Adapting Stella Dallas: Class Boundaries, Consumerism, and Hierarchies of Taste

Abstract

In her 1961 autobiography, Olive Higgins Prouty reflected that [t]he feature of most interest about Stella Dallas is, I think, number of its reincarnations. First serialized for nearly two million readers of American Magazine in 1922 and published in book form in 1923, Prouty's poignant tale of class hierarchy and maternal sacrifice went on to become a 1924 stage play, a 1925 silent an Oscar-nominated 1937 film starring Barbara Stanwyck, and a long-running radio soap opera. Indeed, Stella outlived her creator, reappearing in a third film starring Bette Midler in 1990. Yet to Prouty these adaptations, filled with melodrama and sentimentality, were something of an embarrassment: How much better if Stella had never emerged from covers of a novel. Certainly adaptation of Stella to stage and screen and finally radio did not help me to acquire kind of reputation I desired (Pencil Shavings 156). It is doubtful, however, that avoiding mass media would have spared Prouty from being, like so many popular and critically acclaimed women novelists of 1920s and 1930s, relegated to dustbins of history by a masculinist, modernist establishment. (1) Arguably, Stella and her creator have been remembered only because of these adaptations: while novel went out of print for nearly four decades, 1937 film remained in circulation and was elevated to canonical status by feminist scholars in 1980s as an exemplary woman's film, a powerful alternative to Hollywood's male gaze. Only since its 1990 reprinting as part of a literary cinema classics series, illustrated with stills from has Prouty's novel gained a modicum of scholarly attention. (2) My concern here is less to establish Prouty in canon than to examine what novel and its reincarnations reveal about evolving discourses of class, taste, and cultural hierarchy in America. The adaptation and reception history of Stella Dallas provide a particularly valuable case study not only because Prouty's comment so clearly exposes intense anxieties centered on boundary lines of literature and mass culture but also because Stella's story is so explicitly and centrally concerned with issues of taste and class distinction. In all versions, Stella Dallas depicts in excruciating detail difficulties faced by a working-class woman who marries above her station. Rather than living happily ever after, in Cinderella fashion, Stella quickly alienates her husband with her flashy dress, coarse manners, and lowbrow tastes, and they separate. Although daughter of this mistaken marriage grows up beautiful and refined, it soon becomes clear that Stella's hopeless vulgarity threatens her daughter's social chances. (3) When Laurel loyally refuses to leave her mother to live with her father and his elegant new wife, Stella drives her away, destroying girl's respect by pretending to love a boorish alcoholic whom Laurel loathes. Stella ends up alone and anonymous, but glowing with maternal pride, standing in a dark, rainy street to glimpse through a distant window spectacle of her daughter's new life (in novel, her debut; in films, her wedding to a wealthy young man). Even after being reunited with her married daughter in radio serial depicting the later episodes in life of Stella Dallas, Stella continued to struggle to reconcile her devotion to Laurel with what program's announcer daily described as the differences in their tastes and worlds. (4) The long popularity of this tale suggests that American mass culture throughout first half of twentieth century--particularly those genres created by and for women--was far more attuned to, even obsessed with, intricacies of class distinctions and barriers than usually acknowledged by our myths of America as a classless society. Yet, as story was repeatedly reinvented in new periods and media, we can observe significant shifts both in ways that class distinctions are defined and in degree of sympathy given to Stella's aspirations. …