UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Passionate Failures: The Diva Onscreen Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2117p747 Author McElroy, Dolores C Publication Date 2019 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Passionate Failures: The Diva Onscreen By Dolores C McElroy A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Media in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Linda Williams, Chair Professor Mary Ann Doane Professor James Q. Davies Summer 2019 © 2019 Dolores C McElroy All Rights Reserved Abstract Passionate Failures: The Diva Onscreen By Dolores C McElroy Doctor of Philosophy in Film & Media University of California, Berkeley Professor Linda Williams, Chair I place the origins of the diva in the 19th century artistic movement l’art pour l’art (“art for art’s sake”) in order to show that the diva was born of mechanization and the reaction against it. Therefore, to consider the diva “onscreen” is to acknowledge the very dialectic that birthed this paradoxical prima donna: uniqueness vs. reproduction, private vs. public, ritual vs. politics. I understand the notion of the female voice as a way to anchor the meaning of “diva,” which has come to be used too promiscuously, sometimes denoting just about anyone whose manner of self-presentation puts them on some imagined scale between self-confidence and vanity. I do not aim to offer a strict definition of the term, but I do aim to draw from certain tropes of the presentation of the diva onscreen the contours of particular relations of desire that hem the specificity of what “diva” might mean. The common ancestor of the operatic prima donna, I argue, accounts for many other iterations of the diva type, which goes well beyond singers. The virtuosic female voice has historically been thought of as “expressing the inexpressible,” a melodramatic striving for an unattainable meaning that is also manifest in the grand theatrical postures of 19th century actors, in the violent and tortured D’Annunzian body language of the Italian silent film divas, as well as in the languid and swooning gestures of Hollywood silent film stars, and in popular American singers of the 20th century, such as Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, and Whitney Houston. In this dissertation, I define “diva” as a cultural type that has broadened beyond opera singers to include nearly any woman with a theatrical manner of self-presentation who is narrated as a “public success,” and a “private failure.” Still, I posit that it is crucial to understand the diva’s origins in discourse around female opera singers because the diva’s overdetermined relationship to the notion of presence is determined by a history of ideas regarding the female voice. I divide the dissertation into three tropes surrounding the diva: The Voice, The Narcissist, and The Comeback. Using studies in musicology, and citing a history of ideas about the female voice, including psychoanalytic notions and queer theory, I explain the importance of the fact that “diva” came into currency particularly in association with a series of two-soprano duets in the late 1820s. It is this redoubled and self-referential femininity, coupled with ideas of the female voice as “beyond language” which trouble standard regimes of representation, such as those codified by mainstream cinema. Finally, I use theories of melodrama and cinematic time to explain the meaning of “the comeback” and the diva’s relation to nostalgia and pathos. 1 For Ashley Putnam i Table of Contents List of Figures………………………………………………………………………………… iii Prelude: Diva vs. Machine……………………………………………………………………. iv Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………………. v-vi Introduction: È tardi!................................................................................................................. vii 1: The Voice Sinister Sonorities: The Double Feminine and the Asynchronous Voice…………….. 1 2: The Narcissist Arias for an Untold Want: Rethinking the Diva’s Narcissistic Desire……………….. 29 3: The Comeback Every Diva Is a Has-Been: Melodrama, Time, and the Grammatical Moods of the Comeback Narrative………………………………………………………………….. 49 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………. 83 References…………………………………………………………………………………….. 87 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………... 99 ii LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1. “More than one Alba” Rapsodia Satanica (1917) 37 2. Lyda Borelli in Rapsodia Satanica (1917) 38 3. Lyda Borelli in Rapsodia Satanica (1917) 38 4. Lyda Borelli in Rapsodia Satanica (1917) 43 5. Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1968) 43 6. Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1968) 43 7. Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl (1968) 43 8. “Snow again, eternal snow,” Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933) 45 9. Greta Garbo in Queen Christina (1933) 46 10. Liza Minnelli in Cabaret 77 11. Judy Garland in 1955 77 12. Judy Garland as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939) 77 iii PRELUDE DIVA VS. MACHINE In the mid-1960s, Judy Garland recorded her thoughts for a never-published autobiography using an audio tape recorder. This is how she began: Well, for openers, I don’t know how to work this machine. I’m just astounded at this machine. This is the silliest way I’ve ever known of spending the nights alone talking to yourself into an obvious Nazi machine. This is a Red China Manchurian Candidate machine because I can’t get anything on tape and when I do recording anything I automatically erase it and I’m sitting in a room all by myself… ho ho, boy. And across the room on my library shelf are about 35 tapes of shows I’ve done for CBS… hmm… mmm hmm… Now, in those boxes that hold the tapes, my life depends on those, and yet I don’t know how to work it, that’s not my business! I was trying to be a singer. I don’t read notes, I can’t read music, and I can’t count too well, and I don’t know how to work this machine. But that’s the story of my life: You go with it even if you don’t know what’s going on, keep talking, smiling, singing, and taping. Somebody told me this might be interesting, but I’ve gotten so involved with this Donovan’s Brain machine, tape machine, it should be Johnson & Johnson tapes… my wounds I’d like to tape. I just am trying to get a few thoughts down and then I’m all by myself, as usual, and trying to go straight with myself. Now, that makes you feel kinda dumb! I can’t find my glasses to find the directions. I don’t know what 33 1/3 means, that just means out of synch to me. Then they’ve got all kinds of kinda early Franz Joseph directions that I’m not equipped for. I have done –– believe me, I have done –– two, what do they call it, spools of tape, of talking. I think I erased the whole thing and just Peggy Lee and myself came on in a rehearsal tape that played backwards. I wonder if Sid Luft’s mother makes these machines. Could be, she makes all these machines. She made Sid. She spawned him in the Red Sea somewhere… But to, yeah, let’s just think about my trying to be heard. Do you realize how many people have talked about me, written about me, imitated me? Told my children that they really know me, they really know Judy Garland! My little girl Liza came home one day from school. She was about 10 years old and she said, “What is this?” –– she has a kind of lovely Italian indignation, indignity, I should say –– see, I can’t read, write or talk too well… but it’s all in the machine! Maybe Madison Avenue puts out these machines… Webster and Madison… At any rate, Liza came home from school one day and said, “What is this nonsense that I always hear at school, that everybody knows… you, Judy Garland? Everybody knows Judy, yeah, but they really know her, no they really know her, they knew her when she lived in Transylvania, they had the house next door, and they heard all the… insanity of mama. And Liza looked at me and simply said, “Look, I don’t know you, Mama. And nobody ever will! I never will!” [chuckles] That’s my girl. We know each other pretty well, I’m rather proud of that. So far, I think I’m on a blank tape, I don’t know. And I might admit defeat at this point. I doubt it. I have the tenacity of a Praying Mantis with a little Black Irish witch involved. Let’s see if we got anything, hmm? iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is with humility and the deepest gratitude that I would like to thank the following individuals who made the completion of this dissertation possible. Thanks goes first and foremost to my advisor and chair, Linda Williams, whose generosity and enthusiasm (and clarity!) will always be the exemplar of what I would like to be as a scholar. I wouldn’t have made it without you. Deepest thanks also to Mary Ann Doane, who so wonderfully reconciles those seemingly paradoxical qualities, kindness and precision, and from whom I have learned so much. Thanks to James Q. Davies, for his sense of poetry, which always inspires me, and his good humor. Thanks also to Jane Gaines, to whom I undoubtedly owe a good chunk of my intellectual tastes, and whose imagination and passion made it seem desirable to make a life as a scholar. I would also like to thank Professor Tom Lindblade of Colorado College, who always “got” it and who inspires me to this day never to bore my readers.