural and eternal.” The elevation of theatre over film is, according to David Savran in Highbrow/Lowdown: Theater, Jazz, and the Making of the New Middle Class (2010), a feature of the cultural hierarchies forming in this period, where Eugene O’Neil constitutes the birth of American theatre, and “legitimate theatre” defines itself by its distance to jazz, musical revues, radio, and vaudeville. 51 Ironically, given the theatre versus Hollywood rivalry in the play, screen actress Margaret Sullavan played the role of Terry Randall when the play premiered on Broadway, a point not lost on New York Times theatre critic Brooks Atkinson, who writes in his review that their point about theatre acting would be better taken if “Margaret Sullavan had not learned a great deal about acting since she went to Hollywood.”

Ironically, while descrying the mechanization of acting in film, Terry simultaneously uses an industrial metaphor to describe the birth of an actor: “It’s as though they’d turned on an electric current that hit you here.” The actor emerges into her body in the exchange of energy between audience and performer on stage. To the playwrights, no parallel exchange occurs between audience and actor on film—there is nothing “electrifying” in that experience. Having watched countless others get lured, as

Jean is, by “the swimming and the sunshine” and the bigger pay cheques of Hollywood

(628; Act 1 Sc 2), the play’s positioning of theatre’s artistic supremacy over film reflects

Ferber and Kaufman’s concern for the survival of theatre in a modified cultural landscape where competition for eyes and ears is enthusiastically offered by the new medium of sound film.52 The ongoing movement of the actresses who live at the Footlights Club is an argument both for their vitality as subjects and workers, and for the vitality of live theatre in the face of its eclipse by motion pictures.

Although “girls of the stage,” none of the residents at the Footlights Club ever appears on a “proper” one. Continually coming and going through the titular stage door, from rehearsals and out to matinees and evening performances, from jobs to dinner, we watch as they rehearse lines, dance, play piano, perform for guests, and scour theatre weeklies for casting calls, but never in an actual play. Because Stage Door takes place entirely in their home, their movements emphasize the work of theatre, rather than the completed production of a play. Coming and going through the “Stage” door into the

“Footlights” Club, what we watch the actresses perform is their lives.

While men do enter the Footlights Club, most appear only briefly before taking their dates to dinner. The few who linger are connected to Terry and to the play’s central

52 By 1937, movies accounted for three quarters of American dollars spent on leisure (Denning 41).

46 dichotomy of a “fresh” New York theatre versus the “tin can” of Hollywood film. Terry’s first beau, Keith Burgess, starts out an idealistic playwright with socialist leanings but before the end of the play has “sold out” to Hollywood. David Kingsley, her second beau, is a former Broadway producer who maintains his love for the theatre while working as a talent scout for the Globe Picture Company. But while these men are thematically important, it is the texture of the actresses’ daily lives that is the play’s central concern.

Stage Door offers a contrast to the popular backstage musicals of the 1930s such as Dames (1934) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) in which the action and setting move back and forth from stage to back or offstage. In Stage Door every scene takes place at the Footlights Club. In other words, backstage is centre stage. Instead of an ensemble of women (aside from two or three leading ladies) who function generally as anonymous, interchangeable objects in Busby Berkeley geometric formations, the women who reside at the Footlights Club are given voices, personalities, and agency. While Terry and Jean are the ostensible leads, Judith, Madeline, Bernice, Louise, Kendal, Olga, Susan, Linda, and the two Marys, “Big” and “Little” (whose monikers represent the opposite of their actual stature) all have their parts to play in a story about those who remain committed to the theatre despite never getting the lead, and rarely even a role, in a play. Their energy and passion, their liveliness and flexibility, fuel their resourcefulness and resilience, allowing them to weather the ups and downs of the theatre and of life itself.

From 1910 to 1950 Edna Ferber wrote a series of bestselling novels and short story collections that made her one of Doubleday’s top authors, the winner of a Pulitzer Prize

(So Big, 1924), and a household name. Thirteen of her novels were turned into prestige vehicles for Hollywood, where “Based on the novel by Edna Ferber” appeared beneath

47 film titles and in marketing campaigns, including Show Boat and Giant, James Dean’s final film.53 During this fertile period Ferber also co-authored nine plays, the most successful of which, The Royal Family (1927), Dinner at Eight (1932), and Stage Door, she co-wrote with Kaufman. Despite these Broadway hits Ferber was never identified as a playwright, a source of great disappointment to her, and one she would feel if she were still alive as her plays continue to be overlooked in the recent recovery of her fiction.54

J.E. Smyth makes the valid point in Edna Ferber’s Hollywood (2010) that Ferber’s reputation in Hollywood was not based on her relationship to Kaufman, also citing the absence of significant commentary on Kaufman in Ferber’s autobiographies as reason for not engaging with her plays. But while Ferber may not have devoted many pages to

Kaufman, the theatre is everywhere in her personal writing, not least in the photograph opposite the title page of her first volume of autobiography, A Peculiar Treasure

(1939)55, in which her seven-year-old self stands in front of a thick curtain holding her skirts, right foot pointed daintily to the side. “Certainly I have been stage-struck all my life,” she writes early on in that volume (25), a statement she reaffirms in a second volume of autobiography when she admits to the irony of being a novelist who spent her time largely with theatre people but, she writes, “it is the theatre and workers in the theatre that have been the long-lasting loves of my life” (A Kind of Magic 192). And although Ferber may not spend a lot of time on the process and particulars of her collaborations with Kaufman, she does attempt to explain the success of their partnership: in addition to both being “work worshippers” and “stage-struck,” she and Kaufman were

53 Other novels turned films include Dawn O’Hara (1911), Fanny Herself, (1917), The Girls (1921), the Pulitzer-prize winning So Big (1924), Cimarron (1929), American Beauty (1931), Come and Get It (1935), Saratoga Trunk (1941), and Ice Palace (1958). 54 “I pout a great deal over the fact that that I never am mentioned as a playwright” (A Peculiar Treasure 343). 55 From this point on Peculiar Treasure will be indicated as PT in page references.

“politically and humanely liberal” (A Kind of Magic 92-3). To miss investigating Ferber’s theatre work is to miss a crucial aspect of her worldview.

It may be that critics have also avoided Ferber’s plays because they are co- authored.56 However, Stage Door presents an opportunity to engage with it specifically in relation to Ferber on account of a collaboration credit rule established by Kaufman early in his career, which gave top billing to the writer who came up with the original idea for a play (Kaufman &Co. 855).57 Ferber’s name is listed first on the title page of Stage Door, unlike The Royal Family, about a premiere family of Broadway not the women who hover in the wings of stardom’s stage weathering failed auditions and closed shows.

Along with Dinner at Eight, The Royal Family and Stage Door are regarded as Ferber and Kaufman’s most successful collaborations, but only the first two have been revived on Broadway numerous times, while Stage Door has received a few regional productions.58 One wonders about the implications of gender when the female-centric and

Ferber-conceived Stage Door is the least produced of the duo’s three big hits.59 With women the primary subjects of Stage Door, there are no meaty roles for men like The

Royal Family’s male lead loosely based on John Barrymore. While Ferber’s playwriting dovetailed with her fiction career, Kaufman’s career was entirely devoted to the theatre.

In addition to writing for the theatre, he reviewed it as drama editor for The New York

Times from 1917 until 1930, and directed it, both his own plays and those written by

56 Kaufman and Ferber wrote other plays together but none as successful as the three mentioned above. Besides her collaborations with Kaufman, Ferber worked with George Hobart to adapt her highly successful Emma McChesney stories, published over a number of years in American Magazine,56 into a 1915 play, Our Mrs. McChesney, with Ethel Barrymore in the title role. 57 Moss Hart was Kaufman’s other very successful collaborator with whom he wrote Once in A Lifetime (1930), the still frequently revived You Can’t Take it With You (1936), and The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939). The latter two plays ran for over 700 performances. With George and Ira Gershwin and Morrie Ryskind, he wrote Of Thee I Sing (1931); Ryskind was also his partner on the book for the Marx brothers’ Animal Crackers (1928). 58 Production information from the Internet Broadway Database (IBDB). 59 In their first runs Stage Door ran for 169 performances; The Royal Family for 345 performances and Dinner at Eight for 232. Performance figures from the chronology in Kaufman & Co.

49 others including The Front Page (1929), Of Mice and Men (1937), and Guys and Dolls

(1950). A prominent member of the Algonquin Round Table, Kaufman, like so many of that smart set, also published in The New Yorker. Excerpts from novels by Ferber, on the other hand, set in places like Chicago, Oklahoma, and Mississippi, ran in a Women’s

Home Companion. Both Ferber and Kaufman were born in the late nineteenth century to middle-class Jewish families of German heritage, with Ferber’s formative years spent in

Wisconsin, and Kaufman’s in Pennsylvania. Yet Kaufman conforms to the image of urbane New Yorker, while Ferber, though she lived in New York for most of her adult life, is still often regarded as provincial as her novels’ locations. The well-heeled settings of both The Royal Family and Dinner at Eight, which revolves around a dinner party at a

Park Avenue apartment, are thus more in keeping with Kaufman’s reputation than the boarding house of Stage Door. In light of these facts and their implications, Stage Door seems ripe for recovery when whose stories get told, by whom, and how have become central to the cultural conversation. As a vehicle for a range of female talent it is noteworthy for the same reasons.

While recent recovery work on Ferber’s output has not examined her plays at length, it has honed in on issues and themes that resonate with my discussion of Stage

Door: her creative interest in working women, her liberalism, and the influence of her journalism on her fiction. Politically engaged, Ferber covered the Democratic and

Republican National Conventions in 1912 and 1920 for a syndicated newspaper, and weighed in periodically on significant events such as the public circus surrounding the trial of Bruno Hauptman for the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby.60 Ferber’s early days

60 Her public writing and civic engagement earned her an honorary doctorate from Columbia and an invitation to the White House from FDR.

50 reporting for the Appleton Crescent and Milwaukee Journal and her first novel, Dawn

O’Hara, about a female reporter, are a case study for Jean Lutes’s argument in Front

Page Girls (2006) that women-authored journalism is a key component of the literary history of realism. Carol Batker reads Ferber’s early short stories through the author’s politics as part of an investigation into the reforming fictions of Jewish, African, and

Native American authors in the Progressive Era, while J.E. Smyth, Eliza McGraw, Donna

Campbell, and Heidi Kanaga engage with Ferber’s novels as critiques of national mythologies such as Frederick Jackson Turner’s influential thesis of the American frontier. My study of Stage Door builds on these investigations and their evidence of

Ferber’s avowed “hard and ruthless purpose” (PT 339) by showing how Ferber’s great love, the theatre, in Stage Door provides the perfect setting for her preoccupations with women, work, and liberal politics.61

Ferber’s writing routine, a daily walk before sitting down at the typewriter, unites work and movement into a mutually sustaining process that sheds light on the emphatic motion of the actresses in Stage Door and its relation to their vitality. Early in her career, living back at her parents’ home while writing Dawn O’Hara, Ferber was taking a French class that required her to be at a local university in Appleton for eight am. Walking to and from class each day she soon realized that the morning walk was “exactly the right thing in preparation for a day’s sedentary writing. The brisk walk set the blood circulating; the sharp Wisconsin air cleared the morning cob webs from my brain.” Many years and novels later, she reports, she still “[runs] out to walk somewhere…” before sitting down to write (PT 156). Walking facilitates both her body’s capacity to sit for an extended time

61 Carol Batker, Reforming Fictions (2000); J.E. Smyth, Edna Ferber’s Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History; Eliza R.L. McGraw, Edna Ferber’s America (2013); Donna Campbell and Heidi Kenaga’s pieces appear in the collection Middlebrow Moderns, edited by Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith (2003).

51 and her mind’s ability to work creatively. Moving, both her mind and body have room to roam.

The Work of Theatre

The encoding of acting in theatre as work is central to the play’s presentation of the actresses’ vitality as a function of willful and self-directed movement. Whenever the actresses talk about getting a part in a play, they refer to it in terms of work. Returning home after finally landing a role in a hard-to-get Berger play, Terry announces excitedly,

“I’ve got a JOB!” rather than a “part” (603; Act 1 Sc 1). When Olga, the classically trained pianist, complains about playing the piano at the Winter Garden Theatre as “a star pupil of Kolijinsky” Little Mary says to Big, “Bellyaching, and she’s got a job!” (610;

Act 1 Sc 1). And checking in with Kaye about her acting prospects, Judith asks “Any sign of a job yet?” (621; Act Sc 2). Acting and performing are work, and that work requires action in the form of rehearsing lines, auditioning, scouring dailies for notices, writing letters, and making the rounds of producers’ offices. It also encompasses working a job that has nothing to do with the theatre, such as Terry’s job as a salesgirl, which helps keep her afloat between shows. The play openly disapproves of the one resident, Linda, who attaches herself to a wealthy man, and disappears one day from the Club, presumably to live with and be kept by him. It is through the work, and not through men, that the actresses can achieve independence and self-respect.

The working women of the Footlights Club take on whatever “roles” they can as they await their big chance, whether sales girl or dancing girl. Except, that is, for the new arrival, Kaye Hamilton. Once she enters the house the first time, Kaye rarely leaves her room and never heads out to find any kind of work at all. That she keeps mostly to herself

52 is understood from Judith’s telling comment, “You’ve been here a month, and I don’t know any more about you than when you came in. The rest of us are always spilling our whole insides, but you never let out a peep” (621; Act 1 Sc 2). Kaye’s negativity, apparent in her moaning to Terry that she will “never get a job,” paralyzes her. Unable to move, unable to connect—unable to act in both senses of the word—Kaye lacks the other’s vitality and, not surprisingly, she dies, after swallowing pills, before the end of the play. One could dismiss her death as melodrama, but in the terms defined by the play,

Kaye lacks life. “It could have been any one of us,” Terry muses after Kaye’s suicide, but her comment is disingenuous given the logic of the play’s investment in movement and work to engender vitality. None of the others would have given in to Kaye’s despairing inaction. They would have picked themselves up and moved on.

In the film adapted from Stage Door (1937) it is not Kaye but Terry, played by

Katherine Hepburn, who is the new arrival. Featuring an ensemble of beloved stars and character actresses including Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, and Eve Arden, the film differs enough from the play that Kaufman is quoted as saying, “They should have called it

Screen Door.”62 Written by Kaufman’s sometime collaborator Morrie Ryskind (another nod towards the play being “Ferber’s”—Kaufman would have written another kind of play had he written it with Ryskind), the film’s substantial deviations from the play underscore my reading of female vitality as a product of the movement of women in and out of the house for work and recreation. While Terry is the lead character in the play

Stage Door, she is very much part of the group who live at the Footlights Club, there because of a dream to be on stage. In other words, she is already one of them. Unlike the

62 One of the scrolling “notable quotes” on the George S. Kaufman website. One of whose web masters is Laurence Maslon, editor of Kaufman &Co. http://georgeskaufman.com/biography.html.

53 film, which takes as its arc Terry’s journey to become an actress. In the film, Terry’s move into the Footlights Club is an act of rebellion against her rich father who has given her a year to make it in the theatre. Playing on Hepburn’s patrician upbringing, the film looks ahead to her role in the classic screwball comedy The Philadelphia Story (1940) where, as the wealthy Tracy Lord, she will need to soften her view of humanity and be educated into the compromises of romantic partnerships.63 In rehearsals for the play

Enchanted April whose premiere is the climax of the film Stage Door, Terry continually ignores the director’s advice, declaring acting to be common sense and resisting the company. Her narcissism and myopia connects her to her class and to the flaws of the rich dramatized in many Depression-era films, with her eventual triumph in Enchanted

April a function of her awareness of those less fortunate. The depth of feeling brought out by Kaye’s death is what imbues her performance with emotional “truth,” making the film more about Terry’s education into “how the other half lives,” than the vitality exhibited by those already working in theatre.

Fundamental to the play’s definition of acting in theatre as work is its opposition to the industrialized labour of film. When Terry compares acting in film to “piecework,” her outrage hinges on film acting as analogous to garments paid for by the completed

“piece” rather than by the hour. An actor’s performance on film is not the end result of the performer’s labour but directors and editors who piece it together after the fact. It is commodified and manipulated as part of a production process that separates the actor,

“who [doesn’t] even have to be alive,” from her performance. In that commodification

63 Screwball comedies “portray heterosexual marriage as a unity of two extreme characters–often drawn from upper and lower classes and frequently arranged in binary oppositions such as artist vs. yuppie, jock vs. intellectual, or scientist vs. artists–where each moderates some dimension of his or her personality in order to learn to communicate with a prospective mate. Most often the comic film juxtaposes the values of practical but rigid to free but irresponsible” (Willett 144).

54 the actress loses control of her body and its movements along with her labour, which are ordered and regulated according to the needs and wants of others. As workers for the stage, not pieceworkers, the actresses retain control over their labour, the physical presence of their distinct and whole bodies allowing them to complete a task from start to finish rather than occupy a position as a component of a larger production.

Terry’s argument against film acting expresses an anxiety around the threat to subjectivity that accompanies the emergence of corporate capitalism between 1890 and

1930. The protest against “proletarianization” from the standpoint of modern subjectivity,

James Livingston explains, represents the “loss of control over property in one’s capacity to produce value through work,” control left behind with artisanal culture and proprietary capitalism. This loss of control reverses “the simple, rigid relation between active subject and passive object” which characterizes artisanal forms of work (22). In Stage Door the movement of the actresses for and as work re-installs this active subject while also extending modern subjectivity to women.64 As workers, the actresses sell the product of their labour rather than their labour power, declaring what they do, what they move for, as sites of self-making incompatible with both industrial and domestic labour: “Genuine selfhood can no more be derived from the abstract, unskilled labor of the fully mechanized workplace than it can be derived from the sluggish routine of the private household” (Livingston 22). How movement that resists the “dead duty”65 of domestic labour promotes self-actualization are subjects for the chapters that follow. For now, what

64 This conforms to Livingston’s description of a “pragmatic” feminism of this period, which does not reject the modern subject so much as seek to expand who could be counted as one. 65 This is a quote from Zona Gale that appears in the third chapter; it first appeared in a letter she wrote to The New York Tribune in response to a review of the play she adapted from her novel Miss Lulu Bett where she used it to describe what keeps women like Lulu tethered to their domestic situations.

55 is most important to apprehend is that in the aesthetics with which I am concerned movement, work, and female subjectivity orbit in the same vital universe.

Jean’s defense—and the playwrights’ critique—of film acting, that “you only have to learn a line at a time and they just keep on taking it until you get it right” (629;

Act 1 Scene 2), echoes Hannah Arendt’s stipulation in The Human Condition that

“repetition and the endlessness of the process itself put the unmistakable mark of laboring on it” (125). Work is skilled labour productive of the world around us while labour requires “no special skill,” and is reproductive, that which we do to sustain ourselves

(123). Film acting, the play argues, may sustain your life with its “beautiful pay check every week,” buy it does not make a life. In Stage Door theatre is work; film is labour.

Arendt’s dismissal of “women’s work,” including the actual work of reproduction in her classification of labour as “reproductive,” makes her a compelling reference in a dissertation focused on creative work by women regarded in effect as unskilled labour for its lack of formal experimentation. Ferber is well aware of this distinction when in her autobiography she argues for the work of her writing, both in process and product.

Although included among the members of the Algonquin Round Table she rarely ate with them because “lunching out was something of an event” for her, mornings and early afternoons being her “working hours” (PT 292). Emphasizing her industriousness, Ferber seeks recognition for her creative outputs having emerged through careful thought, research, and political impetus, more than simply a desire to entertain: “From 1921…to

1961, the novels I wrote were novels of protest. Loving protest, but protest nonetheless”

(A Kind of Magic 262). Like her stage actresses, Ferber’s energetic diligence, “working

56 daily for over a quarter of a century,” (PT 11) characterizes her stories, plays, and novels as “serious” work.

Dismissing film actors as sweatshop labourers (labourers despite the “workers” in their union name, the International Ladies Garment Workers Union),66 Terry emphasizes a lack of skill and creativity in acting for film.67 This lack of skill, along with the fact that it was largely women employed in it, contributed to piecework not being considered

“serious” work. Work paid for by the hour rather than by the completed piece represents the more highly valued, and male preserve, of wage work. In the 1930s as unions advocated for the male right to a living wage as heads of families, the idea of worker became increasingly tied to masculinity, extending a relationship established in the antebellum period between “manly” and free labour that explicitly excluded African

Americans and women. As historian Alice Kessler-Harris writes, the “dignity of the name

‘worker’ was reserved for “‘serious’ labour” defined as white, male, and skilled (In

Pursuit of Equity 4). This calculus of serious work and men was mobilized during the

Depression to encourage women, who had only recently moved into the workforce in large numbers, to return home so that men could access their given right to jobs. Not owed a living wage, women had no “right” to a job.68 Arguing for their right to be seen as

“serious,” Stage Door claims its female workers equal to men.

But while the play claims status for its women workers on par with men, it does not account for the African Americans that were also, according to Kessler-Harris, not

“owed” a living wage. The maid Mattie, and her husband, Frank, both of whom the stage

66 Textile workers had gained notoriety in that city in the wake of the New York Shirtwaist Strike of 1909, and the tragic fire in 1911 at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. 67 Piecework reduces the skill and creativity required for jobs, allowing workers to be interchangeable (Enstad 60). 68 Because they did not have the right to a living wage they also did not “rights” to benefits. Mothers and housewives (along with casual labourers, farm workers, and domestic servants) were offered “relief”—a distinction that had implications Kessler-Harris argues, on their access to “rights” of citizenship (In Pursuit of Equity 4).

57 directions tell us are “colored,” perform the domestic labour at the Footlights Club.

Although part of this theatrical community by virtue of their presence in the house,

Mattie and Frank’s labour remains as labour and thus without, according to the ethics of the play, access to the vital selfhood afforded by work and the self-directed movement it permits. If the actresses’ work precludes the domestic labour of being a wife and mother, then Mattie, like Delilah in Fannie Hurst’s Imitation of Life (1933), becomes mother to them all, and their access to vitality is made possible in part by the labour of a black underclass. In Mattie the limitations and exclusions of Ferber’s liberal feminism are exposed.

The freedom and autonomy expressed through their bodily movement also counteracts the fact that the actresses are not in complete control of their destinies when men, in the form of producers, directors, and theatre managers, are the gatekeepers to the complete fulfillment of their desires—a reality they must continually negotiate. The residents may control who comes through their door and onto the “stage” of the

Footlights Club, but it is men who open the real stage doors, something the play acknowledges in numerous complaints about how hard it is to get the attention of a producer, such as the following exchange between Bernice and Madeline:

BERNICE: I make the rounds, but all you see is the office boys.

MADELINE: Well, who do you think sees the letters?

BERNICE: Well, if they won’t see you and won’t read the letters, where do you

go from there?

MADELINE: If you find out, I wish you’d tell me. (595; Act 1 Sc 1)

This is true even for Terry, the one with “the vivid personality, the mobile face of the born actress” (603; Act 1 Sc 1). Terry finally gets her big break, but it is not because of an audition, which fails to convince studio head Gretzl, the man David Kingsley brings to the Footlights Club to hear her read (although he is discredited by the play by virtue of his role as the Hollywood producer who brings the movie star Jean to Broadway—he could never recognize Terry’s talent). She gets the part because Kingsley, who retains his love of theatre despite scouting for Hollywood, buys the play from Gretzl and puts Terry in it. The play, by way of Kingsley, protests, “Now, I’m not one of those boys who puts on a play just so that his girl can act in it” surely knowing that that is exactly how it seems (683; Act 3 Sc 2). Terry has the talent, the commitment, the drive, but is only crowned “queen” when she has her “king,” the appropriately named David Kingsley. The freedom and autonomy promised by the play, in its final moments leaves its audience with Terry getting her lead part because her boyfriend buys it for her—even if he does it because he believes in her. Her talent finally finds a role worthy of her, but it comes attached to a man.

The limitation of women’s movement as pure resistance to male power is a theme running through this dissertation, but so is the accompanying notion that these limitations do not nullify the resistance expressed by their movements because they expose the systemic inequities and suppressions required under patriarchy. In their ongoing movements in and out the door, across the room, and up and down the stairs—in their

“unruliness”—the actresses at the Footlights Club insist on their right to both take and make space for themselves in a world otherwise dominated by men, taking pleasure in their boarding house as a space in which they get to call the shots.

By the time Stage Door premiered on Broadway actors had in fact been workers for some time. The Actors Equity Association (AEA) was established in 1913 to protect American stage actors from exploitation by their employers and to bind them to a code of professional conduct. By 1919, after theatre managers proved uncompromising and uncooperative, the AEA affiliated with the American Federation of Labor and ordered their members out on strike, taking their grievances out to the street where potential ticket buyers could see and hear their protest. While stage actors asserted their artistic supremacy over those who plied their trade in film, they still sought to include them in their union, and in 1920 sent a representative to California to extend their jurisdiction

“beyond the legitimate theater and into the ‘dream factories’ of the Hollywood film industry.” As Sean Holmes writes, though they dismissed the artistry of their work, the actors and playwrights of the metropolitan stage were not “prepared to allow” film actors

“to declare their collective independence and to construct for themselves an occupational identity unfettered by the traditions of the stage” (29).69

Despite her interest in workers and her insistence on the protest represented by her novels, Ferber would not be considered part of what Michael Denning calls “the cultural front” of working-class artists and modernist radicals who were responsible for the “laboring of American culture” throughout the 1930s.70 She is best described as a

New Deal Liberal, in deep sympathy with White House reforms designed to preserve the dignity of every human being, especially those who work hard for their money.71 While

69 Stage actors actually claimed the right to speak for Hollywood actors because of their presumed superiority (Holmes 27). 70 These artists produced literary, visual, and theatrical work under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, the national employment program established in 1935, which was responsible for among other “Projects” the Federal Theatre Project. 71 In Liberalism and Its Discontents (1998), Alan Brinkley describes the “reform liberalism” of the Progressive and New Deal eras in this way.

60 sympathetic to Leftist causes and cultural artifacts, Ferber took issue with the Communist

Party’s assumed monopoly over the term “worker”: “I thought the working man had been here all the time, but it seems he appeared here only after the Russian Revolution” (PT

367).72 In her mind, her career was defined by stories about workers: “Almost every line I

[have] written since my writing days began in 1911, these stories were about men and women who worked for a living” (PT 364). She also took offense to proletarian artists who, as she describes them, write “with a hammer” (PT 7), represented in the play by

Keith Burgess, Terry’s playwriting beau in the first half. Terry helps Keith with the writing of a play he eventually sells to a producer, which Judith insists would have been unlikely without Terry’s help, “It was nothing but a stump speech the way he wrote it.

You made him put flesh and blood on it” (634; Act 2 Sc 1). In their emphasis on the daily lives of the actresses at the Footlight Club, Ferber and Kaufman, like Terry, put “flesh and blood” on their message about their own undervalued workers.

While critical of their outputs, Ferber did not take issue with the passion driving proletarian writers. Principled passion is what Terry first admires in Keith and disrespects him for losing when he moves to Hollywood.73 But the play suggests that when it stands in for political “stumping,” playwriting is more concerned with its message than with the actual people at whom it is directed. In the excerpt below Terry and Keith, who have just met, are discussing his recent play, which closed within a week of its opening:

KEITH: (Vastly superior) I don’t think in terms of material success. Who cares

whether a play makes money! All that matters is the message!

72 Ferber refers to communism in A Peculiar Treasure as a “democracy destroyer” (366). 73 Ferber was receptive to creative outputs of the cultural front, such as Orson Welles’s production of A Cradle Will Rock, which she called, “stirring and courageous” and a “fine play about the American working man” (PT 367).

TERRY: (Mildly) But if nobody comes to see it, who gets the message?

KEITH: I write about the worker! The masses! The individual doesn’t count in

modern society.

TERRY: But aren’t the masses made up of individuals?

KEITH: Don’t quibble! (617; Act 1 Sc 1)

Drily puncturing each one of Keith’s points above, Terry offers a rebuttal to communism and the social materialist art it inspired, proffering the play’s view that the presence of a

“message” does not preclude a play from also being entertaining. Juxtaposing Keith’s

“masses” to Terry’s “group of individuals,” the play alleges that communism lumps workers together, ignoring the diversity of the men and women who are its constituents.

To Ferber and Kaufman, the community of the Footlights Club, the city in which it is located, and by extension the country itself, achieves its vitality as a diverse community of individuals rather than a monolithic one. Thus, although it carries echoes of Marxist alienation in its metaphoric description of the film actress’s alienation from the products of her labour, Terry’s “piecework” analogy stems not from a communist critique of capitalism but from the play’s critique of film as unskilled labour.74

The playwrights’ concern for the work the actresses do and the corresponding dignity and respect that should flow to them situates Stage Door as a liberal and feminist

(or liberal feminist) response to another play about workers that premiered the year before, one whose communist sympathies were clear (and one that falls under Denning’s proletarian purview). Written by Clifford Odets, Waiting for Lefty debuted on January 6,

1935 at the Civic Repertory Theatre on Fourteenth Street in New York City. Presented by

74 Although the play does demonstrate the influence of the language of leftist politics on cultural life in the period, the “laboring of American culture” described by Denning.

62 the Group Theatre, the play was directed by Sanford Meisner and included Lee J. Cobb,

Elia Kazan, and Odets in the cast, all of who were members of the Communist party at the time. Based on a taxi strike that occurred the year before, Waiting for Lefty is a one- act, agitprop play comprising six vignettes about various men and the situations that forced them to work as taxi drivers, bookended by two scenes in a union hall where a crowd waits for the union organizer Lefty to advise them on whether or not they should strike. Lefty never arrives, and when at the end of the play they find out he has been murdered, one of the men calls out from the stage “Strike!”, after which a first-night audience of 1,400 “swept up in the call” rose to their feet yelling “Strike!” along with him. Originally conceived as a one-night benefit performance for New Theater Magazine, the play moved in March to Broadway where it played for 144 performances at the

Longacre Theatre.75 Throughout the next year it was the most widely performed play in

America (Denning xiv). Like Waiting for Lefty, Stage Door is also a play about workers, those workers Ferber and Kaufman knew and admired. Running to auditions and acting classes, suffering setbacks and closures, working at whatever jobs they can while waiting for the next show, the actresses living at the Footlights Club represent those who “work harder than any craft, trade or profession...under the most maddening and idiotic of circumstances…” (PT 211).

While references to Waiting for Lefty underscore its claim to the actresses’ status as workers of equal standing, the play also takes aim at its playwright. When Terry first meets Keith early in Act One he asks her if she knows who he is. Terry replies, “Yes.

You’re a playwright, and you wrote a play called Blood and Roses that was produced at the Fourteenth Street Theater, and it ran for a week and it wasn’t very good” (617; Act 1

75 “Waiting for Lefty,” http://ibdb.com/production.php?id=9728.

Sc 1). Clearly referencing the location of the theatre in which Waiting for Lefty premiered

(if not its run), the title of Keith’s work also plays on the political slogan first spoken by labour activist Rose Schneiderman, “The woman worker needs bread but she needs roses too,” connecting Keith’s play to Odets’s not only in content but location, while also offering a sly commentary on the erasure of women workers in Odet’s play. Keith’s protestation, “I write about the worker! The Masses!” provides additional support for

Odets as a model. While he professes not to care about the money, when Hollywood calls

(as it did for Odets), Keith is quick to answer, becoming, as Judith says, “one of those fellows started out on a soapbox and ended up in a swimming pool” (662; Act 3 Sc 1).

When he returns in Act Three after a year away, Keith reveals that he has not written another play, despite having insisted to Terry before he left, “Listen! I’m going to use

Hollywood. It’s not going to use me…I’ll write their garbage in the daytime, but at night

I’ll write my own plays” (655; Act 2 Sc 2). Referencing his latest picture, Terry suggests that the “masses got a little crowded out” of Loads of Love. Not pulling their satirical punches, Ferber and Kaufman have Keith respond with “Masses! It played to eighty million people. That’s masses, isn’t it?” (675; Act 3 Sc 1). While satirizing the principles of writers who are taken in by Hollywood, Ferber and Kaufman also take a swing at critics of popular art who dismiss it for its broad appeal to ask who are the “masses” if not mass audiences? Ironically, while claiming the superiority of theatre over film as productive work, Ferber and Kaufman defend their comedic play from the supposed superiority of proletarian art, which overlapped with modernist art in the cultural front as the basis for “serious” work in the theatre. Commercial culture, that which appeals to

64 masses of people, the play seems to imply, is not inevitably a sign of mass deception

(Enstad 6).76

The final scene of Stage Door recalls the ending of Waiting for Lefty with a significant twist. When David Kingsley brings Gretzl to the Footlights Club so that Terry can audition for him, the lines given to her to read echo the words both of Edna, Joe’s wife, and those of Agate in the last lines of Waiting for Lefty. In one of the play’s vignettes Edna tells her husband to stand up to the union and encourage the men to strike.

As imagined by Ferber and Kaufman, Edna is not at home with her husband but in the strike hall with the men, and instead of Agate it is Edna/Terry who is arousing them to strike:

“It means hungry, and maybe cold, and scared every minute somebody’ll come

home with a busted head. But which would you rather do? Die quick fighting, or

starve to death slow? That’s why I’m telling you—strike! Strike! Strike!” (682;

Act 3 Sc 2)

Keith may be the Odets stand-in, but Terry is the one calling “Strike!” at the end of the play, replacing Odets’s version of the worker with Ferber and Kaufman’s own.

But Terry effectively performs the role of union organizer earlier in the play, as recalled in her account of her exasperated explosion in the producer Berger’s office:

TERRY: This was my second week. I was just going to send out for a toothbrush

and a camp chair when suddenly he opened the door. He was going. I said,

“Mr. Berger!” That’s practically all I’ve said for two weeks–Mr. Berger.

76 I paraphrase for my own uses a statement Enstad makes in Ladies of Leisure, Girls of Adventure.

(She gives an assortment of readings of “Mr. Berger,” ranging from

piteous pleading to imperious command.)

LITTLE MARY: What did he do?

SUSAN: What happened?

TERRY: He never stopped. Suddenly I was furious. I grabbed his arm and said,

“Listen! You’re a producer and I’m an actress. What right have you got to

barricade yourself behind closed doors and not see me! And hundreds like

me! The greatest actress in the world might be coming up your stairs and

you’d never know it!” (605; Act 1 Sc 1)

In response to Terry’s challenge, Berger had asked her, “Are you the greatest actress in the world?…You don’t look like anything to me. You’re not even pretty…” To which

Terry countered, “Pretty! I suppose Rachel was pretty. And what about Nazimova! She’s no higher than this (indicates a level).77 But on stage she’s any height she wants to be.”

Agitating for her fellow actresses, for their talent rather than their looks (which can actually make then grow taller), Terry stands up to those in power for herself and for them. With her language of rights and barricades, one almost expects her to have yelled

“liberté, égalité, fraternité!” But her response to Berger shares that slogan’s revolutionary ethos in its insistence on her right to perform in her chosen field of work, to be treated equally as a human being, and, accounting for the gender switch, the sisterhood of those joined in a common fight for recognition.

77 Rachel is the stage name of a nineteenth-century French actress. Nazimova refers to the Russian-born actress famous for performances in plays by Chekhov and Ibsen. (Note 605.13 and 605.14, Kaufman &Co. 904). Nazimova also acted in Hollywood. Dorothy Arzner was responsible for continuity between production and script on one of her films and according to George Cukor, was one of Nazimova’s lovers (Mayne 22-23).

The year after Stage Door’s premiere the “pieceworkers” so derided by the play actually became its idealized workers in a musical revue produced by the ILGWU. Pins and Needles premiered at the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union Labor

Theatre on West 39th Street on November 27, 1937, before moving to the 970-seat

Windsor Theater on Broadway. With a cast made up entirely of ILGWU members, among them dressmakers, pressers, cutters, and cloak makers (some of whom were in fact men), the revue’s performance schedule was determined by their primary occupations. Pins and Needles eventually ran for close to three years and 1,108 performances, becoming the longest-running musical in Broadway history (Denning

295). A then-unknown Harold Rome, who honed his songwriting skills writing for weekly shows put on for guests at adult summer camps in the Catskills, was responsible for the music and lyrics. The satirical songs and vignettes of Pins and Needles, which make fun in equal measure of socialists, unions, liberals, and fascists, was not an easy sell to union leaders who felt “the moment was too serious for frivolity…What’s funny about a strike, class struggle, appeasement of Fascists or the exploitation of workers?78 But by

1937, union membership had “doubled several times over.” With unions a new experience for so many members, the cultural arm of the ILGWU wanted to educate its new membership into the ways of the union while also enriching their “spiritual life” after the material gains of the strikes (Denning 295)—now that they had “bread,” it was time for “roses.” The revue’s songs employ romantic tropes filtered through labour themes like “One Big Union for Two” and “It’s Better with a Union Man,” emphasizing the need for substance in relationships as well as art with lines such as, “It must get hot

78 From the liner notes by Charles Burr to the twenty-fifth anniversary recording of songs from the show, featuring a young Barbra Streisand.

67 with what is what or I won’t love you.” Rome’s satirical songs speak to Stage Door’s critique of Keith’s play in the way they alleviate the seriousness of their topics with catchy tunes and humorous asides. “Sing Me a Song with Social Significance” directs its audience to “Dress your observation in syncopation!” Adding substance to songs, putting issues to rhythm, the revue takes the liveness of the stage, its aliveness, to promote the vitality of the union and life as part of it. If the striking actors of the Actors’ Equity

Association took performance to the streets to dramatize their plight, the workers in Pins and Needles now took to theatre with song and dance to express their life as workers, affirming in their success the reasoning behind Terry’s question, “If nobody comes to see it, who gets the message?”

Despite good notices in the Berger play, Terry comes in one night “a drooping figure” to tell Judith and Kaye that the play in which she was so excited to be cast is closing after four performances. No warning, she tells them, just a note on the “call board” letting the performers know it was done:

Just like that. We stood there for a minute and read it. Then we sort of got

together in the dressing rooms and talked about it in whispers, the way you do at a

funeral. And then we all put on our makeup and gave the best damned

performance we’d ever given…I wouldn’t have minded if Berger, or the author,

or the director or anybody [came around]. They can all run away at a time like

that but the actors have to stay and face it. (623; Act 1 Sc 2)

Like Odets’s cab drivers Ferber and Kaufman’s actresses are on the front lines agitating for their rights to a living wage and for their dignity against unscrupulous producers who,

68 like owners and union heads, get “fat” off their labour.79 And like Pins and Needles, the medium for the playwrights’ message also happens to be an entertaining one.

Marriage Is Like a Hit

The actresses’ ability to come and go as they please is a function of their having left home, along with the expectations of marriage and motherhood, for the liberation of work in New York City. Working and earning money allows them to delay marriage and its attendant restrictions on their movements, the quality of which we understand from a letter from former housemate Louise, who quits the Footlights Club in the first scene of the play to get married and settle in Appleton, Wisconsin (Ferber’s hometown). In the letter Louise provides details of her daily life that deviate drastically from life at the

Footlights Club—a series of obligations that keep Louise tethered to her home:

‘First there was the house to furnish…And then of course everybody was giving

parties for me, and after that I had to return the obligations by giving parties for

them. We are all even now. I gave the last one just yesterday— eighteen girls of

the young married set, three tables of bridge and one of mahjong, and two people

just talked. The luncheon was lovely, if I do say so. Everything in pink.’

Responses from those assembled express horror and disbelief at what Louise’s life has become.

Olga: You’re making it up.

Judith: (Very low) Wow.

Terry: Well, I’ll never complain again. That makes my eighteen a week on

79 Fatt is the name of the union leader in Waiting for Lefty who tells the workers gathered that the strike is not a good idea.

the radio look pretty wonderful.

Bobby: We’ve just been livin’ in a bed of roses. (633-4; Act 2 Sc 1)

Living in the city, in the company of other women, choosing how to go about their day, gives the residents of the Footlights Club access to vital subjectivities that the play views as impossible within the middle-class institution of marriage and the restrictions on movement encoded within its roster of duties and obligations. As Kendall opines, “It’s queer about being a hit. You go through everything to get into one and after a few months you’re bored with it. It’s like marriage” (616; Act 1 Sc 1). Initially euphoric, marriage, like a hit, soon loses its appeal when you are stuck playing the same role over and over.

This is what Louise discovers and why she leaves her marriage and returns to the

Footlights Club, having tried and rejected what Mama Rose in the musical Gypsy (1959) will later confirm: the possibility of ongoing movement, of controlling one’s life and identity, is better than death and “rot” of marriage. When, at the start of the play, her father refuses to give her money to take her daughters, June and Louise, on the road

(Louise will eventually become the titular Gypsy Rose Lee), Rose launches into the song

“Some People,” by declaring, “Anybody that stays home is dead! If I die, it won’t be from sittin’! It’ll be from fightin’ to get up and get out!” The song’s last stanza sums up

Rose’s ethos and in effect Stage Door’s: “Some people sit on their butts/Got the dream, yeah but not the guts/That’s living for some people/For some hum-drum people I suppose/Well, they can stay and rot but not Rose! (Gypsy 11; Act 1 Sc 2).

When Louise does reappear in Act Three, happier than she has been “in years,” the reasons for her renewed vitality are meant to be self-explanatory (663; Act 3 Sc 1).

Domesticity relegates Louise to a life of duty and obligation that interferes with the

70 unrestrained mobility (and the fulfillment fuelled by the work it allows), so prized by the play—and by Ferber and Kaufman’s other play about the theatre, The Royal Family. In the latter play, Julie Cavendish’s daughter, Gwen, a theatrical ingénue, decides that she is going to get married and leave the stage. Julie and her mother, Fanny, actresses as well, do not understand why she would. As Fanny says, “marriage isn’t a career—it’s an incident” (60; Act 2). At least, she advises, try to do both. But by the end of the play, it is clear that doing both is impossible. Throughout the play Gus Marshall, who twenty years earlier had wanted Julie to leave the stage so that they could be married, is courting her again. Although she refused him before Julie wavers now, but in the end his description of life in what is to be their home in South America, similar in tone and effect as Louise’s letter, makes Julie’s refusal inevitable. Julie knows the truth of what she had earlier said to Gwen, “[I]f I could only make you realize that the thrill you get out of doing your work is bigger than any other single thing in the world” (61; Act 2), and that marriage to

Gus would mean giving up everything. In Julie, and in the responses to Louise’s letters, one hears the never-married Ferber, having looked upon marriage as a “far from a desirable state”: “I must confess that I know no woman with whom I should want to change places” (PT 234). Like Julie, if she married Ferber would have had to give up too much of her life, a life in which she worked unceasingly and travelled extensively. For

Louise, Julie, and Ferber the freedom to move as they please, to do work they enjoy, and the fulfillment engendered by both is impossible within the bounds of marriage.

The Footlights Club offers its young women an escape from conventional middle class lives, from small towns and overbearing mothers, and into the warmth of an urban, welcoming community of like-minded women who care for each other, help pay each

71 other’s rent when they are short, lend each other clothes, and even share their men:

“Look, you don’t want to go out tonight, do you?” Madeline says to Judith, “I’ve got an extra man” (595; Act 1 Sc 1). More than a successful career, which the aspiring actresses may never have, what their work in the theatre builds is a life. Feeding each other lines, boosting the morale of those who fail to get a part, cheering for those who do, or commiserating with compassionate wit, they perform “affective” labour complementary to the work of auditioning and rehearsing, labour that, according to Michael Hardt produces “collective subjectivities, sociality, and society” (98). Like their freely moving bodies, their affective labour provides the women at the Footlights Club a measure of control over their lives and identities while fostering a sense of belonging in a female community where they can share their hardships, pleasures, clothes, and men in equal measure.80

The constant coming and going characterizing life at the Footlights Club is a source of criticism for Keith, who compares the actresses’ home unfavourably to Grand

Central Station. Despite his progressive politics Keith exposes his social conservatism in a comparison that faults the Footlights Club for transgressing idealized notions of home as a private space for immediate family, cordoned off from the marketplace and from its neighbours. Referring to the Footlights Club as Grand Central Station, Keith means to fault it for operating like a public space. But it is precisely its blending of private and public that makes the Footlights Club vital to the women who live in it.

If Keith is unable to see the actresses’ home as a vital space of movement, community, and conviviality, the playwrights make sure the audience does. The stage

80 Hardt admits that affective labour is embedded in capitalist accumulation and patriarchal order, but he still sees “the production of affects and subjectivities, and forms of life, [as presenting] an enormous potential for autonomous circuits of valorization, and perhaps for liberation” (100).

72 directions for Act Three Scene One, which takes place a year after the ending of the previous act, sketch out a Sunday morning at the Club:

The girls are scattered about the room in various informal attitudes and various

stages of attire. Pajamas, lounging robes, hairnets, cold cream, wave combs.

Four or five Sunday papers, open and distributed among the girls, are in drifts

everywhere; girls are lying on the floor reading bits of this and that; lounging in

chairs; coffee cups, bits of toast, a banana or an orange show that Sunday-

morning breakfast is a late and movable feast.

The looseness of their bodies, lying, lunging, lounging, and crawling, the messiness of their “movable” feast, all express “the girls’” ease and comfort with each other, and the vitality of this unconventional “family” in their coexistence. The stage directions also inform us, “during the year two girls have joined the club, and now are sprawled at ease with the others.” Physically and figuratively, newcomers are easily absorbed into the broader mix. The vitality infusing the actresses’ home indexes the vitality of a city and country that absorbs all newcomers, despite their differences, into its national family.

That national family is encoded, like their movements, in stage directions that mark the actresses by origin and verbal inflections. Bobby is a soft, Southern belle, fluffy, feminine who greets her beau with, “Ah hope Ah didn’t keep you waiting,” when she usually has. Kendall, one of the Boston Adamses, speaks in the plummy tones associated with a Brahmin: “Isn’t it splendid, Terry, about you’re getting a job!” Terry, the daughter of a Midwest country doctor, sounds as healthy as the heartland: “Greens! I’m a regular

Popeye.” Hard, wise, debunked Judith speaks with the grittiness associated with an urban milieu: “Well, Mitchell, you’re finally getting the hell out of here. Huh?” The women

73 have come from across the country to pursue their dream of stardom in the promised land of New York City. The Footlights Club is their Ellis Island, the picture of Sarah

Bernhardt next to the door their statue of liberty welcoming them to the land of the free— free from the restrictions of home, parents, and husbands.81 All are equal here, no matter where they are from or who arrived first:

Terry: Kendall, you’re going social for the day, h’m?

Kendall: Yes, I’m going out to Piping Rock.

Terry: Piping Rock—isn’t that where your ancestors landed?

Kendall: Thereabouts.

Judith: Mine landed in Little Rock. (665; Act 3 Sc 1)

Substituting Piping Rock for Plymouth Rock, Judith erases the hierarchy imposed by the foundational narrative. Everyone is an “immigrant” in this house—and this country.

Their accents may be markers of class and cultural differences, but they live together as equals by virtue of the dreams and work they share.

The open and welcoming community of the Footlights Club makes it worth remembering that New York in 1936 is home not only to Broadway but also to millions of Southern and Eastern European immigrants who arrived in the previous decades (and who largely formed the workforce in the garment industry). The equation of European with “white” had originally opened the door to immigration from Southern and Eastern

Europe in the late nineteenth century, but by the second decade of the twentieth, the

“threat” posed by their growing numbers was “cast in terms of racial difference and

81 In her book-length study of twelve novels by Ferber, Edna Ferber’s America, Eliza MacGraw positions her Jewishness similarly, placing it at the centre of her vision of America as a multi-ethnic country whose vitality depends on ethnic and social mobility.

74 assimilability.” Race “became the prevailing idiom for discussing citizenship and the relative merits of a given people” (Jacobson 8).82 Anxiety over these foreigners ignited a campaign of nativist racism that eventually led to the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, limiting immigrants from any country to two percent of the number of people from that country already living in the United States in 1890; that is, to Northern Europeans. Ferber and

Kaufman’s identification of the vitality of subjects and spaces generated by ongoing movement may be seen as expressions of anxiety on the part of playwrights who are themselves first-generation children of Jewish immigrants.83 But in the terms of my project, the community of equals at the Footlights Club expresses the prioritizing of sisterhood in works that seek not to pit women against each other but to portray their commonalities as modern women searching for life experiences beyond the roles of wife and mother.

The Unruliness of Movement

When Stage Door opened on Broadway at the Music Box Theatre on October 22, 1936,

New York Times’ film critic Brooks Atkinson gave top marks to Kaufman’s deft staging and to the play’s “flying a little bunting in honor of the legitimate theatre as a place where acting can be learned and social-minded drama can be practiced with independence.”84 But Atkinson had difficulty at times with its comic tone, a “sardonic

82 As Andrea Most argues in Theatrical Liberalism (2013), theatricality, in response to the racializing of citizenship, became a method for Eastern European Jews to demonstrate their successful assimilation and inclusion in (white) America. 83 Ferber and Kaufman are at this time deeply distressed by the plight of Jews in Europe. Ferber writes in A Kind of Magic that she was driven to write A Peculiar Treasure (published in 1939) because of her “helpless fury and seething indignation” (44), at the world standing by as Germany began to systematically eradicate what would eventually amount to six million Jews. Ferber’s archive contains heartbreaking letters from people hoping that because of her fame she would be able to help them. She did succeed in getting some distant family members over to the U.S., as did Kaufman. Visiting Buchenwald soon after it was liberated, Ferber described it as bringing on a depression “so acute that it was like a physical illness.” She didn’t write for close to a year afterward (A Kind of Magic 220, 233). 84 The New York Times, November 1936, p. X1.

75 spirit” he felt was “hostile to solemn ideas”: “To me Stage Door would be funnier if the whole subject of acting were less painful.” Atkinson sees the play’s dramatization of the lives of the actresses as an argument for the theatre taking better care of its own: those minor players who work so hard without ever getting a break. But Atkinson misses the point about the humour in the play—not the least of which is that comedy can make a serious point, that it is not “hostile to solemn ideas.” Producers’ disinterest in the actresses is maddening, and closing a show without warning is shameful and cruel, but the humour of the women is what sustains them. To Ferber,

“[a] sense of humor is a glorious gift which has nothing to do with jokes…it is

the rare quality which makes life bearable when it has reached the unbearable

stage. It can make a tragic situation tolerable; it can bring understanding and even

forgiveness into the emotions of one who is deeply hurt or resentful. It can make

an affront seem ridiculous; a dull day luminous; a rebuff comic; hardship

fascinating. It is salt, it is water, it is oxygen…” (PT 290)

A sense of humour breeds generosity of spirit, empathy, and wonder. It keeps people from getting stuck in one place or one state of mind. In other words it keeps people moving, open, and resilient.

And so the humour that fortifies vitality becomes in the comedy Stage Door the vehicle for its presentation. Commitment and perseverance like that of the “two Mary’s” who come in “dead” from visiting “every manager’s office on Broadway” is an absolute necessity, but their ability to weather their precarious existence is greatly enhanced by their capacity to process it through humour (594; Act 1 Sc 1). The actresses’ self- deprecating wit, used to make light of unfortunate situations, expresses the corporeal

76 flexibility and adaptability fundamental to the play’s notion of vitality. While their movements connect to work, what often keeps the actresses moving amid the closed shows and failed auditions is their capacity to approach people and events with humour.

To consider Stage Door in terms of comedy and gender enhances our understanding of the way both women and play transgress established norms. Genre conventions, as Kristine Karnick and Henry Jenkins explain in their introduction to

Classical Hollywood Comedy (1995), are helpful in that they provide a framework of

“shared assumptions that make works “understandable,” while also “defining the space for potential innovation and invention” (11). Ferber and Kaufman enlist the genre of the backstage play to open the borders of “high” comedy, with its word play and sexual innuendo, to a group of women from a variety of classes and from around the country and make their relationship to the theatre and to each other, rather than their relationship to men, their primary subjects. American high comedies, as defined by Steve Vineberg, take place in an upper-class milieu to “investigate ways in which American identity, historically in tension with the distinctly undemocratic substance of the high comic universe, interacts with that universe to produce a series of variations on the genre”

(Vineberg 2).85 In Stage Door Ferber and Kaufman substitute those stately drawing rooms for the “main room” of a boarding house. Transgressing in both their portrayal of the women and their disruption of high comedy genre and setting, Ferber and Kaufman re-vitalize the anonymous women of backstage film musicals who serve merely as

85 In his influential Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981), Stanley Cavell codifies American film comedy, specifically the genre known as screwball comedy, by tracing its lineage to Shakespeare, skipping over American theatrical comedy entirely. Vineberg also makes a claim for American comedic drama inheriting an English theatrical tradition, but from Sheridan and Congreve rather than Shakespeare.

77 physical components in spectacular formations, by giving them back control over their bodies and their voices.

In the most esteemed of American “high” comedies, the screwball comedies of the 1930s and early 1940s, verbal play is usually confined to the central heterosexual couple as a stand-in for the sexual variety.86 But in Stage Door it is the women who make the jokes, quips, and asides for their own and each other’s pleasure, not for men. When

Terry comes home with the exciting news that she has been given a role in a “Berger” play, the other women gather round to hear her recount the details. When she tells them that she got the part after she stood outside his office for a week they are incredulous, especially Judith, who exclaims “I laid there for a whole afternoon once with ‘Welcome!’ on me.” Understanding exactly what she means, Terry retorts, “I’ve had a longer run outside his office than I’ve had with most shows” (604–605; Act 1 Sc1). Humour is one way the residents of the Footlights Club keep themselves moving forward but it is also the way the women connect to each other, communicating compatibility through repartee.

One of the funnier performances on the main room stage of the Footlights Club comes courtesy of Bernice when David Kingsley, the former theatrical producer now

Hollywood scout, waits to take future film star Jean out to dinner. Everyone knows of his arrival, and many of the girls have gone upstairs so that they can make a “proper entrance.” Bernice stands with her body just outside the dining room, her face angled in, appearing to be talking to the maid, Mattie. The stage directions read, “apparently all unaware that anyone (certainly not Kingsley) is in the living room,” but her subsequent

86 The Hays Code, or the Motion Picture Production Code, was a set of directives designed to prove to the government that the studios did not condone immoral behaviour, which included the presentation of sex and criminality without consequence. Romantic comedies of the period following its enforcement in 1934 used repartee between a heterosexual couple as a replacement for sex.

78 performance shows the playwrights’ tongues to be firmly planted in their cheeks:

If you could only see the different types that I do in the course of a day, Mattie.

For example, an English actress came into the office today. (Goes suddenly very

English.) “My dear, Harry, how definitely—ripping to see you. Definitely

ripping!” And then, Mattie, a little girl from Brooklyn came in. “Listen, I did

write for an appurntment! You got a noive!” (613; Act 1 Sc 1)

After which Bernice turns, “sees” Kingsley, and says, “Oh I am so sorry! I didn’t dream anyone was here.” Although her performance and its intent is obvious to the audience, who know that the girls have been thrilling all afternoon at the thought of his visit and the prospect that they too might have a chance for a “beautiful cheque every week,” and to

Kingsley, who the stage directions tell us is “politely amused,” we still laugh at Bernice’s irrepressible theatricality. The humour of the scene is compounded as Pat comes in and makes a “slow turn” to show her camisole-wearing torso to better effect, followed by the landlady, Mrs. Orcutt, a former actress, presuming intimacy with Kingsley, and insisting he must remember her from his early days as a young producer. Henri Bergson’s account of laughter as social correction, as critical of those whose rigidity aligns them with machines rather than the human community, does not take into account key features of the humour showcased in Stage Door. Bernice’s performance is funny because its intent is so obvious and she does not care. She believes in her performance, possessing both the desire and will to use her theatricality however she can. She is not demure but brazen. We laugh at her, at Pat, and a well-past-her-prime Mrs. Orcutt for taking advantage of any opportunity that comes their way with whatever skills they have available to them. Our laughter is more affectionate than hostile, borne of admiration rather than malice.

We also laugh due to the skillful way the playwrights shift back and forth between backstage and front stage situations. We know that “the girls” are hungry for jobs, and that it is impossible to get a producer to see them. When a connected man like Kingsley shows up on their doorstep—their stage door—it is too good an opportunity for Bernice and the others to pass up. Their performances for Kingsley push them out onto the front stage (as the play does) while the audience stays backstage, delighted to be in on the playwright’s joke. Of course, as a former theatre man, Kingsley gets it too.

The playwrights use this technique again to slightly different effect when Terry’s father, Dr. Randall, in New York on a visit, stands in the main room waiting for his daughter. Like the performances for Kingsley’s benefit, the stage is again the main room of the Footlights Club, but while the actresses previously sought the attention of Kingsley feigning nonchalance, here they overtly practice their performances ignoring or barely registering Dr. Randall’s presence.

Olga about to launch herself on the finale of the selection she has been playing. It

entails terrific chords, dissonances and actual physical effort. The length of the

keyboard seems barely adequate. Dr. Randall stands arrested by this. Three times

the music pauses as if finished, each time Randall steps forward to speak and

Olga starts again. He gives a little nod of approval as Olga finishes, rises, and

gathers up her music and her coat. Olga acknowledges this with a little

inclination of her head and goes. The front door slams on her going. Immediately

the dining room doors open and out come the two Marys.

Big Mary: “I tell you there is something mysterious going on in this house.

Little Mary: “We must call the police.”

Big Mary: (with no particular expression) “Last night I heard moans and shrieks,

and this morning a dead man was found on the doorstep, his head

completely severed.

Little Mary: “What about the blood in the library?” (They disappear up the stairs)

(642; Act 2 Sc 1)

Olga’s elaborate flourishes on the piano, completed with a slammed door and no word of goodbye, followed by the itinerant performance in medias res of Big and Little Mary, rehearsing lines that might easily be interpreted as pertaining to a murder at the Footlights

Club, all leave Terry’s father quite befuddled. Dr. Randall has wandered into a front stage situation that he does not understand, while we in the audience are still backstage with the actresses. We understand their behaviour because Olga has grumbled before about having to play the Winter Garden Theater when she is a classically trained pianist. We know the lines spoken by the two Marys are from a play and not in reference to a possible murder at the boarding house because we watched them rehearsing these lines in a previous scene. As we did with Bernice, we laugh again with appreciation not with scorn.

In her breakdown of the aesthetic category of “zany,” Sianne Ngai explains that while Lucy Ricardo of the “I love Lucy” television show fails repeatedly at numerous activities, her failures serve to fortify the virtuosity of the actress Lucille Ball as a performer. Ngai sees a desperate quality in zaniness—not just an aesthetic about play and work, zany is also about precariousness. At first glance the performances of Bernice, Pat,

Mrs. Orcutt, Olga, and the Two Marys could be said to give the play a zany quality, especially given the importance of work, play, and movement to my analysis, and the precariousness of the lives of the actresses, which during a Depression makes the failure

81 to land a part, or its loss when a show is closed, that much more desperate.87 However, what makes the character Lucy funny in Ngai’s account is the inflexibility of her body, its inability to move as she wants it to, be that her legs at the ballet bar or the inability of her fingers’ to keep pace with the chocolates passing by her on the conveyor belt. In her rigidity Lucy Ricardo conforms to Bergson’s description of that which makes us laugh as

“something mechanical encrusted on the human” (Laughter 35). But the bodies of the women in Stage Door do not fail them (that is more the province of male producers who refuse to hire or even see them). Their bodies actually demonstrate their capacity for improvisation. Bernice switches voices and accents sentence by sentence to reflect a new character as she pretends to talk to Mattie on the other side of a door. Olga and the two

Mary’s ignore Dr. Randall because they are immersed in their line readings, their disregard an expression of their commitment rather than a failure to pay him attention.

Executed with force and directionality, their movements are not manic; they are demonstrations of will, not its refutation. Although they might not all be great actresses, they still move from a place of ambition, dedication, and desire in ways that both express and generate feelings of vitality. Their movements are not “zany” but “unruly.” They are

“unruly women,” those comedic heroines who transgress norms of idealized femininity with their wit, their volubility, and their bodies. Roleplaying, slow turning, glad handing, or door-slamming their combined unruliness only increases the sensation of their vitality.

Defined against the “seriousness” of tragedy, comedy is often not taken

“seriously.” The play’s portrayal of the “serious” work of its actresses asks us to take their transgressive movement seriously, to see their movement as vital in counterpoint to

87 Sianne Ngai’s category of “zany,” which along with “interesting” and “cute,” comprise what she terms, “our aesthetic categories” encompass “capitalism’s most socially binding processes”: those of production in the case of zany; consumption in the case of cute; and circulation, in the case of interesting (“Our Aesthetic Categories” 948-9).

82 the lives of middle- and upper-class women of the period who, staying true to the normative roles of wife and mother, remained in one place.

While incessant and improvisational movement indexes their flexibility and responsiveness, what the women are doing as they move is vitally important (pun intended). The two Marys’ itinerant rehearsal, from dining room to main room and up the stairs, as well as the residents’ coming and going to auditions and matinées, to day jobs and producers’ offices, are movements they perform for and as work. While female social and economic mobility make the city a threatening place in turn-of-the-century fiction,

Stage Door portrays the city as vital as the women who move and work within it. When

Terry asks her father where he is staying when he is in town, he replies, “the New Yorker hotel, for go-getters.” Their demonstrated vitality is the play’s argument for why these women would want to work rather than stay at home.

With the freedom to take on more than one role, or to alternate between them, the actresses achieve a level of autonomy unavailable to them within the industrialized milieu of film acting and the middle-class realm of domesticity. Their constant movement around and in and out of their house is significant as movement performed by women in a domestic space unrelated to the roles of wife, daughter, or mother. Placing female desire, for a career and for pleasure, front and centre, Stage Door casts the notion of sublimated desires required by the “bonds of maternal reality” to the wings—or more, specifically, to

Louise’s letter about married life in Wisconsin.

The play’s representation of acting in theatre as self-directed work establishes the vitality of female movement born of will and desire in opposition to the prescribed movements of industrial and domestic labour. Subsequent chapters will flesh out these

83 vital movements by positioning them in relation to restrictive norms of feminine embodiment found in both the creative realm and society as a whole. Stage Door’s conflation of work and gender continues to underwrite explorations of the ways women perform their selves as they perform their work, while extending the play’s emphasis on movement for and as work to work performed on oneself, that is, to self-actualization.

The community and conviviality of the women who lounge together on a Sunday morning, who gather round to listen and act as cheerleaders, comforters, and commiserators manifests in other chapters in women who recognize in each other a sisterhood of shared experience.

Stage Door’s heroines migrate into non-comedic works that continue to present women whose self-directed movements resist the expectations of others. The

“unruliness” of these movements serves the genre pushing represented by each work. As

Stage Door flouts the conventions of the backstage play and high comedy so Arzner uses her transgressive women to push against the confinements of the “woman’s picture,” and

Gale the domestic novel. In its emphasis on her own restless movements, Luhan’s autobiography resists ideas about what constitutes a life in published form—not a record of public acts but a sprawling narrative of private growth.

Chapter 2 That Vital Oomph: Gesture and Embodiment in Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance

As members of former Imperial Russian ballerina Madame Basilova’s struggling dance troupe Bubbles (Lucille Ball) and Judy (Margaret O’Hara) are by definition “movers.”

But for most of Dorothy Arzner’s 1940 film Dance, Girl, Dance it is Bubbles, the ostensibly inferior dancer, and presumably the less valued mover, who appears the more vital—her effervescent name only compounding that impression. Bubbles may not have

Judy’s technical skill, but what she has is “oomph.” And while derided by traditionalist

Madame Basilova, Bubbles’s “oomph” is exactly what Judy needs, as a woman and as an artist.

The film’s central trope of dancing women encourages the parsing of Judy’s and

Bubbles’s movements into gestures and embodiments, thereby expanding the movement vocabulary established in chapter one beyond expressions primarily of action and displacement. The actresses in Stage Door demonstrated their vitality through transgressive movements that led them away from home into professional careers outside the confines of marriage and motherhood. The dancers in Dance, Girl, Dance articulate a broader range of conditions encompassed by their movement including self-actualization, social and economic mobility, and modern American womanhood. If the actresses in chapter one performed their vitality in their transgressive movements as women workers, the dancers in chapter two perform the centrality of transgressive movement to the realization of a vital self.

84 85

When Bubbles is given the chance to headline her own show at the Bailey

Brothers’ burlesque theatre she solicits the ballet-inspired Judy to join her act, neglecting to tell her that she is to be Bubbles’s “stooge.” Holding out the job as an opportunity to earn twenty-five dollars per week, Bubbles “holds back” the true nature of her offer—that

Judy’s formal jetés are meant to provide comedic rather than “tony” counterpoint to her singing and strutting. Although Judy despairs when she realizes her intended function, she persists with her role and the act becomes a sensation, profiled in the entertainment press and popular magazines. While the film denounces the treatment of women by the men who book the dancers and sit in the audience of the burlesque theatre, it does not censure burlesque itself. Rather, burlesque performance is legitimized in the film as a form of work women do to support themselves, worthy as a means to an end or an end in itself. Although not a formal dancer, Bubbles carves an autonomous space of freedom, on stage and in the world, out of a public sphere largely defined by male desire and inclination. Knowing how to move to satisfy that desire allows Bubbles to achieve a degree of agency, both social and economic. Judy may have “ambition,” but as Bubbles tells her, she has “brains.” Despite its artistic distance from the ballet of Judy’s desires, burlesque is also where Judy comes into and learns to hold her own, eventually defying her audience of hecklers and confronting them for their bad behaviour from its stage.

More than a place she works, the burlesque stage is the place Judy works on her technique, and in the end, herself. The discipline of dancing every night prepares her for her eventual “audition” for American Ballet Company director Steve Adams, who recognizes her unformed talent from his seat in the burlesque audience and offers her the chance to be part of his company. Bubbles may be more than just her body (as the one

86 with “brains”), but Judy must “find” hers. To become a professional dancer, and a modern woman, she must inhabit her body with greater ease and confidence, and liberate herself from the intertwined restrictions on movement and the public display of the female body required of ballet and normative femininity.

The relationship between ballet and burlesque, and ballet and modern dance, and the way each form frames the female body, deepens the characterizations of Bubbles and

Judy and the realities of modern womanhood their characters embody. While Jimmy

Harris (Louis Heyward) seems from the first scene to be the central figure in a romantic plot involving the two women, he is more of a distraction, a love interest required by the convention of the “women’s picture,” rather than a real romantic possibility.88 From his first conversation with Judy, after the troupe’s performance in a nightclub in Ohio, it is clear that Jimmy is in love with someone else. When he suddenly registers the colour of

Judy’s eyes he blurts out “I don’t like blue eyes!” before rushing off without explanation.

Although Jimmy ends up leaving with Bubbles that night, we find out that he eventually abandoned her as well after seeing a stuffed bull on the floor of another club. Subsequent scenes reveal that the person who haunts Jimmy is the wife he is meant to be divorcing, and that despite her own protestations, she feels similarly about him, making it highly unlikely that Jimmy will give her up for either Bubbles or Judy. More schematic device than character, how both women relate to Jimmy and what he sets in motion are more important than Jimmy himself. Never really theirs to have, it is the relationship between the two women that is of greater interest to the film, not their respective relationships to

Jimmy.

88 Jimmy Harris is pictured in the bottom left of the poster for the film dancing with Judy. Bubbles appears with the other members of the dance troupe at the top of the poster. The studio’s marketing of the film persists in a description of the film on You Tube: “two women vie for the attention of a wealthy playboy.”

Bubbles may regard the wealthy Jimmy as an attractive meal ticket, but she does not ridicule Judy’s more innocent longing for love. In a telling scene at Madame

Basilova’s dance studio, Bubbles wonders aloud how the stuffed bull, Ferdinand, which

Jimmy had handed to her before leaving her at the club in Ohio, and which she had cast aside, had found its way back to New York. Turning her head first to look at Judy, then to the bull, then back again to rest on Judy’s face, Bubbles lets us know that she understands that Judy has held on to Ferdinand because of its tie to Jimmy, letting the moment pass without a word or wisecrack, which in most other instances flows readily. Towards the end of the film, after Bubbles tricks a drunken Jimmy into marriage, she and Judy get into a fight onstage during their act. But this fight actually releases them from their supposed rivalry. In the scene at the courthouse that follows, where Judy has been brought up on charges of causing a public disturbance, she tells the judge and the audience gathered that she understands Bubbles—as should we: “Lots of time I’ve been mad at Bubbles. But I shouldn’t have been. She’s just like a kid who can’t stand it if another kid has one marble even if she has twenty.” Bubbles, who had petulantly accused Judy of being jealous of her stardom, and of securing Jimmy, looks on wide-eyed and contrite. As Judy is led out to serve her ten days in jail, having refused Jimmy’s offer to pay the fine, a chastened

Bubbles runs to her, calling her name in a show of compassionate reconciliation.

Bubbles and Judy’s relationship is not dissimilar to the one between the intended couple of romantic comedy, in which one party must alter some aspect of him or herself to make the union possible. The differences between Bubbles and Judy are expressed in their movement styles: Bubbles strides across the burlesque stage, her arms and hands swaying as much as her hips, while Judy shifts haltingly on point, her limbs as rigid as

88 her torso. Judy’s journey over the course of the film is to learn to move more like

Bubbles; that is, with greater ease and freedom. As she does, Judy and Bubbles move together toward a more satisfying friendship and recognition of sisterhood that portrays the complex relations of female desire and everyday experience. Because the film is more interested in the connection between the women than their relationship to a third male party, the vitality of one woman can “vitalize” the other rather than cancel her out in the zero sum game of romantic comedy.

As initially performed on American stages, ballet posed a threat to the ideals of femininity it would later come to encompass. Appearing at the Bowery Theater in the

1820s, French ballet dancer Francisque Hutin caused a sensation for the same reasons burlesque would a few decades later: the public display of her female body. Hutin shocked her audience when she bounded across the stage, her tunic-like dress flying up to reveal loose trousers. Absent the “sentimental” costume of voluminous skirts that hid the

“secret half of the female body,” Hutin’s presentation was to many the equivalent of nudity. Ballet’s problem at this early stage, Robert Allen explains, was that despite the possibility of being “narrativized” into a story, the ballerina was always already herself— that is, a woman: “Her art was predicated on the display of self, not its effacement.” Her appeal lay not in impersonation, but “grace and agility,” and called attention to her body in a way that would be “unthinkable” in the period’s popular melodramas (Allen 89).

Romantic ballet gained broader cultural acceptance and eventually entered the realm of high art by containing the threatening spectacle of female sexuality exemplified by Hutin.

Placed within a supernatural world of fairies and nymphs, the ballerina’s body became

89 correspondingly small and slight, encouraging audiences to believe that they were indeed watching a fairy (Allen 91).

One of the defining features of modern dance as it emerged in the 1920s and

1930s was the insistence on the return of this lost female body, as expressive tool rather than sexual spectacle. Rejecting the idea of a woman on stage as only an object of male desire, modern dance in its early formation positioned the female dancer as subject and

“author” of her own movement,89 liberating her from the “highly mannered codes of motion” of ballet, to insist on effort, weight, and torque rather than defying gravity

(Schwartz 72). Grounding the romantic ballerina from her toes to her feet, and releasing her torso from its rigid posture freed both dancer and dance from European forms and content. Modern dance’s early choreographers, many of them women, sought to create a form of dance that would reflect American society. They fashioned female bodies as sites not of spectacle but of meaning making, responsive to social and political issues in ways that traditional European forms avoided in their ahistorical content and aesthetic emphasis on beauty. In its formative years modern dance was American dance.90

Modern dance’s opposition to the sexual spectacle of “theatrical dancing” makes it unsurprising that for many the 1930s represents the heyday of burlesque. But burlesque in the 1930s had veered far from the form Lydia Thompson and her “British Blondes” inaugurated on a New York stage in the 1860s. Operating within the European tradition of burlesque, Thompson and her troupe parodied esteemed plays and works of literature,

89 Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis, Linda Tomko writes, “proposed that women could stand alone, that they could author their own movement as well as perform it” (Dancing Class 33). 90 New York Times dance critic John Martin (the first full-time editor for dance at a newspaper, appointed in 1927) declared American dance to have “come of age” in January 1930 when four modern dance companies (Martha Graham, Doris Humphrey, Helen Tamiris, and Charles Weidman) performed on Broadway on alternating nights as part of the short-lived Dance Repertory Theatre (quoted in Foulkes 1). While Isadora Duncan pioneered the no-corset, barefoot dancer earlier in the twentieth century, her repertoire was drawn largely from the classical world.

90 as well as the behaviours of the upper classes, but with one significant exception: every role except one (played by Thompson’s husband) was played by a woman.91

Compounding this reversal, while dressed as men Thompson and her troupe made no attempt to hide their femininity, wearing their topcoats over loose-fitting pants like those worn by Hutin. What proved most transgressive, however, was the adoption of the swagger and “verbal insubordination” that to many was the province of men in burlesque.

As Robert Allen explains in his cultural history Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and

American Culture (1991), burlesque emerged in the nineteenth century when what it means to be a woman was being “asked in a wide range of forums and answered by many, different, conflicting voices.” Combining the spectacle of female sexuality with female “impertinence,” Thompson and her blondes challenged the “approved ways women might both display their bodies and speak in public” (Allen 27) thus posing a threat greater than the one originally presented by pre-romantic ballet: ballerinas do not speak.

But burlesque’s original challenge was muted once it became prey to the general

“incorporation of America.” The success of Thompson’s troupe had spawned countless imitators and by the late nineteenth century hundreds of burlesque theatres had opened across the country.92 Eventually their owners, aided by advancing railroad tracks, consolidated these theatres into burlesque circuits or “wheels.”93 With that consolidation came standardization and, by the end of the nineteenth century, Thompson’s original show-length parody was abandoned in favour of the three-part structure of popular

91 Burlesque derives from the Italian word “burla” meaning a joke or mockery. 92 Thompson’s six-month tour turned into a six-year run (Zemeckis 3). Between 1870 and 1940 burlesque troupes toured every part of the U.S. “from New York to Klondike mining camps” (Allen 29). 93 Vaudeville had its own parallel circuits in mid-size towns; burlesque circuits were largely in cities.

91 minstrel shows,94 with her impertinent women increasingly silenced as chorus girls. By the time the striptease was added in the 1920s (to provide burlesque with a competitive advantage over vaudeville) the comedic content that had crucially been performed by women in Thompson’s incarnation was largely relegated to men who came on between the dancing women. If a woman spoke in a comedic act it was only as the stock character known as the “talking woman.” As Leslie Zemeckis notes in her oral history of burlesque in America, Behind the Burly Q (2010), audiences may have “hollered and stamped,” but the stripper “wasn’t…expected to speak” (48).95

If romantic ballet contained female sexuality by dematerializing the ballerina’s body into that of a fairy, industrialized burlesque contained the “dangerous” combination of female sexuality and female insubordination by silencing its women.96 Increasingly equated with displays of female sexuality, burlesque in the twentieth century came to be associated almost exclusively with the working class, its absent middle- and upper-class audiences absorbed by vaudeville.97 Gypsy Rose Lee arguably gained fame (and attracted those absent middle and upper classes) by harnessing some of burlesque’s lost female impertinence, combining humour and intellect with her “tease.”98 Like Gypsy, Bubbles combines talk with her tease to reassert some of Thompson’s original transgressive

94 For more on burlesque’s incorporation of the minstrel show format, see Allen’s Horrible Prettiness and Jayna Brown’s Babylon Girls. 95 Because burlesque eventually became all about sex, once men could see nudity without having to go into public spaces (via porn magazines and porn theatres) burlesque died. Burlesque’s more recent revival is perhaps a function of sexual display now a mainstay of western culture and there being something attractive in holding back the display of nudity, if only temporarily. 96 Burlesque is often referenced as the training ground for many comedians who went on to fame in radio, TV, and film such as Abbott and Costello, Red Buttons, Jackie Gleason, Phil Silvers, and Bob Hope (Allen 258). There were some funny women, like Fanny Brice, who worked in burlesque but she is the rarity and her (ethnic) body muted the threatening combination of female sexuality and rhetorical impertinence (Allen 272). 97 While dancers on the stages of vaudeville shows like Ziegfeld’s Follies could be as scantily clad as those in burlesque, their “girl next door” looks neutralized their sexuality, allowing them to attract a broader audience than burlesque (Allen 246). 98As Rachel Schteir writes in Gypsy: the Art of the Tease, Gypsy was the only stripper whom intellectuals, bankers, socialites, and ordinary Americans adored” (2). Zemeckis writes of Gypsy that she “raised the art of the stripper into a symbol of sassy intellect” (47).

92 power. Far from a “talking woman” in a scene dominated by men, in Dance, Girl, Dance,

Bubbles sings, moves, and cracks wise alone on stage. Modern dance’s claim of artistic superiority over “theatrical” dancing, with its inscription of female sexual spectacle, makes it easy to overlook the power Bubbles exhibits in her movements, crucial to gauging her value to the film. When Judy stops dancing and confronts her heckling audience, she appropriates the transgressive power of Bubbles’s talk and tease, positioning her previous movements on the burlesque stage as crucial steps towards her eventual self-actualization.

Plotting A Female Gaze

The centrality of dance as setting, as job, as performance style, and especially as the means through which Judy expresses her defiance (by refusing to dance) make Dance,

Girl, Dance a particularly rich site for feminist analysis because of the interconnections and intersections between embodied movement, women’s liberation, and self- actualization in the physical cultures prominent in the period. As it emerged in the United

States (following Europe) in the late nineteenth century, the physical culture movement advocated health and fitness to liberate the body from the restrictive postures and behaviours of Victorian society, becoming central to the health and dress reform movements that were offshoots of the suffragette cause. But the movement remained popular well into the twentieth century with physical cultures such as Delsartism, the

Alexander Technique, calisthenics, and bodybuilding presenting bodily fashioning as self-fashioning, and physical mobility as social mobility.

The theories of French acting teacher Francois Delsarte (1811–1871) were particularly integral to the ethos of women’s self-fashioning through movement. As

93 adapted by Genevieve Stebbins and Henrietta Hovey, Delsarte’s theories were shaped into exercise systems that emphasized “the facility and quality of movement” rather than their originator’s “rigid equation of specific gestures with specific meanings” (Ruyter 71,

Schwartz 72). Performed regularly, these systems were meant to promote the use of the body as an expressive tool for personal development. Widely credited with the initial popularization of Delsartism in the late nineteenth century via her lecture tours, performances, and the founding of her “New York School of Expression,” Stebbins’s influence extended into the twentieth century through former students like Bess

Mensedieck who used Stebbins’s teachings to formulate her own “Mensedieck System of

Functional Exercises,” popularized in a series of books and instrumental to the formation of physical education programmes in the 1930s.99 Henrietta Hovey made her impact on the west coast after moving to Los Angeles from New York in 1909. Although her students were mostly women, there were some men among them, in particular Ted

Shawn, who would go on to found the Denishawn School in 1915 with dancer and choreographer Ruth St. Denis. As one of their students, modern dance pioneer Martha

Graham would have encountered both Delsartism and self-cultivation as part of the curriculum. The line from Delsartism through Denishawn to modern dance may also be drawn to the then new medium of film, whose “first generation of stars” came to

Denishawn to be trained in Delsartean techniques (Preston, Modernism’s Mythic Pose

60).100

99 Mensendieck also taught on the dance faculty at the New School of Social Research, a hugely important node in the development of modern dance (Veder 829). 100 According to Preston, “Studies of film overlook the impact of Denishawn, Delsartism, and the many theatrical sources for poses in the kinesthetic of early film” (87).

While students of Delsartism were largely middle and upper class, the link between women, movement, and empowerment extended beyond them into the wider population. Between 1890 and 1930 Bernarr MacFadden wrote books, published magazines, hosted a radio program, and produced films all showcasing the physical culture lifestyle. His magazine Physical Culture, which promoted women’s vitality and empowerment through greater control of their bodies, sexuality, health, and clothing

(Endres 2), boasted articles by labour organizer Ella Reeve Bloor, feminist Charlotte

Perkins Gilman, and birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger in its pages.101 Women in

Physical Culture were pictured performing exercises or playing sports (swimming, fencing, wrestling) to present an image of the strong and fit woman who is physically able to take care of herself (Endres 7). Physical Culture had a circulation of one hundred and fifty thousand in the 1920s, and maintained its readership well into the 1950s (Fabian

53-56), but Macfadden’s most successful magazine, with two million readers in the mid-

1920s (most of them women), was True Story. True Story featured working-class readers’ accounts of changes in diet and exercise that fused bodily and personal transformations.

In the pages of Macfadden’s most popular publication, bodies and movement were central to life narratives.

Components of the larger physical culture movement, modern and social dance were key cultural practices in the 1930s, mobilized in the construction of race, class, and national identities as well as gender (Franko 3). Settlement houses offered dance classes as a form of outreach to immigrant communities and as a way to free their bodies from

101 Macfadden is a contradictory figure. The magazine also promoted exercise to improve woman’s health to allow her to better perform her responsibilities as wife (as sexual partner and lover) and mother. While promoting feminism in his magazine, he also created the bathing beauty competition. He is also known to have flirted with the fascism of Mussolini.

95 the repetitive movements of factory jobs and the cramped living spaces of tenement apartments. Many young immigrant women on the Lower East Side learned to dance from the Levinsohn sisters, who ran the dance and drama classes at the Henry Street

Settlement (and eventually opened the Neighbourhood Playhouse in 1915). One of their students was Helen Tamiris, a child of Russian-Jewish immigrants who became one of modern dance’s early progenitors and who played an integral role in establishing a separate Federal Dance Project from the Federal Theatre Project under the Works

Progress Administration (Thomas, Dance, Modernity and Culture 121). Not only an aesthetic practice, dance was also a communal activity, with dance halls acting as crucial sites for the performance of modern subjectivities (Tomko 27). In 1910 there were 195 commercial dance halls in New York City holding anywhere from 500 to 1200 people.

By 1920 some halls were big enough to hold 3000 (Tomko 22). Dance styles of the period broke apart the joined couple of ballroom dancing to engender forms more urban and urbane, allowing both partners to explore their bodies as registers of their own cosmopolitan pleasure and identity (Tomko 25).

Biographical details from Arzner’s life underscore my focalizing her directorial eye on movement. Marian Morgan, Arzner’s partner of forty years, was a dancer and choreographer who worked on silent film sets and whose eponymous company performed interpretative dances on Vaudeville stages in the 1910s and 1920s.102 After her choreographic work in film phased out with the industry’s move to sound, Morgan became a physical education instructor at Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles, in

102 Other critics have cited this biographical information to explore the film’s interest in dance but dance is not considered as movement outside its more common apprehension in performance.

96 addition to running a dance school.103 The relationship of Morgan’s career to the broader physical culture movement, along with Arzner’s relationship to Morgan, invite us to consider dance as movement, and movement as dance. Even if Bubbles struts more than she “dances,” her moves are no less choreographed than aspiring dancer Judy’s, calculated as they are to please male audiences and get her what she wants—money.

Dance in the film reflects Hillel Schwartz’s account of movement in the modern period as both “expressive” and “operative”: it both “says” things and makes them happen (79).

Following in Bubbles’ footsteps, Judy attains the self-awareness and self-possession that

Bubbles exhibits from the start, learning that a little oomph goes a long way.

As the only female director in Hollywood during the 1930s and early 1940s Dorothy

Arzner was as much a part of the publicity for her films as her stars. Born in San

Francisco at the turn of the twentieth century and raised in Los Angeles, Arzner grew up surrounded by the actors, writers, directors, and producers who regularly dined at the

Hoffman Café managed by her father.104 Although she enrolled at the University of

Southern California with plans to study medicine, she abandoned them after a short stint working in a doctor’s office. After William de Mille invited her to visit Paramount

Studios in 1919 (then Famous Players-Lasky), Arzner decided that the modern business of moviemaking was perfect for a “modern girl” like her (Mayne 15). She started her career at the studio typing scripts, but by her own admission was not a very good typist, and very quickly moved on to editor, eventually editing fifty-two films, including action adventures, historical epics, and westerns. Arzner’s value to the studio and her own

103 With their emphasis on tableaux, the kind of dances Morgan choreographed were more compatible with the silent era (Mayne 42). 104 According to Judith Mayne her year of birth is listed alternately as 1897, 1898 and 1900, but Arzner decided to list 1900, “defining herself quite literally as a modern woman” (15).

97 mettle are evident in her successful leveraging of an offer from rival Columbia Pictures

(at the time the less prestigious studio) to write and direct her own films at Paramount.

When she first told Paramount chief Bud Schulberg she was leaving to take the Columbia offer, Schulberg encouraged her to wait for the right directorial opportunity to arise, but

Arzner threatened to quit if she was not helming a film in two weeks (Mayne 33).

Schulberg relented and Arzner’s first film, Fashions for Women, starring Clara Bow in her first talkie, was released in 1927. Arzner remained at Paramount until she refused to take a pay cut demanded of all personnel (Mayne 59). From that point until illness forced her to retire in 1943, Arzner worked as an independent director for hire rather than stay exclusive to one studio. Arzner and Morgan moved away from Los Angeles in the following decade, settling in La Quinta, California until their deaths, Morgan’s in 1971, and Arzner’s in 1979.105 Of the sixteen films Arzner directed, Dance, Girl, Dance is today the most well, if still not widely, known.

Despite her fame during the active years of her career, Arzner was largely forgotten after she left Hollywood until the 1970s, when feminist scholars across the academy set out to uncover work by forgotten or previously dismissed female artists.

Their attention resulted in Arzner being honoured at the first International Festival of

Women’s Films in New York and the subject of a special issue of the Directors Guild of

America magazine. Claire Johnston’s still-influential edited collection The Work of

Dorothy Arzner: Towards a Feminist Cinema (1975) was first to position Arzner’s contribution to film history in terms of her feminism and its challenge to patriarchal ideologies: “the woman [in Arzner’s films] determines her own identity through

105 Biographical details on Arzner are largely taken from Judith Mayne’s Directed by Dorothy Arzner who uses biographical details as a key feature in her criticism. Although she never discussed her lesbianism, hers and Morgan’s relationship was an open secret.

98 transgression and desire in the search for an independent existence beyond and outside the discourse of the male” (4).106 Although Arzner remains largely unknown outside the film circles in which she was initially recovered, she remains significant to feminist and queer film scholars for her ability to communicate resistance within the conventions of the studio system and for the complexities of her portrayals of women. In Directed by

Dorothy Arzner (1994) Judith Mayne explores the connections between Arzner’s art and life by examining how her career was shaped by the various meanings attached to being a

“woman director”: her lesbianism, her reputation for spotting female talent, and her direction of “women’s pictures” (80). Donna Casella sees Arzner defying the conventions of women’s pictures while critiquing the genre of the women’s picture itself.107 A critique that failed to register, Casella argues, because of studio and media constructions of her films as affirmations of women’s roles as wife and mother. Running throughout Arzner criticism, and most relevant to my project, is an appreciation for the equal time given in her films to the world of women as to that combined with men, and to her films’ presentation of female desires beyond love, courtship, and marriage.108

Feminist film critics have recently enlarged their referential sphere to consider

Arzner’s films within the context of modernity. Casella situates her analysis in relation to the persistent examination of gender norms that followed the “political, economic, and educational gains” of the suffragette movement. Sara Bryant positions hers within a modernist “sensorium.” Both do so to expand Arzner’s reach within the academic film community. I position Dance, Girl, Dance alongside other “vernacular modernisms” that

106 Other early engagements with Arzner’s film include Molly Haskell’s From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in Film (1974) and Annette Kuhn’s Women’s Pictures: Feminism and Film (1983). 107 Women’s pictures, Cassella writes, are defined by a “female point of view that addresses a female audience, with themes that focus on a desire for love, courtship and marriage” (244). 108 Communities of women and the celebration of female bonds concern are, according to Mayne, a feature of all Arzner’s films (131).

“register, respond, and reflect upon” the experience of modernity, such as Broadway theatre and middlebrow novels, in the hope of bringing her work into view for an audience beyond film scholars.109 Moving her out of her filmic “home” into the more diverse sphere of the boarding house, Arzner and her dancing women are able to cross paths and bump into other “residents.” As someone so clearly identified with feminist concerns, whose most famous film makes dance central to its story, Arzner’s work is crucial to the recognition and articulation of the aesthetics of movement that I track throughout this dissertation. Film’s visuality also makes the “reading” of movement I advocate more accessible, preparing my audience for its less obvious apprehension in text, where movement must literally be read.

Categorizing films of the period as works of vernacular modernism also opens up

Dance, Girl, Dance to a conversation that might otherwise be unlikely. While traditionally ahistorical approaches to screwball comedy, widely considered the qualitative height of classical Hollywood comedy, such as Stanley Cavell’s influential

Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981) have been joined more recently with analyses that explore variations in the genre over time (such as Maria

DiBattista’s Fast-Talking Dames (2001); Christopher Beach’s Class, Language, and Film

Comedy (2002); and Katherine Glitre’s States of the Union (2006)), overall, screwball comedies are discussed in relation to other screwball comedies. That means a backstage musical such as 42nd Street (1933) would be a more likely foil for Dance, Girl, Dance than a screwball comedy like Preston Sturges’s The Lady Eve (1941). But it is the latter that provides a more useful ally in my discussion of the interrelationship between

109 I borrow the term “vernacular modernism” from film scholar Miriam Hansen, who uses it in reference to classical Hollywood cinema. She prefers vernacular, she writes, to the “ideologically overly determined popular” (60).

100 transgressive female movement and female vitality. Brought into the boarding house and its intersecting pathways, the vitality of Sturges’s heroine, Jean Harrington, emerges as more than a matter of “fast talk,” but an overall expression of corporeal flexibility indifferent to the normative prescriptions that would restrain and constrain other women.

Thus framed, Jean’s vitality, and the vitality of the screwball genre, boosts the vitality of

Bubbles and Judy as well as their overlooked film.

Because of her status as the only significant female director in Hollywood during the height of the studio system, keeping Arzner front and centre in an exploration of her films is relevant and appropriate despite the troubling of auteur theory in recent decades.110 Other female directors active during the silent era lost their careers with the advent of sound, but not Arzner (Casella 262).111 Arzner also chose to be a director precisely because of the control she would maintain over the filmmaking process: “I remember making the observation, if one was going to be in the movie business, one should be a director because he was the one who told everyone else what to do” (quoted in Casella 235). When she bargained with Schulberg for her right to direct, Arzner told him she would “rather do a picture with a small studio and have [her] own way, than a

“B” picture at Paramount” (Mayne 33). Arzner’s career trajectory had made her fluent in the various stages of film production, pre and post, and once seated in the director’s chair she continued to exercise her influence on screenwriting (often teaming up with female collaborators like Zoe Akins), wardrobe design, and especially casting. Her acting

110 This critique has largely been the province of feminist critics who have pointed to film as a collective endeavor, with cinematographers, screenwriters, etc. shaping the finished film. This has proved difficult when trying to claim the seriousness of female filmmakers. Auteur is still the term with the most cultural capital to describe a “master.” The issue of the female auteur was the subject of a workshop I attended given by University of Pennsylvania film scholar Karen Redrobe at the University of Toronto in October 2017. 111 The other prominent female director in Hollywood was Ida Lupino but her career is largely post the Second World War.

101

“discoveries” would go on to become onscreen epitomes of strong female heroines—

Katharine Hepburn and Rosalind Russell, then company players, were each given their first starring roles by Arzner in her films Christopher Strong (1933) and Craig’s Wife

(1936), respectively (Mayne 62, 69). To Mayne, Arzner’s career and collaborations with women challenge Laura Mulvey’s germinal definition of man as subject (as director, character, and spectator) and woman as object of classical cinema to give an indication of

“what would be unique and specific to women’s cinema (a ‘return’ of the look)” (45,

139).112 This is especially true of Dance, Girl, Dance, a film in which numerous scenes turn the camera lens on men as they look at women in a way that is clearly meant to elicit disdain from the viewer, and in which a female character stands still on a burlesque stage and scolds the men in the audience for their taunts and cat calls. In the film women both return the look at men and look at other women in a way that is admiring and empowering rather than objectifying. It is Arzner’s gaze alighting on women as they move (especially for and as work) that this dissertation envisions operating in each of the texts in its purview—movement that includes Arzner’s own, sitting at a typewriter or editing film, movements she made on the way to claiming the director’s chair, a position that subsequently afforded her a much broader range of movements (choosing and dressing her actresses and pacing the floor behind her female screenwriters) through which to carve out the creative space to reveal richness and complexity in the lives of the women she put on screen.

112 Mulvey first presented the concept of the male gaze in her 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” The term has been critiqued in the years since, including by Mulvey herself. I see the gaze as a contested term not unlike “auteur,” which presents a difficulty for feminist critics trying to capture the singular work of a female director, and how a female perspective might be structured into a film.

102

Modern Dancers, Modern Women

Early in Dance, Girl, Dance, having arranged an interview for her with Steve Adams,

Madame Basilova accompanies Judy to the American Ballet Company (ABC). But before they can enter the building, Basilova is hit by a car, and she dies, along with her (and the larger culture’s) belief in ballet’s supremacy (“Hula is not dancing, it is oomph”).113 But as ballet fades, modern dance ascends—despite the “ballet” in his company’s name,

Adams subscribes to the tenets of modern dance.

The opposition between ballet and modern dance is the subject of two rehearsal scenes at the ABC (Figure 1)114. But both scenes, filmed in a room without mirrors or ballet bars, and with dancers in full costume, ask the film’s audience to engage with the rehearsals as if they were watching a performance on stage, and to see them not as diversions but as thematically significant. The first performance occurs in the scene immediately following Basilova’s death. Floor-to-ceiling curtains and metal columns fashioned out of classical decorative shapes form the background for male and female dancers dressed identically in flowing, jersey-like fabrics and arranged in pairs on either side of two central ballerinas dressed in traditional tutus. Only a few minutes in, Adams halts the performance, telling the dancers to take a break. As he walks away with the choreographer, Fitz, Adams lets him know that the dance needs a lot of work, adding just before he shuts the door to his office, “Frankly, Fitz, I am afraid your classical influence has been a little strong.” What Adams means and what he is looking for is outlined for us once he is inside and dictating a letter to his secretary, Miss Olmstead, presumably in

113 Basilova was originally written as a male character—Arzner requested the gender switch. Changing the character to female de-emphasizes the shift from one paternal authority to another (from male Basilova to a male Adams) to further emphasize the relationship between Bubbles and Judy as the subject of the film (Mayne 143). 114 Due to Microsoft Word’s instability around photographs I have banked screenshots beginning on page 129.

103 response to a professional query: “And your imitation of a bluebird was lovely. Who do you think cares? Have you ever heard of telephones, factories, cafeterias…?!” Reading back a more diplomatic response, Miss Olmstead reveals her own corporeal flexibility, and consequent vitality, by reformulating his words into a more coherent philosophy in which she connects America, modernity, and dance: “We aren’t interested in an interpretation of bird life, however lovely, but an interpretation of American life today: shopkeepers, mechanics, aviators.” Adams dismisses romantic ballet’s preoccupation with the natural world as out of step with the present life of an industrialized country. His comments to Fitz and dictation to Miss Olmstead reflect modern dance’s desire to pull the body down to earth in style and content, away from defying gravity to honouring its pull, away from birds in the sky to workers on the ground.

Fitz’s attempts at a more modern dance form in the first performance seem largely confined to the dancers’ covered heads and flowing garb, reminiscent of costumes worn in an early performance of Martha Graham’s company. The modernity of dance comprised more than a change of costume, it more essentially encompassed the way a body moved (although the former of course impacts the latter). Fitz’s “classical” influence still shows because his ballerinas are corseted in tutus and his dancers are all still on point. Arranged formally around the ballerinas, the bodies of the dancers, male coupled with female, are also still in rigid formation.

The second rehearsal evidences a shift in style and content more in line with

Adams’ vision even if Fitz cannot completely abandon his classical influence (When it is over Adams will tell him that it still “needs work.”). After completing her more classical solo, the principal dancer stops dancing and slowly descends to the floor. As it did on the

104 street outside, classical ballet dies again on stage, before a curtain opens up to reveal an urban skyline with a soundscape reminiscent of the site of Basilova’s death (car horns, sirens). Dancers emerge from the wings to stride across the stage as if traversing a sidewalk, embodying Adams’s recently voiced vision of modern life: newsies, milkmen, street sweepers, shoe shine boys, and a “Harlem” couple in blackface. The principal dancer is then “reborn” in a black and white costume with a more art deco motif.

Appearing en masse rather than in parallel lines around the principal dancer, the energy of the dancers and the arrangement of their bodies is more ebullient, less ordered and restrained than in the first performance.115 This performance of the contrast between ballet and a more modern and looser American style is one replayed over and over in

Hollywood film (for example, in An American in Paris and The Bandwagon).

If one of modern dance’s key departures from ballet is the release of the torso from its fixed position, as demonstrated by the free movement of the ABC dancers in their second performance, Bubbles’ looser comportment declares her modern long before

Judy, who will end the film in their “company.” In a parallel to the ABC rehearsals,

Bubbles performs two numbers on the Bailey Brothers’ burlesque stage, “Mama, What

Do I Do Now?” and “Jitterbug Bite,” with Judy’s performance in between occupying a narrative position similar to the scene in Adams’s office; that is, as commentary on the performances on either side (Figure 2). The rigidity of Judy’s ballet-performing body accentuates the looseness of Bubbles’s strides across the same stage, hips swaying, arms moving, and feet tapping. But it is Bubbles’s second number, “The Jitterbug Bite,” that aligns her moving body with the American content central to Adams’s vision of modern

115 Mayne also connects this sequence to modern dance, but more in terms of its identification with Judy as the “art spirit” vs. Bubbles’s “commercial spirit” of the movie, and part of dance’s metaphor for female aspiration and community.

105 dance and its implied critique of ballet. As a contemporaneous dance style, the jitterbug is both modern and American. It is also popular. With “Jitterbug Bite,” Bubbles critiques aesthetic hierarchies that make ballet and its restricted torso a sign of artistic merit (as more “ladylike”) over the freer movement of the jitterbug. “How can I be highbrow?” she sings, “My feet are itching to go.” Although she “tried to be a lady,” she cannot help herself. To be a “lady” would mean staying still when she has the urge to move. If propriety means restricting her movements, Bubbles and the film suggest, then to hell with being a lady. For a woman to be modern she must abandon outdated ideas about what constitutes a lady and redefine them for herself. Ballet’s restricted forms of feminine embodiment, demonstrated by Judy’s rigid posture, bolster cultural definitions of a lady, definitions and embodiments Bubbles rejects when she “gives in” to the jitterbug.

Modern and American, the jitterbug is also particularly associated with African-

American musicians. The word “jitterbug” originated in the “jive talk” of swing musicians like Cab Calloway, who released the “Song of the Jitterbug” in 1935 (Dance in the City, Thomas 177). Bubbles’s oral and physical reference to an African-American cultural form (as well as the dancing couple in blackface in the ABC’s second rehearsal scene) demonstrates both Susan Manning and Brown’s arguments about modern subjectivities—personal, artistic, and national—that in the first half of the twentieth century (and which may be argued continue today) rely on the adoption of racialized subjects and bodies. Manning offers as a prime example the Jewish Helen Tamiris, who performed dances to black spirituals such as “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” from 1928 to

1944. These “modern” dances relied on the representation of African-American bodies as

106 natural, primitive, and rhythmic, that is, outside of and in contrast to modern western civilization’s restrictive posturing.116 While Timaris enacts contemporary assessments of cultural appropriation and racism, Manning argues that her “embodied references to black spirituals cannot be separated from her disembodiment of conventional femininities.”117

Timaris’s dances supported varyingly “a liberal, leftist, and antiracist politics as well as dissident stagings of gender,” depending on the spectator (10-12). Brown similarly points to New Women who “embraced black expressive forms, adopting racialized gestural vocabularies to shape and redefine their own bodies as modern” (3).118 Both analyses intersect in the multiple presentations of modern womanhood in Dance, Girl, Dance.

Bubbles’s body is fashioned as modern in its adoption of racialized verbal and gestural vocabularies while Judy’s eventual defiance on stage speaks to the urge by female modern dancers to use their bodies for purposes other than male titillation.

Unlike the dancers at the American Ballet Company, Bubbles occupies the burlesque stage by herself. And as she moves she takes in its entire expanse, front, back and centre, demonstrating her command over the space as equally as she does over her audience (Figure 3). Developmental psychologist Daniel Stern says that we experience another’s vitality in our apprehension of the duration of a movement, where it occurs, its shape, and intention or force (4). Bubbles’s use of her entire body, face, hips and hands and the performative ground she covers lend her movements the force and directionality that create, in both dance and dancer, an impression of greater vitality.119 Like “oomph,”

116 Manning calls Timaris’s dances “metaphorical minstrelsy”: she did not impersonate but offered abstractions of black bodies (10). 117 Manning reports that Timaris was drawn to the spirituals by “her cultural politics as a Jewish leftist.” 118 According to Brown, the historic availability of black bodies as commodities bred an entitlement to their abilities and efforts leading to the appropriation of imagined properties of blackness (3). 119 Because movement unfolds in a stretch of time (“it begins, flows through, and ends”) Stern says it brings with it “the perception or attribution of force(s) ‘behind’ or ‘within’ the movement.” Stern calls the qualitative dimensions of

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“jitterbug” is onomatopoeic, and similarly expressive of a kinesthetic liveliness. In contrast, an article that flashes on screen during a montage of front-page stories and magazine profiles about the act describes Judy’s footwork on that same stage as “halting but nonetheless capably executed ballet steps.” Hardly vitality’s preferred adjectives,

“halting” and “capable” suggest that Judy moves without fully inhabiting her body. Like the women targeted by Stebbins, Hovey, and Mensendieck, Judy, early in the film, moves without much awareness of her body or herself. She will eventually attain that awareness, but only after repeated performances on the burlesque stage.

Arriving late to the theatre one night, Bubbles tells Judy that this is to be her last show as she and Jimmy are now married (he was drunk but Bubbles leaves out that information). Bubbles goes on stage, leaving Judy dazed in their dressing room, causing her to miss her cue. Angry that Judy is going to spoil the show, Bubbles pushes her on stage, inadvertently snapping the strap of her tutu. As she dances, Judy struggles to keep the strap from falling, but her audience tells her not to bother, one man yelling, “Don’t mind us. We can take it!” As she continues to dance, the camera cuts back and forth from the audience to an increasingly flustered Judy, with intermittent close-ups of Miss

Olmstead’s face (she is there with Steve Adams) letting us know we should be horrified by the laughing and yelling. In seeming defeat, Judy moves to exit the stage when another man in the audience shouts to howls of laughter, “She’s going home to mama!”

Judy stops, turns around, and struts out onto the apron, her movements displaying greater force than any of her previously choreographed moments. She takes her place at centre,

time, space, force, and directionality the “forms of vitality,” which add texture to movement that produces the impression of “aliveness.” See chapter one of Forms of Vitality (2010).

108 her stance confrontational, arms crossed, and feet apart (Figure 4). She glares at the audience and launches into the film’s most lauded moment:

Go ahead and stare. I’m not ashamed. Go on laugh! Get your money’s

worth. Nobody’s going to hurt you. I know you want to tear my clothes off

so’s you can look your fifty cents worth. Fifty cents for the privilege of

staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you. What do you suppose

we think of you up here—with your silly smirks your mothers would be

ashamed of? And we know it’s the thing of the moment for the dress suits

to come and laugh at us too. We’d laugh right back at the lot of you, only

we’re paid to let you sit there and roll your eyes and make your

screamingly clever remarks. What’s it for? So’s you can go home when

the show’s over and strut before your wives and sweethearts and play at

being the stronger sex for a minute? I’m sure they see through you just

like we do.

Judy’s monologue represents, to use Jayna Brown’s words, a “powerful act of self- possession” (38).120 Her aggressive stance is that much more transgressive because women on the burlesque stage were presumed to be there for the pleasure of men, not to berate them. Modern dance challenged the convention of female bodies as “desired objects of heterosexual male audience members” by “displaying different visions of women on stage with the purpose not of titillation but of defiance and demand” (Foulkes

27). In her expression of defiance and demand, Judy becomes both modern dancer (she

120 Brown uses the phrase to describe the performances of black female dancers in the early twentieth century, who with their movements on stage affirmed habitation in bodies that only recently had literally not been their own. While Judy’s self-possession obviously differs in significance it is similar in its declaration of her status as subject and “author of her own movement.”

109 ends the film in Adams’s office at the ABC) and modern woman. Positioning her unmoving body directly in front of the burlesque theatre audience and inviting them to look for reasons other than their “titillation,” Judy comes into her body and into her own.

As modern dance returned its dancer’s feet to the ground from her position on point, Judy’s emergence into a modern and vital subjectivity requires her own metaphoric grounding from the heights of her romanticism (as seen in her wide-eyed interactions with Jimmy and in her clinging to the fairy world of ballet) to a more clear-eyed view of the complexity of everyday human emotions and interactions. This acquired knowledge is evident in the scene in the courtroom immediately following her confrontation with the audience, in her account of her own behaviour, but also that of Bubbles (mentioned earlier in the chapter) and Jimmy, whom Judy tells the judge she can now see was

“running away from a part of himself”—that part still in love with his ex-wife.

At the time a wife who displayed herself provocatively in public was said to be

“giving away” a portion of her husband’s proprietary rights (Allen 151). Presumably, a woman on stage appears to belong to no one and therefore to everyone, allowing men to assume the right to call out as they please, no matter how demeaning to the woman at whom their comments are directed. But, standing still and encouraging them to “go ahead and stare,” Judy rejects such assumptions. Her words make sure the men in the audience do not forget the women who forbid their leering (“staring at a girl the way your wives won’t let you”), exposing the fiction of her movement on stage for their pleasure and framing it in the terms of economic exchange: men watch to get “their 50 cents worth” while women dance to “get paid.” Claiming her body as a working body, Judy claims her body as her property not theirs.

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For a film that so centrally features dance, it is revealing that Judy only comes truly alive when she stops moving. In her study of the “fast-talking dames” of comedy,

Maria DiBattista emphasizes the importance of silence as a contrast to her subjects’ verbosity. Not cowed or defeated by another’s words, the silence of the “fast-talking dame” allows the audience to glimpse “the moral vista of shame” ascribed to others (18).

Judy’s stillness functions similarly in the drama of Dance, Girl, Dance. Only when she stops can we begin to gauge the depth of shame the burlesque audience is meant to feel.

At the same time, standing still is not an absence of movement, but an activity in and of itself. Judy’s temporary stasis facilitates our apprehension of Judy in the process of becoming someone new. Her stillness marks not only her transformation from ballet to modern dancer, but from traditional to modern woman, from naïve and passive to self- aware and active. By the next scene, when she “performs” before judge and spectator gallery in the courtroom, Judy has visibly changed. Standing in the witness box, she is clear and emphatic in her assessments of Bubbles, Jimmy, and herself, and steadfast in her refusal to take Jimmy’s money to pay the fine that would keep her out of jail. Judy declares herself a modern woman by taking back control of her body. And taking control of her body, she takes control of her life.

The portrayal of Judy and her evolvement differs considerably from that of Cyd

Charisse in the musical comedy The Bandwagon, directed by Vincente Minnelli (1953), providing a worthwhile contrast to the way Arzner’s female gaze frames the trajectory of her ballet dancer. Charisse plays Gabrielle Gerard, a ballet dancer who has repeatedly refused to work on Broadway so as not to dilute her talent. Fred Astaire (fifty-four at the time) is aging, and fading, star Tony Hunter who has returned to Broadway after years in

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Hollywood to perform in a play his friends have written to showcase his talent as a

“song-and-dance-man.” The director they hire decides they need Gabrielle, who makes no attempt to hide her “superior” technique and training over Tony and his style of dance throughout rehearsals. While initially holding her opinions strongly (that dancers should not smoke for one), Gabrielle is encouraged to relinquish them when Astaire quits the show, tired of being made to feel inferior. Sent to make peace Gabrielle soon breaks into tears, confessing between sobs, “I’ve behaved horribly to you.” She refuses his offered

“I’ve behaved horribly to you,” which he has, calling her “a monster” among other things, but the film makes light of any possible wrongdoing on his part by having

Gabrielle moan, “Don’t be nice to me. It makes me seem twice as ugly.” Soon enough

Gabrielle is dancing her compatibility with Tony dressed in flats rather than toe shoes.

From that point on she is compliant (she even tries smoking) to the point that she falls for

Tony despite a twenty-plus year age gap (as he does her). Unlike Judy who is self- actualized while dancing on a commercial stage, Charisse’s character is brought down low, off her high feet and her high horse. Judy turns her humiliation around on her audience. Gabrielle is left with hers.

While some critics have considered the applause that erupts following Judy’s speech as neutering her feminist challenge, Donna Casella points out that it is Miss Olmstead who is the first to stand and react (260). That is, a woman is the first to move in response to

Judy’s words. In Miss Olmstead’s applause is an appreciation for Judy’s resistance to the objectification and belittlement of women that extends beyond the rows and doors of the burlesque theatre. As Adams’s secretary, Miss Olmstead is a regular spectator of women’s performance (We first see her sitting alongside Adams and Fitz as they watch

112 the rehearsal at the ABC.). Based on previous interactions between herself and Adams, and with Judy, we can also surmise that Miss Olmstead understands the difficulties women face maneuvering through worlds dominated by men. Miss Olmstead may assert some control over Adams’s movements, revising his letters and pushing him out his office door to meet with a young dancer (though Judy leaves before he gets to), but she must also bear his patronizing, “Olmi, how come you are the only one who understands me?”

Judith Mayne recognizes Judy’s speech as a challenge to the idea of women as objects of spectacle but argues that her confrontation with the audience heralds the

“creation of another kind of performance,” in which women are empowered rather than objectified because of the gaze of other women (145). Men may consume women through a look, but in Dance, Girl, Dance, women also watch and take pleasure in the performance of other women (147). In addition to Miss Olmstead’s spectatorship, Mayne cites Basilova, on the stairs and out of sight, watching Judy dance alone in her studio, and

Judy, similarly silent and delighted as she watches the rehearsal performance of the ABC just outside the studio doors (Figure 5). That “front-row seat” is made possible by Miss

Olmstead, who sympathizing with Judy’s story of Basilova’s troupe when she returns after her missed interview with Adams, has sent her to wait in the lobby. As they watch,

Arzner’s women gather alongside the actresses of Stage Door, who also form appreciative audiences for their co-residents at the Footlights Club, to observe their fellow women with empathy and appreciation for movements made in pursuit of dreams and desires. How they watch each other is important and relevant to how we, in turn, are meant to watch them.

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Although she is at first excited by what she sees through the lobby doors during the rehearsal performance at the American Ballet Company, Judy leaves before the performance is done. Her body language as she turns slowly away, her eyes downcast, tells us that despite her physical proximity to the dancers, she recognizes the vast distance separating her from them (When she is back at the boarding house she will tell Sally,

“I’m through, I saw what real dancing is. What’s the use of pretending?”). Unbeknownst to Judy, because she left before meeting him, Adams is on the elevator next to her going down. His prolonged glance her way exemplifies how the convention of female movement on stage for the titillation of men extends to the movement of women on the street outside. Adams’s admiring look, on which the camera lingers (as it lingers on the cigar-chewing man in an audition scene, and at the men who shout, jeer, and leer at both

Judy and Bubbles in the burlesque theatre) ignores Judy’s obvious dejection, his bemused gaze effectively denying Judy her inner life. Absorbed in her thoughts, Judy never turns to look at him, but his face, eyebrow hitched, communicates surprise that his gaze alone cannot will her to move. Once out of the elevator and onto the street Adams follows her even when it is clear his attention is unwanted. When he offers her his umbrella, she moves out from under it. He then puts the umbrella over her head and asks, “Mind if I share my own umbrella?” Judy fails to find him charming and walks on. Nevertheless he continues to walk alongside her claiming that he wanted to talk to her on the elevator not just because of her beauty but because she “looked unhappy,” refusing to leave her be despite her disinterest. She finally breaks free by telling him, “I like the rain and I like walking alone” and running off. In her triumphant moment on the burlesque stage later in

114 the film, Judy does not run away but meets that male gaze to powerfully assert her inner life and body as her own.

But her dismissal of Adams’s unwanted advances means Judy does not learn who he is until the end of the film. When he appears backstage one night (having recognized her in the article Miss Olmstead showed him) Judy assumes he is following her and rips up the card he left with one of the stagehands. Had she looked at the card, her time on the burlesque stage might have ended much sooner. But cutting short her tenure in burlesque would have meant bypassing a necessary stage in her personal development, the culmination of which she demonstrated in her defiant stance on the burlesque stage, one that will better prepare her for what comes later when she is part of Adams’s company, a hint of which we see in the final scene of the film. While her grit on stage finally leads her to Adams’s office at the American Ballet Company, she still has to listen to him scold her as he wags his finger in her face: “Listen to me, you silly child…You’ve had your way long enough. From now on you’re going to listen to me.” Like the applause that erupts after her speech, Steve’s words have been cited as undercutting the feminist messaging of Judy’s confrontation with her audience. But what happens to Judy in

Steve’s office may also be viewed as a reminder that her hard-won empowerment will continue to be challenged—as presumably Arzner’s was in the male-dominated milieu of the studios. While lauded for its creative daring, supposedly separate from the crassness of the marketplace, the art world as represented by the American Ballet Company does not necessarily make it a refuge of freedom and self-direction for women. Though Judy has moved into a supposedly “higher” realm (no leering men in the audience here—they

115 just do it in the elevator), she will still have to negotiate her autonomy relative to a world in which men are the ultimate gatekeepers to the achievement of women’s desires.

Working Dancers, Modern Women

In Steve Adams’s terms what makes modern dance “modern” is its focus on workers— the shopkeepers, mechanics, and aviators Miss Olmstead formulates out of his dictation, as well as the newsies, milkmen, and street sweepers who appear on the ABC rehearsal stage. Arzner’s film makes a similar claim to modernity in its representation of its female dancers. Like Stage Door, Dance, Girl, Dance first brings its heroines into focus as workers.

As the film opens the camera zooms in on a neon sign perched atop a factory,

“Home of Harris Tires, the Royalty of the Road,” then pans down the side of the building to land on a marquee for the “Palais Royale,” before cutting to the club’s smoky interior where dancers perform on a stage for an unenthusiastic crowd. Factory labour merges with performative labour as they sing “Roll out the Barrel” standing in their own production line (a quasi kick line absent the high kicking). What is first established visually is articulated verbally when after they finish their number, the club is raided for backroom gambling. After a policeman tells everyone to go home including the dancers,

Bubbles refuses, “Not until we get paid.” Judy also chimes in, although a little less forcefully: “We’re just trying to earn a living. Same as you are.” Rendered visible as workers, audience member Jimmy Harris (of the Harris Tires family) is able to pass around a hat for the dancers, soliciting donations by virtue of their hard work with, “How would you like to dance your feet off for a jaded public and not get paid?”

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Factory labour actually merged frequently with performative labour in the 1930s, a period in which audiences watched modern dance in union halls as often as they did in theatres. The establishment of the Federal Dance Project as part of the Works’ Progress

Administration made modern dancers government workers while factory workers likewise became dancers, forming groups like the Workers Dance League to express on stage their concerns about working conditions, unemployment, eviction, and poverty.

Leftist politics and formal aspirations for a particularly American dance overlapped in the early years of modern dance, with differing views of what constituted “American” content.121 But as modern dance becomes simultaneously art and labour, its opposition to the theatrical dancing of vaudeville and burlesque is also framed in terms of work: modern dance requires talent and hard work while burlesque requires neither. Dance,

Girl, Dance dramatizes this binary in a scene in which Miss Olmstead is again an appreciative and sympathetic audience for Judy. After seeing Judy in the paper in a story about Bubbles’s act, she brings the article to Steve Adams to show him the girl who had come to see him but left. Also present is Fitz, the choreographer, who suggests that Judy did not wait around to meet Adams because she is a “gaiety girl”—a dancing girl, rather than a dancer. But Miss Olmstead quickly rebukes him, “That’s right, condemn a girl because she has to earn her own living.” A dancing girl is still a dancer—and a hard worker. Burlesque dancers often worked a punishing schedule of four or five shows a day over a forty-week season. Even if Fitz and the audience do not take her seriously as an

121 For more on the overlap between workers and modern dance see Mark Franko’s The Work of Dance: Labor, Movement, and Identity in the 1930s. (2002). According to Franko these dance groups were important forerunners for the musical revue Pins and Needles discussed in the last chapter. Modern dance becomes increasingly aligned with the art for art’s sake ethos of aesthetic modernism as it was institutionalized in journals and university departments, which favoured the work of Martha Graham and Doris Humphreys. Though she closely identified with leftist causes Graham “privilege[d] aesthetic goals over direct political engagement” to distance dance from what she and others considered propaganda (80).

117 artist, Judy is still dancing, and working hard, on that burlesque stage. We know how much from the montage of articles, magazine spreads, and front pages intercut with shots of Judy performing her routine. When she tells the judge that she did not hit Bubbles out of anger because “being a stooge was like practice” for her, she confirms what we are already meant to understand. Performing on the burlesque stage Judy has been practising, enough that Fitz, who accompanies Adams to the burlesque theatre one evening, can judge that her “footwork isn’t that bad.” Repeatedly performing her routine amid the laughter and cat calls enhances Judy’s corporeal flexibility, priming her body for the action she takes in her climactic moment on stage when, rather than exit limply into the wings, she strides confidently upstage to confront her audience. Even if the steps she performed are ballet, as per the Mensendieck exercise system, in which physical discipline was “the route to self-discovery and graceful kinaesthetic style” (Toepfer 40),” the discipline of dancing night after night as Bubbles’s stooge facilitates both Judy’s improved footwork and her self-actualization.

Although linked to the commercial enterprise of theatrical dancing, Bubbles is portrayed sympathetically and with greater complexity than Hollywood-star Jean in Stage

Door, who returns to the Footlights Club for a photo opportunity rather than to see her former housemates (and replaces the picture of Sarah Bernhardt with one of herself).

Unlike the self-involved Jean, Bubbles stands up for the other girls in the troupe, just as the theatre-loving (and playwright-favouring) Terry does in the producer’s office in

Ferber and Kaufman’s play. As a film director, Arzner would obviously not have Ferber and Kaufman’s urgent concern for the theatre’s loss of prominence to film, which is a major reason behind their dismissal of Jean as part of the Hollywood machine. But in her

118 portrayal of Bubbles and Judy, Arzner resists the same supposed hierarchies between art and commercial entertainments as Ferber and Kaufman do in their satire of proletarian art, demonstrating that a commercial vehicle like a “women’s picture” can have a message just as their Broadway comedy can.

Only a few scenes after being the first to insist to the policeman that she and the others would not be leaving the Palais Royale until they had been paid, Bubbles dances to save the audition that without her, and led by Judy, failed to impress their cigar-chewing client. Bubbles gains and holds the man’s interest by pulling her grass skirt down to reveal the top of a bikini bottom and moving her hips more emphatically than Judy had, a few slaps on her behind providing added effect (Figure 6). As she moves, the camera alternates between Bubbles and her male spectator, closing in tightly on his face so that he appears both lascivious and malevolent. Unfazed, Bubbles meets his gaze, daring him to look away. Her moves and her eye contact demonstrate her control over her performance if not its presentation; she knows how to move her body to elicit his desire and get his attention (Figure 6). After he tells Bubbles she is the only one to be hired, she is shocked, “What about the rest of the kids?” Once he leaves she is quick to apologize,

“Gee, kids, I’m sorry, I was hoping he could take all of us.” When she returns to the boarding house after becoming a burlesque star, Bubbles also secretly gives the landlady money to cover Judy and, her roommate, Sally’s rent. Although not as talented as Judy

(when asked by the client whether she can dance, Bubbles replies, “Been called that”),

Bubbles is vital and valued in her readiness to do what she can to make a living and for looking out for her fellow women.

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Indeed for women like Bubbles, who did not have the talent (or desire) to reach the artistic heights to which Judy aspires, burlesque represented the chance to make a good living for women with few options. As Zemeckis points out in Behind the Burly Q, burlesque offered young women a way to escape poverty and abuse and to make something of their lives (3).122 Some stayed “just long enough to buy a Frigidaire or a car,” others for twenty or thirty years (47). Earning often in excess of husbands or boyfriends was empowering for burlesque performers, as former dancer Dixie Evans states plainly and emphatically, “We had the power. We had the money” (109). Bubbles is similarly empowered to make “patriarchy literally pay for its social and economic exploitation of women” (Allen 285) when she offers Jimmy an annulment so that he can marry his ex-wife in exchange for $50,000. Modern dance may, in Adams’s terms, represent modern life but burlesque expresses it.

Judy finally grasps the sexual politics of female performance after literally walking in Bubbles’s footsteps. Bubbles’s first number, “Mama What Do I Do Now,” ends with her behind a tree, her outstretched arm sending her clothes flying off into the wings (literally—they are on strings). Eventually Bubbles’s arm is replaced by Judy’s, followed by the rest of Judy’s body, denying expectations of an undressed Bubbles with a ballerina fully clothed. When Judy finally decides to deny audience expectations of her own performance and tell it like it is—that she is up there to make money not to fulfill their desires—she similarly walks into a space formally occupied by Bubbles, upstage, on the apron, front and centre.

122 Nineteenth-century feminists were critical of Lydia Thompson because they feared exactly this: facing huge obstacles competing with men in the workplace, women would choose the lucrativeness of burlesque as an easier route to economic independence (Allen 126). They were not wrong, but this does not account for the reality that many women then as now do not have the luxury of choice.

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Fast Talkers and Modern Movers

Bubbles’s combination of talk and tease recalls burlesque star Gypsy Rose Lee, and even

Mae West, who combined talk and tease, if not striptease, on film.123 But her wisecracking manner on and off stage (“I don’t fall in gutters, I pick my spots”) in a film from 1940 is more helpfully viewed in terms of the fast-talking variety tracked by Maria

DiBattista in screwball comedies of the period, a “dame” whose “very stride…proclaims that she knows where she is going and seldom pauses to look back” (86).124 Bubbles’s ironic asides punctuate her definitive strides across the burlesque stage. Strutting out from the wings across the stage and on to the apron, Bubbles, clearly past the age of ingénue, launches into the “Jitterbug Bite” with “I am just a sweet young thing of twenty- two.” After a man in the audience laughs uproariously, Bubbles looks at him sideways and adds “Or so.” She then continues, “I never sink to smoke or drink. My life is one long…” When the same man yells out “What!?” Bubbles again stops singing to stare at him, this time swatting her hand and crying “No!” before strutting back upstage to launch into the rest of the number.

As a character, a mover, and a talker, the fast-talking dame to which Bubbles is most fruitfully compared is Jean Harrington in Preston Sturges’s classic screwball comedy The Lady Eve (1941). In that film Jean (Barbara Stanwyck) is a card shark, who, with her father, Harry, and their partner, Gerald, stakes out luxury ocean liners for wealthy men to grift. Jean’s role is to seduce and distract their mark so that Harry can fleece him at cards. This time out that mark is Charles Pike (Henry Fonda), “the heir to

123 DiBattista writes of West, “She may be the mistress of the double entendre…but she is decidedly slow, even lethargic, in speech and movement (93). Neither fast talker nor fast mover, West is not part of the “sisterhood” of vital womanhood that I (or DiBattista) am talking about. 124 The classic screwball comedies were released in the 1930s and 1940s.

121 the Pike’s Ale fortune (“the one that won for Yale”), but by profession a scientist of snakes, who would prefer to spend his time in the jungle “in the pursuit of knowledge” rather than in polite society. Quickly fulfilling her role in the charade, Jean makes

Charles fall for her—something he literally does after she trips him in the ship’s dining room. But Jean surprises herself by falling in love with Charles, and prepares to give up her life of dissembling to marry him. Until the ship’s purser shows Charles a photo of

Harry, Jean, and Gerald disembarking another ship, their various aliases listed on the reverse. Despite Jean’s protestations that she planned to confess everything before the ship reached New York, Charles calls off their engagement. Vowing revenge, Jean finds her opportunity when she learns that a fellow con, Perlie, is living as a titled Englishman in Connecticut near the Pike home. Convincingly presenting herself as his elegant niece,

Lady Eve Sidwich, Jean makes Charles fall for her all over again despite the fact that she physically looks exactly like the woman he rejected (with requisite costume changes).

Though Charles judged by appearances on the ship (the purser’s photo), he declines to do so in his parents’ home, using the convoluted logic that because Eve looks so much like

Jean they could not possibly be the same person. This time the couple does marry, but while on a train for their honeymoon, “Eve” steamrolls the conservative Charles with accounts of her numerous dalliances, beginning with her father’s stable boy. Again,

Charles’ stubborn adherence to human one-dimensionality interferes—How could a con artist sincerely love a wealthy man? How can Eve be of the upper class and behave this way? Unable to accept Eve’s promiscuous past, as he could not Jean’s criminal present, he gets off, or rather falls off, the train at the first opportunity. After putting in place plans for divorce, Charles heads back on board the ship where he first met Jean. Realizing that

122 she is still in love with him, and knowing he would retreat back to the jungle, Jean is already there waiting for him. As she did the first time they met, Jean trips Charles.

Rising from the floor, Charles realizes with great excitement that it is Jean who is responsible. He embraces her, then quickly grabs her hand to run down the stairs to her stateroom. There they embrace again, Charles finally accepting Jean for who and as she is.

Sturges’s personal history provides a compelling link between his film and this dissertation’s concern with women, movement, and vitality, underscoring my bringing

Bubbles and Jean together. As a boy, Sturges’s and his mother, Mary, travelled to Europe where they spent a number of years following her friend Isadora Duncan as she performed around the continent. While Sturges eventually returned to live with his stepfather in the United States, his mother continued to travel back and forth across the

Atlantic. Though his relationship to his mother was not without its trials, Sturges remained close to her throughout her life. In her itinerancy and vibrancy, Jean bears a strong resemblance to Mary. At minimum, Sturges’s biographer Diane Jacobs writes, the liberation of being on a boat can be seen as a tribute to “Mary’s view of life as a glorious quest” (235).

One of the most famous scenes in The Lady Eve occurs early in the film as a series of women in the ship’s dining room vie for the attention of the eligible Charles, sitting alone at his table, his nose in a book. As each woman approaches or turns her head to look at him, Jean “frames” the scene both visually and verbally. Watching through her pocket book mirror, she offers a running commentary on what each woman is thinking, saying, or hoping will happen. What Jean sees, we see: a woman’s forced smile;

123 another’s straining to nonchalantly pick up a handkerchief dropped in front of Charles’s table; still another walking stiffly over to his table, cigarette holder in hand, arm held up archly against her body. Their movements telegraph the women’s intentions—as Jean’s commentary makes clear: “Every Jane in the room was giving him the thermometer but he feels they are just a waste of time.” When Charles gets up to walk out of the dining room, Jean, uses her own body to greater effect: she trips him (Figure 7).

Critical discussion of this scene tends to focus on its self-reflexivity (Jean framing the scene for us in her pocketbook mirror) and the consequent linking of Jean and director Sturges. But this perspective bypasses what we actually see in the mirror, which is the awkward and self-conscious movement of women’s bodies. Jean succeeds in her goal by moving her body differently; that is, with greater ease and directness. Just as the apple she dropped on Charles as he boarded the ship succeeded in getting him to look up when shouts from other passengers failed to elicit a glance, Jean’s strategically placed foot finally gets Charles to pay attention. Like Bubbles pulling her skirt down and slapping her behind in the audition, Jean’s move is not subtle, but it is effective. She understands that preferring the inside of the book he brings to dinner, as well as the thoughts in his head, Charles requires concrete contact to arouse him into his body. The screwball heroine’s use of language is usually cited as the modality through which she transgresses societal norms,125 but Jean’s movements are equally transgressive, both playing with and rejecting the comportment of a prescribed femininity that severely limits the movements of her fellow women in the dining room.

It is a standard trope of the screwball comedy that one partner must lose his or her rigidity as a prerequisite to their eventual union as a couple. This temperamental

125 This is the basic argument of Christopher Beach’s Class, Language, and American Film Comedy (2002).

124 flexibility, like the emphasis on the self-reflexivity of the dining room scene, largely ignores the corporeal flexibility that both accompanies and expresses it.126 Charles is rigid in his attitudes, but he is also rigid in his movements. Not only does Charles need to be more like Jean, he also needs to move more like her. In one scene, disguised as Lady

Eve and dressed in a formal gown at a dinner in her honour, Jean rushes to help Charles after he has fallen headfirst over a couch, crossing the room via the path of most resistance, a sliver of space between a chair and its side table, neither catching her train nor even making contact with the presumed impediments in her path. Charles, on the other hand, falls throughout the film, over a couch, over Jean’s foot, on the stairs (Figure

8). Though usually regarded as a metaphor for his fall from innocence as precipitated by

Jean (his “Eve”),127 his many falls throughout the film also just make Charles look clumsy in relation to Jean’s grace. Jean literally sets Charles off balance, but at the same time she manifests in him what is already an imbalance. Too much in his head, Charles the scientist needs “righting” through an emergence into his body. Jean may initiate

Charles into knowledge, but what she sets in motion is not Charles’s fall from innocence, but his awakening into life. She may use her fluency in the language of movement to manipulate Charles, but that manipulation is redeemed as dynamic energy that releases

Charles’s body from its restrictive carriage and his mind from limiting thoughts, fostering his own emergence into vitality.

Like Jean, Bubbles is a con artist. She “plays” the nightclub owner at the audition, making him think she is dancing for him rather than a job, just as she plays the wealthy

Jimmy Harris, dragging him to get married while he is drunk. She also plays Judy to

126 “Most often the comic film juxtaposes the values of practical but rigid to free but irresponsible” (Willett 144). 127 As in Stanley Cavell’s influential interpretation in Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981).

125 convince her to join her act, flattering her with appeals to her “tony” moves knowing that

Judy will not refuse because she needs the money. But the film does not fault Bubbles for her misdeeds, just as The Lady Eve does not fault its con artist for hers. The ability to both read bodies and use their own is key to the con artists’ manipulations. Yet, it is not the manipulation of others that is of interest to the films, but rather each one’s fluency in the language of movement and gesture that enables them to maneuver within the bounds of society to achieve some semblance of autonomy. Both Bubbles and Jean embody and understand vital movement as a tactical language that can be read, taught, and exploited to achieve a desired end.

In the nineteenth century con artists were not heroes but menacing figures who posed a threat to young men seeking their fortunes in the city. Far from the immediate sphere of family, town, and church, impressionable young men were considered easy prey for “confidence men and painted women.” As Karen Haltunnen explains, fear of these “natural” actors, promoted an anxiety over how to place people in a world of strangers, resulting in the codification of rules about the correct ways of walking, bowing, gesturing, and entering and exiting a room. In other words, the regulation of the body was a means to establish who was and who was not admissible in society.128 Attitudes to con artists began to shift in the turn toward the twentieth century when an upwardly mobile middle class recognized the essential theatricality of their class position and came to appreciate theatricality in and of itself. American mythologies of success, particularly the stories of Horatio Alger, shaped the previously maligned con artist into a model of middle class aspiration, a “man-on-the-make” admired for his aggressiveness, drive, and

128 “By admitting some applicants and excluding others at various levels, polite society offered a way of establishing a clear social identity for placeless men and women in a fluid, middle-class society” (Haltunnen 96).

126 mastery of public presentation on the road to success (Halttunen 197). However, seen within the twentieth-century revolt against bourgeois repressiveness and restriction epitomized by the bodily regulation their presence originally initiated, con artists like

Jean and Bubbles represent free and agile movers who demonstrate the facility for bodily improvisation so prized by the physical cultures of the period. Both Bubbles in her song and Jean in her disguise knowingly claim the title of “lady” while refuting that label’s normative feminine embodiment.

Just as Jean’s fluid movements offer dynamic contrast to Charles’s clumsy ones so Bubbles’s easy strides across the stage offer vital contrast to Judy’s rigidity on point.

Bubbles may not have Judy’s skills but she moves skillfully, employing tactics that will get her the attention that will provide her with a measure of economic and social freedom.

As a dancer, Judy may not need to be initiated into movement like Charles, but she does need to be initiated into the material reality of her body and out of the restrictive movements of femininity as ballet defines them if she is to be both a modern dancer and a modern woman. The ease and flexibility that registers Bubbles’s vitality early on, Judy finds only when she violates her audience’s directives and stops moving on the burlesque stage. Predictably, in the courtroom scene that follows her climactic stance, Judy, who has yet to make any kind of amusing remark, now makes one to the judge. After he asks her if she hit Bubbles, she admits matter-of-factly that she did, adding, “I wanted to kill her.” When the judge tries to steer her away from incriminating herself with a period- specific, and prejudicial, association between the Irish and a fierce temper, Judy quips,

“Well I have a habit of simmering, your honor, but I usually keep myself from boiling over!” for which she is rewarded with appreciative laughter from the gallery. Having

127 resisted patriarchal assumptions and entitlements with her refusal to move on the burlesque stage, Judy is initiated into the unruliness of the comic heroine, demonstrating that she is now in control of her audience’s laughter rather than its target.

Together Jean, Bubbles, and Judy demonstrate that movement is a way of knowing, and that the more we move, the more we know how to use that embodied knowledge to map vital and autonomous spaces and identities in lives otherwise restricted.

While at first glance the title of Arzner’s film might be read as an expression of heartfelt exuberance, it emerges as an expression of the constraints a hegemonic male gaze enforces on the ways women move, both literally and figuratively in the choices for women circumscribed by that gaze. With commas singling out “Girls” as the objects of direct address, “Dance” becomes, as the film proceeds, in the audition scene and in the burlesque theatre, an imperative directed at the women who are infantilized as “girls.”

Significantly, in the opening scene at the Palais Royale club the policeman calls the dancers “accessories” for turning a blind eye to the gambling going on in the back room.

Because he does not use the full phrase “accessories to a crime,” when Judy responds,

“We’re not accessories any more than the people who come here,” accessories bears its other meaning of “objects.” At this early point in the film what Judy has yet to understand is the extent to which as women on stage she and her fellow dancers are objects—of a male gaze. The difference between Bubbles and Judy at the outset is that

Bubbles understands this and uses that knowledge to gain some room to move within its constraints. Judy may have the words, but at this early stage she does not yet have the

“moves” to push against it.

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Basilova’s last words to Judy before she dies in the street also recall the title but with a crucial difference. Telling her to “dance, dance, dance!” Basilova urges Judy to maintain her commitment and not give up on her dream. As Basilova’s words recall the title so do they echo the “Girls Girls Girls” on the marquee outside the Bailey Brothers’ burlesque theatre. In the commercial arena of burlesque the worth of the girls is equal to their bodies, which a newspaper headline declares outright: “New Figure Raises Figures for Bailey Bros.” If, as spoken by Basilova, “Dance” is the link to artistic dance, and

“Girls” to the commercialism of burlesque, when combined in the title Dance, Girl,

Dance they point to the realities expressed throughout the film about the ongoing negotiation between a desire for self-expression and self-determination and the limitations imposed by patriarchal assumptions and entitlements. Seeking to fulfill their own desires for a career or simply to be self-supporting, women are often confronted with men who seek to control how they move.

For another Arzner heroine this dilemma proves fatal. At the start of Christopher

Strong (1933) Cynthia Darrington (Katharine Hepburn) is a risk-taking pilot who races strangers in her car and sports a wardrobe of jodhpurs and button-up shirts.129 After she becomes involved with the married Christopher (the stranger in the car), the headstrong and ambitious Cynthia asks that he promise never to ask her to stop flying. But after a particularly daring flight, Christopher does what he promised not to do and asks Cynthia not to fly anymore—“for him.” She agrees, but downing her plane, Cynthia too takes a downward turn. Waiting around her apartment for her lover to call or come by, she loses her identity and her independence (and the androgyny of her wardrobe)—the risks of inaction much greater than the more ostensibly dangerous behaviour of her former life.

129 Once she is involved with Strong she begins wearing dresses.

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When she discovers that she is pregnant, Cynthia never tells Christopher (she hints at it but he does not make the connection), choosing instead to kill herself in her plane by forgoing her oxygen mask once her plane surpasses a certain altitude. True to melodrama, as a transgressive heroine, Cynthia is heroic in her suffering, her only way out of her predicament the taking of her own life. Christopher suffers nothing. Cynthia’s suicide frees him from ever having to choose to leave his wife. In Dance, Girl, Dance Judy

“suffers” for her art, as Bubbles’ stooge and as subject to audience humiliation, but after her public transgression she finally achieves her dream to be part of a professional dance company—and even cracks a few jokes.

While sharing Dance, Girl, Dance’s conflation of movement and identity, what is missing from Christopher Strong is a sense of female companionship. Even with their conflict, there is enough between Judy and Bubbles to support Judy in her struggle.

Cynthia is absolutely alone. Christopher’s daughter, previously a friend, finds out about the affair and treats her like a pariah, and Christopher’s wife, if not an enemy, is certainly not a friend. But like Cynthia she suffers alone. Because Christopher never tells her about the affair, she can never speak about it openly, even when she and Cynthia finally meet.

It is actually her kindness that leads Cynthia to make the decision to end her life so as not to destroy her marriage and family.

Bubbles and Judy could both be said to meet the male gaze, but how they do so differs.

Bubbles works within the gaze’s crosshairs, while Judy eventually meets it with resistance. Both tactics yield a degree of agency and autonomy but are ultimately limited, respectively, by the requirements of male desire and Adam’s wagging finger. As a director, Arzner could be said to combine Bubbles’s and Judy’s tactics, making all the

130 right moves to conform to expectations of women’s pictures while simultaneously resisting studio definitions to present her own idea of what constitutes “women’s” pictures (and a female gaze). In its presentation of the negotiations required of both characters, and in its presumed representation of Arzner’s own reality working within a studio environment that cannot see beyond her gender when promoting (and assigning) her films, the film speaks to a contemporary world in which women continue to have their movements defined, constrained, and increasingly threatened, by the hegemony of a male gaze that continues to construct men as subjects and women as objects of and for their pleasure.

131

Figure 1: The first and second rehearsals of the American Ballet Company in Dance, Girl Dance.

Figure 2: Judy’s ballet steps and Bubbles’s “jitterbug”

Figure 3: Bubbles traverses the stage

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Figure 4: Judy confronts the burlesque audience

Figure 5: Madame Basilova watches Judy dance and Judy watches the ABC ballerina dance

Figure 6: Bubbles captures the attention of the talent scout

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Figure 7: Jean watches Charles, and other women, through her pocket book mirror in The Lady Eve. Jean puts out her foot to trip Charles

Figure 8: Charles falls while Jean glides

Chapter 3 Moving Towards Selfhood in Zona Gale's Miss Lulu Bett

Published the same year in which women were granted the right to vote, it is perhaps not surprising that Zona Gale’s 1920 novel Miss Lulu Bett charts its heroine’s path to self- actualization through movement. Like the women who marched through the streets to protest their attenuated citizenship, Lulu increasingly resists her domestic confinement through the movement of her body. Initially fixed in and to her place, through movement

Lulu gains access to a self formerly hidden within the drudgery of household chores and a blue gingham dress. Barely visible or accessible at the start, Lulu can only imagine this self as belonging to some “other Lulu.” But the more she moves, the more Lulu manifests this “other Lulu,” and soon the Lulu who “never goes anywhere” has moved out of the kitchen into the parlour, and out the front door.

Lulu Bett represents a departure from the women encountered in the previous chapters. She is who the other women might have been had they never left home. Neither dancer nor actress, Lulu lives in a small town in Wisconsin, not New York City. Her life bears closest resemblance to the one glimpsed passingly in Louise’s letter in Stage Door, sent after Louise has left the Footlights Club to get married, in which she describes a routinized life of duty and obligation. But Lulu is not someone’s wife; she is a servant in her sister’s home. And while women’s desire for careers, men, and money are on view throughout Stage Door and Dance, Girl, Dance, Lulu’s task over the course of Gale’s novel is to recognize and articulate complementary desires of her own. Increasingly choosing herself over her perceived obligations, moving for reasons other than for the domestic work of the house, Lulu’s movements in the idealized middle-class home

134 135 presage (or in Erin Manning’s terms, “preaccelerate”) the transgressive movements of the boarding house. And just as the Footlights Club is the stage on which Stage Door’s actresses perform their lives, so the Deacon home is the stage on which Lulu performs her gradual self-actualization.

Lulu’s final exit recalls another female character who, chafing against her own enforced domesticity, famously walked out her front door.130 But what distinguishes Lulu

Bett from Nora Torvald in A Doll’s House is that Lulu is unmarried—as Gale herself was until her mid-fifties (Miss Lulu Bett was written when Gale was in her late forties). The house Lulu leaves is not the one she shares with her husband but one that belongs to her sister, Ina, and her husband, Dwight Deacon. Dwight and Ina allow her to live under their roof, which they regard as an act of charity, but in actuality is an arrangement for which they are well remunerated by Lulu’s near-constant labour. Thirty-three and never married, Lulu is also to be distinguished from the young woman of nineteenth-century domestic fiction, still at home but preparing for marriage, and the wife adjusting to it in the “modern” domestic fiction of the early twentieth century.131 Gale subverts the form in both incarnations to account for the life and desires of a spinster who occupies not just a nether space, but in a way, no space. No longer young, and neither wife, widow, nor mother, Lulu has no “place” in a patriarchal society in which she has not fulfilled the presumed expectations of her gender.

While not unrepresented in American literature (Emily Dickinson’s writing being the most famous instance), the spinster figure takes on different shadings in the early

130 Other critics have made the same comparison to A Doll’s House, although without making the distinction that though she exits the domestic realm, she is not a wife. That Lulu is a spinster is, I claim, crucial to Gale’s story. Henrik Ibsen’s plays were in fairly steady production on Broadway in the first three decades of the twentieth century (Internet Broadway Database). A Doll’s House played at the Plymouth theatre two years before Gale published Miss Lulu Bett. 131 These are the terms in which Birte Christ defines these women in Modern Domestic Fiction: Popular Feminism, Mass-market Magazines, and Middle-class Culture, 1905-1925 (2012).

136 twentieth century as the world opens up to (white and middle-class) women with greater possibilities for work outside the home yet continues to restrict their imaginative capacities to consider such possibilities once they are, inevitably, married. Lulu’s growing appreciation of her desires outside of her domestic reality represents Gale’s efforts to both expand these impoverished capacities and to carve out space for a placeless woman like Lulu to inhabit.

Rather than present a bachelor girl already in the city, the life of which Gale had actually experienced, Gale presents a version of that single woman in her nascent state, languishing in a small town, to track her eventual emergence. Gale re-imagines Lulu not as someone alone and passed over, but as someone who might have avoided marriage out of a hazy desire for a life of her own, even if she has yet to realize that life. Soon after meeting her, Dwight’s brother, Ninian, asks her, “Is it Miss Lulu Bett? Or Mrs?” (24).

Lulu replies in a low voice, “‘Miss,’” as one, the narrator opines, “who confesses the extremity of failure.” But then “from unplumbed depths another Lulu abruptly spoke up.

‘From choice,’ she said” (24). The voice of this other Lulu, rising to the surface from somewhere deep inside, conveys that somehow that statement is true, that not marrying was a choice, even if Lulu cannot really explain how and why that is.132 In this she bears a resemblance to upper-class Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth (1905) who repeatedly sabotages her chances to marry without fully understanding why. Craving a life beyond one in which she is meant only to be charming and amusing, Lily cannot imagine what that life might be beyond a “freedom from worry.” After an editor writing in The New York Tribune questioned how Lulu was represented in the play adapted from her novel, Gale felt compelled to explain herself, and Lulu, in a letter:

132 Perhaps because she is looking primarily at the play, Riann Bilderback finds this not particularly credible (20).

137

To your feeling that women of Lulu Bett’s ultimate initiative would not have been

trampled upon for fifteen years, do you mind my saying: ‘I know them.’ Doesn’t

every one? Overshadowed, browbeaten women, wives or Lulus…Liberation is

inspiration. It is there, simply, and then at last it breaks through…As to why they

remain so long browbeaten—whether wives or Lulus—that is another matter.

Partly it is the poison of the ‘duty’ obsession—dead duty…133

Miss Lulu Bett suggests that in the absence of models for what her life would be like if she were to leave, without the words to describe desires present but unformed within her,

Lulu has stayed on in her sister’s home (as Lily Bart has remained tied to the upper-class milieu in which she was raised). Offering further rebuttal to doubts that someone like

Lulu would have suddenly found the initiative to leave after so many years of resigned passivity, Gale explains in the same letter to The New York Tribune that “these

Cinderellas [stay] in the ashes” because “they so often live in little towns. Liberation is not a matter of reading the want ads. It is a matter of a journey and uncertainties and terrors. And they may not have $25 or $10 in the world.” Confined to small lives in small towns, the strength and imagination to leave is not always quick in coming. Even if women like Lulu are able to envision a life beyond the confines of “dead duty” there is still the matter of simple economics. Gale understands that for Lulu to leave the Deacon house as she does without money or job is a hero’s journey.

A journey Edith Wharton does not allow her comparable heroine to make. The naturalism of House of Mirth offers no opportunity for Lily to break free of the environment in which she was raised and the life for which she was bred, unable as she is

133 The letter to the editor appeared in The New York Tribune on January 31, 1921 under Cinderella Bett: Why Miss Zona Gale Considers the Slavery Theme True to American Life.

138 to accommodate herself to the “dinginess” of spinster Gerty Farish’s life. Gale’s realism, however, sees a way out for Lulu, which she reveals in her attention to the incremental, everyday movements that shift Lulu’s thinking. Gradually and increasingly moving her body in accordance with her own desires and in defiance of Dwight and Ina’s demands and expectations ultimately leads to Lulu’s realization that even if she has no place to go moving out is infinitely better than staying put under their roof.

That Gale should be moved to such critique is evident from the interests and activism that marked her life. Born in 1874, Gale attended the University of Wisconsin,

Madison. After graduation she moved to Milwaukee to become a reporter with The

Evening Wisconsin and the Milwaukee Journal. Showing the determination of Terry in

Stage Door and Judy in Dance, Girl, Dance, Gale secured her first reporting job by presenting herself “each morning at the desk of the city editor to ask for an assignment” until he finally gave her one (Craig 25). Like many young women from the Midwest inspired by the exploits of women journalists and their lives as bachelor girls, Gale moved to New York City in 1901 to write for The New York Evening World. While covering theatre and the arts, and doing Nelly Bly-like stunt reporting, Gale also submitted short stories to various magazines, eventually earning enough money from her fiction to quit journalism, although she continued to submit articles and essays to magazines like The Saturday Review and The Nation. After a few years, Gale returned to live in Wisconsin, but would move back to New York City every fall where she placed stories with The Delineator, Harpers, Women’s Home Companion, and Everybody’s

Magazine. For the entire two months of her stay she would stay in a hotel because she hated housework (Craig 29).

139

In all, Gale wrote twenty-two volumes of fiction, seven plays, eighty-plus

Friendship Village stories, and four larger works of non-fiction. But her career, which garnered her considerable fame and public profile, was always in tension with her obligations to family. After she was awarded a $2000 prize for a story submitted to The

Delineator, Gale planned to travel to Europe but her parents convinced her to come home instead (Simonson 43). Parental pressure may also have interfered in her relationship with poet Ridgeley Torrence, whom she met as a young woman during her early years in

New York. They had plans to marry but she struggled to tell her parents about him, and in the end he married someone else (Simonson 20). This tension between fealty and independence is echoed in Lulu’s fight to assert her autonomy in the novel as Dwight and

Ina continually confront her with her obligations to their family.134

As both servant and spinster, Lulu is doubly invisible—a condition echoed in the novel’s first sentence: “The Deacons were at dinner.” Lulu is not a Deacon. Nor is she at dinner.

She will eventually take a seat at that table, but only after everyone has received their food. Regarded as too weak for work outside the home, Lulu is nevertheless the family’s

“beast of burden,” a double entendre encompassing both Lulu as the one doing the heavy lifting of child-minding, cooking, and cleaning, and her perceived position as an economic burden. The Deacons’ underestimation of her worth binds Lulu to them in her consequent underestimation of herself, which inhibits her ability to imagine a life different from the one she lived as their domestic servant.

But life begins to change for Lulu with the arrival of Ninian, Dwight’s globetrotting brother whom he has not seen in twenty years. Ninian takes an immediate

134 Biographical details largely culled from Ehrhardt, Simonson, and Williams.

140 interest in Lulu and they quickly establish a rapport. He encourages her to do things she would like to, but otherwise would never do: leave the house to join the family on a picnic; leave the kitchen after finishing the dishes to sit in the parlour; and accompany him, as well as Dwight and Ina, on a trip into town to see a show. Dinner following that show sets the stage for Lulu’s eventual exit from the Deacon house. As conversation stalls, Dwight teases the group to liven up or someone will “read the funeral service over them” (54). Playing off Dwight’s remark, Ninian suggests that he and Lulu perform the marriage ceremony, promptly offering his vows to Lulu, and encouraging her to respond in kind. Lulu does, and because Dwight is a justice of the peace, their vows spoken in his presence constitute a valid marriage ceremony in the state. Although Dwight tells Ninian that the marriage can easily be “set aside,” Ninian and Lulu decide to “see it stand” (56), and depart that evening to travel south before heading west and north to Ninian’s Oregon home. Married to Ninian, Lulu leaves the Deacon home for the first time in fifteen years, marking a dividing line between the old Lulu who needed someone to encourage her to move, and the Lulu she will become, who needs no permission.

This latter Lulu begins to emerge when she returns a month later to the Deacon house after discovering that Ninian is already married. Lulu tells Ina and Dwight that not having heard from his wife in eighteen years, Ninian had long assumed that she was dead, certain that if she were alive she would have asked for a divorce. Rather than stay with him until he found out for sure, she had decided to return. Upon hearing her story,

Dwight spitefully suggests that Lulu has made it up to cover for the fact that Ninian has abandoned her. Lulu insists that she is telling the truth, and that she be allowed to convey it to anyone who asks, but Dwight forbids her to do so, breaking her resolve with talk of

141 the shame that would come to the Deacon family if Ninian were a bigamist. Nevertheless, standing up to Dwight constitutes Lulu’s first act of defiance. Having left the house to go on the picnic, into town, and then travel to different states, Lulu has begun her transition to become one of the boarding house women, her movements increasingly made in accordance with her own desires rather than others’ expectations.

Although the novel ends with her leaving town on the arm of the kind-hearted piano salesman, Neil Cornish, the novel’s primary interest is clearly Lulu’s slow emergence into self-possession—growth the patient plotting of movement communicates—not her eventual marriage. Lulu leaves Dwight and Ina’s house before the prospect of marriage has been proposed; only when she stops by Cornish’s shop to say goodbye on her way out of town does he suggest they marry. The importance of her self-actualization is reinforced by the ending of the first version of the play that Gale adapted from her novel in which Lulu exits on her own with the words “for the first time in my life…I’m going I don’t know where—to work at I don’t know what. But I’m going

…from choice.”135 Whether at her producer’s urging or of her own volition in response to audience pressure for a “happy” ending, Gale revised this ending soon after the play opened so that Lulu ends the play married to Ninian (Cornish has a much reduced role in the play versions).136 This revised version earned Gale the distinction of being the first woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, but it is not the ending she preferred

(Atlas 38).

135 The play Miss Lulu Bett premiered on Broadway at the Belmont Theater on December 27, 1920. It played for 600 performances in New York and on the road (Simonson 84). 136 It is not entirely clear why she changed the ending, both reasons have been offered (Atlas 40). Simonson says that rumours that the public found the ending depressing made her change it (84).

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When it was published, the same year as Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, with which it competed for bestseller status, Miss Lulu Bett was hailed as a compelling portrait of contemporary American culture (Williams 109). But while Lewis’s novel is now a frequent inclusion on American literature syllabi, Gale’s tends to be overlooked. Upon its release, reviewers compared the novel to Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome and Willa

Cather’s A Lost Lady (Noe 12), but Carl Van Doren’s account of Miss Lulu Bett as a prime example of “Revolt from the Village” literature proved the most influential in the following decades.137 For most of her career Gale had written the kinds of stories that she was now considered to counter. Her Friendship Village stories celebrate places where

“No one is really poor, sick, or lonely. Where people help one another; [and] former big city dwellers find peace and comfort and healing by moving to this lovely, comfortable, tranquil town (Noe and Neff 9). Marcia Noe and Nancy Neff suggest that Gale’s perspective on small towns may have shifted in her years of activism on behalf of the rights of women, her campaigning for Progressive governor Robert La Follette, and her vocal pacifism during World War I, the latter of which generated considerable conflict for her in her hometown (9). While Van Doren’s categorization ensured Miss Lulu Bett’s inclusion in surveys of American literature for some years, the decline of the “revolt from the village” as a critical rubric, Noe and Neff argue, meant the novel faded from view until its limited recovery by feminist critics in the 1970s and 1980s (11-12).138

“Limited” because Gale has never gained the acceptance of her contemporary and

137 Van Doren defined the category—Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio being prime examples—in a series of articles for The Nation in 1920. Alfred Kazin includes Miss Lulu Bett as an example of “revolt from the village” literature in his On Native Grounds published in 1942. 138 It is interesting that the decline in the rubric did not lead to a complete vanishing of Lewis’s novel.

143 friend Willa Cather and her self-styled mentor Edith Wharton.139 In their determination to differentiate themselves from the “scribbling women” associated with commercial culture, Cather and Wharton cast themselves in the mold of the solitary male artist, which, as Deborah Lindsay Williams argues, made them “safe” choices for feminist revival (Not in Sisterhood 5). Ironically, given their recovery by feminist scholars, Cather and Wharton themselves maintained distance from the feminist movement. And, as

Williams rightly points out, they kept their independent and economically self-sufficient women at the margins of their novels,140 whereas Gale never made her politics a secret as a prominent member of the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association and the National

American Woman Suffrage Association (122). Gale also nurtured writers such as a young

Anzia Yezierska by funding scholarships at the University of Wisconsin, which gave them a full year of support in which to focus on their writing (Ehrhardt 19). Her sense of sisterhood extended to her membership in Heterodoxy, the women’s group that met for regular lunches in Greenwich Village from 1912 to 1940, whose members included

Susan Glaspell and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, along with Fannie Hurst and Mabel Dodge

Luhan, as well as doctors, lawyers, and artists. Gilman and Glaspell have also been revived by feminist critics with societies devoted to them in the American Literature

Association while Gale remains a regional writer, scholars of her work more likely to be found at a conference of the Midwestern Modern Language Association than the ALA.

Twenty-first-century attention to forms of middlebrow culture (the category to which Gale migrated after modernism’s eclipse of realism, and the feminization of

139 Gale’s correspondence with Wharton began after Gale sent a letter to her publisher after the publication of Wharton’s Glimpses of the Moon (1922). Wharton, though only a little over a decade older, cast herself as a member of an older generation of writers (Williams 13). 140 Gerty Farish in House of Mirth and Lena Lingard in My Antonia are two notable examples.

144 regional literature) has Gale (very) slowly moving in from the sidelines. Williams’s Not in Sisterhood: Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, Zona Gale, and the Politics of Female

Authorship (2001) is the only book-length work devoted to her, but Gale features prominently in Julia Ehrhardt’s Writers of Conviction: The Personal Politics of Zona

Gale, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Rose Wilder Lane and Josephine Herbst (2004), Birte

Christ’s Modern Domestic Fiction: Popular Feminism, Mass-Market Magazines, and

Middle-Class Culture, 1905–1925 (2012), and in Lisa Botshon and Meredith Goldsmith’s

Middlebrow Moderns (2003) which includes a chapter on Gale (written by Williams).

The 2003 issue of Midwestern Miscellany published by The Society for the Study of

Midwestern Literature is devoted to Gale, as is an article by Marilyn Atlas in the same publication the previous year. The fact that Midwestern Miscellany is not a peer-reviewed journal and is published by a society devoted to regional literature also says a good deal about Gale’s current status.

Of the recent attention paid to Gale much of it has hinged on her activism, which in addition to women’s rights and pacifism included racial equality (Gale was an early member of the NAACP).141 Ehrhardt places politics at the centre of her investigations of

Gale’s work because, as she writes, Gale considered her writing and activism as “equally constitutive of her identity” (19). However, the urge to demonstrate how Gale’s fiction reflects her politics often leads to an emphasis on content over form, despite the “serious artistic intent” Gale communicated in numerous essays on writing.142 Lynn Rhoades does

141 A friend of Jesse Fauset, she wrote the foreword to Fauset’s novel The Chinaberry Tree (missing from subsequent editions), after Fauset’s publisher Frederick A. Stokes would not accept it for publication. In 1915 she submitted a story advocating social equality between blacks and whites to the Atlantic Monthly but they rejected it. A copy of the letter is in her papers at the Wisconsin Historical Society. 142 In their introduction to Middlebrow Moderns Botshon and Goldsmith admit that many of the writers within the volume, despite popular success, voiced “serious artistic intent” (10) but that usually refers to an intent to say something about early-twentieth century society rather than the literary methods they employed to do so.

145 make the “rhetoric of rebellion” in Miss Lulu Bett her topic, and Alan Ackerman its

“infelicities of form,” although he does so only with respect to the novel’s theatrical adaptation.143 Situating what Gale “does with words” in the play as a form of modernist experimentation, Ackerman is dismissive of the novel for what he considers its lack of the same.144 The assumption made of the play he seeks to refute, that realism is devoid of complex literary strategies, is one Ackerman nevertheless applies to the novel.145 I disagree with his assessment of the novel and argue that Gale exhibits a complex literary strategy in her attention to the movement of Lulu’s body. In the novel Miss Lulu Bett

Gale’s creative experimentation extends beyond language to explore a body’s capacity to express the “unexpressed,” and unarticulated. In Lulu’s movements Gale gives shape to the suppressed desires of a woman for a life beyond marriage and domesticity for which at the start of the novel Lulu has no words. In the absence of words to describe what she wants, Lulu moves her body. And as she moves, she finds the words to declare that what she wants is a life of her own.

Gale took issue with authors who claimed they could record only what they could see because, as she says, “we cannot record what is not manifest. Not every bit of us is incarnate.” To Gale the novelist’s mission is to “to see us both in flesh and spirit all the time” (“Beauty in the Commonplace” 174). The “other” Lulu, the one Lulu will become, exists first only in spirit, as a sensation she feels somewhere beneath her blue gingham dress. But in the successive and cumulative movements of her body, usually in opposition to the opinions and edicts of Dwight as to how she should move that body (as a “regular

143 The little that Gale has been discussed over the years is usually in relation to her Pulitzer-Prize winning adaptation of the novel as with compendiums of American women playwrights. 144 The centerpiece of Ackerman’s argument is Gale’s “Note to Novel Readers” published in The Saturday Review in 1926, which I will discuss later in the chapter. 145 Gale’s methods as a dramatist are less visible, Ackerman says, than those of a modernist playwright like Berthold Brecht.

146 homebody” she would not be interested in heading out on a family picnic, for example

(40)), that spirit gradually materializes into being.

As befits its categorization as Revolt from the Village literature, fused to the novel’s concern for Lulu’s self-actualization is a scathing portrait of middle class life rife with hypocrisy and stultifying conformity, both of which prop up the patriarchy represented by Dwight. A dentist and justice of the peace, Dwight Deacon (as his name suggests) sees himself as a pillar of his community in the fictional Warbleton, Wisconsin.

The opening dinner scene epitomizes the novel’s critique of bourgeois provincialism and suffocating patriarchy, the satire razor sharp and relentless.146 Although he sees himself as “the light of his home, bringer of brightness, lightener of dull hours” (11), Dwight is actually the one responsible for making those hours dull. Offering the mundane as fascinating revelation, Dwight holds forth on the superiority of the baked potato over potatoes prepared any other way, “The nourishment is next to the skin. Roasting retains it” (7). Typical of the novel’s treatment of Dwight is the sly commentary embedded in such pronouncements. Dwight would never deign to cook; it would be beneath his stature as paterfamilias. The narratorial intrusion that accompanies the arrival of a visitor during dinner is similarly dry: “It was notable how slight a thing would give him a sense of self- importance. Now he felt himself a man of affairs, could not even have a quiet supper with his family without the outside world demanding him” (9). But more than Dwight’s immeasurable self-regard is the sense that this dinner scene plays out in similar fashion every night. When Dwight congratulates himself on his remarkably accurate assessment

146 The opening dinner scene and Dwight’s behaviour encapsulate what Gordon Hutner, in What America Read: Taste, Class, and the American Novel, 1920–1960 (2009), describes lying beneath the struggle between urbanity and provincialism as represented by the “revolt”: “As much as the allure of modernism was concentrated in a vision of urbanity and a repudiation of the rustic, these opposing principles also screened a perhaps more intense struggle for supremacy, the charm and wisdom of the cosmopolite versus the self-satisfied hypocrisy of the haute bourgeoisie, along with the petit bourgeoisie’s small-minded fearfulness” (22).

147 of time, “I’m pretty good at guessing time” (8), the implication is that he is good at guessing time because he runs his life in accordance with such regulatory measures.

Dwight is not just as but more mechanistic than their unreliable grandfather clock, a device made for the distinct purpose of keeping time. Dwight’s responses to Ina and hers in turn, “for fifteen years they had agreed” about the potatoes, the narrator tells us (15), are all markers of their routinized lives. Ina’s “I always think that” manages to communicate the immutability of their lives, their conformity in thought and action, in one short statement. Never budging from the safety of custom, Ina and Dwight are effectively immoveable, like the heavy furniture in their parlour, “[r]arely used,” but every morning “dusted. By Lulu.”

She dusted the black walnut center table which was of Ina’s choosing, and looked

like Ina, shining complacent, abundantly curved. The leather rocker, too, looked

like Ina, brown, plumply upholstered, tipping back a bit. Really the davenport

looked like Ina, for its chintz pattern seemed to bear a design of lifted eyebrows

and arch reproachful eyes. (20)

The piano, rather than a source of music and pleasure, when compared to Dwight becomes menacing, “in a perpetual attitude of rearing back with paws out, playful, but capable, too, of roaring a ready bass” (20). Provincialism and patriarchy combine in the stolid objects of the Deacon parlour, the public space and face of the house. Here as in the larger society men condescend and patronize (as Dwight does with Lulu and his daughter Di) while their wives monitor other women with judgement and reproach (as

Ina does her daughters Monona and Di, and Lulu) all the while “tipping back” obligingly to husbands, the better not to disrupt their husbands’ sense of themselves as the axis on

148 which their world turns. The oppressive immovability borne of slavish conformity to routine and behavioural norms, attitudes and comportments that perpetuate the diminution of women, is everything Lulu, joining her fellow women in the boarding house, will actively come to move against.

Lulu’s first “move,” in her gradual journey out the door takes the form of a yellow tulip she places in a vase at the centre of the dinner table. When Dwight finds out that it was Lulu who bought the flower and put it there, he is incensed because, as he explains, they offer Lulu a place in their home “on the supposition that [she has] no money to spend, even for the necessities” (10). When at first he thinks it might have been offered in the service of courtship, Dwight accepts it, but informed that the tulip was purchased by

Lulu herself, it is inconceivable to him, its seeming lack of purpose rendering it inappropriate to the dinner table of a dentist and justice of the peace (10). While the dismissal of the tulip and, by extension, of Lulu independent of her role in the household, offers insight into Dwight’s casual cruelty and parochialism, the tulip is also significant for what it says about Lulu, particularly the colour it shares with the wallpaper in Gale’s friend Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s early feminist short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper”

(1892).147 Sequestered in her home after a bout of neurasthenia, the young woman whose declining mental health is the subject of Gilman’s story fixates on the wallpaper in an upstairs room: “It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper [sic]! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things” (14). Lulu’s tulip is a “beautiful yellow thing” that turns “foul” in the wake of

Dwight’s disdain and humiliation, causing Lulu to throw it on the chip pile in the wood

147 Gale wrote the introduction to Gilman’s memoir.

149 shed.148 But later, “grop[ing] about in the dark,” she retrieves it, fastening it to the lapel of her dress. Both as an aesthetic object and in its chromatic manifestation the tulip hints at a stirring within Lulu, a yearning for something beyond her stimulant-deficient domesticity, something she is unable to express in words, constrained as she is by provincial and patriarchal (often one and the same) assumptions, but which suggests a hunger for beauty and for life, for growth and change. “In all the deadliness of our routine, there are colors, the reflected colors of another plane,” Gale writes in “Beauty and the Commonplace” (173). Lulu’s placement of the yellow tulip on Dwight’s table is a reflected colour of this other plane in Lulu’s life, the “spirit” of the “other Lulu.” Lulu gropes for the flower (towards this other plane) as she will grope her way towards articulating for herself and to others both her discontent and her desires.

Lulu’s tulip similarly recalls Susan Glaspell’s domestic drama, Trifles (1916), in which a pair of wives deduce what the men surveying a crime scene do not: that the silent housewife sitting in a chair in the corner has murdered her husband. Paying attention to small details the men overlook as insignificant, as trifles, they understand how a housewife can be made to feel trapped and resentful—and murderous—when a husband takes from her (a love of singing, a beloved bird) that which she holds dear. The tulip’s appearance so close to the start of the novel acts as a warning to Gale’s readers not to overlook seemingly small, “commonplace,” gestures and movements. While Dwight may think otherwise, that tulip is no mere trifle in Lulu’s life.149 The yellow tulip is Lulu’s first wordless act, her first vital movement toward her eventual articulation of her desire for a life of her own. While at one point Lulu thinks to herself that Ninian invested her

148 Interestingly, the colour changes in the play to pink. 149 The tulip’s centrality is evident on the cover of my Anchor Books edition, which features a silhouette of a woman with a tulip threaded through her buttonhole.

150

“with a longing which she had never really had, until he planted that longing,” the tulip she places on the Deacon table belies that Lulu indeed wanted before he arrived, she is simply unable to say exactly what it is, “She had wanted she knew not what” (44).

Lulu’s Becoming Body

To focus only on those instances where Lulu asserts herself in words misses the many ways the novel makes readers “feel” the movement “towards” the actualization of the

“other Lulu” before we witness her incarnation (like the yellow flower), and thus Gale’s novel-length concern with issues of female identity and self-actualization rather than issues of marriage.

Dusting in the parlour early in the novel Lulu catches a glimpse of her reflection,

“bodiless-looking in her blue gingham gown” (20). As befits someone largely invisible to herself and others, Lulu appears at first materially insubstantial. It is the loose fit of her dress that ostensibly blurs the outlines of her body, but in her lack of self regard Lulu is metaphorically bodiless; the image she sees reflects the space she occupies in the house

(and a wider society) and of her own self-regard, so attenuated that she can see herself in a “narrow pier of glass” (20). Yet, though bodiless, Lulu is “somehow alive. Natural.”

Her feet give “news of some other Lulu, but slightly incarnate” (25, my italics). At this early stage, Lulu cannot even recognize, let alone articulate, the presence of an inner life, and externalizes it as “other.” As the novel progresses, we watch Lulu’s “bodiless” body move in the process of becoming the “other Lulu,” eventually actualizing this virtual self as just Lulu.150 Just as, in Dance, Girl, Dance, Judy’s body moves even as she stands still on a burlesque stage, bearing the dynamic force her words articulate, Lulu’s silent but

150 Lynn Rhoades interprets this moment as Lulu needing to transcend her body, rather than inhabit or fully embody it as key to her self-actualization (79).

151 moving body “prearticulates,” the thoughts for which she does not yet have words. Her feet, the only part of Lulu’s bodiless body that is “incarnate,” and the part of her body that physically moves her from one place to another, express “immanent” movement, movement we (and Lulu) feel before she actually moves her body outside of its habitual patterns and places. Lulu’s feet are the virtual force, the “preacceleration,” of Lulu’s movements taking form. Her movements beyond this moment, in turn, “prearticulate” her final confrontation with Dwight, in which she forcefully declares that she “can’t stand it” any longer and must go (131).

This connection between movement and consciousness, between thought and motion, is actually established in a conversation between Ninian and Lulu. When Lulu suggests that it must be awful for him to be away from his family for so long, he is dismissive of her theory: “You think that? A man don’t know what he’s like till he’s roamed around on his own” (27), adding “Course a woman don’t know that.” Lulu,

“stupefied by her own question,” asks, “why don’t she?” (27). She will eventually understand the merit and truth behind her question, that women need to roam as much as men to understand who they are, after she has done some “roaming around” herself.

In her “Note to Novel Readers” Gale asks readers to envision the new writing of the “modern age” alongside modern innovations such as the radio, electricity, and skyscrapers. Trying to build appreciation for the work of contemporary authors who were being dismissed for not writing “old-fashioned” stories, she explains that modern writers are “experimenting with expression, with interpretation, with human material, with style and diction.” Describing these new “excursions of the novel” Gale alights on changes to the presentation of dialogue, in which lines “run together” with the rest of the text

152 without quotation marks. To make this less confusing to readers, Gale writes, the author must lose some of “his omniscience,” and enter only the consciousness of one character, resisting the temptation to describe the appearance of the protagonist, and devise a means for imparting “by some chemistry,” all the “prismatic areas of his character’s consciousness of which neither the character nor the public has measurable intuition”

(446). Following her own prescription, Gale has Lulu, whose emerging consciousness is our guide, see her reflection and describe what she sees—which at the beginning of the novel is someone barely present, a bodiless body. Just as she has Lulu put the yellow tulip on the dinner table, Gale positions Lulu in front of a mirror to communicate what she will spend the entire novel finding out, that she and the “other Lulu” are one and the same.

Lulu Is Moved

Drawn to motion, Lulu nevertheless eschews it for herself. Ambling around the garden one evening when Dwight and Ina are out, Lulu imagines the gathering they are attending

“as a futurist receives the subjects of his art—forms not vague, but heightened to intolerable definiteness, acute colour, and always motion—motion as an integral part of the desirable” (23). 151 But when Ninian asks her, “Where you been mostly?” she answers, “Here. I’ve always been here” (28). When he insists she come on the picnic with the family, an invitation Dwight has not extended to her, she tells him, “Oh I never think of such a thing,” something Dwight confirms, and we suspect is the reason she never thinks it, when he tells Ninian that “Lulu is a regular homebody” (40). Ninian convinces

151 Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s futurism advocated that artists capture the movement of things.

153 her to go and later, once they are settled in a spot, reveals to him that “[this] is the first place she had been to in years” (44).

In a letter expressing admiration for Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, Gale raves that Woolf’s writing seems “to prove, as science proves of the ‘inorganic’ that there is no such thing as inaction…. All is furious action all the time.”152 Gale shows us that within Lulu, seemingly placid and immoveable, all is “furious action.” Even if Lulu never goes anywhere, having “always been here” at the Deacon house, movement has coursed through her body waiting to take form. For women like Lulu, socialized into believing themselves unable to move their bodies for purposes other than domestic and familial duties, to actually consider moving her body for herself requires some provocation.

That is why before Lulu moves on her own, she is first moved by Ninian. It takes someone like Ninian, drawn himself to motion, to make Lulu begin to feel her way towards initiating her own. When Lulu returns to the Deacons without Ninian, we are told that she does not “seem in any wise upset” (65). Her only wish is that Ninian had waited to tell her about his wife when they reached Oregon rather than telling her in Georgia

(68). In other words, having experienced travel, she yearns only to have been able to keep

“roaming” a little while longer.

To a large extent, Ninian’s desirability is directly attributable to his life in motion.

Movement adheres to Ninian from the moment we hear of his coming visit, in the reference to the travels that have kept him from seeing his brother for twenty years, and in the roving eyes that look out from his picture on the parlour shelf following Lulu as she dusts (21). Ina even mistakes Ninian for a peddler, an itinerant salesman, when he first arrives at the house. That he embodies movement explains why Ninian, only minutes

152 From letter to Mrs. Helen Bridgman dated September 1922.

154 after meeting her, can say to Lulu, “It strikes me…that you’re going to do something mighty interesting before you die” (30). Motion incarnate, Ninian can sense the nascent vitality in Lulu’s body, borne of the desire for movement Lulu carries within her without ever having made a move, and drawn toward it, invites her to move with him. After dinner his first night at the house, Lulu rushes to finish the dishes, but when she is done, rather than head into the parlour with the others, she sits down by the kitchen window.

Only after Ninian finds her in the kitchen and escorts her “on his arm” does she enter the front room. Once there, Lulu does not join in the conversation but sits silently in a rocking chair and rocks. She may exhibit the outward signs of movement, but at this early stage it is the chair that moves Lulu—just as Ninian did by bringing her into the parlour on his arm—not her body, which sits “motionless, save for the rocking” (38). Theodore

Dreiser’s Carrie Meeber ends her story in a rocking chair, but this is where Lulu’s begins.

At the close of Sister Carrie its narrator laments: “In your rocking-chair, by your window dreaming, shall you long, alone. In your rocking-chair by your window, shall you dream such happiness as you may never feel” (659). Throughout the novel, whenever Carrie is disturbed or unhappy she takes to her rocking chair to think. But all her rocking never really leads anywhere; she never finds happiness. Carrie’s rocking chair is a function of

Dreiser’s critique of capitalism and the fundamental lack of agency of individuals under it—the rocking chair may move, but it stays in one place. In Miss Lulu Bett the rocking chair offers Lulu her first taste of “desirable motion.” Moved by the chair, Lulu will move on to move herself.

Ninian is distinguished not only by movement, but also improvisation. “The precision and speed of his improvisation reveal[s] him” when he weaves a fanciful story

155 about Santa Claus and a jewelry shop in heaven for the younger Deacon child, Monona, after she asks him about his diamond ring (30). But his improvisatory skill brings out

Lulu’s latent one, and from the moment they meet, she is candid and feisty with him.

After Lulu replies, “Miss…from choice” to his initial question “Is it Miss Lulu Bett?....Or

Mrs.?”, she retorts, “What kind of Mr. are you?” Her response prompts Ninian (and the reader) to dwell on the fact that, unlike a woman, a man’s marital status cannot be discerned from his title (28). When Ninian “proposes,” at dinner in town, Lulu gamely offers “I, Lulu, take thee, Ninian, to be my wedded husband” as proof “that she too could join in” the fun (55). Like the other fast-talkers in my boarding house, Lulu’s quick wit and improvisatory skill, before she has made any concrete moves of her own beyond the placing of the tulip on the dinner table, signal her vitality and instill expectations of further movement to come. Though she first identifies her candour as belonging to the

“other” Lulu, “whom she had never known anything about, [but who] seemed suddenly to speak for her” (45), as she builds up momentum in movement, Lulu will drop this attribution, assimilating the “other Lulu” to speak wholly as herself.

Ninian’s itinerant life and his gift for improvisation position him as the polar opposite of Dwight and Ina and their worship of stability and decorum. Rather than sameness, he seeks variety, the unknowns of travel over the security of home. This makes

Ninian difficult for Dwight to pin down both literally and metaphorically. To Dwight,

Ninian has not accumulated much in his life beyond mileage because he cannot identify him with a specific profession or position: “Hey, Nin, what are you anyway?” he asks in front of guests. Juxtaposed to their routinized household and their conformity to the established roles of husband, wife, father, mother, dentist, magistrate, and hostess,

156

Ninian’s itinerant lifestyle is directly linked to a disregard for bourgeois norms that evaluate people according to professional identifications and marital status. That disregard is exemplified by his entering through the kitchen, the space of “women’s work,” rather than the front door and parlour, a way into the house that would be anathema to Dwight. Fittingly, Ninian is the first one to see “something” in Lulu that no one else can. This is Ninian’s ultimate value: he is the first to actually see Lulu for herself. That he himself is difficult “to place,” makes him desirable in a narrative about one woman’s ultimate refusal to stay in hers. As Ninian is the first to see Lulu, so too does the novel enact Gale’s having first seen women like her, and through Lulu offered similar license to take on Lulu’s movements for themselves.

It is true that Ninian is not an entirely unproblematic character. Despite his identification with motion, he is not without Dwight’s self-regard or his patriarchal assumptions and entitlements. He is a “tease,” a “braggart,” an “unbridled, unmodified male” urging Monona when he first meets her to “give us a kiss.” And Lulu has to correct his assumption that only men “need to roam” to find out who they are. But Ninian’s fabrications, the flash of his diamond rings, and his life of ongoing travel align him with gamblers and con artists, and as is the case with the con artists of the last chapter, Ninian is ultimately sympathetic. His outsider status as a man hard to pin down enables his recognition of Lulu. He also redeems himself later in the novel by writing to Dwight with proof that he indeed had a wife, and that he did not leave Lulu because he did not care for her, which allows Lulu to save face. He likewise sends a letter to Lulu, apologizing for what he did to her because she “is so downright good” (138).

157

Lulu Moves

Lulu leaves town on Ninian’s arm, but she returns to the Deacon house alone, immediately demonstrating that she is not the same Lulu as the one who left. “The body becomes through forces of recombination that compose its potential directionalities,”

Erin Manning writes (6). Having travelled and seen more of the world, Lulu has absorbed and assimilated this movement into her body, creating potential and momentum for action on her own. Each time she moves that movement “recombines” with ones already enacted to initiate other and varied movements, bringing her progressively closer to a more robust actualization of the “other” Lulu visible in her entire body rather than just her feet.

Attired in a new dress and hat bought for her by Ninian, Lulu begins to assume a place for herself in the Deacon home. Though she returns to cooking and cleaning, she is no longer the passive Lulu. One evening after her return, Dwight and Ina invite to dinner

Neil Cornish, the piano salesman whose shop is on the ground floor beneath Dwight’s office, thinking him, at thirty-four, a possible suitor for the teenaged Di, never even considering the more age-appropriate Lulu in whom over the course of the evening we can see he is actually interested (They also fail to see anything wrong with him for being thirty-four and unmarried, obviously not the case for a woman of a similar age.). Just as he did when Ninian was visiting, Dwight does not include Lulu in the invitation to gather in the parlour around the piano for a “sing” after dinner. This time Lulu does not wait for someone to find her in the kitchen after she has done the dishes and bring her into the parlour; she enters on her own. But while an advance from walking in on Ninian’s arm,

Lulu still enters holding a lamp, asking those assembled whether they need more light

158 before assuming a place among them. Not with someone, Lulu as yet enters the parlour with something. An object rather than a man, the lamp still provides Lulu with an excuse, a functional escort, for leaving the private, domestic space of the kitchen to join the others in the public space of the parlour.153 Nevertheless, at this early stage of independent action, it does enable her to take up a position alongside the others at the piano to sing full-throated. Not surprisingly Dwight cannot resist making fun of her. His snide “Lulu, the mocking bird!” is clearly meant to silence her for the impertinence of assuming a place at the piano. But Lulu, exhibiting the wit first exposed with Ninian, now uses it to defend herself against Dwight’s cruel, and literal, “mocking”: “Lulu the dove, to put up with you” (92). Standing beside them at the piano, singing her heart out, Lulu performs vital movements that defy Dwight and his refusal to take her into account.

The next time Cornish comes to dinner Dwight, Ina, and Di are out. After the meal, he asks Lulu to play something on the piano. This time Lulu leaves the dishes to her mother, and walks into the parlour to sit down in the seat previously occupied by Di.

Rather than read music from the songbook as Di did, Lulu plays and sings from memory.

Not having played piano in a long while, her playing is far from perfect, but Lulu,

Cornish, and even Mrs. Bett in the kitchen are all stirred by her performance. Once she stops playing, “They rested, and, miraculously, the air of the place had stirred and quickened, as if the crippled, halting melody had some power of its own, and poured this forth, even thus trampled” (98). Leaving the kitchen behind to choose pleasure over duty,

Lulu builds on the confidence gained the last time she left there, when she stood beside the piano to sing, but not to play. Taking fuller possession of her body, both playing and

153 Williams refers to the shift in Lulu is somewhat similar terms, saying that Lulu needs too become a “public figure,” to exist outside the kitchen to achieve self-reliance” (111).

159 singing, Lulu finds a vitality that now moves not only her but also the air and others around her. Her bodily improvisations, choosing to play piano over doing dishes and playing from memory, reflect her increasing corporeal flexibility, itself a reflection of her developing capacity to fashion herself in her own rather than Dwight and Ina’s image. In the vital movement of playing the piano and singing, Lulu finds her speaking voice, one she will increasingly use to resist Dwight’s orders, and which allows her to make her first reach beyond the Deacons to ask their neighbours the Plows, after one of Dwight’s particularly cruel insults, whether they might help her find a job.

Every move Lulu makes towards her final exit is incremental. Each action assimilates and recombines within her as virtual movement, increasing her momentum and propelling her towards the “fleshing out” of her “bodiless” body. Leaving the house to go on the picnic at Ninian’s insistence, entering the parlour on his arm, then leaving town with him to travel, followed on her return by entering the parlour first with a lamp, then of her own accord to sing and play the piano, Lulu becomes increasingly embodied and emboldened. Di Deacon’s secret plans to elope with her boyfriend, Bobby Larkin, set the final stage for Lulu’s full emergence into herself by forcing her to leave the house on her own (as she did the kitchen) to find them and bring them back. Home with the children and Mrs. Bett while Dwight and Ina visit his ailing mother, Lulu discovers that

Di is headed toward the railway station with Ina’s new satchel. Frantic, Lulu, rushes out of the house in her blue gingham dress and worn-out shoes. The Lulu who never went anywhere now runs two or three blocks toward the station, the effort of which is made clear in how badly she runs, “her ankles in her low loose shoes continually turning, her arms held taut at her sides” (108). Lulu’s body, like the “crippled, halting melody” she

160 plays on the piano with Cornish at her side, still bears the vestiges of the habitual inertia that characterized her life before the arrival of Ninian and his desirable motion. But running, Lulu’s body quickens both literally and figuratively, advancing the revivification

(or vivification in the case of the “other Lulu”) of her body that began with her first outing during Ninian’s visit. When she reaches the station and is told that Di and Bobby took the last train to the next town, Lulu exhibits the improvisatory skills that have accompanied her increasing physical dexterity and convinces the conductor to let her on the next train though she has no money, “you got to give me a ticket to Millton, without me paying till after—and you got to lend me two dollars” (108). Suddenly Lulu is alone on a train headed to an unfamiliar town. She finds Di at a hotel and brings her home, but having made this journey, exhibiting velocity in excess of any movement executed thus far, as well as a surprising resourcefulness in her quick thinking at the train station, Lulu is finally ready to make her final exit. In her loping run through the streets of Warbleton, she finally shakes off the old Lulu to fully embody her “other” as just “Lulu,” moving and speaking for herself rather than from the “unplumbed depths” of her first responses to

Ninian. When Dwight, with Ninian’s letter in hand confirming the truth of her story, still refuses to allow Lulu to reclaim her pride by telling people what happened, Lulu has finally had enough. For the sake of Di’s “future prospects” (Dwight’s final manipulation)

Lulu agrees not to reveal what actually happened to her “marriage,” but she is now done with the Deacons.

Because (what little) critical focus on Miss Lulu Bett has been its critique of patriarchy and celebration of female empowerment, how critics approach the endings of the various versions of Miss Lulu Bett —the novel, that play as originally adapted from

161 the novel, and the play as it was revised for Broadway—often affects their evaluations of the critique and empowerment that precede it. Like the final of scene Dance, Girl, Dance when, after her triumphant dressing down of her audience, Judy must listen to Adams scold her for having had “[her] way long enough,” Lulu marrying Cornish or Ninian after she has made her own triumphant decision to leave the Deacon house has been a problem for many critics. But, as Marilyn Atlas notes, even Gale’s favoured version of the play, in which Lulu leaves on her own, leaves open the possibility that she and Cornish may unite at some later time. As she’s leaving his shop, Cornish asks Lulu, “Couldn’t you stay with me—?” To which Lulu responds, “Sometime, maybe. I don’t know.” Whether or not

Lulu ends the play with a man does not discount the empowerment she has achieved along the way. Again, to quote Atlas: “Lulu Bett number one, two, and three, will never again be under the power of Dwight Deacon…” (40).154 All three versions retain Lulu’s evolution as she strives to define herself rather than accept Dwight and Ina’s radically reduced version. Lulu’s movements, more than her “rhetoric of rebellion,” reinforce that story.

Viewed through the lens of movement Neil Cornish is not a parallel suitor to

Ninian in a domestic novel’s marriage plot, but a stage in Lulu’s gradual attainment of autonomy from the Deacons. The time Lulu spends with him is significant to the extent that the actions she takes in his presence, abandoning the dishes to play piano and sing, further her embodiment of the “other Lulu.” Although the possibility of her being with

Ninian is eliminated in the novel when Ninian’s wife turns out to still be alive, Lulu is not really meant to be with Ninian either, as suggested by her solo exit at the end of the first

154 In Patricia R. Shroeder’s chapter on realism and feminism in the progressive era in the Cambridge Companion to American Women Playwrights, she cites Carol L. Cole, who writing about female playwrights and “the search for power” takes a similar position to Atlas: “The way the play concludes is not its whole meaning.” (35).

162 version of the play (Gale’s favoured ending).155 Like the romantic rivalry in Dance, Girl,

Dance, the marriage plot in Miss Lulu Bett fulfills the conservative expectations of its form—the women’s picture in Arzner’s case, the domestic novel in Gale’s—allowing

Gale to pursue her own more subversive interest in a spinster’s interior life just as Arzner can the relationships between women. As with Jimmy in Arzner’s film, it is what Ninian sets in motion that is most important, which is Lulu. Lulu’s empowerment and autonomy are not measured by whether or not she marries, but how she takes control of her desires, her person, and her life, which may also include a decision to marry. Marriage to Cornish may not even mean the end of the new Lulu. To Lulu, Cornish “gave her something instead of drawing upon her” (101). As a newcomer to Warbleton, Cornish, like Ninian, is an outsider, allowing him to see something in Lulu that others overlook. Just as Dwight cannot place Ninian (“What are you anyway?”), people have trouble placing Cornish: “A music man, what on earth was that, Warbelton inquired” (83). But while Lulu was largely

Ninian’s audience, Cornish is Lulu’s. Although he sells pianos and sheet music, he neither plays the piano nor reads music. He may be a “music man,” but unlike Ninian, he is not a performer, which allows Lulu to take centre stage, as she does at the piano. As such, Cornish might prove to be a fine partner, providing the music that lets Lulu sing.156

Lulu’s accumulation of motion links her to other females in the Deacon home.

Lulu thwarts Di and Bobby’s plans to elope, but never divulges to Dwight and Ina what

Di almost did, having recognized that she and Di are the same: “was it possible that Di was suffering in the air of that home that she herself suffered?” Lulu comes to understand

155 The revised version of the play, the one written to give audiences a “happy ending,” is more in keeping with the traditional romance plot: Lulu meets a man, they face an impediment to their being together (his being married to someone else), which is then resolved (his wife died; he is now a widow and able to marry) so that the couple can re- unite. 156 Lynn Rhoades sees Neil Cornish as a new model for Prince Charming in Gale’s revision of the Cinderella story, who sees Lulu’s value and prizes her independence and will support it (78).

163 that Di’s coquettish behaviour is designed to attract anyone who might take her out from under her father’s roof (113-114). Lulu and Ina’s mother, Mrs. Bett, similarly suffers under Dwight’s stifling self-regard and condescension, often heading off to her bedroom after an argument of some kind, shutting the door behind her. Like the “madwomen” of

Victorian literature these “tantrims” (as Dwight and Ina call them) are a likely outcome of anger and frustration for her constricted life. When Dwight and Ina are not at home, Mrs.

Bett “lolls at her ease” in Dwight’s leather chair, “as if lolling were the positive, the vital part, and her ordinary rigidity a negation of her” (24). Most of the time, however, like the fireplace in the Deacon parlour, Mrs. Bett is “colourless, fireless, and with a dust of ashes” (20). But Lulu’s gradual incarnation provides the spark that re-ignites her mother’s flame. It is Mrs. Bett who opens the letter from Ninian when it arrives, after

Dwight has specifically ordered Lulu never to open his mail, ensuring Lulu can confront

Dwight with the veracity of her story about Ninian’s first wife before Dwight can suggest otherwise. Ina is too invested and implicated in the patriarchal structures of her home to recognize herself as oppressed or to appreciate Lulu beyond her status as servant.

While Lulu’s movement toward self-actualization may connect her to other oppressed women in the novel, it differentiates her from contemporaneous fictional women outside it such as Lily Bart (in Wharton’s House of Mirth), Carrie Meeber (in

Dreiser’s Sister Carrie), and Antonia Shimerda (in Cather’s My Antonia). Lily Bart may move frequently, but her movement is a sign of precarity not increasing agency. With no source of income and no home Lily is dependent on people to offer her temporary residence, making her vulnerable to gossip and mistreatment. We first set eyes on Lily in

Grand Central Station, a metaphor in Stage Door for the vitality of the Footlights Club

164 and its constant coming and going, but in House of Mirth a representation of Lily’s transience and her own circulation as a commodity within the marketplace of marriage, fetishized by the collector Percy Gryce and the arriviste Simon Rosedale. Lily may be restless with a system that wants to keep her in place (why she cannot bring herself to be another piece of Americana in Percy Gryce’s collection), but she can never imagine any movement outside it. Her abhorrence of “dinginess” makes it impossible. Lily also finds no excitement in her movement about the city, “she hated every step of the walk…through the degradation of a New York street in the last stages of decline from fashion to commerce” (288). Walking is not vivifying for Lily, but the opposite. Once her dwindling means only afford her a room in a boarding house, she walks to tire herself out because her living conditions are so repugnant to her: “She had spent her days in the streets, partly to escape from the uncongenial promiscuities of the boarding house, and partly in the hope that physical fatigue would help her to sleep” (301). Movement can never alter Lily because she is unable to change, having “inherited tendencies” that

“combined with early training” have made her unfit for anything more than being charming and amusing. Unlike Lulu, whose feet are “alive,” Lily has “listless hands” that make her ill suited for the work of millinery at Madame Regina’s and make economic independence impossible.

For Carrie Meeber movement is also not fuel for self-knowledge. Traversing

Chicago streets soon after her arrival, she is initiated only into consumerism and commodity fetishism: with the “right” clothes and place to live she believes she will be happy and soon moves in with the salesman Drouet who can finance both. Eventually, when she achieves some notoriety as an actress, Carrie herself will become a commodity

165 used to sell tickets and apartments in luxury hotels. Movement in pursuit of her desires, following “whither her craving led” (102), is never enlivening for Carrie as it is for Lulu.

It leads only to a continual sense of dissatisfaction—and to her rocking chair.

Unlike Lily Bart, Antonia Shimerda is actually a dexterous and vital mover, the best dancer in the town of Black Hawk. Compared to the other girls whose bodies “never moved inside their clothes,” whose “muscles seemed to ask but one thing—not to be disturbed,” Antonia has “so much spring and variety” in her steps (154). The movement of dancing does not loosen up the bodies of the other girls. It only affirms Antonia’s already present superiority by virtue of her rural upbringing, which engendered in her both a “positive carriage and freedom of movement” (153). The movement of dancing, movement performed outside her domestic duties at the Harlings, is not the source of

Antonia’s vitality. Her vitality is a consequence of having worked the land on her family’s farm. And although a great dancer, her regular attendance at the Saturday night dances first makes Antonia “irresponsible,” and then puts her in danger. Caring “about nothing but picnics and parties and having a good time” (165), she allows a boy who is already engaged to walk her home. The kiss he attempts to plant on her cheek gets her cast out of the Harling home into that of the widely reviled moneylender Wick Cutter after Mr. Harling gives her an ultimatum to either give up the dances or give up her job with his family. Cutter then puts more than Antonia’s propriety in danger when it is revealed that he had conceived an elaborate plan to get his wife out of the house so that he can have his way with Antonia. “Discovered” at the dances, Antonia is eventually forced to leave town because of them, when her fiancé Larry Donovan abandons her already pregnant. Antonia returns to the country and marries, finding happiness in the

166 care of her children and her orchard. Movement performed as work on a valorized and vanishing frontier leads to vitality and vibrancy. Movement in town leads to no good.

Lulu’s Moving Words

People move people, but so do words. One of the pivotal scenes of the novel, the marriage vows in the restaurant, clearly evokes J.L. Austin’s paradigmatic “performative utterances” in his influential How To Do Things With Words.157 Because Ninian already has a wife, despite proposing in the presence of a magistrate (Dwight), Lulu and Ninian are not really married, but they are in the only way that matters to the novel. Their vows may not make a real marriage happen but they make Lulu happen. As Ninian’s “wife,”

Lulu is able to make her first move out of the Deacon house. The novel is less interested in the ritualized performance of the marriage rites than it is in Ninian and Lulu’s improvisatory ones as aspects of a more general corporeal flexibility that sets them apart from Dwight and Ina. Increasingly moving her body in ways she has never done before,

Lulu expands her capacity for bodily improvisation, which includes finding the words to make Dwight move as she wants him to—just as she convinces the conductor to let her on the train despite having no money.

When Lulu returns with the news that Ninian is already married, Ina suggests that no one need know why she has returned, but Lulu insists, “People will have to know”

(68). When Dwight disagrees, Lulu again stands up for the preservation of her pride—it is Ninian’s disgrace not hers. Dwight eventually wrests her into agreement with

157 Alan Ackerman also links the marriage scene to Austin but he makes the connection for a different end: to explore what Gale does with words in the play, which is to “[direct] attention to the building blocks of reality, language itself” (54). He argues that this makes the novel more radical than people realize given its essentially realist mode. As I argued in reference to her “Note to Novel Readers,” the same could be said of the novel, but what is radical is the way the words articulate what has often already been expressed in movement and gesture. Lulu needs movement to find the words to say what she wants.

167 characteristically insensitive manipulations, “Folks’ll feel sorry for you. But the disgrace

[of Ninian’s bigamy]—that’ll reflect on me. See?” (69). But after one too many references to his revised version of her story, in which Lulu made up Ninian’s first wife to cover for his abandoning her, Lulu demands that Dwight give her Ninian’s address so she can write to him to have him confirm her account. After he refuses, she defies

Dwight’s expressed insistence she not speak of Ninian outside the house and goes to the post office to see if she can get the address there. When the post office is unable to locate the address, Lulu demands again that Dwight give it to her. Rather than do so, Dwight tells her he will write to Ninian himself. When he makes no effort to do so, Lulu,

“spring[ing] to her feet,” barks, “’Write to him now!’” (78). And he does.

In the play, Lulu’s assertive use of the directive “now” contrasts with an earlier use of “now” that is not in the novel, but which underscores the weight of the word in both forms. Used in conversation with Ninian, this earlier “now” expresses Lulu’s resigned passivity.

NINIAN: See here—couldn't you tell me a little bit about—what you'd like to do?

If you had your own way?

LULU. I don’t know—now.

NINIAN. What did you ever think you'd like to do?

LULU. I can't get out. I'll never get out—now.

NINIAN. Don't keep saying “now” like that. You—you put me out of business,

darned if you don't.

Ninian cannot tolerate the fatalism that speaks through her use of “now,” her sense of herself and her circumstances as immoveable. In her “now” is the assumption that her life

168 will ever be thus. But after her return from her travels with Ninian, Lulu’s temporal reference takes on the dimension of an illocutionary act in her confrontation with Dwight.

Lulu’s “now” now makes Dwight do things for her. It makes Dwight write the letter to

Ninian, and then give it to her to mail. Lulu eventually turns that “now” on herself, when she realizes she can no longer tolerate living with Dwight and Ina, and must leave now.

Reclaiming and repurposing words, Lulu finally articulates her dissatisfaction and her unwillingness to accept it any longer in a speech that appears verbatim in novel and play.

Where before she saw no future, Lulu now claims the present for herself. “Can’t you understand anything?” she asks of Dwight,

“I’ve lived here all my life–on your money. I’ve not been strong enough to work

they say–well, but I’ve been strong enough to be a hired girl in your house–and

I’ve been glad to pay for my keep...But there wasn’t a thing about it that I liked.

Nothing about being here that I liked...Well, then I got a little something, same as

other folks. I thought I was married and I went off on the train and he bought me

things and I saw different towns. And then it was all a mistake. I didn’t have any

of it. I came back here and went into your kitchen again—I don’t know why I

came back. I suppose it’s because I’m most thirty-four and new things ain’t so

easy any more—but what have I got or what’ll I ever have? And now you want to

put on to me having folks look at me and think he run off and left me and having

them all wonder. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand it. I can’t....” (131)

The heroine of “modern domestic fiction,” defined by Birte Christ as an amalgam of the courtship plot of nineteenth-century domestic fiction and early twentieth-century feminist discourse around the New Woman and gender equality, is no longer a young girl

169 about to get married but a mature woman struggling with married life. Although Lulu is not a wife at the start of the novel, her struggle to liberate herself from Dwight and Ina could be said to follow modern domestic fiction’s dramatization of the struggle between domestic duty and independence. Yet categorizing her thusly threatens to eclipse an important difference represented by the unmarried, “most” thirty-four-year-old Lulu.

Single herself for many years, as Atlas points out, Gale perhaps could not completely ignore the fact that single women’s lives often lack power and can be economically tenuous and lonely: “Perhaps whether women married or not was not Gale’s main issue, but how they maintained dignity and integrity in a patriarchal world where they had few opportunities to earn a decent living and little support from women or men (42).158

Dwight’s inflated sense of his own importance as magistrate and dentist deems Lulu as spinster and servant to have little or no value. Worthless, Lulu does not need to worry that anyone will think less of her if they find out Ninian is already married. Her shame is thus of little consequence, unlike the calamity it would be for him and Ina. In her final refusal to submit to his callous and continual diminishment of her person, Lulu asserts both her value and her claim to the dignity Dwight so zealously reserves for himself.

Lulu begins the novel almost immobile, as someone who “has always been here,” but by the time she leaves the Deacon household she has travelled to another state, run through town, and taken a train on her own. Yet her desire for a different life, for beauty, for something, is present at the start of the novel—in the tulip she places on the dinner table and in the visibility of the “other Lulu” in her feet. This recognition is fundamental to

158 Atlas writes: Three endings and “none of them makes the problem of women’s economics and troubled self-esteem disappear…Her fictional and dramatic exploration of dependent lives in all three versions demonstrates that she was very conscious of the potential tragedy of being uneducated and dependent on others either economically, spiritually or socially” (41-42).

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Gale’s project: the absence of overt articulation does not equate to an absence of thought, or of feeling and sensation. Lulu’s reticence and the fact that in fifteen years she had rarely left the Deacon home belies the fact that Lulu wants more from life. As she moves,

Lulu accumulates self-awareness, leading to more, and more definitive, movements, and finally to the discovery of words with which to describe the formless desires, present though unarticulated, those prior movements expressed.

Like the Delsartean exercises performed by middle class women in the hopes that their movements would eventually “naturalize,” freeing their bodies to capitalize on the new social roles available to them in modern society, Lulu, moved first by Ninian’s will and direction, begins increasingly to move herself, energizing her body and calling into being what before she could acknowledge only as the “other Lulu.” In the compounding of vital movements Lulu achieves the self-awareness to understand that Lulu not as

“other” but wholly herself. And as she comes to embody this other Lulu, Lulu takes back from Dwight and Ina their presumed ownership of her body and her being.

“The neglected implications of daily human living, when at last these are observed, move us most,” writes Zona Gale in her essay “Implications,” published in

Portage, Wisconsin and Other Essays (116). Thirty-three and unmarried, neither mother nor wife, Lulu is a largely invisible figure both inside the Deacon home and beyond it.

But Gale uses her novelist’s eye to observe and carefully render the everyday movements

—rocking in a chair, carrying a lamp into a parlour, singing and playing piano, running for a train—that are vital for Lulu to perform before she can make, or even consider, her ultimate move to leave the Deacons and their presumptions behind.

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In her striving for and movement toward realizing a life of her own Lulu’s struggle remains relevant when so many women continue to assume that heterosexual marriage is necessarily a part of their destiny, or have difficulty even imagining a life outside its boundaries, as Kate Bolick’s 2015 memoir, Spinster: Making of Life of One’s

Own attests. Choosing herself and her own aspirations, putting herself first, remains a radical act for many women. Although Lulu marries at the end of the novel, her desire for more than what society envisions for her remains both provocative and extremely moving.

Chapter 4 The Feminist Movements of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Intimate Memories

Although her sexual honesty certainly qualifies Mabel Dodge Luhan as a New Woman, a number of confessions in her four-volume autobiography Intimate Memories, published between 1933 and 1937, seem to call into question her feminist bona fides, especially the following, “I wonder, I really do, if any woman can ever do anything that is not drawn out of her by a man” (B 48).159 Considering the number of women she knew who contradict this statement it seems an odd thing for her to say, but it does makes her more representative of her time than her friends Emma Goldman, Willa Cather, and Margaret

Sanger: “Once we look past the sexually liberated image of the New Woman in the popular press and fiction of her day, we often discover women who are intellectually and emotionally reliant on men,” Luhan scholar Lois Palken Rudnick writes in Mabel Dodge

Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds (1984). Being muse to a genius was often an easier route to power for women (xii, xiii). Rudnick offers as possible explanation for the above comment that while writing her autobiography Luhan was reading Havelock Ellis, who insisted that women’s “primary vehicle of fulfillment lay in ‘mothering’ male genius.”

She also suggests that A.A. Brill may have exerted particular influence as her therapist with his theories on “the fulfillment of women’s ‘nature’ through love and motherhood”

(ix).

159 Because the four volumes of her autobiography were originally published separately, they are numbered individually. Page references begin with designated volume followed by page number as per Rudnick’s example: B for Background; EE for European Experiences; MS for Movers and Shakers; and ETD for Edge of Taos Desert.

172 173

But positioned within the boarding house, Luhan’s statements read differently.

They are, instead, analogous to endings that seem to undercut otherwise feminist messaging: Stage Door’s celebration of women’s work and female community concluding with a feisty Terry getting her big break at the same time as she gets her man, the theatre producer David Kingsley; Dance, Girl, Dance’s final scene in which Judy, after her defiant speech on the burlesque stage, faces Steve Adams’ hectoring that she has

“had her way long enough”; or Lulu finally breaking free of Dwight Deacon only to agree to marry Neil Cornish. Should Luhan’s contributions be disqualified in light of a seemingly incomplete or insufficient awakening, when to look at what she did accomplish speaks so much to a feminist willfulness? Can we not acknowledge her contradictions and shortcomings in the same way we acknowledge the imperviousness to racial concerns of her group of reformers (and at times their racism) while still recognizing the value of their social and artistic contributions? In Movers and Shakers, the second volume of Intimate Memories, Luhan recounts what feminist and founder of

Heterodoxy Marie Howe said to her during her last year in New York, before she made her move to New Mexico:

‘You have counted so much for Women,’ she exclaimed. ‘Your Example has

stood for courage and strength; I wonder if you realize that hundreds of women

and girls have been heartened and fortified by the position you took?…The fact

that you lived your life openly and frankly—to take a lover if you wished without

hiding under the law. You have shown women they had the right to live as they

chose to live and that they did not lose respect by assuming that right.’ (MS 526)

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Luhan had spent the majority of her years in New York unmarried and, truthfully, the above is offered as reason for Howe’s disappointment that Luhan had decided to marry her lover Maurice Sterne (she had lived with poet John Reed and never married). But her autobiography shows that although she married, Luhan still lived a life of her own choosing, determined as she was to live a vital and meaningful life. Luhan was a model for women of her time. Can she be one now?

Given that it was A.A. Brill’s idea that Luhan begin writing her autobiography as part of her therapy,160 it is hard not to be reminded of the theories of psychoanalyst Joan

Rivière in her “Womanliness as Masquerade,” published four years before the first volume of Intimate Memories. Did Luhan play up her femininity and play down her ambition and intellect as Rivière describes so as not to intimidate men? As Rudnick herself says of Luhan, “she was not someone to take a back seat to genius” (New Woman

68). Luhan wanted people to know she had a brain: “I was serious and I wanted everyone to know it” (MS 58). But she also learned to be selective about when to put that brain on display: “I learned very early to talk to people only of the things they knew about and liked and never to try to tell them all that I carried locked up inside me” (B 50). Why include in her autobiography alongside the stories, articles, and letters of other more esteemed writers so much of her own writing, including poetry and articles written for newspapers and magazines? Why offer primary sources that testify visibly and contextually to the centrality of her involvement (including meeting minutes) in key events and causes rather than simply write about them, if she really believed she was not a “self-starter” (B 43)? Luhan is well aware of her contradictions—obviously so. At the top of her stationery she had printed a monogram of her initials with words from

160 A.A. Brill is considered the “father” of the American psychoanalytic community.

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Whitman’s Song of Myself pursuing each other in a circle around them: “Do I contradict myself, very well then I contradict myself.” Luhan’s honest and often unflattering self- depictions are worthy of note as part of a determined effort to grow and evolve, to find her place, and to make an impact. They also show a woman who put her own wants and needs before her husbands’ and often her child, a choice that arguably remains as radical today as it was then.

Women like Luhan illustrate a complex struggle. One present in slightly altered form in previous chapters, where the desire to put will to power is complicated or compromised by the need to make a living or by men who are the gatekeepers to the successful attainment of female ambitions and aspirations. As represented in the autobiography, Luhan’s ambivalence towards marriage, marrying four times out of some notion of respectability (or to give a father to her son) while acting as a wife in name only, aligns her with women already encountered who assert their independence, their shrewdness, and resilience, and still end up with men in the end. As a teenager Luhan told journalist and editor Arthur Brisbane that she would never marry, and had imagined she would become a nurse because nurses were the “only women [she] had ever seen who were free and not married” (EE 13). And yet, much like Di in Miss Lulu Bett, who sees marriage as the only way to get her out of her father’s house, Luhan ends up married at twenty-one after her father’s insistence she stop “‘carrying on with the Evans boy!’”

(EE 29). We forget, as Christine Stansell reminds us, just how difficult it was for Luhan’s generation of women to conceive of a life different from their mothers (xii). That difficulty extends to capacities to see themselves beyond what the roles of wife and mother prescribe for them to feel and to be, which is essentially nurturers, not creators.

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Even with Luhan’s extremely privileged status as the only child of wealthy parents, she still found it difficult to shed ingrained ideas about women. Her contemporaries and friends Goldman and Sanger, Cather and Stein, are exemplary in their lives and work, but to focus only on the exemplary perpetuates a binary of value that does a disservice to them all, denying all of the women their right to complexity and contradiction.

The performance of a gendered self, which in previous chapters was read through what Jean Lutes calls “the body-conscious legacy of women’s journalism” (11), is to a certain extent a function of the autobiographical form itself: Luhan is a woman and in

Intimate Memories she gives an account of her life. But she is well aware of the kind of gendered self she is presenting. In the foreword to the autobiography’s second volume,

European Experiences, she rebuts the critical evaluations of her as vain and selfish that followed the publication of the first volume by declaring her intention throughout the autobiography to “show the crude and unflattering aspects of the past, the influences and the changes as the years move along” so that her own experience would prove instructive.

Her dramatization of her foolish and often noxious behaviour is meant to serve a larger purpose: to “facilitate the destruction of the system that produced her” (Rudnick, New

Woman 255).161 Her vanity and selfishness was to Luhan the product of an upper-class upbringing, in which women were raised to do nothing. Finding purpose allows her—as it would all women—to experience her formidable energy as vitality rather than venality.

As a woman, and particularly a wealthy woman, Mabel had always to contend with people who did not take her seriously. Parodies of her autobiography appeared almost as soon as it was released in The New Yorker, amongst other places (Rudnick,

161 Rudnick writes that Luhan presents her life “as a paradigm for the decline and fall of Anglo-American civilization, and in her final volume to provide her fellow Americans with an alternative model of self and cultural transformation” (viii).

177

New Woman 259).162 In Movers and Shakers she expresses her frustration at her consistent categorization as a “sphinx” by journalists covering labour activist Frank

Tannenbaum’s trial, her daily presence presenting an ongoing mystery for journalists given her status as a “society woman from Fifth Avenue.” Luhan hated being labelled anything whether “Red, ardent socialist or society matron” but hates “sphinx” the most

(MS 113). Luhan was “serious,” but her gender and class positions often clouded (and continue to cloud) perceptions of her efforts to engage meaningfully with social and political causes.

Scholars have largely not seen anything in Luhan that could be used as a model for women because they regard her as having contributed nothing substantial of her own—her myriad articles, short stories, and autobiography not amounting to a culturally recognizable oeuvre.163 To writers drawn to her as an enticing subject, such as Gertrude

Stein, Max Eastman, and Carl Van Vechten, she was an “artist-of-life,” a woman (as artists-of-life usually are) who shaped the lives of others around her. Rudnick claims this categorization not as patronization but admiration for an “intelligent mode of being,” but it nevertheless seems a consolation for, as she writes, Luhan having “never found a clear and coherent direction for herself” (New Woman 111). It also makes her an embodiment of the works in the preceding chapters, dismissed for not meeting the (largely male- defined) standards of artistic achievement. A predicament it seems hard for her to escape when she is rarely engaged with outside the context of the modernist writers, artists, and activists with whom she was so famously associated. And so putting her autobiography

162 “Unfortunately for Mabel, most of the serious critics of the 1930s were not interested in her intentions” (Rudnick 256). Steffens, Hapgood, and Eastman all published memoirs in the 1930s but hers was “most widely condemned by Marxist critics” (257). 163 Rudnick argues that Luhan is undervalued because she did not succeed in the “masculine realms of public activity,” having applied her energies to the “creative use of space and place” and “nurtur[ing] the genius of others” (viii).

178 into conversation with the commercial works of the previous chapters, I offer a different way to view Luhan’s legacy. Reading her autobiography via the lens of movement reveals that it is through her restlessness that Luhan can be reinvigorated.

When Christopher Lasch dismisses Mabel as “another rich and restless woman, a footnote in the cultural history of Bohemia” (quoted in Rudnick xv), he clearly intends

“restlessness” as an insult. But Luhan’s restlessness is the fuel driving a woman who from a young age felt keenly the limitations imposed on women, especially of her class.

Her restlessness is the same restlessness her friend Hutchins Hapgood cited as the energizing force behind the development of the Greenwich Village mindset: “When the world began to change, the restlessness of women was the main cause of the development called Greenwich Village, which existed not only in New York but all over the country”

(quoted in Stansell 225). It is the restlessness of women chafing at Victorian restrictions on their desires, ambitions, and most fundamentally, their movements. Luhan’s restlessness is both her resistance to and her transgression of those restrictions, one that finds expression in her autobiography in a preoccupation with people, places, and minds that move, beginning with her own free and careless movement trotting around Buffalo on her pony. Luhan’s restlessness is not aimlessness. On the contrary, it is her restlessness that gives Luhan’s autobiography, and the life she tells, its direction.

In other words, movement is my lens, but it is also Luhan’s. Existential restlessness and its embodied expression as movement characterize her writing of her life and her representation of her unwillingness to be literally and metaphorically stuck in one place, either by marriage, motherhood, or someone else’s idea of who she is. Intimate

Memories is in many ways a narrative of movement: of bodies and of minds in pursuit not

179 only of new ways of seeing, but new ways of being—for Luhan, for women, and for

American society as a whole.

Before getting into the substance of those movements, I must first give a nod to the modernists I would like to leave behind. After they met in the spring of 1911 at her

Parisian salon, Gertrude Stein and Mabel Dodge Luhan maintained close epistolary contact for a number of years, during which time Luhan read, and enthusiastically endorsed, a draft of Stein’s novel The Making of Americans, and Stein, on a visit to

Luhan’s home in Florence, wrote her “Portrait of Mabel Dodge Luhan at Villa Curonia.”

Their many letters, a number of which Luhan includes in Intimate Memories, 164 along with her astute evaluations of Stein’s method, a formal impulse to do “with words” what

“Picasso is doing with paint” (MS 27), make intriguing Luhan’s choice of words early in the first volume of Intimate Memories, published the same year as The Autobiography of

Alice B. Toklas (1933). Referencing the residences she occupied over the course of three decades (at the time of publication), two of which were in the news as much as she was,

Luhan writes, “Of all these houses I will try to tell.”165 Stein, writing as Alice in “My

Arrival in Paris,” the first chapter of The Autobiography, writes repeatedly (as is Stein’s wont) that she will “tell” about the “pictures”; for example, “But this time I am really going to tell about the pictures” (10) and “But gradually I knew and later on I will tell the story of the pictures” (15). By “pictures” she means the paintings by artists like Picasso and Matisse that hung at her flat at 7 Rue de Fleurus. Having “Alice” “tell” “Gertrude’s”

164 Their letters are collected in A History of Having a Great Many Times Not Continued to Be Friends: The Correspondence Between Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein, 1911-1934, edited by Patricia Everett. There are 101 letters from Luhan to Stein and 34 from Stein to Luhan, all at the Beinecke Library at Yale. Stein regularly sent samples and news of her writing to Luhan. The bulk of their correspondence dates from 1911 to 1914, but while their relationship cooled somewhat their letters date into the 1930s. Luhan also remained close to Stein’s brother, Leo. 165 After she left New York, Luhan still circulated in the culture in New Yorker cartoons that referred to her in Taos; her influence is also present in set designs for Shakespeare productions on Broadway based on adobe architecture.

180 life via these “pictures,” Stein positions her literary audacity alongside that of the male painters who came to define modern art.

Telling the pictures, Stein tells herself, just as Luhan tells herself by telling her houses, which to her “have shown the natural growth of a personality struggling to become individual, growing through all the degrees of crudity to a greater sophistication and on to simplicity” (B 16). And just as, by telling the pictures, Stein inserts herself into the history of modern art, by telling the houses Luhan inserts herself into twentieth century history and to the predominant aesthetic, political, and social movements of her time.166 Telling the houses is to demonstrate how her Greenwich Village apartment was not merely a backdrop for the “movers and shakers”—the socialists, anarchists, labour activists, feminists, poets, writers, and intellectuals—who gathered there, but actively shaped their attempts to change the world by providing an environment in which people from different intellectual, political, and social worlds could move and speak unimpeded, thereby helping to facilitate the Movements that agitated on the streets outside.

Luhan periodizes her life in the autobiography according to the places she lived.

The first volume, Background, relates details of her childhood in Buffalo until her coming out into society at eighteen; European Experiences covers her time in Florence from 1904 to 1912; Movers and Shakers her life in Greenwich village from 1912 to 1917; and At the Edge of Taos Desert her move to and first year in Taos, New Mexico, in 1918.

Each period also corresponds to one of Luhan’s houses, the first technically not hers, but, significantly, her parents’. That we are introduced to Luhan’s childhood home in a volume entitled “Background” describes equally the subject of the volume and the way in which her childhood home sits in the background of all the volumes that follow, each

166 Rudnick also makes the point that Luhan asserts her cultural and literary authority in her autobiography (xviii).

181 volume’s representative home a kind of three-dimensional palimpsest bearing traces of the first. It is her parents’ house that proves the most telling, providing a crucial framework through which to view Luhan’s subsequent houses, her life in those houses, and what propelled the moves between them. In European Experiences that home is the

Villa Curonia; in Movers and Shakers it is her apartment at 23 Fifth Avenue; and in At the Edge of Taos Desert, it is her adobe house, Los Gallos.167 Luhan compares these houses to the “shells of the soul in its progressive metamorphoses—faithfully recycling the form of the life they sheltered until they were outgrown and discarded” (B 16), an analogy that leads Rudnick to label the houses “object correlatives for the state of her interior being” (ix). If her homes are object correlatives of her self in transition then the autobiography is an object correlative of Mabel’s life, performing the interactions between people and place, body and object—a life lived “in relation”—that is her idea of a vital life well and purposefully lived.

In his explication of “thing theory” Bill Brown writes, “the story of objects asserting themselves as things…is the story of a changed relation to the human subject and is thus the story of how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject- object relation” (4). Luhan’s houses, and others she mentions over the course of Intimate

Memories, in her telling exceed their “thingness” to encompass an approach to life. How people use their houses, and the things in those houses, what they do there, and how they do it, function as evidence of an approach to living. Thus her parents’ home with her idle father and rigid mother, where furnishings, flowers, and people were always in order

167 It is fitting given the importance of her houses to her story that Mabel’s presence is felt strongest today in Taos, where the Mabel Dodge Luhan house still stands. It is now “a center of art and education” housing a hotel, conference center, and meeting facility.

182 stand in for a life marked by an “immobility of thought and feeling.” A life that each approach represented by her subsequent houses resists in its own way.

In the introduction to her edited version of Intimate Memories, Rudnick explains that she took out significant chunks of the autobiography to focus on Luhan’s value as an

“artist-of-life” and the way she enlightens the struggles of upper-middle and upper-class women of the period. While in agreement with Rudnick’s assessment of the importance of the latter, I have used the unedited version of the autobiography as her edits delete passages crucial to my argument. Of course, focused as I am on the houses, I necessarily perform editing of my own, paying closest attention to the first volume for the seeds of her lifelong restlessness as well as the chapters where she actually describes the houses:

“In Our House,” in Background; “Making a Home” in European Experiences; and “At 23

Fifth Avenue,” in Movers and Shakers (the fourth volume does not separate out into named chapters, about which I will speak in the next paragraph); as well as chapters that take place in the houses, such as “Evenings” in the third volume. As her parents’ home hovers in the background of Luhan’s subsequent homes, so does each representative house sit in the background of its respective volume, providing the settings for her interactions with the people and issues with which she was engaged at the time.

Accepting that Luhan did not just creatively compose her life as she lived it but also its telling, I pay considered attention to her language, especially as it relates to movement.

While Leo and Gertrude Stein, D.H. Lawrence, and Proust, as well as the conversion narrative of American literary tradition, are cited by Rudnick as influences on the structure of Luhan’s autobiography (256), I seek a way of engaging with Luhan’s story of

183 her life that is modern rather than modernist as a way to free her from that label’s capacity to hem her in.

Although part of a title for only one chapter in the volume European Experiences,

“vignettes” could easily describe the first three volumes, which are extended sketches or ruminations on people, both famous and not (“John Reed,” “Isadora Duncan,” “Leo

Stein,” “Dr. Brill,” “Dorothy and Madeleine,” “Miss Tuck”), places (“At Bayreuth,”

“Chevy Chase School,” “Provincetown”), and objects (“Books and Playmates,” “Green

Horses,” “Peyote”) that made an impact on Luhan’s life; and, in fewer cases, describe states of being (“Real Life,” “Depths,” “Change,” “Tendencies,” “Struggling On”). That

Luhan is paying attention to how she is writing her life is most evident in the structural variance of the last volume about Taos. Unlike previous volumes, which break down into chapters with named titles (and subchapters in the first two volumes) as though a collection of seemingly unrelated thoughts, the final volume is presented as a continuous narrative of numbered chapters. The Edge of Taos Desert is also written in a more overt chronological order, from her arrival in New Mexico to the building of her house and her commitment to Tony Luhan.168 This less episodic and tangential structure reflects that, in

Taos, Luhan feels spiritually whole and connected to the life around her.

To focus on her intention to tell her houses is not to suggest that Luhan’s autobiography is a kind of “domestic” history in which, like nineteenth-century writers, she assumes the moral authority of the domestic sphere to bolster her participation in public life. Though a wife (four times) and mother (once, John Evans), she rarely enters a

168 Rudnick also notes this shift, which she says Luhan was quite conscious of in its abandonment of the elaborate prose and often complex sentence structure of the previous volumes (258).

184 kitchen, a point she makes while taking her reader on a “tour” of the Villa Curonia.169

And though extremely happy while pregnant, she immediately plunges into depression as soon as her son is born—“It seemed to me I didn’t want a baby after all” (EE 51). Similar reactions follow her marriages to her first and second husbands, Karl Evans and Edwin

Dodge. When she can no longer abide the wayward eye of her third husband, the artist

Maurice Sterne, she tells him: “It’s no use, Maurice…One of us must leave. And I want to stay here” so she sends him off to the Southwest where “there are wonderful things to paint” (MS 532). Like a boarding house, Luhan’s houses, as represented in the autobiography, are not “private” spaces of family, but spaces she shares with countless others, some of whom actually move in, as artists were invited to do in New York and in

Taos. They are sites where marriage and motherhood are sidelined in the exercise of her, and others’, passions. The ideology of separate spheres that assigned men to the world and women to the home had, to the moderns who took up residence in Greenwich

Village, bred “lies, reticence, ignorance, evasion and hypocrisy” (Stansell 88). Luhan tells her personal, feminist reaction to this story via her houses, themselves housed in the open space of her autobiography, in which a multitude of voices and forms of writing

(letters, meeting minutes, articles, poetry) intersect in the story she wishes to tell.

Before I continue, a note on appellation. From this point on I will refer to Luhan as Mabel. Mabel was very pleased when after the Armory Show she was no longer called

Mrs. Dodge but Mabel Dodge.170 This makes the academic practice of referring to a writer by her last name (which would become Luhan after she married Tony Luhan in

Taos) an erasure of her presence, which does not feel appropriate to a discussion of her

169 “Though one of the most attractive rooms” she enters only once (EE 166). 170 Written in a letter to Stein quoted in Rudnick Mabel Doge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds (68).

185 autobiography and the “intimacy” of its title. Calling her by her first name also recognizes that in the act of writing her life, Mabel makes of herself a character, one who sits alongside Terry, Judy, Bubbles, and Lulu.

Mabel might seem an odd choice for a dissertation about “working” writers and directors generally positioned as middlebrow. Born Mabel Ganson in 1879 to a wealthy family in

Buffalo during that city’s industrial heyday, Mabel never had to work for her living. But while she may not have worked for money, Mabel was preoccupied with the idea of purpose, especially for the “idle” women of her class, and throughout her life feared “the immobility of thought and feeling” that descends upon a person when you have “nothing to do.”

That Mabel was deeply embedded in both the ascension of American modernism and the radicalism with which it often overlapped in the early decades of the twentieth century might also make Mabel seem outside this dissertation’s purview. Mabel wrote poetry, articles, and short stories for The Dial, The Masses, and Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera

Work, and was also on the advisory board for The Masses, guest-editing an issue in 1914.

An attendee at one of the “evenings” in her Greenwich Village apartment might hear

Margaret Sanger on women’s sexual pleasure and birth control; Emma Goldman on the ethos of anarchism; Bill Haywood (I.W.W.) on labour issues; or the father of American psychoanalysis, A.A. Brill, expounding on the new therapy, one of the first places he did so in North America (Rudnick ix). During the Paterson silk workers’ strike of 1913

Mabel spent her days driving picketers around, and helped to organize the pageant play attended by thousands in Madison Square Garden, in which scenes from the strike were reenacted by two thousand workers to raise funds and gain public support. She was also

186 one of the organizers of a citizen’s group (which also included Bill Haywood and W.E.

DuBois) formed to communicate the labour point of view to the Industrial Relations

Commission set up by Woodrow Wilson after the large-scale strikes of the early 1910s

(MS 109). After moving to Taos and becoming an evangelist for the beauty and healing power of the Southwest she enticed many modern artistic and literary luminaries to join her there, among them Willa Cather, D.H. Lawrence, and Georgia O’Keeffe.171

Of course, as I noted in the general introduction, Mabel also invited Edna Ferber to Taos. But given the more common framing of a new modernist utopia in New Mexico,

Ferber is not usually mentioned or considered alongside Mabel.172 Nor is Zona Gale, who was a member with Mabel in Heterodoxy, the Greenwich Village women’s group.

However, placed alongside Stein in particular, Mabel’s correspondence to Ferber and

Gale, as someone both critically dismissed and undervalued, becomes more apparent.173

Stein and Mabel emerged in American culture at the same time and in connection to the same event—the 1913 Armory Show, the first large-scale exhibition of modern art on

American soil. Mabel was brought in to garner publicity and raise money for the show soon after her arrival in New York in 1912.174 Her “Speculations, or Post-Impressionism in Prose,” which both introduced and explained Stein’s writing to a broader audience, circulated at the show in copies of Arts and Decoration magazine as did Stein’s “Portrait of Mabel Dodge Mabel at Villa Curonia.” However, Stein is today the modernist icon and

171 Luhan helped to put Taos on the national and international map of the avant-garde. In addition to Cather, O’Keeffe and Lawrence because of her Marsden Hartley, John Marin, Ansel Adams, Jean Toomer, Mary Austin, Carlos Chávez, Carl Jung, Martha Graham, Aldous Huxley, and Paul Strand were drawn to the Southwest. 172 See Flannery Burke’s From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's (2008), Katja Fauth’s Modernist Visions in Taos: Mabel Dodge Luhan and the Artists of the Stieglitz Circle (2009) and Lois Palken Rudnick’s Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and American Counterculture (1996), as well as her edited catalogue with MaLin Wilson Powell, Mabel Dodge Luhan: American Moderns and the West (2016). 173 Luhan is not undervalued by the many people who visit the Mabel Dodge Luhan house in Taos every year. 174 The Armory Show was what today we would call a “blockbuster” consisting of approximately 1,300 works and advertised with posters all over the city. Some 70,000 people attended.

187

Mabel a minor historical figure, a member of the bohemian community in Greenwich

Village (in Christine Stansell’s American Moderns, for example), the host of a famous salon, but not regarded as having made a substantial contribution of her own. Yet

Mabel’s prominence on the American scene, as Rudnick rightly points out, is evident in

Harcourt Brace and Company agreeing to publish four volumes (and more than fifteen hundred pages) of her autobiography (Rudnick, New Woman viii). But it is also evident in her headlining (“Mabel Dodge Writes on”) a nationally syndicated column for Hearst newspapers. In these columns, which appeared on the editorial page, often next to those of suffragist, journalist, and editor Elizabeth Jordan, Mabel wrote about topics such as the unconscious, the liver’s role in optimal health, and, sounding like a compatriot of Terry’s in Ferber and Kaufman’s Stage Door, work:

The factory girl is earning nine dollars a week, but she is not working for her

living…If she got ninety dollars a week—and remained in those close rooms,

deadened by the relentless machinery that grinds her soul out of her—she would

not be earning her living. (Washington Times, 30 August 30 1917)

The public was interested not just in what Mabel did (which often made it into the papers) but also what she had to say. Proof beyond her national column is provided by articles Mabel includes in Intimate Memories, where she was interviewed in relation to events and causes she supported, such as the case of Frank Tannenbaum, who was arrested, tried, and convicted for organizing a demonstration to draw attention to the plight of the unemployed and homeless.175 But what Mabel had to say and how she said it

175 Luhan raised money for his legal defense and was a daily presence at his trial. Tannenbaum had led a group of 600 unemployed and homeless men around to churches each night demanding they house and feed the men for a night. One

188 has largely been ignored in the years since her death (and really for some decades before that). Scant critical attention has been paid to her writing save the more than two decades worth of sustained engagement by Rudnick, who has written and edited a number of books on Mabel as well as the edited edition of Intimate Memories.176 Feminist critics like Rudnick have done much to recover women like Mabel, muses to more famous men

(like her lover John Reed or her friend Carl Van Vechten). Rudnick’s scholarship and her intimacy with Luhan’s archive form a crucial foundation on which this chapter rests. But while in agreement with her as to Mabel’s interest and value I seek new ways to relate that value. How Mabel “tells” the houses in her autobiography is central to that exploration.

Because she is regarded, if at all, as predominately a historical figure, Mabel’s autobiography has been mined largely for information, especially of the period for which she is more readily known: the Greenwich Village and Taos years valorized along with the canonization of American modernism. My reading of her autobiography requires to some degree looking beyond the famous names usually uttered in the same breath as

Mabel’s, the Steins, Hapgood, Reed, Lippman, Steffens, Goldman, and Sanger, to the many “unknowns” she mentions alongside them, in an emphasis less on the people she

night a priest called the police and a fight broke out, leading to the arrests of 200 men, including Tannenbaum (Stansell 113). 176 In addition to Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds (1984), Rudnick’s books on Luhan include Utopian Vistas: the Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture (1996); The Suppressed Memoirs of Mabel Dodge Luhan: Sex, Syphilis, and Psychoanalysis in the Making of Modern American Culture (2012), for which she is editor; and with MaLin Wilson-Powell the exhibition catalogue for Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: American Moderns and the West. (2016); Articles decades old include Jane Nelson’s “Journey to the Edge of History: Narrative Form in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Intimate Memories” Biography (1980); “Mabel Dodge Luhan: In Search of a Personal South,” Southwest Review (1998). More attention has recently been paid to her Taos home and the radicals and modernists she drew there: Flannery Burke’s From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's.(2008) and Katja Fauth, Modernist Visions in Taos: Mabel Dodge Luhan and the Artists of the Stieglitz Circle (2009).

189 drew to her, and more on why she drew them to her in the first place.177 Not in terms of the Movements she was part of, but the movements of her own life—which are not disconnected. As I have argued throughout this dissertation, to get the full texture of the women’s lives on offer and to appreciate works without the formal pyrotechnics, either in syntax or structure, we associate with modernism and “literature” requires paying closer attention to that which is easily overlooked, details seemingly more quotidian than exemplary. Taking note of the expressive use of movement is key again to this method, with Mabel’s movement between houses, as opposed to Lulu Bett’s within one house, a first-order recognition.

Intimate Memories, it should be clear by now, is not Mabel’s version of Edith

Wharton’s The Decoration of Houses (1897). To Mabel the desirability of a house is not measured according to notions of good taste and proportion but the life actively lived within them. A vital house operates as a “functioning organism” with all components— people and “things”—contributing equally to its vitality (17).178 Of the objects in her own homes, she writes,

I have struggled to live deeply in many ways, and one of the ways for me to has

been through the ‘things’ about me. But I have never had a room merely

‘arranged’ in any house I have ever lived in…I have never, thank God, regarded

things as merely inanimate. They have always lived for me or else I did not have

them about. (B 15)

177 Her upbringing in Buffalo and her period in Florence are not overlooked in Rudnick’s accounts for instance but what I mean is that the Greenwich Village apartment and her Taos home are of most interest to scholarly work as modernist sites. 178 This is a comment she makes about the only house she admired in her native Buffalo, belonging to the Cary family.

190

To understand how things live for Mabel and why they are central to the narrative of her life, I begin with her childhood home in Buffalo.

The Immobility of the Delaware Avenue House

Mabel’s parents’ home on Delaware Avenue is the principal backdrop of Background, the first volume of Intimate Memories, and the autobiography as a whole—the place that hovers in the background not just of her life but the story she tells of that life. The

Delaware Avenue house was, she writes, a “deathly place.” There “was never a sense of life…No one really cared to be in it. Really no one lived in it, you might say” (B 49).

Mabel offers a number of reasons for this lifelessness. Having refused to join his own father in the family bank, her father, Charles Ganson, pursued an education as a lawyer, but never practised, leading to a life “terribly empty of interest or activity.” This lack of purpose made him moody and often cruel: “The energy in him turned to poison, stagnating in his veins, and his only outlets were anxiety, jealousy and querulousness” (B

9). Undirected energy as toxic to the body in its dormancy is a view Mabel had espoused in one of her columns for Hearst newspapers, “Consuming Energy Is Keeping Well.”

Having nothing to do, she says there, is “a negation of living.” A negation her father exemplified in his interest- and activity-free life, which provided her with an early model for the “deathly sense of life sinking down in one from an immobility of thought and feeling” (B 34): “Better a real pain, better a danger to life itself, than this negation of living that comes from not having anything to do” (B 42). Her description of her father is one of the first ways Mabel uses movement to evaluate people. Although the title of the third volume, Movers and Shakers (from the Arthur O’Shaughnessy poem “We Are the

Music-Makers”) is meant to describe people who were agitating to change the world, the

191 words themselves literally and metaphorically counter the immobility of people like her father. The feminists, anarchists, socialists, writers and labour activists of the third volume epitomize people whose thoughts and feelings move, whose bodies and minds are stirred into action on the streets and in print.

Mabel’s mother’s unrelenting reserve (her “mute endurance”) and strict adherence to Victorian standards of propriety and domesticity render her as immobile as her husband. Sara Ganson “spent herself in ordering her household and in controlling the servants” (25). Objects and, by extension, people in the Ganson home were never “out of place,” including Sara herself. Mabel would sometimes catch her mother in tears in her room on a Sunday but she “overcame these relaxed moods by getting up and going out to church” (B 37). Even the tulip bed in their garden, a “symbol for rest of [the] house” was

“ordered and organized” with “nothing left to fortuitous chance.” As a result “no life ever rose” in that tulip bed “taking its own form.” Mabel’s mother “was too good a housekeeper for that” (21). Keeping house Sara also managed to keep the life out of it. In

Mabel’s estimation a house in which things are placed just so, where “everything [is] carried out according to ‘what was what’” is one in which there is no life (B 25).

The Ganson family neighbour Mary Goodyear exhibits a similar relation to objects as Mabel’s mother. Mary buys decorative items and antiques many would call tasteful, but as Mabel writes, they too failed to bring life to her house: the “old things just stood there in the well-planned rooms, just stood there, breathed their last, and died” (B

15). Mary would move houses a number of times, but an essential lifelessness always remained—moving into a new house not enough on its own to bring life to a house. To

Mabel, the relations between people, and between people and objects, are what move the

192 air of a home, allowing both home and residents to “breathe.” What Mary Goodyear and

Sara Ganson do not understand is that objects—and homes, as objects themselves—are not inanimate. It is people and their relation to them that render them so.

Free movement of objects and people is the central trope in Mabel’s descriptions of places we are meant to understand as vital. Houses in which objects are not placed “in well-composed groups or in symmetrical juxtapositions” (B 15), in which objects have room to “breathe,” are correspondingly places where people have room to breathe, absent as they are of the expectation to conform to “what was what.” The carefully ordered objects in her parents’ and Mary Goodyear’s homes recall the comparison in Miss Lulu

Bett of the stolid Ida and Dwight Deacon to the heavy pieces of furniture in their parlour, immovable objects that signify a corresponding immobility in their owners’ thoughts and feelings. The rigidity of object placement in Mabel’s childhood home mirrors the rigidity of her parents’ comportment which never allows for demonstrations of emotion and affection towards one another (B 24), let alone their only child, Mabel.

Characterizing her childhood home as a place where nothing lived, where no one moved, where behaviour was restricted, where minds never changed, where objects and people were never to be out of place localizes modernism’s critique of Victorian society in the Gansons’ Delaware Avenue home.179 But the Ganson home was not alone in its lifelessness. Everyone in their upper-class community was literally and figuratively closed off from each other. Existing “only on the outermost rim of life,” Mabel’s neighbours “never talked to each other except for outward things” (B 3). Every night as the sun set maids drew the shades on their “big, solid houses,” the better to keep “prying” eyes out and “shameful” things in (B 5). This included, most damagingly for Mabel,

179 In this, the autobiography could also be considered part of the genre of Revolt from the Village literature.

193 anything about girls’ bodies beyond their being one more space to keep neat and tidy.

While mothers and nurses “worried over” the cleanliness of their hair, eyes, teeth, nails and toes, they ignored “whole areas of us”—the breasts and pubic areas where they had begun to experience the first sensations of their sexuality (B 181). Intimate Memories is

Mabel’s testament to living her life, and running her houses, in opposition to the

Victorian mania for shutting off, shutting out, and shutting in.

Shut-in in by a sense of shame is not how one would characterize Mary MacLane, the subject of another of Mabel’s syndicated columns for Hearst.180 By the time she published her memoir I, Mary MacLane in 1917 MacLane had written a number of autobiographical works, the first and most notorious (and commercially successful) being

I Await the Devil’s Coming, published in 1902. In it MacLane detailed her fantasies, sexual and otherwise. Mabel’s editorial response indicates that, to her, MacLane’s latest output, appearing fifteen years after her first incendiary volume, strikes the reader as more of the same, and thus a bit self-indulgent. Of course that Mabel herself would write a four-volume, close to 1600-page memoir, might make one question her attribution of self-indulgence, but Mabel’s problem lies with the “narcissism” represented by the book, which offers no new revelations about its author. While Mabel shares MacLane’s disregard, and outright hostility, to prevailing conceptions of morality and marriage, as well as her firm belief in women’s right to their desires, to her MacLane is missing something significant: the ability to exchange energy with others, the absence of which

Mabel diagnoses as narcissism. This narcissism makes MacLane fundamentally antisocial, whereas to Mabel life and living is fundamentally social: “Living is the outcome of being in relation to others of our kinds. The stuff of life is what we exchange

180 “Strange Mary MacLane Analyzed,” 13 August 1917, p. 16.

194 with each other.” MacLane’s “narcissism” diminishes her “capacity for experience because she is incapable of exchanging energy with anyone outside of herself.” This makes her “a shut-in.” Shut within herself and shut off from others. Despite her temperamental opposition, then, MacLane is not unlike Mabel’s Buffalo neighbours who are “shut-in” for reasons of propriety. Both they and Mary, in Mabel’s terms, are not fully living. In Intimate Memories Mabel continuously draws back the shades on her own homes to permit others to see her often unflattering behaviour (she shamelessly flirts with

Karl Evans when he is already engaged) to chart the evolution that accompanies a life lived in relation with others. The vitality engendered by a life lived in relation is a defining ethos of Mabel’s life, the centrality of which she both reinforces and performs by naming countless chapters after those with whom she did.

Even with Sara’s rigid self-control young Mabel is drawn to her mother as someone who seemed to “move freely within the narrow boundaries of her life” (59).

Mabel “wanted to be as free,” and eventually would be, but she never achieved her mother’s ability to be as “unconscious” or as “indifferent” to others (59). But Mabel likely did not see this as weakness on her part. “Hidden” from others, Sara Ganson did not live her life in relation. She may have moved her body, but “shut-in” within herself, her movement did not make her open to others, it only kept her busy. One of the key understandings represented by the autobiography is that movement itself does not always equate to vitality.

An Anatomy of Restlessness

Set against the Ganson home and a larger Victorian society characterized by immobile objects and equally immovable people, Mabel writes repeatedly of her attraction to

195 people and things that move. One of the first images she offers of herself in Background is riding a Shetland pony and cart given to her by her maternal grandfather, which enabled her and her friends to venture all over Buffalo, “galloping as fast as [they] could.” While at this young age speed is the primary thrill, Mabel relates an accompanying excitement in the autonomy accessed through that movement, able as she is atop her pony to go off “in all directions.” Riding her pony and cart also gives Mabel and her friends knowledge “of all sorts of places in a way that other children never could have known in that town” (B 4). Like the early female reporter making space for herself as she makes her way through the city on assignment, gaining access to places and to social knowledge previously barred to her, Mabel’s childhood rides promote a feeling of vitality through the freedom, autonomy, and access such mobility provides—freedom and autonomy that diminishes as she gets older and the restraint and decorum expected of a young woman effectively slows her down, at times to a full stop. At sixteen Mabel is sent by her mother, at the urging of her grandmother who had advised a “firm hand,” to Miss

Graham’s School on West 72nd Street in New York City. There she feels as if in

“prison,” immobilized after a childhood in which, “[a]fter school until dark, I had galloped my pony, or bicycled, or caught rides from one end of our part of town to the other, full of my own affairs, pursuing my own investigations into life, collecting experience” (EE 233). Like the objects in the Ganson home, Mabel was never meant to be “out of order,” and so is removed when she becomes “unruly.”

Other childhood vignettes similarly centralize movement, emphasizing both its desirability and transgressive quality, especially a story involving her friend Madeline

Scatcherd’s Aunt Em. Em had lived in Paris for many years, smoked cigarettes, and

196

“twinkled” with laughter. But she “didn’t laugh at the same things” as other people in her

Buffalo circle, “she knew things to laugh at that they had never heard of” (B 181). Em is regarded by other adults with both disapproval and fear but with endless fascination by a young Mabel, not least because of the “very small interesting things” she keeps on her dressing table which include a framed photograph of a woman in trousers wearing a high silk hat whom Em refers to as her “dearest friend, the Baronness Blanc” (B 181). One night when Madeline’s parents are out Em offers to “show them something.” She leaves the room and returns wearing a suit of men’s evening clothes: stiff shirt, long tailed coat, eyeglass, hat and cane. She then offers to teach Mabel and Madeline a new dance. Soon,

Mabel writes, she and Madeline were pushing each other aside to dance with her (B 184).

For Mabel, moving with Em suggests access to worlds beyond her imagination (she calls this chapter “Other Worlds”). The equation between embodied movement and new ideas and experiences is a theme threaded throughout the autobiography, coming into relief each time Mabel leaves a place, and a volume, to take up residence, and her story, in another.

Dance and transgression appear again in Mabel’s account of her “coming out” into society, a rite of passage for upper-class girls that she wanted no part of. At the party

“[f]our or five hundred polite inviters” asked her to dance but she did not accept any of their offers. Instead she “sat and sat and sat” (B 289). Here Mabel’s emphatic lack of movement, the repetition of “sat,” turns her inaction into action. With this prolonged refusal to conform to expectations of feminine behaviour, Mabel brings the first volume of her autobiography to a close: “With that, I was out,” playing with the dual meaning of that final word as both “out” in society and “out of there.” Indeed she will soon “get out”

197 from under her parents’ roof (recounted early in the following volume) by running off at twenty-one to marry her first husband, Karl Evans. Mabel’s body and by extension, its movements, are repeatedly the site of defiance, whether it is cutting her hair short (which her father hates), refusing to turn her body to face west on the ship when she returns to the United States, so unhappy is she to be leaving the Continent (even if she is “done” with Italy (EE 102)), or living unmarried with her lover John Reed.

The second volume, European Experiences, begins like the first with a story of movement and speed, her childhood pony replaced by the “green horses” her neighbour

Seward Cary imported from Canada to train for the fox hunt in the Genesee Valley southeast of Buffalo, and which provide the first chapter of European Experiences with its title. Although this volume is primarily about her years living in Italy, the first two chapters recount details that explain how she came to travel there—after her father dies and her first marriage ends abruptly with Evans’ untimely death in a hunting accident in

1903. But, significantly, before getting into details of her courtship and eventual marriage to Evans, Mabel begins the volume with her memories of the exhilaration she felt riding those green horses: “We [she and Cary], too, were like galloping horses, wild and untamed” (EE 77). The depression that sets in almost immediately after her marriage is therefore to be understood in terms of the sudden cessation of movement it symbolizes— marriage tames women as she had tamed the horses. Hunting on her honeymoon with

Evans, lying in wait for a deer, she realizes that it is the first time she has stopped moving since running off with him. Sitting in silence, Mabel writes, “my nerves ceased to tremble inside my body, and my heart slowed down until I reached a new quiescence.” Struck by

198 the horror of this sudden immobility she realizes, “The honeymoon was over” (EE 43).

Though she will marry another three times, Mabel will always resist her domestication.

The only time Mabel can stand to be still is when she is pregnant with her son,

John, experiencing “the joyful motionless activity of pregnancy when inertia is not dangerous.” So afraid is she of not moving (immobility is defined elsewhere as “the dynamic turned static” (B 34)), Mabel can be still only because her body is as yet

“wholly occupied” (EE 45). Presumably inertia is not dangerous during pregnancy because of the “dynamism” of a life being formed inside her. That feeling is gone after the birth of the child: “The baby was gone and my soul had returned to my body.” This

“return to knowledge” is a “melancholy awakening” (EE 50). Pregnancy’s active inaction had lulled her consciousness, but it makes an abrupt return postpartum in the material reality of the child in front of her.

Movement features prominently in Mabel’s descriptions of all of the people she is drawn to. The dancing Aunt Em “swaggered a little.” Her fellow rider Seward Cary

“walked light and true on his small feet, a beautiful dancer” (EE 47). Journalist and editor

Lincoln Steffens, who she will credit in the third volume with the original idea for the

“evenings” in her New York apartment, is “very flexible in his movements” (MS 66).

Movement even explains her own attractiveness to others, which according to her was not a function of her facial features: “I was not much to look at, ever. I am sorry to say.

(Really sorry.) But I was alive and always had a forward stride in my petticoats (EE 17).”

As she gets older Mabel’s relationship to movement becomes more nuanced, but she hints at this later development in European Experiences. Seward and her first husband,

Karl, attract her because they move so well—Karl lives “in action” (EE 37). But writing

199 in hindsight she can see that they lack her desire and need to engage with ideas and the life of the mind. Bodies in motion, though thrilling, are not enough if minds are not carried along with them. Bodies and minds lived in relation, engaged, curious, and responsive, comprise Mabel’s philosophy of human vitality.

A model for the vital mind she has in mind belongs to Seward Cary’s wife, Emily, an outlier in her Buffalo circle, who to Mabel seems like a “revelation” (EE 10).181 Emily does not physically move like her husband, but Mabel as yet discerns a palpable energy moving through her body, “the fine, free-flowing energy of life….” (EE 9). Emily is

“alive all over” and seems “to breathe through all the pores of her skin and to think with every cell.” Asked her opinion on an idea an “answer would come as quickly and spontaneously as water bubbling from a spring…” (EE 9). Energy and ideas flow through

Emily’s body unimpeded. Although a mother, Emily is unlike Mabel’s own who, she writes, “had no mind. I mean it almost literally. She did not think about things” (B 24).

Although not a rider or dancer like Seward, Emily’s body is as yet alive and moving because of her active mind.

Movers and Shakers is the only volume to explicitly reference motion in its title, but the movement of bodies and minds is essential to Mabel’s presentation of herself and her houses, which are vital in relation to the people and objects that reside or pass through them—objects, people, and houses being mutually constitutive. When objects or people no longer seem vital, when bodies or minds no longer seem to move, then the space itself is no longer vital and Mabel is ready to move on. By the time we get to the social and political activists of Movers and Shakers she has demonstrated that, by virtue of her restlessness, she was always already a mover and shaker—someone who

181 Interestingly, Emily is not featured in Rudnick’s edited version of the text. Seward, however, is.

200 continually sought to shake things up by moving and thinking differently than people expected or deemed she should.

Moving Houses

Villa Curonia

Florence initially “moves” Mabel because of the presence of a “living” past so radically different from the staid and static present of Buffalo. Places, paintings, and objects imbued with past lives make Mabel believe that moving around, her preferred method of engagement, in a city and home rich in history will also enliven her.

Although Mabel never mentions it, letting us assume the nervous breakdown that precedes her voyage to Europe is about grief and loss, Rudnick reveals that Mabel had had a scandalous affair with her married gynecologist compelling her mother to whisk her away to avoid scandal more than seek rest. On the boat to France she meets Edwin

Dodge, an American architect who had studied in Paris, returning after a period at home in Boston. Smitten, Dodge pursues her in Paris and Mabel eventually accepts his marriage proposal, primarily as she presents it, to give a father to her son, John. Initially planning to stay in Tuscany for the winter, she and Edwin soon find and renovate a villa in the hills above Florence.

Like her early years in Buffalo, the feeling of vitality she experiences in Florence is at first satisfied by near constant movement. Life in Florence, she writes, is one of

“visiting”: “people, the landscape, architecture, scenery, palaces, villas, museums, garden, and galleries” (EE 137). Once the renovation of the villa is complete, people come to visit her “in an unending procession” that includes Carl Van Vechten, Arthur

Rubinstein, Andre Gide, Eleanor Duse, and Leo and Gertrude Stein. All of this

201 movement will lose its lustre once the past, the basis on which to build a life in Florence, itself loses lustre. But her first night in the Tuscan city, sitting in the salone of her hotel room, Mabel contemplates the objects she had “fallen upon” in the curio shops that day and feels “that I could sink down into the past and it would support me” (EE 97). As she opens a gold box with embossed leaves on each end and mother of pearl inlaid with a monograph at its centre, she inhales “the evocative, magical life that arose from it” (EE

97). Unlike her mother, or Mary Goodyear, who purchased things out of some notion of correctness or taste, Mabel fills her Florentine home with objects that are alive by virtue of past lives that have adhered to them in their centuries of existence, believing that their

“life” would infuse her own. When she tells us that she and Edwin looked at many houses before settling on Villa Curonia (Figure 9) it is not surprising. Built by the Medici family in the fifteenth century for one of their doctors, the house embodies Florence’s

Renaissance past. In the Villa Curonia Mabel could literally live in, and be enlivened by, the past.

But if the past is alive in Florence, so are the dead. “The vital dead” she writes,

“thicken the Italian air” (EE 173). Eventually these “vital dead” become deathly, always

“clustering, eager.” Moving around in the past people in Florence eventually register for

Mabel an immobility not dissimilar to the one she experienced growing up. She tires of

Florence as a place where pictures have “the same or even a greater value than persons, and the painted Madonna and saints assumed…an aesthetic importance that far exceeded the merely human lives they stood for. Not what the saints had done, counted, [sic] as much as how it was depicted” (EE 137). Objects so overwhelm people that human life becomes secondary rather than interdependent, object and owner mutually investing each

202 other with life. In their excessive aestheticism and reverence for the past over an engagement with people in the present, the “so-called living” in Florence become as immobile in body and mind as the people in Buffalo, “stuck” in the past rather than by notions of propriety (EE 173).

As befits her preoccupation with people and places that move, when Mabel describes Villa Curonia, she places us in the villa and invites us to move alongside her:

“Which way shall I take you?” she asks before beginning her tour in the North salon, the room most identified with Edwin. Like the immobile Ganson home looming in the background of the entire autobiography, Mabel begins her description of Villa Curonia with the room against which the rest of the house is measured. The “long, wide room,” perhaps fifty feet, was “cold” and “aloof,” always with “a brooding quiet” that made her want to “[fly] noiselessly through it” (EE 149). Again Mabel’s moving body expresses her rejection, this time of a room—and of Edwin. The North salon had, she says, “a life of its own” but “it was not my life” (EE 146). She next takes us to the Gran’ salone, which, at ninety-feet long, was bigger than the North salon but, unlike the latter, was

“warm and sumptuous” (EE 150). Mabel writes that she entertained here frequently, especially on the loggia running the length of the room and overlooking the gardens.

Unlike the spare North salon, in her descriptions the “Gran’ salone” is filled with people and objects, tapestries, wood figures, statues of Buddha and Vishnu, as well as the smell of flowers from the garden. There is a life here, she says, that the North salon, with the

“immobility of [its] surroundings,” never had for her (EE 147). Writing in hindsight the architecture of the house manifests the largely separate lives she and Edwin lived while in it, the lifelessness of the Gran’ salone emblematic of the lifelessness of her marriage just

203 as the lifelessness of the objects in her childhood home, ordered and never out of place, express the lifelessness of her parents within it.

In the chapter she devotes to Edwin in European Experiences, Luhan expresses remorse for her ill treatment of a man who was “good and kind.” She blames her “selfish ego for her separation from Edwin long before she left him” (396). But as with Karl

Evans and later with Maurice Sterne, Mabel married Edwin despite herself, acquiescing to her suitors’ implorations only to immediately resist the pull on her freedom marriage initiates.

After taking us through her bedroom, Mabel stops in the “little yellow salon”

(Figure 10). Decorated in eighteenth-century style, the salon has a gold chaise longue covered in a brocade of green, pink, and silver, a desk, and a settee in yellow. It was, she writes, the most “comfortable and intimate [room] in the villa” (EE 162). Mabel reinforces the room’s intimacy not by leading us into it through her bedroom, the room to which it is physically adjacent, but by leading us back out into the austere North salon to access the room from a door in that room’s back corner. Writing earlier of the Gran’ salone Mabel describes it as having “a curious intimacy in it: a life” (EE 152). A room’s ability to foster intimacy and connection, to “move” people, is a material manifestation of

Mabel’s edict of living life in relation to others. Although originally intended as her “very own” sitting room the little yellow salon was “as much anyone else’s” as hers and she was rarely alone there (EE 160). Like the Gran’ salone it has intimacy and, therefore, life.

Mabel will revisit this idea of intimacy in Movers and Shakers when she describes her apartment in Greenwich Village coming to life in the exchange of energy, emotions,

204 and ideas that moves the air, permitting people and place to “breathe.” The “stuff of life is what we exchange with others,” she writes in her review of I, Mary MacLane. For

Mabel that truism is especially validated by her New York apartment.

Despite relating fond memories throughout the tour, we feel Mabel’s retrospective uneasiness, her doubt that she was actually “living” in the Villa Curonia reflected in lingering impressions of seemingly mindless and empty movement. Standing amidst the substantial drapery and voluminous pillows of her bedroom, she explains that she had imagined spending her mornings “in lazy contemplation,” enjoying the scents of coffee and flowers. But she never did because she was always overcome by the sudden urge to dress, mumbling to herself, “I’m going down to town. I’m going…I’m going…” (EE

159). Frequently cross at her maid for coffee that did not arrive quickly enough, tossing clothes in a heap on her bed in the rush to get going, she classifies it all as “Haste for its own sake, barren, barren” (EE 158). Looking back at such movements, quick and constant but without real direction, Mabel thinks she “had made a lovely setting to live in,” but “never really lived in it” (EE 99). What she had begun to gauge with Seward and

Karl, and even with her mother whose unhappiness she could detect despite never being physically idle, she comes to more fully understand in Florence—movement “for its own sake” does not equate with vitality.

Mabel knows she has had enough of Florence, that she is “ready for something else” when she no longer feels the urge to move: “The day came when I no longer went down to the Ponte Vecchio and mooned along its narrow passage” (EE 450). Soon after she and Edwin return to the United States to put John in a boarding school, her life at the

205 villa—as well as her life with Edwin, who would not stay long in the New York apartment—ending in that voyage.182

Late in European Experiences Mabel offers “The Story of Francesca,” which despite its title, is neither fiction nor about one woman. Francesca Alexander and her mother are two American expats from Massachusetts living in Florence. Francesca’s story is partly a function of her mother’s, which Mabel summarizes in a paragraph, one of the more poetic in the autobiography:

For all her life Mrs. Alexander had, herself, wanted to travel, but she had married

a man whose business it was to do this, and her business it became to stay at

home. So she sat still in Salem, and dusted and cared for the ‘things’ Captain

Alexander brought home from faraway places, took care of Francesca and looked

out the window towards the coming ships. (EE 414)

It is curious that Mabel should make of the Alexanders a “story.” Chapters about individuals are titled predominantly by their first and last names (“The Case of Frank

Tannenbaum” deviates from this model, but “case” refers to the labour activist’s arrest and trial and thus has a different connotation). However, viewed from within the perspective of Mabel’s restlessness and the fear of immobility that is its flip side, the story of Francesca and her mother becomes an allegory for Intimate Memories and all the vital movement it represents. The plight of Mrs. Alexander and her unfulfilled longings is the plight of all women confined by marriage to one place whose desires and aspirations shrink to fit. Men roam in pursuit of their business while women’s “business” becomes to

182 Edwin will be around for a bit in New York but after Mabel becomes ill on their return, she convinces herself that Edwin is the cause. He is dispatched soon after. Luhan’s callousness is apparent but so is her hunger for new experiences and ideas and the sense that Edwin was holdng her back: “Freed from Edwin’s conservative habit, I thought, I was able to move as the spirit dictated” (MS 39).

206 stay put, defined by what it is not. Captain Alexander eventually dies at sea and Mrs.

Alexander moves to Florence with her daughter, but their new life is a virtual replica of their life in Massachusetts, furniture and all. Although Mrs. Alexander had always longed to travel, by the time she finally has her chance she is unable to really move; having been tied to one place for so long has diminished Mrs. Alexander and her imaginative capacities: “She did not move with the times…[but] adhered strictly to the period she had passed in Salem… She had mingled so little with the life of the day that she wasn’t of it anymore (EE 414). As evidenced by the autobiography, Mabel set out to live her life in deliberate opposition to the Mrs. Alexanders of the world who are confined by ideas about what constitutes “women’s business.” Mabel made it her business to go out and find life (objects, people, and ideas with which to be “in relation”) and bring that life, ostensibly outside it, into her homes.

But the tale of Mrs. Alexander appears in “The Story of Francesca,” and

Francesca does in fact get the last word. Despite living a “meagre” life, Mabel tells us

Francesca and her mother were content, with ample time to spend in contemplation of life and art and nature. When Francesca observes of the people she sees around her, “They seem lonesome, somehow, and always going around from place to place” (EE 418),

Mabel lets Francesca’s words linger without comment, and in that silence we understand that Mabel knows that in Florence she had been one of those people. By the time she is ready to leave, which coincides with the end of the volume in the next chapter, moving around from place to place in Florence no longer makes Mabel feel vital, having lost sight of what exactly she was moving for.

207

23 Fifth Avenue (figu By the time she reaches New York City, Mabel has stopped moving around in the past, and soon begins to seek out life among those looking toward a different future—the transgressive movements of her youth finding their adult expression in action aimed at reforming the world. Not only is “every single bit of the woodwork” in her “four ample rooms” in Greenwich Village “painted white,” so is the “thick” white wallpaper, the marble mantelpiece, and the silk curtains covering her “three high windows” (MS 4).

Although she explains this as a likely reaction to the grime of New York City, it is hard not to see the excessive white making her home a kind of tabula rasa for the new life

Mabel hoped to invite in.

When Mabel furnished the Villa Curonia in Florence it was with faith in the

“liveness” of the past, that the life congealed in the objects she acquired would bring life into her home. But the objects Mabel brings back to the United States, even though from her idealized little yellow salon, fail to bring her apartment to life, a condition she approximates once again with recourse to movement: “Mirrors on the white walls reflected each other’s immobility”; Persian miniatures “halted in attitudes of serene lovemaking”; and two “turquoise blue sea and sky pictures hung still on either side of an entry into a room” (MS 10, italics mine). As if she had not already declared it so, Mabel tells us directly, “There was no life in anything about me” but a “deathly stillness.”

Having finally felt Florence’s “production of death” as deathly, the objects she brings back no longer move her. Like the objects and her rooms, Mabel is also halted when she first arrives in New York, still and immobile. Without anyone (she does not know many people when she arrives), without anything to do (“‘Nothing to do’ again! The same old recurrent dilemma!” (MS, 10)), she and her home lack vitality. Until Carl Van Vechten

208 arrives to give her rooms “an appreciation of the cozy living world they made, soft in firelight and sunshine, drenched with the smell of tea roses and heliotrope, and fine cigarette smoke…”. After his visit “The place became alive for us and for all others who ever afterwards entered there” (MS 16).

Van Vechten’s vivacity provides the spark that “animate[s]” her “lifeless rooms” and the lifeless Mabel, and soon she is involved in the publicity for the Armory show, becoming its vice president. Her apartment springs to life first via the movement of

“things…flowing in and out of the apartment” (MS 37) and then people: “Imagine, then, a stream of human beings passing in and out of those rooms…” (MS 83). After the success of the Armory Show Mabel receives numerous requests to bring her energies and sympathies to other causes, leading to many other visits, meetings, and eventually her famous “evenings.”183 With its steady stream of people and objects flowing in and passing out, Mabel’s home not only comes alive, but shifts into the realm of public space.

While the Villa Curonia, with its own steady procession of visitors, is certainly a precursor to her apartment at 23 Fifth Avenue (Figure 11), the latter’s location in the heart of Greenwich Village makes it more public-facing than her high-walled villa in the hills above Florence. Amplifying its more public location downtown, her New York home is the upstairs apartment in a brownstone, not a single-family dwelling.184 While she was never alone in her “little yellow salon” in Florence, Mabel gives the impression that she is never alone in her entire apartment in New York, which will come to stand in

183 Luhan’s exegesis of Stein’s writing and her active involvement in drawing people to the Armory Show had, according to Luhan, gained her a “mythological” reputation in the heady days of Greenwich Village activism. As she notes, the publicity she had been “able to gain overnight” for Stein “had apparently been the starting point for the belief that I had only to be in some way associated with a movement for it to be launched” (MS 140). 184 Christine Stansell makes the good point that Luhan’s authentic interest in the causes she pursued is partially underscored by her locating herself downtown. She had the means to live in the wealthy enclave uptown near Central Park but chose to be in the heart of Greenwich Village (108), a neighbourhood of brick houses, renovated stables, tenements, and rooming houses.

209 the public’s mind (by virtue of newspaper accounts of evenings at her home) for Mabel’s

“salon.” But Mabel’s apartment is also public in the way she relates it to its historical moment, a material manifestation of a time when “barriers went down and people reached each other who had never been in touch before.”185 23 Fifth Avenue drew people of all kinds and from all walks of life: “Socialists, Trade-Unionists, Anarchists,

Suffragists, Poets, Relations, Lawyers, Murderers, ‘Old Friends,’ Psychoanalysts,

I.W.W.’s, Single Taxers, Birth Controlists, Newspapermen, Artists, Modern-Artists,

Clubwomen, Woman’s-place-is-in-the-home Women, Clergymen, and just plain men…”

(MS 83). In New York Mabel finds what she was missing in Florence, where an obsession with aesthetics prioritized people over things: “a life in common with others”

(MS 165). A life lived in relation.186

In Mabel’s estimation the only other place like 23 Fifth Avenue was Alfred

Stieglitz’s famed gallery 291, named for its location on the same avenue as her apartment

(MS 95).187 Stieglitz’s public gallery celebrated avant-garde art and photography and hosted lectures and discussions, not unlike the “evenings” at her apartment, which assembled people interested in art, anarchism, labour politics, and women’s rights, among other topics. And like 291, 23 Fifth Avenue functioned as a kind of sanctuary, a community for its supporters, which in the case of Mabel’s apartment was support for the broad exercise of free speech:

185 “Looking back on it now, it seems as though everywhere, in that year of 1913 [the year of the Armory Show], barriers went down and people reached each other who had never been in touch before. There were all sorts of new ways to communicate as well as new communications (MS 39). 186 In common with others did not include all races. W.E.B. Du Bois may have come once, but her descriptions of “Negro” dancers brought one evening by Van Vechten demonstrates how her attraction to free movement does not include their free movement which she sees as barbaric. Luhan’s racism was, as we know, not atypical. 187 Luhan was first taken there by Hutchins Hapgood at the end of 1912. The connections she made there actually led to her involvement in the Armory Show.

210

“There were so many people with things to say and so few places to say them

in…no meeting place for free exchange of ideas and talk. So many intersecting

people only meeting each other in print. So I thought I would try to get people

together a little and see if it wouldn’t increase understanding…” (MS 83)188

The vitality generated by the movement of ideas at 23 Fifth Avenue is the same kind produced by the movements of the boarding house—energy generated by the free-flow of ideas analogous to the free movement of people. Passing each other on the stairs or in hallways, on the way to work or out to dinner, exchanging successes, frustrations and confidences, the working women of the boarding house form a vital community of women who move in pursuit of their own dreams and desires, their home a sanctuary for the free expression of those dreams and desires away from the restrictions and restrictive mindsets of family and a patriarchial society. The free-flow of ideas at 23 Fifth Avenue creates a similar sanctuary for people joined by their shared desire for social and political change. And as with the boarding house, all of this activity in her apartment, as well as the community created from it, transgress bourgeois notions of home, in Mabel’s case her own childhood home in Buffalo, in which one family lives closed off from its neighbours and from the commercial and cultural life of a city. The transgressive movements of single working women on their own in the city find a suitable home in the transgressive space of the boarding house. The transgressive movements of the men and women agitating for social and cultural change find a home in the transgressive space of Mabel’s apartment, which refuses to pay heed to supposed boundaries between “life” and home.

188 This is from an interview with a “Mrs. Pearson” about the evenings at 23 Fifth Avenue which Mabel quotes from at great length, as she does with most items written by others (letters, poems, profiles, articles) she includes in the autobiography.

211

According to Stansell, Mabel may have had an inflated sense of her own power,189 but a newspaper report from the time, which Mabel includes in Movers and

Shakers, seems to endorse her apparent hubris: “that men and women and ideas and

‘movements’ seemed to find expression and coherence was due largely to the fact that

Mrs. Dodge seemed to know everybody worth knowing, not in a society way, but in the real way, and to get the right people together” (MS 82). Lincoln Steffens must have agreed, having told Mabel that she had “a certain faculty…a centralizing, magnetic social faculty. You attract, stimulate, and soothe people, and men like to sit with you and talk to themselves. You make them think more fluently, and they feel enhanced” (MS 80).

Steffen’s evaluation of Mabel’s talent, and her inclusion of it in the autobiography, defy her diminution of herself early on. Mabel values her ability to draw people out, and refuses to see it strictly as a corollary to hostess.

While Mabel credits Steffens for the inauguration of her “evenings” after he tells her that she should “organize all this accidental unplanned activity around you, this coming and going” (MS 81), his comment makes plain that her apartment was already a hive of activity, having begun organically as a function of who Mabel wanted to meet

(MS 83). In the interest of free speech and the free movement of ideas, Mabel tells us that she tried to keep the evenings fluid, and “sturdily” maintained [her] attitude in letting It decide,” refusing to interfere too much, and “offering her house and acting like anyone present” (84). She rejects the notion that she should control the proceedings. Life flows when things are not arranged according to “what was what.” Sometimes that attitude results in an unsuccessful evening, with “no form to it.” But, she writes, “of course that was the risk one took when one let things be and did not try to shape events or direct the

189 Stansell says she entertained “fantasies of the power of her own broadmindedness” (110).

212 people there (MS 90). But if Mabel was fine with this laissez-faire approach, another influential visitor was not. Walter Lippman found the evenings disorderly and told her,

“‘Do try and make something of it instead of letting it run wild. Weed it out and order it’”

(MS 92). Though Mabel does not say, given the language attributed to Lippman, one can deduce that she resists ordering the evenings in the same way she resists ordering objects, or herself—her own “running wild” the reason her parents sent her to boarding school.

The merit of these assumptions is borne out by her agreeing, begrudgingly, to interfere in the proceedings: “So I agreed to try their way—these young cocksure boys who knew it all” (MS 92). The tone of her resignation forces a reconsideration of the query in

Background with which this chapter began, “I wonder, I really do if a woman can ever do anything that is not drawn out of her by a man?” Is it ironic? Mabel is certainly ironic about the confidence of “the young cocksure boys” who think they know “it all.”

In her telling, Mabel’s apartment acts out the Greenwich village community’s

“ethic” of conversation while offering a material improvement on the public sphere of print: “The familiarity of people toward one another in the press is nearly always antisocial in its effect, because there’s no real contact in it” (MS 83). In the “free” space of her apartment, both public and private, where there were no barriers to entry (except an invitation some nights), Mabel could bring people of opposing views face to face to foster conviviality and open discussion thereby changing the world one interaction at a time.190 Free speech enacted in Mabel’s home was barrier-free communication. Words and topics were free to move wherever a conversation led them, just as people were meant to overcome sectarian, class, or artistic distinctions, by getting to know one

190 To the men and women in this “conversational community,” Stansell writes, talk was substantive action (118). Free speech was a political act: “Listening and discussing supported, it seemed, both the ethic of free speech and the stance under discussion, much as walking a picket line supported a strike” (Stansell 87).

213 another. In that way 23 Fifth Avenue was an “intimate public” of Mabel’s own creation.191 Only after talking to Margaret Sanger “at home in [her] sitting room” does

Mabel really “[get] something from her” (MS 70). The intimacy that equals life in the little yellow salon and the Gran’ salone in Florence extends to her sitting room in New

York, and to her entire apartment as the site of a public intimacy capable of overcoming social and political differences.

Intimate Memories as a whole, but Movers and Shakers in particular, mimics 23

Fifth Avenue’s public/private nature and Mabel’s ethos of living in relation. Other voices join hers in its pages including those of Gertrude Stein, John Reed, Leo Stein, Bill

Haywood, Emma Goldman, Neith Boyce, a famous “bachelor girl” (in articles for

Vogue) before she was married to Hutchins Hapgood, as well as Hapgood, Steffens, and

Lippman in quotes from private letters or public articles, gossipy snippets of conversation or published poetry and prose including Stein’s “Portrait of Mabel Dodge at Villa

Curonia,” and Reed’s, “A Day in Bohemia,” both reproduced in full. But these famous names are joined by those of average citizens asking for Mabel’s help or questioning her demonstrated support for a cause (MS 151). “There were all kinds of communications from people who had something to say and no place to say it and who sought for a chance in my house,” Mabel writes (MS 161). The space of her autobiography offers the same chance in her inclusion of their words in its pages. Just as 23 Fifth Avenue was the site for the public airing of feelings so Mabel’s autobiography is an archive of these public feelings. Public feelings demonstrate how politics “manifest themselves at the level of

191 I play on Berlant’s idea of an intimate public where feelings are publicly shared in lieu of ideas about systemic change but what I envision has more in common with the “public feelings” that concern Ann Cvetkovich. See note 192 on next page. The airing of public feelings are a form, she writes of “community formation” (461).

214 lived affective experience,” writes Ann Cvetkovich.192 Intimate Memories manifests

Mabel’s lifelong resistance to Victorian norms of behaviour and embodiment and to the socially constructed barriers between people including the public/private divide so rigidly enforced. Telling her houses Mabel politicizes them by harnessing their intimacy for the airing of public feelings, transgressing the repression of feeling endemic to the Victorian home as well as its habitual closing of the shades to anything happening inside.

Los Gallos Throughout the autobiography Luhan endlessly negotiates and renegotiates the vital role that movement plays in her life both physically and mentally. By 1917, dismayed and disillusioned about the ability to actually “move and shake” the world after the entry of the Unites States into the First World War, Mabel begins to tire of life in New York. The

“confusion of ideas and activities” that had marked her life prior to the war seemed now

“like trying to live in one’s head to neglect of the heart and the senses” (MS 140). Once she moves to Taos, movement in the natural world becomes her guide to meaning and vitality as the movements to change society had been previously.

Before she sets out for New Mexico, Mabel tries to relocate outside the city at

Finney Farm, her country house, but finds it “dreary” to have “lost all interest in the outside world” (MS 426), and with “nothing [there] to feed the heart, mind or soul” (MS

469). So when Maurice (whom she had previously sent away on his own) writes to her from Santa Fe that she would find there what she is searching for, she immediately hops a train to see for herself, drawn by the need for a “change” (ETD 6) as much as

192 “Public Feelings” is the title of an article by Cvetkovich in South Atlantic Quarterly (2007) in which she provides a genealogy for the term in queer theory, trauma studies, and affect studies. “Queer theory contributes to the more expansive definition of political life that Public Feelings also seeks to foster—that political identities are implicit within structures of feeling, sensibilities, everyday forms of cultural expression and affiliation that may not take the form of recognizable organizations and institutions” (461).

215 adventure—she knew people who had gone off to Florida, to California, or to “the West,” but not the Southwest. But once there Mabel does not take to Santa Fe (“All these people!

I want to get away somewhere, I don’t like living on this street and going to tea parties”

(ETD 23)) and almost immediately sets out on the rough road for Taos in a hired car with

Maurice reluctantly in tow (Her son, John, is also there, it having been arranged that he would meet her there for his Christmas vacation).

Where the past was alive, or seemed to be for a time, in Florence, where talk was alive, or seemed to be for a time, in New York, it is nature that is alive in New Mexico.

Although not taken by Santa Fe proper, where most of the “Anglos” live, Mabel is immediately struck by the living landscape of New Mexico. Looking back at Santa Fe from a hill just beyond it “the town seemed to vibrate and to breathe. It was a living thing” (ETD 18). Unlike previous volumes, this sensation of aliveness does not leave her by the end of The Edge of Taos Desert. By the end of the volume, the end of the autobiography itself, this first sensation has only deepened as she comes to spend more time with and learn from the “Indians” of Taos Pueblo, especially her eventual husband,

Tony Luhan.

Mabel’s appreciation for the palpable aliveness of nature in New Mexico recalls the feelings she had surveying the objects purchased on her first day in Florence. Nature, as the past was in Florence, is something Mabel can “sink into” and it will “support her.”

Almost as soon as she arrives in Taos she begins to look for a place to live, not caring that Maurice has no interest in staying there. She rents rooms from a curmudgeonly

Englishman and aspiring architect, Mr. Manby, who will at a later point turn the

216 authorities on Mabel for suspected anti-American activity.193 Within a few months she will make her sojourn permanent and put an offer on a house outside of Taos. This is the first time, as she points out, that she does this on her own (Villa Curonia and 23 Fifth

Avenue were bought with Edwin). Sterne will never actually enter the house having returned to New York before it is completed. Mabel ends the autobiography with the move into her new house, which she calls Los Gallos (Figure 12), but in her mind she had found “home” months before. After visiting the pueblo her first day in Taos she soon settles into a routine of spending mornings in Luhan’s home and teaching his wife,

Candelaria, and his nieces to knit scarves and shawls.194 All through her first spring in

Taos, she writes, she “feels” that the pueblo is her “real home” (ETD 174).

While her home starts out a four-bedroom adobe house it will eventually grow to three stories and include fourteen guest bedrooms, as well as five guesthouses on twelve acres. Because the volume ends just as Luhan is to move in to the original structure, it ends without mention of all the people yet to come (although the volume was published in 1937, which means they had already arrived). But her home would again fill with people, as did her apartment in New York, and function as a “kind of home” for people to give “their souls a little fun,” to give those who needed it a chance to be “discursive” and

“thoughtful” (MS 94, 95). Although, in her Taos home those souls would have more than fun, they would be nurtured by the presence of nature all around them and a consciousness that they too are part of it.

193 Manby had overheard Maurice Sterne and a few others talking in support of the German side in World War One (Mabel is not one of them). 194 Luhan is not clear in the autobiography how Tony comes to leave his wife, but she portrays their love as kismet, each seen by the other in dreams prior to her arrival.

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As always Mabel’s appreciation for people and places is expressed by way of movement. In New Mexico, snow-topped mountains “sloped away southwards in vast, shimmering gray green masses that pulsated in the clean light” (ETD 18). The “rocks vibrate and sway, dancing together…everything lives and moves and has its being” (ETD

31). “Nothing” in the environment was rigid and fixed in its place”— as objects, people, ideas and movements should be (ETD 31). Mabel’s deepening affinity for Taos and the

Pueblo culture is transcribed through the movement of her body: “It was the Indian life I was entering, very slowly, a step at a time” (ETD 177). But the life she enters with this movement is not a new world, but “reality.”195

In a way, Mabel stops moving in Taos and takes “root.” Taking root does not mean she ceases completely to move, just not with the same restlessness. She will go back to New York over the years, but Mabel will live the majority of the rest of her life in

New Mexico. In Taos, experiencing herself as part of nature, she can stop moving and still feel alive: “For the first time in my life I heard the world singing in the same key in which my own life inside me had sometimes lifted and pored itself out” (ETD 33). As part of nature, she is always already living in relation, and so can simply “be.” Like pregnancy, when inertia is not dangerous, experiencing herself as part of the eternal movement of nature, Mabel is able to experience stillness without disquiet.

As she writes about her increasing acclimation to life in Taos, Mabel informs us that she “began to open [her] hands and let things slip away. Things!” (ETD 196). Her exclamation expresses the incredulity of someone like her giving up the things she had deemed crucial to make her homes come alive. However, in New Mexico nature is the

195 The subtitle to the volume is Escape to Reality.

218 overwhelming “thing” that is alive and that she must have “around” her: “From the very first day I found out that the sunshine in New Mexico could do almost anything…It entered into one’s deepest places and melted the thick slow densities. It made one feel good. That is, alive” (ETD 17). Movement in and of nature makes Mabel feel vital. Her house, built from “the living earth… under their feet” with trees from the mountain used for the “long round beams” inside, has no need for extraneous things to make it alive

(ETD 292). Built of and from nature it is already so.

Of course this is likely Mabel taking creative license. Ferber describes the house in Taos in her own autobiography as “richly furnished,” a house filled “with suave upholstery, paintings, rugs, china, glass, [and] sculpture (Peculiar Treasure 383). But the discrepancy only provides further evidence of Mabel’s crafting her autobiography according to an aesthetic of movement and vitality. In New Mexico that she does not need things reinforces the sensation of aliveness she feels as part of the movement of nature all around her.

Mabel’s decline in restlessness is reflected in the structure of The Edge of Taos

Desert, which is almost a moment-to-moment account of her awakening into the “reality” of life, offering a more straightforward narrative than the collection of vignettes of the previous volumes. Chapters are numbered rather than named for people, places, and preoccupations as in previous volumes (Green Horses, Reed, Leo Stein, Provincetown,

Finney Farm, Tendencies). She calls her method in the earlier volumes “anthropological” for its recording of lives and customs, here abandoned: “If I can get any part of the truth out to others it will not depend upon the intimate details of Tony’s life and mine together” (ETD 222). The intimacy with which she shared details of her previous homes

219 and the life in them is here abandoned because they no longer serve a larger purpose of disavowing the “system that had produced her.” In New Mexico she experiences herself as having moved beyond western ideas of the world into “reality” and now invites others to come experience it for themselves.

Mabel’s restlessness, her determination to live a vital life of her own choosing, had led her in different directions, to sojourn in various places, but in New Mexico she takes root, finding vitality in a life lived close to nature, and to the Pueblo. Significantly,

John is also more present here; he cuts off her hair, one of the first things she does when she moves to Taos—for herself and not in defiance of her father. Perhaps a little less restless, Mabel is better able to appreciate being a mother.

Despite the movement she sees in nature, with which the Pueblo people live in harmony, Mabel see the Pueblo people themselves as unchanging, a construction familiar to us from a postcolonial perspective.196 Like many others before and since Mabel is prey to primitivism in her portrayal of the indigenous culture of the Pueblo, investing its people with a timelessness and purity that is seen as a corrective to the loss and alienation of contemporary industrialized society. So much of what Mabel writes about personal growth, connection, and the experience of nature in The Edge of Taos Desert has become commonplace in our contemporary exhortations to “get outside,” to “slow down,” and shed our “stuff.” For all her apparent confidence and bravery, Mabel lacked for a significant part of her life a fundamental sense of her own worth, flinging herself into relationships because she believed she was “nothing in [her]self” (ETD 232). In New

Mexico she senses a more profound connection to others and to nature (the “one in the

196 Rudnick also makes this point, true of so many writers encountered from our present-day perspective, but argues that it should be put into context and that Mabel should be appreciated for what she did draw attention to (xvi).

220 many”) and begins the process of what contemporary cultural discourse refers to as

“healing.” Mabel’s trajectory has since been repeated in countless moves to the

Southwest (and more recently to upstate New York, by “new bohemians,” today recast as advocates of artisanal culture). Nature as a refuge from the relentless routine of ten-hour days and “shallow” consumerism remains a reason to Go West or, at least, head to the country.197 Our fast-paced society rejected for slow movements and spiritual renewal.

This, as Flannery Burke explains in From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and

Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's House, is not without its consequences. Mabel and the others she urged to move west left a legacy in which New Mexico remains “a world apart,” out of time and thus unable to address its current problems. But with John Collier, eventually the commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Mabel did spend twenty years fighting for Native American rights, and her admiration for the native cultures of

New Mexico helped Native American and Hispanic art to be taken seriously. In her treatment of the Pueblo dwellers Luhan reveals herself again to be representative of her time as well as settler culture.

As Zona Gale’s feminist activism plays out in the Deacon home, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s plays out across her many homes. Movement is central to Mabel’s documentation of her transition to the transformed self of her later life as it is to Gale’s telling of the “other”

Lulu’s gradual incarnation. But Mabel charts that progression not in moves away from a confining kitchen she never entered, but in her accumulated distance from the lifeless

Delaware home, dedicated always to the notion that life is released in movement, “for only in movement is there any liberty, and life can only develop under freedom” (MS

197 “In Journey To the End of History” (1980) Jane Nelson reads the autobiography as a form of spiritual confession and journey from East to West.

221

360). Yet it is not only the movements between houses but also the movements she invited into those houses, of people, ideas, or “isms,” that are crucial to this release of life. Mabel’s endorsement of the free flow of ideas, like her “tell-all” autobiography and her homes’ open doors, represent antitheses to the shut down and shut-in house of her childhood, a home and approach to life that made her forever resistant to anything that would keep her literally and metaphorically stuck in one place.

Rather than representing an inability to find a “clear direction” for herself, in its record of continuous movement Mabel’s autobiography’s demonstrates her view that she was always moving with internal momentum, her life one of ongoing “becoming,” each period of her life corresponding to an actualization of a self out of myriad possibilities.

Rather than Stein, Lawrence, or Proust, what emerges in the reading of Mabel’s autobiography through the lens of movement is the influence of Bergson, the philosopher whose vitalist theories course through this entire dissertation.198 Intimate Memories is structured as an account of living according to Bergson’s dictum, “For a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly” (Creative Evolution 7). Moving between houses Mabel expresses both her consciousness and her vitality as someone continually changing. Sharing her feelings through her autobiography, a “prominent mechanism” for “bringing into public view individual experiences that should be understood as collective, however idiosyncratic and queer” (Cvetkovich 466), Mabel, despite her rarity as a woman of means, builds community with other women similarly resisting the confinements of their gender—those

198 Rudnick refers to Bergson’s vitalism as an influence of her life but she does not relate him to the structure and form of the autobiography (“Mabel Dodge Luhan and the Myth of the Southwest” 207). For literary models she cites the Steins, Lawrence and Proust (New Woman 256).

222 women for whom, as Marie Howe told her, she “counted for so much” by living her “life openly and frankly.”

In a letter to Alexander Berkman, then editor of Mother Jones, written in response to his dedication of a book to Mabel for her “crystallization of a definite goal to make the world a better place to live in for men and women,” Mabel writes,

“Now any crystallization seems to me only an opportunity for further

disintegration…It seems to me that no sooner has an idea become crystallized into

an institution, a habit, or even a party, that it is ready for some spiritual

dynamiting—the life that is released, and put once more in movement, for only in

movement is there any liberty, and life can only develop under freedom.” (MS 60)

To Mabel, ideas that ossify into movements and institutions lose their dynamism, their vitality, because they lose the ability to “move,” to change, and to grow, “for only in movement is there any liberty, and life can only develop under freedom.” In the same letter to Berkman she also writes that she cannot imagine “crystallizing into an anarchist or socialist, any more than into a ‘society woman’ or a Roman Catholic because to become the member of a party signifies to me the exclusion of other parties. But I can conceive of being a woman in the world, taken in its broadest meaning—or a humanitarian” (MS 60). Mabel’s restlessness, at its most basic level an exercise in freedom, extends to her resistance to labels that would metaphorically fix her in place and inhibit her ability to move freely because of notions inherent to those labels about who she is and where she belongs. Raised to be a “lady,” Mabel was acutely aware of how little room that label left her to move. Restlessness kept her a moving target, able to elide

223 being “crystallized” into any one thing because only in movement is “there any liberty,” and only in liberty can there be life.

224

Mabel’s Houses

All images from Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Figure 9: Villa Curonia, Florence

Figure 10: Yellow Salon, Villa Curonia

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Figure 11: Interior, 23 Fifth Avenue, Greenwich Village

Figure 12: Los Gallos, Taos

Conclusion

My dissertation has engaged with works generally regarded as lacking in aesthetic and thematic substance by virtue of their ties to both the marketplace and to women (as creators and characters). I have refuted this claim through an exploration of their common preoccupation with the movement of their female characters. Although not the protests and marches by which feminist activism is most readily imagined and understood, the movements I describe express similar concern for the recognition of women as subjects and equals to men, and with the importance of freedom and autonomy for women. In other words, I identify what is feminist about the presentation of women’s movements.

Moving their bodies for work and pleasure, outside the duties and obligations of marriage and domesticity, female characters in the works discussed here express vitality as a product of the opportunities, empowerment, and self-realization their movement allows.

A right to choose—for themselves, and in accordance with their own desires—expressed through the language of movement.

As envisioned within a metaphoric boarding house, suspect in the early decades of the twentieth century for subverting the concept of the ideal home cordoned off from its neighbours as well as commercial enterprise, the movements of my “residents” are contextualized as resistance to normative assumptions about women and their rightful place. Women who lived in boarding houses with other women unrelated to them, working outside rather than inside the home, formed an alternative community that supported each other in their ambitions, successes, and frustrations. Like these women, the residents of my boarding house are also “unrelated,” appearing in texts that diverge in

226 227 genre and medium, and as the products of different creators, but are drawn together by their shared aesthetics of movement. As a space of intersecting movements both inside and out, the boarding house framework has enabled authors and texts to “cross paths” on the landings, stoops, and living rooms of their common issues and concerns.

Just as the lives and work of each of the creators must be read with and against each other for the full scope and significance of the connections I make to emerge, so my investigation has required an interdisciplinary method to capture the multiple intersecting ways their movements make meaning. A living space itself characterized by hybridity and variety, the boarding house has supported an analysis of movement that incorporates insights from cultural studies of the everyday, especially the spatial practices that contribute to the social production of space; philosophies emphasizing movement as duration rather than displacement, as process rather than product; and the expressive, rather than (although not excluding) the semiotic, capacities of the body.

Chapter one’s discussion of Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman’s Stage Door established the significance of female movement in relation to the confinements of the domestic sphere as the underlying theme of the entire dissertation while also foregrounding the importance of movement for work and as work to the feminist aesthetics it identifies. The presentation of the actresses as workers declares them as subjects worthy of our attention, while also introducing the way work underwrites other kinds of vital movement for women—the actresses move for pleasure as often as work, heading out to dinner as often as they do auditions. The ability to follow their own desires, whether for work or fun, is a key component of their vitality, as is the

228 conviviality and camaraderie their bodies express gathered round to hear the latest tale of triumph or woe, or huddled together on a Sunday morning.

The discussion of Dorothy Arzner’s Dance, Girl, Dance parsed Stage Door’s more general investigation of moving women into norms of feminine embodiment, represented in the film by burlesque and ballet, to explore how these norms both forge and limit female subjectivities, limits the film links to an ever present and often dehumanizing male gaze. While Judy takes the entire film to resist that gaze, Bubbles spends the film satisfying it. But though she moves within it, Bubbles also returns that gaze—swaying her hips and slapping her behind tactics she knowingly uses to carve out a measure of freedom and autonomy in a world otherwise dominated by men. Moving on stage in accordance with a male audience’s desires allows Bubbles to move off stage as she chooses by virtue of the money she earns doing it. She is in control of her body, if not its presentation. Dancing night after night on the burlesque stage gives Judy the time and space to work on her footwork, but also on herself. Her eventual resistance, standing still and refusing to dance, and berating her audience for its dehumanizing catcalls, heralds both her self-actualization and her soon-to-be realized dream of dancing with a professional company. While Judy, like the period’s modern dancers, is the one who asserts her right to be the author of her own movement, both Bubbles and Judy, moving for work and for themselves, are modern women in their ongoing negotiations between money, personal freedom, and identity.

Movement and self-actualization on stage was then broken down off stage to consider the movements that are vital for a single woman bound by “dead duty” to make before she can even imagine leaving her home to find work in the city. Lulu’s steady

229 accumulation of self-directed movements in Zona Gale’s Miss Lulu Bett —to the drawing room from the kitchen, playing piano rather than doing the dishes, running to catch a train to save the teenaged Dinah from running off with her boyfriend—both embolden

Lulu and foster the embodiment of her “bodiless body” formerly visible only in her feet.

Making a crucial connection between movement and unarticulated desires, Lulu’s movements focus particular attention on the way our bodies speak for us when we have no words. Gale’s novel demonstrates how difficult it can be for a woman like Lulu to imagine what she wants when she rarely ventures outside her home and barely moves for reasons other than domestic labour. But the more Lulu moves for herself, the more she thinks, until she is able to verbalize that what she wants is to get out of the Deacon house.

Lulu’s movements in turn allow Gale to make space for a conversation about single women and their placelessness within a patriarchal society built on the foundation of the nuclear family.

Extending the movements Lulu makes within the Deacon home across a number of houses, my discussion of Intimate Memories explored Mabel Dodge Luhan’s ongoing search for a vital life in light of the movements she makes in and between those houses.

Her childhood home in Victorian Buffalo, her villa in Florence, her apartment in New

York City, and her adobe house in Taos, are each characterized by a different kind and understanding of movement. The Buffalo home, a place in which objects did not move and people could not “breathe,” represents the immobility and lifelessness each subsequent home and the life she lives in it are meant to counter. In Florence where the past feels alive, Mabel feels vital walking through its ancient streets. In New York the movers and shakers agitating to change the world through demonstrations and

230 conversations engender that feeling. In Taos, experiencing herself as part of the ongoing movement of nature, Mabel is finally able to separate rest from restlessness and take root.

But throughout the autobiography, her attraction to things that move—herself, others, objects, ideas, and places—speak to the restlessness manifest by a deathly fear of the

“immobility of thought and feeling” that comes when one “has nothing to do.”

Vitality and The New Vitalism199

According to the editors of The Routledge Handbook of Mobilities (2014) the dominant concerns of mobilities research are often peripheral to other projects (Adey et al 8). This is true of my project’s focus on the mobility of its women, which is, for example, secondary to the velocity of speech in DiBattista’s study of “fast-talking dames.” Another way to describe this peripheral position is to call my dissertation’s story of movement an

“alter-tale.” Inspired by Kafka and Deleuze and Guttari’s Towards a Minor Literature,

Jane Bennett calls the story she tells in The Enchantment of Modern Life (2001) her

“alter-tale” within the major tale of the disenchantment of modern life. If popular culture is a minor literature within the major that is modernism, then my telling of Stage Door,

Dance, Girl, Dance, Miss Lulu Bett, and Intimate Memories, written by women marginalized by modernism’s male-defined artistry, functions as my own alter-tale about the vitality of commercial works by women.

Accounting for the vital movements of their female characters—the movements that both generate and are vital to their vitality—the works themselves are revitalized (re- vital-ized) for contemporary audiences made newly and urgently aware of the restrictions and dangers of the male gaze, today more commonly referred to in terms of “toxic”

199 I refer here to the term used by the editors of Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism (Sage, 2006).

231 masculinity. The legacy of sexism that continues to circumscribe women’s movements echoes in Terry’s outburst in the producer Berger’s office in Stage Door when she must submit to his querying whether she is really an actress because she is “not even pretty.”

Terry’s determination to have Berger “see” her and her talent, expressed in her refusal to literally move from his office, finds common ground with women who continue to be underestimated or dismissed because of their gender and appearance. The collective transgression of women’s roles and feminine embodiments expressed in and by their movements also showcase women putting their desires first, whether for work or pleasure, a choice that remains a struggle for many women, who are often demonized as selfish by the larger culture. And while no longer invisible, the single and childless woman remains if not threatening then discomfiting in her position outside the heteronormative contexts of marriage and motherhood.

As expressed by Ann Cvetkovich, my readings of these commercial texts are

“reparative.” They are motivated by my own “pleasure and curiosity” in the strength, resilience, wit, and gumption of the women they feature, and directed towards the

“textures” of the works, which in my case, are formed out of the seemingly functional movements of the women’s lives and the sensations of vitality they engender.200 I have discovered that the pleasure I experience is partly due to the pleasure the women themselves express in their movements: pleasure with work, with life, and each other, and their refusal to stand still or stand down; that is, their insistence on their right to be taken into account.

200 “Reparative reading is affectively driven, motivated by pleasure and curiosity, and directed toward the textures and tastes, the sensuous feel, of one’s objects of study” (462–3).

232

One could call their vitality enchanting. Bennett defines enchantment as a physical sensation that begins with the “immobilization of surprise” but “ends with a mobilizing rush as if an electric charge had coursed through space to you” (Enchantment of Modern Life 104).201 That is to say, enchantment is both a function of and an expression of movement.202 According to Bennett even commodities like “swinging” Gap pants can enchant because of their “aesthetic of vibrant mobility” (114). Works of commercial culture can similarly enchant because of the “vibrant mobility” of their constituent people and places, and the “wonder and surprise” they can elicit when that vibrant mobility reveals a complex of relations previously undetected.

The so-called “new” vitalism (which encompasses Bennett’s vibrant matter) refuses mechanistic and reductivist explanations of phenomenon whether in the natural world or network systems.203 Similarly, my project refuses to reduce popular culture to mass deception, and specifically women’s cultural artifacts to a narrowly defined

“women’s culture,” of no interest or relevance beyond the women who are its presumed targets, without craft or political imperatives. As a heuristic, movement gives forms and genres feminized by their positions in various binaries metaphoric room to move, allowing them to be mobilized into productive relation with works positioned beyond their culturally imposed boundaries.

“Enchantment is a mood of lively and intense engagement with the world,”

Bennett writes (111). A mood, she argues, that can propel ethics. Ethics require “both a moral code (which condenses moral ideals and metaphysical assumptions into principles

201 Not unlike the connection between actor and audience described by Terry in Stage Door with which I began chapter one. 202 “Enchantment is something that we encounter, that hits us but it is also a comportment that can be fostered through deliberate strategies” (Bennett 3). 203 I refer here to the term used by the editors of Inventive Life: Approaches to the New Vitalism (Sage, 2006).

233 and rules) and an embodied sensibility (which organizes affects into a style and generates the impetus to enact the code)” (131), one nurtured by a willingness to be enchanted. To

Bennett it seems that “presumptive generosity, as well as the will to social justice, are sustained by periodic bouts of being enamored with existence, and that it is too hard to love a disenchanted world” (12). This ethos of generosity “emerges in conjunction with a picture of the world as a web of lively and mobile matter-forms of varying degrees of complexity” (131). Seeing the world as a complex system of mobile, vibrant matter makes the world “so much more interesting” and that much easier to love (112).

Moments of enchantment do not erase the very real disenchantments of modern life but,

Bennett argues, they prepare us to better confront that disenchantment with action.

Taking inspiration from Bennett, I wish to posit that a willingness to be enchanted by the works of commercial culture presented here (which according to the tenets of aesthetic modernism have contributed to that disenchantment) can also fuel that ethic of generosity. To approach them with a willingness to experience wonder and surprise constitutes a way of meeting the world. That is, with the assumption that things are always more complex than they appear. It just depends on where and how you choose to look.

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