Go West, Young Women! The Rise of Early Hollywood

Abstract

In this intelligent, thoughtful and well-written study, Hilary A. Hallett focuses on women working in early Hollywood to interrogate dominant narratives about US cinema's masculine origins and cultural significance. In the process she revises the history of the American West, reconsidering how it generated modern feminine archetypes (such as the New Woman) more typically associated with the urban centres of Europe or northeastern America. Hallett links the film industry's colonization of small-town Southern California and its attraction for women migrants to the development of Hollywood's iconic western-influenced independent modern femininity. Combining bohemian impulses, traditional family ties and an investment in fashion and glamour, this form of New Womanhood drew on the allure of a more public life. Such archetypes attracted female audiences and would-be workers hoping to replicate cinema's promise of independence. Each of the book's two parts traces historically distinct forms of early female stardom: a pre-World War I incarnation based on intimacy and emphasizing work, and a later emancipatory form of postwar glamour that culminated in a backlash, exemplified in press coverage of the Virginia Rappe/Fatty Arbuckle murder trial. Hallett makes an utterly convincing case throughout for young women's centrality to the rise of Hollywood, both as audiences and on- and offscreen Hollywood celebrities, while emphasizing modern femininity's foundational role in the medium's development. Indeed her work makes us question why Hollywood's clear institutional, social, cultural and textual links to more progressive forms of modern femininity have so often been eclipsed. Arguing that fan magazines were probably more responsive to the fantasies of their female readers, she traces their accounts of active, desiring and independent femininity compatible with relationships, work and fame. Commenting on the remarkable number of fatherless female stars in early Hollywood – many of whom, like Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish, had sisters – Hallett suggests that these figures created a ‘safe’ place for female accomplishment, associating the search for fame with ‘professional, rather than sexual freedoms’ (p. 47). Like earlier stage archetypes such as the renowned Charlotte Cushman, these screen stars incorporated masculine vitality and adventure into images of resolutely feminine independence. Hallett traces similar accomplishments offscreen in the careers of celebrity journalists like Louella Parsons, directors like Lois Weber, screenwriters like Frances Marion, and the numerous female stars of the 1910s like Pickford and Ruth Roland, who acted as producers, screenwriters and/or directors. Such activities appealed both to female audiences who lived vicariously through their accomplishments and to those who hoped to follow in their wake (something she links to the advertisements for professional correspondence courses and screenplay submissions found in the period's fan magazines). Such discourses of self-improvement defined Hollywood's female-oriented stardom during the 1910s, along with the promise of intimacy and the homosocial pleasures of looking at other women – with the attendant implications of a more public femininity.