A Seed for Change: The Engenderment of "A Florida Enchantment"

Abstract

On June 14, 1990, the 1914 film A Florida Enchantment (Sidney Drew) was screened at the New York International Festival of Lesbian and Gay Film.' The festival program described Lillian Travers, the main character of the film, as New York heiress, [who] after a fight with her fiance over his affairs with other women, pops a magic seed which changes women into men and men into women. But she doesn't turn into a man, she turns into a LESBIAN! ... Later, when a man swallows the seed, he turns into a drag queen.2 Is this a case of a lesbian and gay community in the 1990s reinterpreting an object from the past for its own political purposes, a telos of lesbian existence?3 Regardless of intent, contemporary lesbian and gay audiences are appropriating this historical artifact for contemporary pleasurable gratification. Promotional materials, such as the brochure description above, prep contemporary lesbian and gay audiences to read the film within a lesbian and gay sensibility. In contrast, the box cover for the video tape of A Florida Enchantment, released by the Library of Congress in 1995, describes the film as a gender-bending comedy of manners set in motion when Lillian Travers, very contemporary young woman, angry with her philandering fiance, tests magic seeds that change women into men (and men into women), without altering their outward appearance.'4 This straight description of the film aimed at a general contemporary audience denies the possibility of a lesbian and gay reading of the film except at the level of subtext, for it views the seeds as changing biological sex, not sexual orientation. The video promotional materials prep a contemporary viewer to treat any appearance of lesbianism or gayness as an apparition, the result of an outer gender appearance not aligning with an inner biological sex after swallowing the seed, not the result of any actual same-sex desire. Though contemporary lesbians and gays have positioned the film within a lesbian and gay discourse, would a similar reading of the film (whether by homosexuals or heterosexuals) be reasonable, or even conceivable, in 1914, when the film was originally released?5 Or, in 1914, would such a reading have been precluded and Lillian Travers's transformation conceivable only as a man? Lillian Travers's name can be read as a sentence. Lillian suggests lily, something very feminine and delicate. But more notably, Travers is close to traverse, and Lillian certainly traverses some terrain in A Florida Enchantment.6 Two possible readings,