Vital Movements: Feminist Aesthetics and Popular Culture 1920–1945
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Vital Movements: Feminist Aesthetics and Popular Culture 1920–1945 by Jacqueline Rothstein A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Jacqueline Rothstein 2019 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 ii 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. iv 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. v 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 Copyright Acknowledgements 256 vi 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 re- consideration 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.