City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2017 Butch Between the Wars: A Pre-History of Butch Style in Twentieth-Century Literature, Music, and Film Karen Allison Hammer The Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/2184 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] BUTCH BETWEEN THE WARS: A PRE-HISTORY OF BUTCH STYLE IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY LITERATURE, MUSIC AND FILM by Karen Allison Hammer A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The City University of New York 2017 © 2017 KAREN ALLISON HAMMER All Rights Reserved ii Butch Between the Wars: A Pre-History of Butch Style in Twentieth-Century Literature, Music, and Film By Karen Allison Hammer This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in the Department of English in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. ____________________ _________________________________________ Date Wayne Koestenbaum Chair of the Examining Committee ____________________ _________________________________________ Date Mario DiGangi Executive Officer Supervisory Committee Nancy K. Miller Steven Kruger THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT Butch Between the Wars: A Pre-History of Butch Style in Twentieth-Century Literature, Music, and Film By Karen Allison Hammer Advisor: Wayne Koestenbaum Butch Between the Wars is a pre-history of “butch,” a twentieth-century masculine style that became an identity category for lesbians in the 1940s and ’50s. Between the two world wars and in the early postwar period, women used the energy of butch to create literature, music, and character on film. Butch-styled artists expressed a muscular orientation to the world, one with close associations to lower and working class black and white masculinities. Those who were recognizably lesbian and those with less clearly defined sexualities challenged the idea that strength, authority, and independence are qualities “naturally” bound to the male body. Historical events provided the conditions for these earlier butch styles. The nine artists in this dissertation discovered their artistic exuberance in what I call “butch exceptionalism,” a grandiosity based in masculine monumentality. Because butch-styled women broke with feminine propriety in times and places where this was considered blasphemous, they naturally considered themselves to be exceptions. Further, the butch-styled artist often required what I call a “femme witness,” a person of either biological gender who functioned as stage manager, typist, travel coordinator, publicist, and emotional support for the butch in her rise to success. Butch artists held a treasure chest of private feelings that can only be shared safely with carefully chosen intimates. In Chapter One, “Epic, Amiable, Minuscule: Writing Stone Butch After the Great War,” I explore how Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Marianne Moore developed a stone butch style of writing iv in response to the First World War. These writers used blockage and absence of emotion to convey the loss and tragedy of the War; simultaneously, they rejected the nineteenth-century Cult of True Womanhood that bound women to the domestic sphere. In Chapter Two, “B.D. Women Sing the Blues (and Dance the Charleston): Rage and Defiance in the Era of the ‘Greats,’” I correct a pervasive tendency to minimize or erase entirely questions of racial difference in discussions on butch. Butch style is a multi-layered response to sexism, racism, and homophobia. I consider how Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Josephine Baker used butch defiance and rage to confront the legacy of slavery and the present reality of Jim Crow. Through butch style, black female musicians and performers found the audacity to “tell it like it is,” and discover through performance a sense of body continuity, what Hortense Spillers calls “being-for-self.” However, all three died in poverty, Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith in relative obscurity, which suggests that the very contours of butch style were determined by life-or- death racial, economic, and social factors. In Chapter Three, “‘Just Put Your Lips Together and Blow’”: Butch Pluck and Gumption in the Films of Clara Bow, Lauren Bacall and Hope Emerson,” I observe how representations of butch style gradually shifted as butch become an identity category. All three performers honed an uncanny ability to hijack the plot of the film by throwing a punch, lighting a match, or eating a giant stack of pancakes. However, silent film star and “It” girl Clara Bow had more license to bend gender and sexuality in the pre-code era, and she received little punishment in the narrative arc of the film for her tomboy behaviors. By the ’40s and ’50’s, butch women were maligned, often used as minor characters and foils for the heterosexual love plot. Lauren Bacall expresses butch toughness through clipped language, precise physical movements (such as catching a matchbook in midair), and stone butch impenetrability. Through her representation of what I call the butch body out of control, Emerson used her size to create an imposing butch presence. v CONTENTS Introduction / 1 Epic, Amiable, Minuscule: Writing Stone Butch After the Great War / 19 B.D. Women Sing the Blues (and Dance the Charleston): Rage and Defiance in the Era of the “Greats” / 83 “Just Put Your Lips Together and Blow”: Butch Pluck and Gumption in the Films of Clara Bow, Lauren Bacall and Hope Emerson / 140 Epilogue: Melting Hannah Arendt’s Stone: Butch as a Way of Being in the World / 198 vi ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1: Studio portrait of Willa Cather in embroidered jacket / 33 Figure 2: Willa Cather and Léon Bakst in his studio / 44 Figure 3: Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas with their Ford truck, “Auntie” / 53 Figure 4: Gertrude Stein in the Church Yard. Lucey Church. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten / 54 Figure 5: Marianne Moore and Mary Warner Moore in their Brooklyn apartment / 70 Figure 6: Marianne Moore and Mary Warner Moore holding hands / 70 Figure 7: Ma Rainey and her band / 102 Figure 8: Bessie Smith. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten / 111 Figure 9: Bessie Smith Advertisement / 118 Figure 10: Josephine Baker in Copenhagen / 130 Figure 11: Josephine Baker in the later incarnation of the banana belt / 131 Figure 12: Clara Bow (age 21) with knapsack and gun on the set of Mantrap (1926) / 163 Figure 13: Lauren Bacall, as Rose Cullen, in Confidential Agent (1945) / 171 Figure 14: Hope Emerson, as Rose Givens, in Cry of the City (1948) / 186 Figure 15: Hope Emerson, as Rose Givens, in Cry of the City (1948) / 187 Figure 16: Hope Emerson, as Rose Givens, in Cry of the City (1948) / 188 vii Introduction “Culture on all fours to greet/ A butch and criminal elite”—W.H. Auden, New Year Letter (1941) “Let me recite what history teaches. History teaches.”—(Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him, A Completed Portrait of Picasso” (1923) Butch Between the Wars is a pre-history of “butch,” a twentieth-century masculine style that became an identity category for lesbians in the 1940s and ’50s. Studies of early butch performance tend to focus on familiar figures like the writer Radclyffe Hall, or the lesbian film star Marlene Dietrich, who famously crooned to a woman while wearing a tux in the 1930 film Morocco. However, beyond these usual suspects, butch has a resonant historical and aesthetic presence, one that has yet to be fully appreciated. Between the two world wars and in the early postwar period, women used the stylistic energy of butch to create literature, music, and character on film. Through butch, artists expressed a muscular orientation to the world, one with close associations to lower and working class black and white masculinities. However, while the women in this study might have had lesbian lovers or proclivities, the lines of desire remained unpredictable in this period, in part because “homosexual” or “lesbian” was not yet a cohesive identity. Through butch, black and white artists, those who were recognizably lesbian and those with less clearly defined sexualities, challenged the idea that strength, authority, and independence are qualities “naturally” bound to the male body. Butch offered a self-authorizing power, an artistic license not granted but rather stolen and seized. As part of a stylistic toolkit for gay men and women, transgendered individuals, and people of color, butch disrupts gender/sex alignments, and notions of cisnormativity in the present.1 The 1 Here I refer to the definition for “cisgender” provided by Erica Lennon and Brian J. Mistler (2014); “cisgender” refers to the “cultural and systemic ideology that denies, denigrates, or pathologizes self- 1 economy of pleasure between butch-styled performers and their audience therefore tampers with any sense of continuity between the masculine body and masculine gender orientation. Butch style is characterized by emotional reserve in the public sphere, an aggressive stance, and an enormousness that confronts rather than merely protests. My use of style rather than identity allows for a deeper appreciation of butch pleasures in earlier periods. Susan Sontag writes in the title essay “Where the Stress Falls” that style is the manner in which things appear to us as designed for pleasure (72). First and foremost, writers, musicians and performers found pleasure in butch behaviors and in their ability to aggravate the gender/sex alignment.2 In All We Know: Three Lives, a study of idiosyncratic artistic women of the 1920s, Lisa Cohen defines style: a form of pleasure, for oneself and for an audience, and as an expression of the wish to exceed and confound expectations, to be exceptional…style is a response to the terror of invisibility and isolation—a wish for inclusion.