Spectatrices: Moviegoing and Women’s Writing, 1925-1945 Nolan Gear Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy under the Executive Committee of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2021 © 2021 Nolan Gear All Rights Reserved Abstract Spectatrices: Moviegoing and Women’s Writing, 1925-1945 Nolan Gear How did cinema influence the many writers who also constituted the first generation of moviegoers? In Spectatrices, I argue that early moviegoing was a rich imaginative reservoir for anglophone writers on both sides of the Atlantic. Coming to cinema from the vantage of the audience, I suggest that women of the 1920s found in moviegoing a practice of experimentation, aesthetic inquiry, and social critique. My project is focused on women writers not only as a means of reclaiming the femininized passivity of the audience, but because moviegoing offered novel opportunities for women to gather publicly. It was, for this reason, a profoundly political endeavor in the first decades of the 20th century. At the movies, writers such as Jessie Redmon Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, H.D., Dorothy Richardson, and Virginia Woolf developed concepts of temporary community, alternative desire, and discontinuous form that they then incorporated into their literary practice. Where most scholarship assessing cinema’s influence on literature is governed by the medium-specificity of film, my project emphasizes the public dimension of the movies, the fleeting and semi-anonymous intimacy of the moviegoing audience. In turning to moviegoing, Spectatrices opens new methods of comparison and cross-canonical reorganization, focusing on the weak social ties typified by moviegoing audiences, the libidinal permissiveness of fantasy and diva-worship, the worshipful rhetoric by which some writers transformed the theater into a church, and most significantly, the creation of new public formations for women across different axes of class, gender, and race. In this respect, cinema’s dubious universalism is both an invitation and a problem. Writers from vastly different regional, racial, linguistic, and class contexts were moviegoers, together and apart; but to say they had the same experience is obviously inaccurate. In this project, I draw from historical accounts of moviegoing practices in their specificity to highlight that whereas the mass-distributed moving image held the promise, even the premise, of shared experience, moviegoing was structured by difference. The transatlantic organization of the project is meant to engage and resist this would-be universality, charting cinema’s unprecedented global reach while describing differential scenes and modes of exhibition. Focusing on moviegoing not only permits but requires a new constellation of authors, one that includes English and American, Black and white, wealthy and working class writers alike. Across these axes of difference, women theorized the politics and possibilities of gathering, rethinking the audience as a vital and peculiar social formation. Table of Contents Acknowledgments...................................................................................................................... ii Introduction: From Spectatrix to Moviegoing............................................................................ 1 Chapter One: The Temporary in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage........................................ 54 Chapter Two: Moviegoing and the Public in Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bum ................................ 88 Chapter Three: Thick Witness in Zora Neale Hurston’s Churches .................................. 130 Chapter Four: H.D.’s Fandom and Trilogy’s Star System ..................................................... 170 Moviegoing’s Weakness: a Coda............................................................................................ 221 Bibliography........................................................................................................................... 226 ii Acknowledgments This project is fundamentally concerned with the formation and deformation of communities. In this spirit, I first want to thank those who’ve influenced my thinking that I cannot name: strangers who shout at the screen, who laugh, gasp, and cry with me. I am indebted to these fleeting intimacies and antipathies. And then, of course, there are the lasting ties – the friends, collaborators, advisors, sparring partners, family members, teachers, and students who’ve taught me how to learn, unlearn, attach, and let go. To Sarah Cole, my profound thanks. For your mentorship and advocacy, your loving bluntness, your rigor and zest, I am dizzily grateful. You saw in this unruly project the throughlines and the big ideas, the story I was trying to tell. Thank you for your clarity, your incisiveness, and the playful warmth that turns even the toughest critiques into acts of care. Thanks to Brent Edwards for your meticulous reading and surgical conceptual interventions. You taught me to seek out the inconsistencies, to specify rather than multiply ideas – a lesson I will be learning and applying for years to come. Thank you for impressing on me the shape and weight of keywords, the exhilaration of precision. To Matthew Hart, I am thankful for the sheer audacity and consistency of your encouragement. It was clear throughout the years how much you believed in me – even and especially when I could not. For your sure-footed advice, your generous critiques, your directiveness and Virgo solidity, my thanks. When I was besieged by indecision, you always showed me a way through. To Emily Bloom, Marianne Hirsch, and Julie Peters, my appreciation for guiding me through the earliest seedling phases of this project, for teaching me to follow my passions, and for teaching me how to teach. To the 20/21 British Colloquium, and especially to members iii Therese Cox, Mia Florin-Sefton, Diana Newby, and Naomi Michalowicz, thank you for your always constructive and exuberant feedback, and for fostering an intellectual community that marries rigor with joy. For readers from the IRWGS Graduate Colloquium, especially Noni Carter, Elleza Kelley, and Tiana Reid, thank you for the incisive and far-reading feedback on my Fauset chapter, which changed irrevocably and for the better after our discussion. To Liz Bowen, an ocean of thank you. You held and helped me through the darkest days of this process, reminding me that thinking never happens in a vacuum but through the alchemies of vulnerability and care. For my biological family: Tom, Kerri, Em, and Louisa, for my grandparents Carol and Terry, Gene and JoAnn. Each of you has championed me through these several years of work and worry, and each of you lives in these pages. To Katie Schaffer, another ocean. You have seen me through this strange and estranging process, reminding me always that integrity, community, and joy are the stars by which I should chart my way. Thank you for your witness, your reality checks, your adamant belief that thinking means doing. No three people have been more intimate, regular, and compassionate readers of my work than Kristen Maye, Charles Milliken, and Milan Terlunen. Your fingerprints have smudged any veneer of individual authorship; so much of this dissertation comes from your generous and powerful thinking. Disagreement, skepticism, and uncertainty have blossomed because of your cultivating care. For all the hours and hours and hours – thank you. Finally, my deepest gratitude for Sean Mattio and Imani Parks, to whom I owe it all. We have built our own strange hospice risen overnight. Without it, and without you both, where would I be? Gear 1 Introduction: From Spectatrix to Moviegoing In 1916, the Italian journalist and novelist Matilde Serao published an essay entitled “Parla una spettatrice” (“a spectatrix is speaking to you”) in the journal l’Arte Muta. “Before the war,” she writes, “novelists, poets, and playwrights could not avoid noticing the impetuous and incessant agitation of the curious, even anxious crowds created by the cinema.” Soon after a knee-jerk indignation, says Serao, her literary peers more seriously considered how they could wrangle or accommodate this agitating new form: “‘let’s make these movies’– novelists, poets, and playwrights mused, and then decided – ‘let’s make them, but let’s also uplift the cinematographic art by lofty, poetic, and sublime stories.’”1 Setting up her assertion that writing screenplays was not the proper literary response to cinema, Serao performatively sheds her role as writer, addressing the Italian literati from the vantage point of a spettatrice (spectatrix). … for months and months, and with a feeling of sincere humility, I did only one thing: I went to the movies to take up my role of spettatrice. With my mortal eyes, I went to see, for a few cents, or even less, whatever might please, amuse, or move me in a film show [...] This spectatrix became convinced of a truth – let us say an eternal truth – that the audience of the cinematograph is made of thousands of simple souls, who were either like that in the first place or made simple by the movies themselves. For one of the most bizarre miracles occurring inside a movie theater is that everybody becomes part of one single spirit. Oh, poets, novelists, playwrights, and brothers of mine, we should not strive so anxiously and painfully for rare and precious scenarios for our films! Let’s just go to the truth of things and to people’s naturalness. Let’s just tell plain good stories,