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SUBJECT: Memorial University names honorary degree recipients for 2003 spring convocation
DATE: April 9
A number of outstanding Canadians drawn from business, science, public life and the arts will receive honorary degrees from Memorial University during this spring's convocation ceremonies. In order of presentation, this spring's honorary graduands are: Donna Butt , writer, actor and artistic director of Rising Tide Theatre; Flora MacDonald, former federal cabinet minister; Ben Heppner, noted tenor; Dr. Arthur Carty, president of the National Research Council; Melvin Woodward, local entrepreneur; Thomas Kent, political and social policy researcher and administrator; Edward Roberts, Lieutenant Governor of Newfoundland and Labrador and former chairman of Memorial's Board of Regents; and Sir David Willcocks, noted choral musician.
Approximately 2,300 degrees will be awarded at eight sessions of convocation, starting with Sir Wilfred Grenfell College in Corner Brook on Friday, May 9 at 10 a.m. Convocation ceremonies in St. John's will take place in the St. John's Arts and Culture Centre from May 28-30. There will be three sessions of convocation on Wednesday, May 28 (10 a.m., 3 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.), and two sessions, at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., on Thursday, May 29 and Friday, May 30.
In addition, former Memorial University president, Dr. Arthur May, will be honoured with the designation president emeritus at the 10 a.m session of convocation on May 30. Dr. May, Memorial's alumnus of the year for 1983, served as president from 1990 to 1999. The title of president emeritus is granted for outstanding service and achievement to the university in that leadership capacity.
Editors please note: biographies of honorary degree recipients in order of presentation and a schedule of spring convocation follows - this release is nine pages in total.
Donna Butt
For her contribution to the development of Newfoundland's theatre, tourism and rural economy, Donna Butt will be awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree at the session of convocation to be held at 10 a.m. on May 9 at Grenfell College.
Ms. Butt was born in Spaniard's Bay, Newfoundland. Since 1978 she has been working full-time to create a dynamic professional theatre company that reflects the culture and heritage of her province. Involved in all aspects of the creative process, she excels in writing, acting, directing and producing. She has traveled to Ireland and the mainland showcasing her productions, but she works predominantly at home. In 1978 Ms. Butt was one of the co-founders (with David Ross) of Rising Tide Theatre Company in St. John's. The company's first production was a collective creation called Daddy, What's a Train? The troupe has presented a wide variety of works, notably by Sharon Pollock and Michael Cook, as well as works such as Amadeus and Children of a Lesser God.
As co-artistic director of Rising Tide Theatre, 1978-1984, Ms. Butt concentrated her efforts on creating plays about Newfoundland and Labrador. Since 1984 she has been sole executive and artistic director of the group, responsible for bringing to the stage a diverse selection of works, from new and innovative pieces by Newfoundland and Canadian playwrights, to the annual Revue production, a popular satire about our province's more prominent stories and newsmakers.
The troupe is often on the road during the year, but in summer they gather in their new artistic centre in Trinity, where Ms. Butt produces a series of dramatized vignettes called New Founde Lande, an annual, historical pageant celebrating the province's colourful and diverse history. Also popular is the Summer in the Bight Theatre Festival, which attracts more than 20,000 visitors a year.
For her role as former parliamentarian, humanitarian and winner of the Pearson Peace Prize, Hon. Flora MacDonald will be awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree at the 10 a.m. session of convocation on May 28.
Dr. MacDonald served 16 years (1972-1988) as a member of Parliament for Kingston and the Islands; during that time she held three cabinet positions: secretary of state for External Affairs, minister of Employment and Immigration, and minister of Communications.
Born and educated in North Sydney, Nova Scotia, Dr. MacDonald is a graduate of Empire Business College and the National Defence College, majoring in Canadian and international studies. She holds honorary degrees from several institutions, including Queen's, McMaster and Acadia universities and the University of Edinburgh. After her career in Parliament, Dr. MacDonald was visiting fellow at the Centre for Canadian Studies of the University of Edinburgh and special adviser to the Vancouver-based Commonwealth of Learning. From 1990 to 1994 she was the host of the popular television series North South, a weekly human affairs series featuring countries in the developing world. She has chaired the International Development Research Centre and served on the Carnegie Commission on the Prevention of Deadly Conflict, and is chair of Future Generations and the World Federalists of Canada. She is on the board or the advisory council of the Shastri Indo-Canada Advisory Council, the Canadian Council for Refugees, CARE Canada, CODE, Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative, Friends of the National Library, National Museum of Scotland, and UNIFEM. She is also honorary president, Association of Canadian Clubs.
Dr. MacDonald was named an officer of the Order of Canada in April 1993, a companion of the Order of Canada in 1999, and named to the Order of Ontario in 1995. In 1999 she was awarded the Pearson Peace Medal.
For his contributions to the world of opera performance and recording, Ben Heppner will be awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree at the 3 p.m. session of convocation on May 28.
Mr. Heppner is recognized as the finest dramatic tenor world-wide. A native of British Columbia, he studied at the University of British Columbia School of Music. He first gained national attention as the winner of the Canadian Broadcasting Company Talent Festival. He was the subject of a documentary for the weekly CBC-TV prime-time news program The Fifth Estate in February 1991. He has been a featured soloist on CBC Radio's stereo broadcast of the Toronto Children's Chorus Christmas celebration and, in September 1992, in a live CBC broadcast celebrating the tenth anniversary of Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto. He was named a Vanier Award winner for 1994 by the Toronto Junior Board of Trade.
In December 1998 he was featured on CBC Television's Something Special in an hour-long portrait. He is a 1988 winner of the Metropolitan Opera auditions and received a Grammy Award in 1998 for his recording of Die Meistersinger on London/Decca records. He has won several Juno Awards for his recordings, most recently for Airs Fran�ais.
Mr. Heppner's career takes him regularly to the Metropolitan Opera, Royal Opera Covent Garden, Vienna State Opera, Op�ra National de Paris, and Lyric Opera of Chicago. He appears with all of the world's leading orchestras and in the most celebrated recital venues. His works appear on prestigious labels worldwide: Yellow Label, BMG, RCA Red Seal, Decca, EMI, Sony and Teldec, and his latest recording, music by Tosti, will be released in fall 2003 on Deutsche Grammophon. His first performances as Aeneas in Les Troyens, recorded live with the London Symphony Orchestra and Sir Colin Davis, won the 2001 Grammy Award both for Best Classical Album and for Best Opera Album.
Arthur Carty
For his contributions as a scientist and for his leadership role in advancing both his discipline and the standing of the scientific community in Canada, Dr. Arthur Carty will be awarded an honorary doctor of science degree at the 7:30 p.m. session of convocation on May 28.
Dr. Carty holds a PhD in chemistry from Nottingham University. He spent two years employed at Memorial University, then 27 years at the University of Waterloo where he was successively the first director of the Guelph-Waterloo Centre for Graduate Work in Chemistry, professor of chemistry, chair of the Department of Chemistry and dean of research. He was appointed president of the National Research Council (NRC) in 1994.
Dr. Carty is an active researcher in chemistry and a former president of the Canadian Society for Chemistry. His research interests are in the areas of synthetic chemistry, metal clusters and new materials. He has published over 270 research papers, in addition to reviews, articles and book chapters, and has chaired or served on many peer evaluation committees for the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) and other organizations. He is an associate member of the NSERC Council, a member of the board of the Mathematics of Information Technology and Complex Systems Network (MITACS), and the Canadian Stroke Network, two of the Canadian Networks of Centres of Excellence.
Dr. Carty has served on many boards and councils, and is a board member of the Communications Research Centre, the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation, the Environment Canada R&D Advisory Board, the Department of National Defence R&D Advisory Board, the APEC Center for Technology Foresight (Thailand), the Ottawa Health Research Institute, Genome Canada and the Canadian Space Agency Advisory Council, among others.
Among the numerous honours he has received are the Alcan Award of the Chemical Institute of Canada, the E.W.R. Steacie Award of the Canadian Society for Chemistry, the Montreal Medal of the Chemical Institute of Canada, the Purvis Award of the Society of Chemical Industry, and the National Merit Award of the Ottawa Life Sciences Council. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and has honorary degrees from the Universit� de Rennes in France, from Carleton, Acadia, McMaster's and Queen's Universities, and from the Universities of Waterloo and Ottawa. He is an honorary fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada and is one of the few individuals to be named both an officer of the Order of Canada and officier de l'Ordre National du M�rite of France.
Melvin Woodward
For his distinguished public service and for his outstanding contributions to the development of business and the economy of Newfoundland and Labrador, Melvin Woodward will be awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree at the 10 a.m. session of convocation on May 29.
Mr. Woodward, CEO of the Woodward Group of companies, was born in Boat Harbour, Newfoundland. He founded Woodward's Oil Ltd. in 1960 and was appointed Imperial Oil Ltd. agent for all fuel distribution and aircraft refueling in Labrador. Over the next four decades, Mr. Woodward built a number of enterprises encompassing fuel, trucking, stevedoring, transportation of petroleum and chemical products and automotive sales. The roster of companies he has created includes Coastal Shipping Ltd., Woodward Motors Ltd., and Coastal Labrador Marine Services.
His long business career has many significant highlights. In 1981 he initiated container service to the Port of Goose Bay with the purchase of the roll-on-roll-off container vessel, M.V. Astron. In 1996 he established the first petroleum products supply and delivery contract with Voisey's Bay Nickel Company Limited in Voisey's Bay, Labrador. In 1998 his newly formed company, Coastal Labrador Marine Services, was contracted to take over marine delivery services from Lewisporte to coastal Labrador locations. That same year he was awarded a contract for supply and delivery of petroleum products for the Nunavut Power Corporation to various Nunavut communities.
Mr. Woodward has a distinguished career in public and community service. Having served one term in the house of assembly as minister of Labrador Affairs and a further term on the Liberal opposition bench (1971-76), he has also served on a number of boards: director, Bank of Canada, 1981-1987; founding member and president, the Labrador North Chamber of Commerce; president of Liberal Association; chairman of Enterprise Development Board for Industry, Trade and Commerce; member of the Board of Regents, Memorial University; and chairman, St. John's Port Corporation. He was inducted into Newfoundland and Labrador Business Hall of Fame in 2001.
For his long-term and continuing contribution to the shaping of Canadian social and political policy, Thomas Kent will be awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree at the 3 p.m. session of convocation on May 29.
Mr. Kent was born in England and was educated at Oxford, graduating with first-class honours in philosophy, politics and economics. After war-time intelligence service in a junior role in the now-famous "ultra secret" of cipher-breaking, he entered journalism with the Manchester Guardian and in 1948 became its chief editorial writer. In 1950 he moved to be assistant editor of The Economist. He was also the London editorial correspondent for the Winnipeg Free Press, becoming editor-in-chief when he moved to Canada in 1954.
Mr. Kent left journalism for corporate business in 1959, becoming a vice-president of the transnational Chemcell Limited. He was also at that time closely associated with Lester B. Pearson in the development of Liberal policies and when the Pearson government took office in 1963, Mr. Kent was made co-ordinator of government programming and policy secretary to the prime minister, becoming involved in the establishment of many new programs, including Medicare and the Canada Pension Plan.
He rose to become the founding deputy minister of two government departments and president of the Cape Breton Development Corporation until 1977. In Nova Scotia Mr. Kent was president of Sydney Steel Corporation (1977-79) and dean of Administrative Studies at Dalhousie University (1980-83). He served as chairman of the Royal Commission on Newspapers (1980-81). From 1980 to 1987 Mr. Kent was also the founding editor of Policy Options and until 1991 a fellow of the Institute for Research on Public Policy; he is now one of its four life-time fellows.
Mr. Kent has written extensively on economic, social, constitutional and political affairs. His best-known book, A Public Purpose, was published by McGill-Queen's University Press in 1988. He has contributed to numerous other books and many journals, magazines and newspapers and a visiting fellow in the School of Policy Studies of Queen's University. Mr. Kent was made a companion in the Order of Canada in 1979.
Edward Roberts
Ed Roberts
For his long and distinguished public service, including his service as chair of Memorial University's governing board, Hon. Edward Roberts will be awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree at the 10 a.m. session of convocation on May 30. Mr. Roberts has been deeply involved in the political, educational, legal and social life of Newfoundland and Labrador for over 40 years. Born in St. John's, Mr. Roberts attended the University of Toronto, where he received a BA and an LLB. During the summer of 1963 he was associate private secretary to the Rt. Hon. J.W. Pickersgill, member of Parliament for Bonavista-Twillingate and the secretary of state and government house leader in the cabinet of Prime Minister Lester Pearson.
Mr. Roberts was first elected to the House of Assembly as member for the district of White Bay North in the 1966 general election. He was re-elected in 1971 and 1972. He entered cabinet in 1968 as minister of Public Welfare (1968-69), and later became minister of Health (1969-72). In 1972 he was elected leader of the Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador, and was leader of the opposition from 1972 to 1977. During the period1978-1985 he practiced law and was a member of the House of Assembly. He did not seek re-election in 1985, and practiced law full-time until 1992. In 1992 he re-entered provincial politics, winning a by-election in Labrador, and was re-elected in the 1993 general election. He served as the minister of Justice and Attorney General and government house leader (1992-96). Mr. Roberts is the only person to have been minister in the administrations of each of the first three Liberal premiers post- Confederation. He did not seek re-election in the 1996 general election.
He was called to bar of Newfoundland in 1965; he joined Halley, Hickman, Hunt and Adams (subsequently known as Halley, Hunt) in 1978, becoming a senior partner until his retirement in 1992. He was appointed Queen's Counsel in 1979 and is one of the most senior members of the Newfoundland Bar. In 1989 he was appointed master of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland. From 1996-2002 he was a barrister with the St. John's firm Patterson Palmer Hunt Murphy.
His other public and private roles have included: director, Scotia Mortgage Investment Corp; past director, Fortis Trust Corp.; chairman, Board of Trustees, Waterford Hospital, 1990-91; chairman, Board of Trustees, the General Hospital Corp., St. John's 1991-92; chairman, Board of Regents, Memorial University of Newfoundland 1997-2002. In November 2002 he was appointed as the province's eleventh Lieutenant Governor.
David Willcocks
For his contributions to the world of music and choral performance, Sir David Willcocks will be awarded an honorary doctor of letters degree at the 3 p.m. session of convocation on May 30.
Born in Newquay, Cornwall, England, Sir David began his musical career as a boy chorister in the choir of Westminster Abbey. His first professional appointments were as organist of the cathedrals of Salisbury and Worcester. His international reputation was established when in 1957 he became director of music at King's College, Cambridge, where he developed, with distinction, its great musical tradition. He made numerous recordings with the King's College Choir and leading British orchestras and toured in many countries. At Cambridge he also held appointments as university organist, university lecturer and conductor at the Cambridge University Chorus and Orchestra.
From 1960 to 1998 Sir David was the musical director of the Bach Choir (London), which, since its foundation in 1875, has given first performances of several important works. With the Bach Choir, he gave the first performances of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem in Italy at Perugia, Milan and Venice in 1963. He later introduced the work in Japan, Hong Kong, Portugal and the Netherlands. From 1974 to 1984 he was director of the Royal College of Music in London.
Sir David appears frequently as a conductor in the United States, Canada and Europe. He has also paid many visits to New Zealand and Australia, Hong Kong and South Africa for concerts. In 1992 he was presented with the Harvard Glee Club medal and in 1999 he received the distinguished Musician Award of the University of Toronto. He is an honorary fellow of King's College, Cambridge and has received honorary degrees in England from the universities in Bradford, Bristol, Exeter, Leicester and Sussex, and from the Royal College of Music in London; in the United States from Luther College (Iowa), St. Olaf College (Minnesota) and Westminster College (New Jersey); and in Canada from the Universities of Toronto and Victoria.
DATE/CONVOCATION SESSION DEGREES CONFERRED HONORARY GRADUATE/ DEGREE
FRIDAY, MAY 9
(SWGC)
10 a.m. B.A. (Hons.), B.A., B.Sc.(Hons.), B.Sc., B.N., B.S.W. ,B.F.A.(Theatre), B.F.A.(Visual), B.B.A.; M.A., M.N. Ms. Donna Butt
Doctor of Laws
WED., MAY 28
10 a.m. B.A. Hon. Flora MacDonald
3 p.m. B.A. (Hon.), B.A. (Police Studies), B.S.W., B.Mus.(Hons.), B.Mus., B.P.E. (Hon.), B.P.E., B.P.E.(Co-op), B.Rec., B.Rec. (Co-op), B.Kin (Hons.), B.Kin. (Co-op) (Hons.), B.Kin, B.Mus.Ed., B.Sc. (Pharm.), B.F.A. (Visual), M.A., M.P.E., M.S.W., M.Sc. (Pharm.), M.Phil., Ph.D. Mr. Ben Heppner
Doctor of Letters
7:30 p.m. B.Ed. (Post-Sec), B.Sc., M.Sc., M.A.Sc., M.A.S., M.Envir.Sc. Dr. Arthur Carty
Doctor of Science
THURS., MAY 29
10 a.m. B. Comm.(Hons.), B. Comm., B.Comm (Co-op)(Hons.), B. Comm (Co-op), B.M.S., B.Tech., M.M.S., M.D. Mr. Melvin Woodward
3 p.m. B.B.A. (Hons.), B.B.A., B.Ed., B.Ed. (Prim.), B.Ed. (Elem.), B.Ed.(Prim/Elem.) Mr. Thomas Kent
FRIDAY May 30
10 a.m B.Sc. (Hons.), B.N., M.N., M.W.S. Hon. Edward M. Roberts
3 p.m. B.Eng., B.Voc.Ed., B.Spec.Ed., B.Ed. (N&N), B.Ed. (Inter./Sec.), M.Eng., M.Ed., M.B.A. Sir David Willcocks


Schick Titanium Trimmer is Perfect for Traveling Dads.
Every now and then someone will offer to send me something to review for the site, and every now and then I accept. My most recent product try-out was something for dads, not for kids, and I have to say I kind of like it. The Schick Quattro TItanium Trimmer is your basic Schick Quattro four blade razor, but on the end of it there's an electric trimmer. Although it has a fully adjustable guard, the trimmer is really only good for mustaches and sideburns (there's no way to tackle a full beard with it), but it does a good job of trimming.
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Critics At Large
Independent reviews of television, movies, books, music, theatre, dance, culture, and the arts.
David Churchill (1959-2013)
Grown-ish: Smart, Funny, and more than merely Serious-ish
Trevor Jackson and Yara Shahidi in Grown-ish.
Grown-ish has been a weekly delight in my household since it first premiered on January 3. As a regular viewer of Black-ish, I've known about the college-set spinoff of ABC's hit family comedy since last May, when its (literal) parent series aired an underwhelming backdoor pilot for the show near the end of its third season. It wasn't the weakest episode of Black-ish's otherwise strong season – that award goes to its cringe-worthy season premiere, set awkwardly within a half-hour advertisement for Disney World – but outside of spelling out the broad situation and setting of the new series, which would follow the Johnsons' eldest daughter Zoey (Yara Shahidi) to nearby fictional Southern California University, it gave few indications what was to come. But as we approach the midway point of Grown-ish's "freshman" season (the 7th of 13 episodes airs this Wednesday), a couple of things have become clear: the first is that Yara Shahidi (who has been capably playing her own age since she was introduced as a 14-year-old in 2014) has proven herself wholly capable of helming her own series, and the second is that Grown-ish has quickly developed its own tone and voice, already making it much more than a Black-ish side project.
Created by Kenya Barris and Daily Show alum Larry Wilmore, Grown-ish shares Black-ish's pedigree, with Barris currently serving as showrunner for both shows. The many charms and strengths of Black-ish have been detailed here before, and the now-veteran comedy continues to reliably mix fun and topicality, e.g., this season's Hamilton-inspired fourth-season premiere with its Emancipation-themed musical numbers. And so Grown-ish showed up with a pretty large – and still growing – legacy to live up to.
Grown-ish has a simple premise, following the challenges faced by Zoey in a new social and academic life after graduating from a high school where she shone, almost effortlessly. (Her high school yearbook quote: "I came, I saw, I mastered this bitch.") She quickly falls in with a textbook diverse group of students thrown together Breakfast Club-style by their enrollment in a midnight class taught by Black-ish's Charlie Telphy (played again by Deon Cole – more on him below). We meet the chill Luca (Luka Sabbat), the too-cool-for-school campus revolutionary™ Aaron (Trevor Jackson), the twin-sister track stars Jazz and Sky (real-life non-twin sisters and R&B duo Chloe and Halle Bailey, who also perform the show's opening theme), the first-generation hustler Vivek (Jordan Buhat), and the bisexual and generally non-conformist Nomi (Emily Arlook). The ensemble is soon rounded out by Zoey's roommate, the devoutly Catholic and seemingly sheltered Ana (Francia Raísa). I did hesitate before listing them this way, because on these terms it's easy to dismiss the cast of characters as one designed by a Hollywood lab to tick off all the right boxes. But after a largely stage-setting first episode, Grown-ish has demonstrated that it is more than willing to subtly undercut many of the expectations that we bring to the situation. (A recent scene springs to mind that, entirely in passing and without much remark from the rest of the cast, lets us know that for all her outward innocence Ana is much more sexually experienced than the more socially outgoing Zoey, for example.)
Rather than becoming fast friends, after six episodes the group still has all the awkwardness of new acquaintances slowly getting to know one another, unsure if they trust or even like one another. Even for this Generation-X viewer, who can only faintly recall his own first year of college almost three decades ago, the often blunt and unaffected interactions of these freshmen feel pointedly true to life. After all, barely eighteen years old, and only recently – and not entirely – out of the shadows of their parents and home communities, they hardly know who they are themselves. This rawness is mirrored by Zoey's regular fourth wall-breaking addresses to the camera that are appropriately intimate and self-aware – offering access to a flawed and insecure version of her character that was largely unavailable on Black-ish.
The cast of Freeform's Grown-ish.
College is a contested ground for growth and maturation, simultaneously offering regular opportunities for self-reinvention, and a social fishbowl that threatens to make any one decision both first and final – all the more so in this age of Instagram and trenchant campus politics. Though the situations they face on the series are hardly groundbreaking (late-night hook-ups, the pressures of tests or school athletics, the ubiquity of drugs and alcohol), the sympathy and general restraint with which Grown-ish approaches these (mostly) freshmen lets us take their age-appropriate struggles as seriously as they do, without any resorting to melodrama or condescension. (Take, for example, its second episode, whose main plotline centred on Zoey's first-time experimentation with Adderall as a 'study aid', a storyline that ended casually open-ended, without clear consequences or any lessons learned – and whose realism only landed for me days later during the next Black-ish episode, when I discovered that I had to deliberately tamp down a newly palpable awareness of the dangers faced off-screen by their absent daughter in order to relax into the safe domestic world of the Johnsons' suburban home.)
Grown-ish also plays with juxtaposition of the caricaturish and the real that its parent show has perfected in three and a half seasons – and here is the one place the new show is experiencing some growing pains. As with Black-ish, there are some characters whose internal lives we are not supposed to take seriously. Chris Parnell (Archer, Saturday Night Live), as the put-upon Dean Parker, seamlessly slips into the only real "adult" role on the series, and though his character inhabits much the same cartoonish position that Dre's co-workers (especially Charlie, Dre's boss Leslie, and Leslie's grown son Connor) play on Black-ish, we've already been given at least some indication that there's something going on there. Charlie, on the other hand, whom we meet solely through his surreally incoherent lectures, remains too solidly two-dimensional and (despite his clear spin-off appeal) continues to feel like a visitor from another series – which, of course, he is. (This is no fault of Deon Cole's performance, which is as hilarious as it is distracting.)
What is remarkable about Grown-ish among spin-off series is that you don't really need to watch the parent series in order to love the child. Black-ish, from its title through its seasonal arcs, has drawn attention to questions of race and economic status; it has a clear mandate. But Grown-ish, like the not-quite-formed-characters that populate it, is fuzzier around the edges. Grown-ish is about the young people we are, or were, or know and love, and about the ambiguity of identity and individuality – revealing things about the characters and about ourselves at the same time. What it has done remarkably well in only six episodes is to give us a host of young people whom we only half-recognize, whom we may fear for, and whom I am confident we will enjoy getting to know for seasons to come.
Grown-ish airs on Wednesdays on Freeform (formerly ABC Family) in the U.S., and on ABC Spark in Canada. Soon after its premiere in January, it was renewed for a 20-episode second season. (Fingers crossed that we don't get a Spring Break episode in Orlando!)
– Mark Clamen is a writer, critic, film programmer and lifelong television enthusiast. He lives in Toronto, where he often lectures on television, film, and popular culture. Mark has been writing for Critics At Large since 2010.
Posted by Critics at Large at 8:00 PM
Labels: Mark Clamen, Television
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← Projections index
Do You Believe in Fairies? Cabbages, Victorian Memes, and the Birth of Cinema: Seeing Sapphic Sexuality in the Silent Era
by Kiki Loveday
2. The Cabbage Fairy, Take One
3. The Cabbage Fairy, Take Two
4. The Cabbage Fairy, Take Three
5. Possibilities
6. Femme Fairies and the Queer Reproduction of Femininity
8. Notes[+]
French postcard, "Dance of the Cabbage Fairy," c. 1900. The title "Dance of the Cabbage Fairy" appears to have been given to the card in 2014 when it was listed for sale on Etsy.
Famed early filmmaker Alice Guy is back in the news in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Guy inaugurated the cinematic century with her early work La fée aux choux/The Cabbage Fairy (1896),[1]In 1996, the film now circulating under the title The Cabbage Fairy was first identified by scholars, although there remains controversy over whether this is indeed Guy's The Cabbage Fairy, and if … Continue reading which many scholars have argued was the first film to tell a story, with others dissenting. Recent attention to Guy runs the gamut from a significant new documentary narrated by Jodie Foster, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché (2018), which is currently in theaters and streaming, to a novelized version of Guy's life that imagines a secret love affair between her and the engineer of the Eiffel Tower.[2]Janelle Dietrick, Mademoiselle Alice: A Novel (Portland, OR: BookBaby [self-published], 2017). On the scholarly front, the award-winning box set Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers, curated by Shelley Stamp, includes eleven newly restored films by Guy, while Jane Gaines's latest book, Pink Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? returns to the scene of The Cabbage Fairy with the intensity of a serial crime drama.[3]Jane Gaines, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018). Taken together, this flurry of interest in Guy, her love life, and her famous first film reignite critical questions, not only about her place in film history, but also about the relationships between history, biography, and sexuality onscreen.
Despite all the controversy over The Cabbage Fairy, the film's significance as a document of sexual history has been nearly completely neglected. More specifically, the sexual imagery of The Cabbage Fairy takes part in the lesbian chic of the Belle Époque (1871-1914). While the terms "lesbian" and "Sapphic,"[4]Throughout this essay, the terms "lesbian" and "Sapphic" are used interchangeably to denote a variety of sexual desires, activities, relationships, identifications, and embodiments, which … Continue reading originate from the ancient poet Sappho of Lesbos (600 BCE), their association with lesbian sexuality as we understand it is, in the words of literary scholar Yopie Prin, "a particularly Victorian phenomenon."[5]Yopie Prin, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 94. When understood in the context of its historical milieu, the Sapphic visuality of The Cabbage Fairy radically transforms common assumptions about the so-called "birth of cinema." Close attention to Guy's early work reveals the centrality of queer sexualities, not only to her trademark disruptions of gender norms, but to the development of motion picture industries more broadly at the turn of the twentieth century.
Screenshot, The Cabbage Fairy. Courtesy of Movies Silently.
The Cabbage Fairy is an ideal starting point for a consideration of Sapphic silent cinema due to its early date, its vaunted place in existing film histories, and the controversy it continues to engender by its very existence. The film engages with core questions of screen and sexuality studies, such as: Where do we locate lesbianism in film and film history? (Is it in the text, the narrative, the iconography, performance, authorship, and/or reception?) How do we see lesbianism in periods with different sexual norms than our own? Who counts as lesbian and on what evidence? For our purposes, the film currently identified as The Cabbage Fairy—misidentified according to Gaines—does double duty, making visible both the intertextual structures of Sapphic meaning-making in early film and the compulsory heterosexuality that continues to dominate contemporary film scholarship.
The Cabbage Fairy, Take One
At first glance, The Cabbage Fairy might not seem particularly Sapphic. There is only one womxn in it, she appears to conform to the gender norms of the period, and the content of the film suggests procreative sexuality. Moreover, Guy's biography includes a heterosexual marriage (later divorce notwithstanding) and two children of her own. The dominant heterosexualized reproductive meaning attached to the cabbage patch is indisputable, as the following 1889 postcard advertisement for fertilizer that graces the cover of a recent monograph on The Cabbage Fairy clearly illustrates.[6]Janelle Dietrick with forward by Alice-Guy Blanche Peeters, La Fée Aux Choux: Alice Guy's Garden of Dreams (Portland, OR: BookBaby [self-published], 2017). Page numbers refer to the Kindle … Continue reading
Trade card, c. 1880s. Private Collection.
Yet, it is precisely in such naturalized iconography that we might expect to find queer resistances to hegemonic norms. The folktale of the cabbage patch is anything but straightforward. It is, after all, a euphemism, supposedly told to children to avoid explaining sexuality and reproduction. Recent scholarly accounts position The Cabbage Fairy correctly in relation to the postcard craze of the fin de siècle, yet they mischaracterize it by positioning it "politely" in relation to our contemporary stereotypes about Victorian prudery.[7]See Jesse Olszynko-Gryn and Patrick Ellis, "'A Machine for Recreating Life': An Introduction to Reproduction on Film," British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 50, no. 3 (September … Continue reading In contrast, I highlight the mise-en-scène of the cabbage patch, which reveals sexual meanings that the story itself obfuscates. The film's iconography points us toward the allegorical and elliptical meanings that structure Victorian discourses of representation and constitute Sapphic meaning-making at the turn of the twentieth century.
Postcard, c. 1900. Private Collection.
The cabbage fairy of the film's title would have evoked the slang term "fairy," with its queer connotations already in place during this period.[8]George Chauncey, "The Fairy as an Intermediate Sex," chap. 2 in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 47-64; on the … Continue reading It is significant that the fairy figure has only one traditional accoutrement of fairydom—a magic wand—which she drops in the first seconds of the film.[9]On the wand as slang for penis in this era, see Jonathon Green, The Vulgar Tongue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 20, 191. For an example of contemporary controversy over sexual visual … Continue reading This easily discarded phallic object emphasizes the fairy's relationship to fantasy and wish fulfillment. The cabbage fits snuggly within the venerable tradition of edible metaphors for (in this case female) genitalia and reproductive organs.[10]See Jonathon Green, "Cabbage," Green's Dictionary of Slang (Digital Edition, 2019), https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/bcvjvsq. The pun is doubled in the French language by the reference to "choux" pastry, which is often split and filled with cream, making it easy to read as a suggestive metaphor for the vulva.[11]On the prominence of "literal punning" and vulgar humor in Guy's early work, see Kimberly Tomadjoglou, "Alice Guy's Great Cinematic Adventure," in Doing Women's Film History: Reframing … Continue reading French audiences would have associated The Cabbage Fairy with the popular French nursery rhyme "Savez-vous planter les choux?" ("Do You Know How to Plant Cabbage?"), which taught children the parts of the body with the lyrics "we plant them with the finger, we plant them with the hand," suggesting the significance of the hand in lesbian sexual play.[12]Thanks to Fabiola Hannah whose linguistic and cultural knowledge of French enabled this reading through our conversations. On the bawdiness of this song, see Yvonne Knibiehler, De la pucelle à la … Continue reading On top of all this playful lesbianized punning, we can also read the fairy's performative display of maternal indifference as she all but drops the babies on the ground. But how can we know if any of these textual associations were intended by Guy, or if they speak more directly to retrospective twenty-first-century lesbian longings?[13]On longing and "retrospectatorship," see Patrica White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999). Moreover, how can we possibly know whether these cultural resonances were actually perceived by fin de siècle audiences?[14]Guy's own claims to authorship of the Gaumont "series N" films (nude films made as early as 1897) reposition The Cabbage Fairy in relation to its own historical moment. See Dietrick, La Fée … Continue reading
The Cabbage Fairy, Take Two
Production still, First-Class Midwife. Private Collection.
In two widely reproduced photographs, a cross-dressed Guy stands in a classic pose of sexual fantasy between two corseted young womxn. These images raise historiographic questions about how we read a film in relation to extra-textual material, as Gaines has noted.[15]Gaines, Pink-Slipped, 52-55. See also Jane Gaines, "First Fictions," Signs vol. 30, no. 11 (2004): 1311; Judith Mayne, "Lesbian Detection," conclusion in Directed by Dorothy Arzner … Continue reading In both photographs, Guy appears at ease, projecting an air of candid pleasure as though she is enjoying the moment. Her gaze is directed intently to one of the womxn standing beside her. In one of the photographs, a smiling Guy suggestively offers a phallic object (perhaps an edible treat or a cigarette) to the womxn on her left in a manner that seems flirtatious. These images create a sharp contrast with other photos of Guy where her erect corseted figure overdetermines retrospective readings. The two stills here were taken on the set of Sage-femme de première classe/First-Class Midwife (1902), a film that reworks the cabbage patch theme.[16]In the third of Guy's cabbage series, Madame a des envies/Madame Has Her Cravings (1906), a pregnant woman steals and consumes a stick of candy, a glass of absinth, and a smoking pipe before giving … Continue reading In First-Class Midwife, either famously or apocryphally, Guy performs the role of the lover, which is often called "the husband."[17]Dietrick quotes Guy's own claims that she did not perform in the film but put on the lover's costume afterwards "for fun." Dietrick, La Fée Aux Choux, 118. In footnote 137, she cites a … Continue reading On the one hand, Gaines points to the cross-dressing in the film to suggest that it may yet wind up in the queer film canon.[18]Gaines, Pink-Slipped, 70. On the other hand, Laura Horak productively questions the a priori assumption that cross-dressing was necessarily a sign of lesbianism in her groundbreaking work on cross-dressed womxn in early film.[19]Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 3. Yet, the cross-dressed lover is but one among many elements of the film's queer structure, as we shall see. Either way, dressed as the lover in the cabbage patch, Guy projects a free youthful confidence that exudes sexuality.
What are we to make of these images? Queer media scholars have generally agreed that cross-dressing and gender inversion are the predominant mode of queer representation before Stonewall. Shall we therefore read them in relation to Guy's extensive oeuvre, which has long been associated with her penchant for cross-dressing comedies and other forms of gender inversion? For example, her 1912 gay cowboy film Algie the Miner is often cited as the earliest extant film representing male homosexuality onscreen.[20]Shane Brown, Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy (New York: IB Tauris, 2016) 3; David M. Lugowski, "Queering the (New) Deal: Lesbian and Gay Representation and the … Continue reading A string of associations in Guy's memoirs, in which one of the photos above is published, heightens the queer plausibility of The Cabbage Fairy. In just a few paragraphs, she moves from gossip about the "odd couple" of Émile Zola and "his wife," to the masculine Princess Bibesco's "lightly shaded lip," to an interaction with René Viviani who asks her flirtatiously when she is going to marry, to which she replies, "I suppose that I love my work too much. If I decide someday to marry it will only be to have children."[21]Alice Guy Blaché, The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, ed. Anthony Slide (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1986), 18. What are we to do with the similarity between René Viviani's name and that … Continue reading
The Cabbage Fairy, Take Three
In First-Class Midwife, the proverbial cabbage patch has been replaced by a fantasy baby boutique, a shop filled with dolls representing babies for purchase. The "fairy," now the "midwife" of the title, is represented as the proprietor of the shop. Her magic wand has been replaced by a feather duster—that mundane object of feminized work that doubles as a classic sex toy. The feather duster gives the femme fairy her wings while locating her in a specific class position, which is important to the film's meaning. A lesbian couple enters, with one of the partners dressed almost identically to the cabbage fairy and the other partner cross-dressed. As we have seen, scholars have rightly cautioned against presuming a relationship between cross-dressing and lesbianism, and Alison McMahan has argued that in First-Class Midwife, "having a woman play the husband signals that this is a children's story."[22]McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché, 212. In this instance, I disagree with McMahan. The film's structure and cultural context point clearly to a lesbian iconography that was a defining part of French culture in this moment.[23]Nicole G. Albert, Lesbian Decadence: Representations in Art and Literature of Fin-de-siécle France (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2016); Francesca Canadé Sautman, "Invisible Women: Lesbian … Continue reading
Antoine Magaud's 1885 photograph "A Kiss in the Glass" is a classic example of the trope of the lesbian double. Public Domain.
Alice Austin's 1891 photograph "Trude & I" literalizes the trope with classic lesbian irony. Public Domain.
The mirrored figures of the similarly dressed wife and midwife emphasize lesbian visuality through the trope of the lesbian doppelgänger, reinforcing the lesbian specificity of the cross-dressed figure. The iconography of the lesbian double is generally understood as emerging from pathologized stereotypes about womxn, vanity, and the threat of lesbianism—but it is historically significant nonetheless.[24]The motif of the lesbian double is also connected to lesbian fashion of the Victorian era. It is historically significant in relation to lesbian cultural practice. See Martha Vicinus, Intimate … Continue reading Barbara Creed calls this fin de de siècle motif of the lesbian look-alike "the narcisstic female double."[25]Barbara Creed, "Lesbian Bodies: Tribades, Tomboys, and Tarts," in Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, eds. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn (London: Routledge, 1995), 86. Mandy Merck points out that "the very doubling that implies a sexual pairing also denies it in a repetition too exact to suggest an encounter rather than a reflection."[26] Mandy Merck, "'Transforming the Suit': A Century of Lesbian Self-Portraits," in Perversions: Deviant Readings (New York: Routledge, 1993), 96. The cliché of the lesbian double emerges from misogynistic conceptions of female narcissism, which associate lesbianism with auto-eroticism—i.e., non-reproductive sexuality.[27]Olu Jenzen, "Revolting Doubles: Radical Narcissism and the Trope of the Lesbian Doppelgangers," Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 17 (2013): 348. So, just what are these figures doing in the cabbage patch?![28]The doubling trope is not confined to the dyad. Especially in its pornographic variants, it frequently evokes triangular relationships through the use of the mirror. This creates an uncanny effect of … Continue reading
Alongside the cross-dressing and doubled femme figures, the lesbian couple in First-Class Midwife kisses, twice. If we accept Linda Williams's premise that a cinematic kiss stands in for the sex act, we might infer that it is the "overtness" of the doubled lesbian kisses within the film's queer structure that makes the femme figure of the fairy with the tell-tale magic wand no longer necessary to sustain the queerness of the scene.[29]Linda Williams, "Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies," chap. 1 in Screening Sex (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 28; On cross-dressed kisses, see Chris Straayer, … Continue reading In any case, the couple rejects the dolls in the shop before the midwife escorts them through a door into what we might describe as a secret or magical space: a mythical cabbage patch reminiscent of the earlier film. In this iteration, there is an over-abundance of living, wriggling, white babies. In distinction, two of the many babies that the couple dismisses are portrayed by dolls, one black and one seemingly Native American or indigenous.[30]On the racialization in First-Class Midwife, see Kim Tomadjoglou, "Wonderment—Seeing the World Through the Eyes of Alice Guy Blaché," in Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer, ed. Joan Simon (New … Continue reading The couple refuses the two dolls with exaggerated gestures, chooses a live white baby instead, pays the midwife, and then leaves.
The film is essentially a dirty lesbian joke structured around white Victorian racism. The blackness of the doll marks the punchline of the cinematic joke as the fear of miscegenation. At the fin de siècle, Guy's queer cabbage fairies engaged in part of a pop culture cabbage patch craze in which the centuries-old folktale spoke to social anxieties about the declining French birth rate, as other scholars have noted.[31]For instance, see Gina Greene, "In the Garden of Puériculture: Cultivating the Ideal French Infant in Real and Imagined Landscapes of Care (1895–1935)," Change Over Time, vol. 6, no. 2 (2016), … Continue reading Far from the polite Victorian prudery often attributed to it, the cabbage patch meme spoke to adult anxieties and was both a racialized and sexualized phenomenon.[32]The idea of a "Victorian meme" is an anachronism, but I hope a productive one, highlighting the ongoing imagined relationship between cultural and biological reproduction. The term "meme" was … Continue reading The reproductive imaginary of the Victorian cabbage patch was a cultural phenomenon that engaged the pro-natalist French eugenic discourse known as puericulture, or "soil and seed." In the sexualized eugenic garden of "soil and seed," the female body is aligned with the natural and fertile French landscape. Within the context of French colonialism, this is certainly a racialized discourse, as we see in the structure of First-Class Midwife.[33]French eugenic thought has been differentiated from US and UK eugenics with the suggestion that French eugenics did not share the racism or classism of the broader movement. See, for example, William … Continue reading Consider the following postcard, circa 1900, which has recently been described as a typical example of the postcards "politely premised" on the "the folk notion of babies emerging from cabbage patches."[34]Olszynko-Gryn and Ellis, "'A Machine for Recreating Life,'" 383-409. On the relationship between postcards and early film more broadly, see Lauren Rabinovitz, "The Miniature and the Giant: … Continue reading
French postcard, c. 1900. "Seed of cabbage." Private Collection. Interestingly, the back of my copy of this card is addressed to "Monsieur Madame," with a message that reads only "Choose?" (Choisissez?).
It seems a self-evident example, but its meaning is legible only in context. (After all, what would be a typical example of a pop culture meme today?) When compared, for instance, to the likewise typical example of the cabbage patch trend below, this postcard begins to look quite different. The phallic placement of the woman's watering can suddenly comes into relief, as does the ethnic ambiguity of the babies and the woman.[35]One notices the small Star of David that appears like a logo printed in the bottom right-hand corner. This is a feature of the card and appears on all the copies I have seen. The Star of David has … Continue reading
French Postcard, c. 1900. Private Collection.
In First-Class Midwife, racialized humor is produced on the condition that the lesbian couple poses no threat of miscegenation; this is not only because they appear to be of the same race, but because their sexuality is presumed to be non-reproductive. That's the laugh line; the joke only works when the lover is a lesbian.[36]I would note that it is possible to read the film as a lampoon of the racism of the white upper class. Such a reading is supported by McMahan's description of the film as a satire. She writes … Continue reading As we have seen, the racialized structure of the film's comedy is organized through doubling: the doubled figures of the wife and midwife mirror the lesbian visuality of the film alongside the perhaps less obvious lesbian connotations of the figure in drag. The doubled racist joke exists in direct relation to the doubled lesbian kisses (sex acts) that produced them. This then is the cultural terrain into which Guy released one of the most debated works of film history. The Cabbage Fairy and First-Class Midwife queerly intervene in the heterosexual imagination of the cabbage patch and starkly underline the essential racialization of this reproductive imagery. In short, as with any mass cultural phenomenon, the cabbage patch craze of the Belle Époque cannot be understood so easily through a single seemingly self-evident instance. Rather, multiple iterations proliferate in which we should expect to find a diverse range of meanings and possibilities in dialogue with each other.
French postcard, c. 1900. The mise-en-scene of the vegetable stand, as featured in First-Class Midwife, shifts the reproductive logic of the cabbage patch into new terrain. Private Collection.
Taken together, the textual, intertextual, and extratextual discourses surrounding the cabbage fairy series surely suggest what scholars like to call the "possibility of lesbianism."[37]Andrea Weiss, "'A Queer Feeling When I Look at You': Hollywood Stars and Lesbian Spectatorship in the 1930s," in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (New York: Routledge, … Continue reading Certainly, if we do not consider the possibility of lesbianism, we are so deeply in the realm of compulsory heterosexuality that we should speak of disavowal rather than invisibility. Put another way, when we watch two womxn cast as a romantic couple kiss each other, yet insist on a heterosexual interpretation, we reveal more about the limits of our own historical moment than about what was going on in the Victorian cabbage patch.[38]This is the classic formulation of fetishistic disavowal, "I know very well, but just the same…" in which perceptual evidence is refused (in this case in favor of the heterosexual fetish). See … Continue reading As Alice Hegan Rice put it in her best-selling 1901 novel Mrs. Wiggs and the Cabbage Patch, "It was not a real cabbage patch, but a queer neighborhood…"[39]Alice Hagen Rice, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (Toronto: William Briggs, 1901), 4. Scholars differ on attributing lesbian meaning to words such as "queer," "gay," or even "peculiar," … Continue reading Yet, the playful lesbianized humor that we see in the two existing versions of the cabbage fairy narrative, and in so much of Guy's early work, has been all but erased from contemporary understandings. It is hardly surprising then, like so much of lesbian history, that its very existence is being called into question. However, my aim here is not to claim an ex post facto lesbian identity for Guy. Rather, I am saying that lesbian representations were central to her oeuvre, because they were central to the representational systems and cultural context in which she produced her work.[40]I believe Guy deployed these meanings deftly, with the inexplicable mix of unconscious instinct and intentional gesture frequently called artistic talent or genius. As McMahan and others have … Continue reading
To begin to see early films as they would have been experienced by early audiences, they must be analyzed internationally as well as intertextually. Scholars have emphasized the transnational nature of the early film industries, in which France was the dominant exporter until World War I. This is significant because France has a unique relationship to Sapphic sexual cultures, including what we might call "the lesbian imaginary."[41]See Gretchen Schultz, Sapphic Fathers: Discourses of Same-Sex Desire from Nineteenth-Century France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). On the visible geographies of lesbian cruising in … Continue reading The international development of the moving image was shaped, in part, by what Tami Williams calls "the Sapphist liberty of the Belle Époque."[42]Tami Williams, Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 89. In fact, the tension between Guy's French sensibilities and "American prudishness" became a source of conflict in her later career.[43]Tomadjoglou, "Alice Guy's Great Cinematic Adventure," 102-103. Those interested in "overt" representations of lesbian sexual acts will note that the kisses between the lovers in First-Class Midwife discussed above are by no means the first lesbian kiss in cinema or in Guy's oeuvre. Film scholar Susan Potter begins her groundbreaking new book, Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema, with what she calls the "unruly erotics" of Guy's 1898 Gavotte.[44]Susan Potter, Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 43. According to McMahan, Gavotte is structured around "the eroticism of seeing two women kiss."[45]McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché, 212. Likewise, the climax of Guy's Les Fredaines de Pierrette/Pierrette's Escapades (1900) is the kiss that ends the scene, suggesting that eroticized kisses between womxn were a staple of Guy's trade and early cinema more broadly.[46]McMahan connects First-Class Midwife to Pierrette's Escapades when she describes the costumes of the couple in the cabbage patch: "Guy's costume resembles a Pierrot costume, and Germaine … Continue reading
Early film audiences would have been fluent in the literal punning and visual metaphors that Guy mined as she experimented with the visual language of cinema. Such fluency is necessary to see the intertextual references being mobilized in later periods. Almost a century after Guy's kissing cabbage fairies, queer conservative Florence King lambasted the new positive images of lesbians in the media by sarcastically declaring that "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch was into Cunnilingus."[47] Florence King, "Democrazy," chap. 8 in Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1990), 95. In short, early film history was a cinema of citations that developed out of nineteenth-century visual, narrative, and sexual cultures.[48]The concept of a cinema of citations underscores the way that film form functions through conventions: it is citational. This reading inverts Charles Musser's productive conception of early … Continue reading It can only be understood intertextually. Throughout most of the silent era, particularly before the end of World War I, intertextual marking, euphemism, and double entendre were among the most common ways that lesbian meanings circulated in popular culture. This is neither an absence nor an invisibility, it is a specific cultural formation with its own representational conventions.
Screenshot, Mrs. Wiggs and the Cabbage Patch (1919). For years, the stage role was played by lesbian actress Ada Dwyer Russell.
Femme Fairies and the Queer Reproduction of Femininity
Guy's cabbage fairies circulated alongside other femme fairies that are unquestionably among the most popular of early films: the iconic serpentine or butterfly dances were produced by most major filmmakers, including the Lumière Brothers, Thomas Edison, and Guy herself.[49]My formulation of the femme fairy follows Patricia White's paradigm of the "femme film" as "women's pictures that sustain lesbian inference." White, Uninvited, xviii. Although these films feature a variety of performers, they are all imitations of Loie Fuller's revolutionary stage performances for which she earned the moniker of la fée électricité, or the electric fairy.[50]See Rhonda, K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Bud Coleman, "The Electric Fairy: The Woman Behind the Apparition … Continue reading
Like The Cabbage Fairy, at first glance, such films seem to conform to later models of womxn as object of the gaze. But when analyzed intertextually and in their historical context, it becomes clear that something more interesting is happening. In the femme fairies of early cinema, we witness the emergence of the normative hetero-feminine ideal of the twentieth century as it is being produced in imitation of and in relation to racialized lesbian sexualities and performance traditions.[51]As case in point, the dancer most closely associated with the genre, "Annabelle the Dancer," was the first Gibson Girl of the Ziegfield Follies. On the Gibson Girl in relation to the New Woman, … Continue reading The magical movements of the electric fairy that were so widely imitated in early film were produced by the manipulation of a patented wand.[52]For more on Fuller's patent, see Garelick, Electric Salome, 41. In performances and films, the wand disappears, reminiscent of Guy's cabbage fairy's discarded wand. But in other ephemera, such as the postcard above, the wand is part of the iconography of the dance, reinforcing the association between the iconic movements and the figure of the femme fairy.
Screenshot, Ballet Libella.
Not surprisingly, Guy's contributions to this genre are infused with a Sapphic eroticism that Potter describes as part of "culturally normative nineteenth-century modes of female homoerotic spectatorship."[53]Potter, Queer Timing, 102. Potter argues that Fuller's erotic identity and performances are not intelligible in terms of contemporary concepts of sexuality including lesbianism, gender inversion, … Continue reading Guy made four such films in 1897 alone, beginning with Ballet Libella, which McMahan describes as "a beautiful hand colored film showing two women, one in a fairy costume, preparing to dance and then beginning to dance, while the second one watches her with an intense gaze."[54]McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché, 51, 211-212. Ballet Libella begins this video compilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGjZB9bJQJQ. Guy's intriguing Danse Serpentine Mme. Bob Walter/Serpentine Dance by Mme. Bob Walter (1897) is another beautiful example of the genre.[55]Mme. Bob Walter's chosen name in the title/listings suggests the significance of her star persona to any reading of the film. I have found little material on her in English. See "Madame Bob … Continue reading
The ubiquity of the femme fairy at the advent of cinema underscores the fact that when kinetoscope parlors and projected cinema were first being commercialized in the 1890s, these lesbian figures, networks, representations, and audiences were central to the development and marketing of the new medium—and they would remain so throughout the silent era. Indeed, this period was so saturated with Sapphic claims to authorship, queer performance trends, and lesbian hyper-visuality more broadly that it could be called the Sapphic era, but that is a story for another time.
The foundational nature of lesbian visuality to early film culture comes clearly into view when we trace the Victorian aesthetic vernacular. While deep intertextual research is often necessary to access, or "see," the meanings made in early film, these significations would have been obvious to their initial audiences. As is well known, reception studies of early cinema present a unique set of challenges. The Cabbage Fairy's relationship to the postcard craze of the 1890s underscores the potential value of the brief messages often written on postcards to offer us fleeting contact with early film audiences.[56]This methodology follows feminist and queer work on scrapbooks by Leslie Midkiff DeBauche and Diana W. Anselmo. See Leslie Midkiff DeBauche, "Memory Books, the Movies, and Aspiring Vamps," … Continue reading The lesbian iconography, which I have argued was central to the popularity of Guy's famous cabbage patch films, is echoed in the cabbage fairies on the apparently popular postcard below (circa 1910). The doubled femme figures mirror each other, reaching their hands provocatively into the cabbages. An apparently older androgynous figure looks on from behind, recalling the cross-dressed lesbian lover in First-Class Midwife. The lover leans in from out of frame, cutting off the figure below the waist so that one cannot be sure of whether they wear pants or a skirt.
American postcard, c. 1910. Private Collection.
Three different hand-written notes sent via this card offer ambiguous messages, each with its own lesbian potential.[57]All three of the cards discussed are from my personal collection. The first reads in part: Don't be caught by fairies as are on the opposite side of this card, they may be looking for you. While the message might carry either heterosexualized or queer meanings, it is significant that the three figures on the card are clearly identified as fairies themselves even without their wands or feather dusters. This is important because it underscores the aggressive sexualization of the fairy figure, which is at odds with accounts that situate the discourse in relation to prudery, children, or the folkloric past. Another copy of this card, apparently hand-delivered in Elmira, California, reads: Take your time and make your choice, B.Y. The use of initials and the lack of postmark suggest the choice in question might be of an intimate nature that requires some discretion. Granted, this choice may have been about any number of things, from a marriage proposal to an abortion. Yet, the joviality associated with a holiday postcard (the mirthful dangers of Halloween in particular) and the lesbian imagery on the card itself, certainly flirt with the possibility of a queer proposition. Finally, a third copy of this card carries a message that could be read as either the most innocuous or the most telling. This card, even more than the last, is conspicuously blank. It is dated by hand as Oct. 31, 1913, with no postmark, and inscribed only To Trina with no other identifying information such as a last name or address. The correspondence section of the card reads only: From Mother. While it is certainly conceivable that this was a mundane note passed from actual mother to daughter, given the iconography on the card it seems more plausible that this inscription marks a lesbian relationship in the Victorian tradition of "Mother-love." As Martha Vicinus and other scholars have demonstrated, during this period, womxn in erotic relationships with each other frequently adopted the idealized language of maternal love as a "highly regarded vocabulary to describe same-sex love."[58]Vicinus, "'A Strenuous Pleasure': Daughter-Mother Love," chap. 5 in Intimate Friends, 113. See also Carolyn Tate, "Lesbian Incest as Queer Kinship: Michael Field and the Erotic Middle-Class … Continue reading Hold this thought.
The historical context of turn-of-the-century "mother-love" offers an opportunity to rethink the spate of recent headlines blaring declaratives such as "Hollywood Froze Out the Founding Mother of Cinema."[59]Matthew Wills, "Hollywood Froze Out the Founding Mother of Cinema," JStor Daily, March 13, 2019, https://daily.jstor.org/hollywood-froze-out-the-founding-mother-of-cinema/. See also Toniann … Continue reading Such headlines frame reviews of the documentary Be Natural, but they also reveal more about the current crisis of gender discrimination in Hollywood than about Guy's work. After a screening of the documentary at the 2018 New York Film Festival, lesbian experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer raised what may be the most pressing question about Guy's career for the present moment. Hammer recalled hearing stories in the 1980s that Guy had thrown her negatives into one of the Finger Lakes in Upstate New York. "Did you run across this story?" Hammer asked director Pamela Green, "Maybe it's a mythology?"[60]Jodie Foster and Pamela B. Green, The Close-Up, Film at Lincoln Center Podcast #223, April 17, 2019, https://www.filmlinc.org/daily/the-close-up-pamela-b-green-and-jodie-foster-talk-be-natural/.
Image from Women I Love (Barbara Hammer, 1976). Courtesy of the Barbara Hammer Estate and Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI).
Hammer's incisive question queerly disrupts the naturalized way Guy's story is framed as a rescue narrative, with scholars and filmmakers performing a heroic recovery of Guy and her lost films.[61]The rescue narrative has been the dominant framing of Guy's career from Francis Lacassin, "Out of Oblivion: Alice Guy- Blaché," Sight & Sound vol. 40, no. 3 (Summer 1971): 151-54, to A.O. … Continue reading The problem with the rescue narrative as a framing device is that, however feminist its intentions, it functions by positioning the profoundly successful Guy as a damsel-in-distress.
In the wake of #MeToo and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's findings of systemic discrimination against womxn in the film industry, it is tempting to draw parallels between Guy's struggles and those of twenty-first-century womxn. [62]See, for example, Elena Nicolaou, "This Fact Will Make You View the Cannes Film Festival Differently," Refinery29, May 8, 2018, … Continue reading Yet, now more than ever, it is imperative to disrupt the damsel-in-distress narrative and the heterosexist gendered stereotypes that propel it. The "untold," "lost," and "forgotten" history of Guy involves more than the insertion of a "forgotten mother of film" into a naturalized and heterosexualized account of film history. The repetition of such rhetoric renders it natural and thus reproduces the status quo, as Patricia White has pointed out in another context.[63]White, Uninvited, xii. Much of Guy's legacy stems from her persistence in combatting such gender stereotypes in her life and across her prolific body of work. Close attention to the lesbian cultural contexts and visual iconographies of Guy's influential output reveals a radically different story about the so-called "birth of cinema" than the ones we have been told. From cross-dressed lesbians kissing in the "cabbage patch" to the erotic encounters of femme fairies, Guy's innovative play with film language presented lesbian pleasures to cinema's first audiences and preserved them for future fairies. Mother of cinema? Mother-love, indeed!
Portrait of Alice Guy Blaché in 1912. Courtesy of Be Natural Productions/Zeitgeist Films.
Acknowledgements: With thanks to Kate Saccone, Maggie Hennefeld, and Shelley Stamp for their patient, generous, and incisive comments on this essay. I would also like to thank Susan Potter for her generative conversations, questions, and reading suggestions.
Notes[+]
In 1996, the film now circulating under the title The Cabbage Fairy was first identified by scholars, although there remains controversy over whether this is indeed Guy's The Cabbage Fairy, and if so, which version, the original or a remake.
Janelle Dietrick, Mademoiselle Alice: A Novel (Portland, OR: BookBaby [self-published], 2017).
Jane Gaines, Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Silent Film Industries? (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018).
Throughout this essay, the terms "lesbian" and "Sapphic" are used interchangeably to denote a variety of sexual desires, activities, relationships, identifications, and embodiments, which today might be called lesbian, bisexual, non-binary, pansexual, queer, trans, intersex, or gender nonconforming, among other terms. I use lesbian and Sapphic because they are era-appropriate, predate the dominance of the sexologists, and retain a gendered meaning that insists on feminist analysis within a patriarchal culture, while remaining capacious enough to include people who may have understood themselves in multiple, variable ways. Additionally, I use the contemporary intersectional feminist term "womxn" to denaturalize racialized and gendered language.
Yopie Prin, Victorian Sappho (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 94.
Janelle Dietrick with forward by Alice-Guy Blanche Peeters, La Fée Aux Choux: Alice Guy's Garden of Dreams (Portland, OR: BookBaby [self-published], 2017). Page numbers refer to the Kindle version.
See Jesse Olszynko-Gryn and Patrick Ellis, "'A Machine for Recreating Life': An Introduction to Reproduction on Film," British Journal for the History of Science, vol. 50, no. 3 (September 2017): 383-409.
George Chauncey, "The Fairy as an Intermediate Sex," chap. 2 in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 47-64; on the Sapphic Fairytale as structure, see Elaine Marks, "Lesbian Intertextuality," in Homosexualities and French Literature: Cultural Contexts/Critical Texts, eds. George Stambolian and Elaine Marks (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 186.
On the wand as slang for penis in this era, see Jonathon Green, The Vulgar Tongue (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 20, 191. For an example of contemporary controversy over sexual visual metaphor in public space, see Rachel Kraus, "These Sex Toy Ads Banned from the Subway. Now the Company is Suing," Mashable, June 18, 2019, https://mashable.com/article/dame-mta-sex-toy-ad-lawsuit/.
↑10
See Jonathon Green, "Cabbage," Green's Dictionary of Slang (Digital Edition, 2019), https://greensdictofslang.com/entry/bcvjvsq.
On the prominence of "literal punning" and vulgar humor in Guy's early work, see Kimberly Tomadjoglou, "Alice Guy's Great Cinematic Adventure," in Doing Women's Film History: Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future, eds. Christine Gledhill and Julia Knight (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 105-107. In English, the "cream puff" also carries queer feminized meanings dependent on this vulval imagery.
Thanks to Fabiola Hannah whose linguistic and cultural knowledge of French enabled this reading through our conversations. On the bawdiness of this song, see Yvonne Knibiehler, De la pucelle à la minette: les jeunes filles, de l'âge classique à nos jours/From the Virgin to the Pussy: Young Girls, from the Classical Age to Today) (Paris: Messidor, 1989), 109.
On longing and "retrospectatorship," see Patrica White, Uninvited: Classical Hollywood Cinema and Lesbian Representability (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
Guy's own claims to authorship of the Gaumont "series N" films (nude films made as early as 1897) reposition The Cabbage Fairy in relation to its own historical moment. See Dietrick, La Fée Aux Choux, 867. But what shall we make of recent claims that Guy did not make this film at all? As for the possibility that this film is not one of Guy's cabbage fairy stories, the best we can do at the moment is understand that this film has been adopted to stand in for Guy's claims to authorship. After all, if we follow the dominant theories of authorship, it is her claims that matter to her author function.
Gaines, Pink-Slipped, 52-55. See also Jane Gaines, "First Fictions," Signs vol. 30, no. 11 (2004): 1311; Judith Mayne, "Lesbian Detection," conclusion in Directed by Dorothy Arzner (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 173-181.
In the third of Guy's cabbage series, Madame a des envies/Madame Has Her Cravings (1906), a pregnant woman steals and consumes a stick of candy, a glass of absinth, and a smoking pipe before giving birth in the cabbage patch. Although, at first there appears to be no "fairy" in this film, it is present through visual play: absinth was known as "the green fairy," while the simulated fellatio that Alison McMahan associates with the early use of the close-up also marks the protagonist as the "fairy," in the slang of the time, suggesting oral sex, an act connected etymologically with "lesbian." See Alison McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché: Lost Visionary of the Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2002), 36-42; Valerie Traub, Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 282-283.
Dietrick quotes Guy's own claims that she did not perform in the film but put on the lover's costume afterwards "for fun." Dietrick, La Fée Aux Choux, 118. In footnote 137, she cites a letter from Guy to Louis Gaumont, dated January 15, 1954, which is held at the Bibliothèque du Film, Cinémathèque Française (Ref no. LG371B50).
Gaines, Pink-Slipped, 70.
Laura Horak, Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2016), 3.
Shane Brown, Queer Sexualities in Early Film: Cinema and Male-Male Intimacy (New York: IB Tauris, 2016) 3; David M. Lugowski, "Queering the (New) Deal: Lesbian and Gay Representation and the Depression-Era Cultural Politics of Hollywood's Production Code," Cinema Journal vol. 38, no. 2 (Winter 1999): 4.
Alice Guy Blaché, The Memoirs of Alice Guy Blaché, ed. Anthony Slide (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1986), 18. What are we to do with the similarity between René Viviani's name and that of Renée Vivien, one of the most famous lesbians at the time, other than simply to note it? On reading Guy's memoirs as montage, see Amelie Hastie, Cupboards of Curiosity: Women, Recollection, and Film History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 77.
McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché, 212.
Nicole G. Albert, Lesbian Decadence: Representations in Art and Literature of Fin-de-siécle France (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2016); Francesca Canadé Sautman, "Invisible Women: Lesbian Working-Class Culture in France, 1880-1930," in Homosexuality in Modern France, eds. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 179, 187.
The motif of the lesbian double is also connected to lesbian fashion of the Victorian era. It is historically significant in relation to lesbian cultural practice. See Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 9-11.
Barbara Creed, "Lesbian Bodies: Tribades, Tomboys, and Tarts," in Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism, eds. Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn (London: Routledge, 1995), 86.
Mandy Merck, "'Transforming the Suit': A Century of Lesbian Self-Portraits," in Perversions: Deviant Readings (New York: Routledge, 1993), 96.
Olu Jenzen, "Revolting Doubles: Radical Narcissism and the Trope of the Lesbian Doppelgangers," Journal of Lesbian Studies, vol. 17 (2013): 348.
The doubling trope is not confined to the dyad. Especially in its pornographic variants, it frequently evokes triangular relationships through the use of the mirror. This creates an uncanny effect of queer reproduction. For example, consider this erotic stereoview of two naked womxn on a bed. The bedroom setting suggests a sexual encounter between the two, but the standing woman's narcissistic doubling stages a lesbian ménage à trois effect.
https://wfpp.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/18_Lovday-300x187.jpg 300w, https://wfpp.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/18_Lovday-768x478.jpg 768w, https://wfpp.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/18_Lovday-200x124.jpg 200w, https://wfpp.columbia.edu/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/18_Lovday-250x156.jpg 250w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" />
"Unknown photographer, France. Two nude women in a room with a mirror, c.1850-1855, Stereo daguerreotype," featured in Hold That Pose: Erotic Imagery in 19th Century Photography [online gallery] via the Kinsey Institute, Indiana University.
Linda Williams, "Of Kisses and Ellipses: The Long Adolescence of American Movies," chap. 1 in Screening Sex (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 28; On cross-dressed kisses, see Chris Straayer, "The Paradoxical Bivalent Kiss," in chap. 3 in Deviant Eyes, Deviant Bodies: Sexual Re-Orientations in Film and Video (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 54.
On the racialization in First-Class Midwife, see Kim Tomadjoglou, "Wonderment—Seeing the World Through the Eyes of Alice Guy Blaché," in Alice Guy Blaché: Cinema Pioneer, ed. Joan Simon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 109, 101-107; Tomadjoglou, "Alice Guy's Great Cinematic Adventure," 105-107.
For instance, see Gina Greene, "In the Garden of Puériculture: Cultivating the Ideal French Infant in Real and Imagined Landscapes of Care (1895–1935)," Change Over Time, vol. 6, no. 2 (2016), 192-214.
The idea of a "Victorian meme" is an anachronism, but I hope a productive one, highlighting the ongoing imagined relationship between cultural and biological reproduction. The term "meme" was coined in 1991, and combines the Greek word "mimesis" with "gene" to describe the "evolutionary cultural process by which social symbols are formed, cross-fertilized, and reproduced in new and diverse iterations of an original (or 'genetic') idea." See Eileen Hunt Botting, Christine Carey Wilkerson, and Elizabeth N. Kozlow, "Wollstonecraft as an International Feminist Meme," Journal of Women's History, vol. 26, no. 2 (2014): 13-38. See also Giles Fraser, "Nobody is better at being human, Professor Dawkins, least of all you," The Guardian, August 29, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2014/aug/29/nobody-better-at-being-human-richard-dawkins.
French eugenic thought has been differentiated from US and UK eugenics with the suggestion that French eugenics did not share the racism or classism of the broader movement. See, for example, William H. Schneider, "The Eugenics Movement in France, 1890-1940," in Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia, ed. Mark Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 69-109. Yet, although significant differences certainly exist, the rhetoric of differentiation between good and bad (or positive and negative) eugenics suggests the possibility of a seemingly benign "biologically based movement for social reform" (Schneider 69). It is through such thinking that we get to current statements such as, "The old eugenic dream, temporarily discredited by Nazi pursuits of a 'superior race,' has been resurrected." See Calum MacKellar and Christopher Bechtel, eds., The Ethics of the New Eugenics (Edinburgh: Berghahn Books, 2014), 2. On the relationship between eugenics, scientific racism, and colonialism in the French context, see Crystal Marie Fleming, Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2017).
Olszynko-Gryn and Ellis, "'A Machine for Recreating Life,'" 383-409. On the relationship between postcards and early film more broadly, see Lauren Rabinovitz, "The Miniature and the Giant: Postcards and Early Cinema," chap. 4 in Electric Dreamland: Amusement Parks, Movies, and American Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 96-135. On womxn as consumers of postcards, see Lisa Z. Sigel, "Filth in the Wrong People's Hands: Postcards and the Expansion of Pornography in Britain and the Atlantic World, 1880-1914," Journal of Social History vol. 33, no. 4 (Summer 2000): 859-885. For the foundational work on the racialization of postcards within the context of colonialism, see Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Marie-Monique Huss, "Pronatalism and the Popular Ideology of the Child in Wartime France: The Evidence of the Picture Postcard," in The Upheaval of War: Family, Work, and Welfare in Europe, 1914-1918, eds. Richard Wall and Jay Winter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 329-368. On the racialization of motherhood, see Ruby Tapia, American Pietàs: Visions of Race, Death and the Maternal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
One notices the small Star of David that appears like a logo printed in the bottom right-hand corner. This is a feature of the card and appears on all the copies I have seen. The Star of David has been loosely associated with Judaism for centuries and this association grew during the nineteenth century. In 1897, the symbol was chosen to represent the Zionist movement. See "Star of David," The Encyclopædia Britannica (Online), https://www.britannica.com/topic/Star-of-David; "The Flag and the Emblem," Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs website, April 28, 2003, https://mfa.gov.il/mfa/aboutisrael/israelat50/pages/the%20flag%20and%20the%20emblem.aspx.
I would note that it is possible to read the film as a lampoon of the racism of the white upper class. Such a reading is supported by McMahan's description of the film as a satire. She writes "Sage-femme pokes fun at the way men use romance to coax women into producing children, but also at the way women insist that their babies meet certain class standards"(112). Such a reading would depend partially upon the film's title which may have been written retrospectively by someone other than Guy. Dietrick argues that this film was originally titled La Fée Choux. See Dietrick, La Fée Aux Choux, 404n45-46.
Andrea Weiss, "'A Queer Feeling When I Look at You': Hollywood Stars and Lesbian Spectatorship in the 1930s," in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (New York: Routledge, 1991), 286.
This is the classic formulation of fetishistic disavowal, "I know very well, but just the same…" in which perceptual evidence is refused (in this case in favor of the heterosexual fetish). See Linda Williams, "'Something Else Besides A Mother': Stella Dallas and The Maternal Melodrama," in Issues in Feminist Film Criticism, ed. Patricia Erens (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 137-162; Teresa de Lauretis, "The Lure of the Mannish Lesbian: The Fantasy of Castration and the Signification of Desire," chap. 5 in The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 222-229.
Alice Hagen Rice, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (Toronto: William Briggs, 1901), 4. Scholars differ on attributing lesbian meaning to words such as "queer," "gay," or even "peculiar," but such words frequently index meanings that are made interstitially.
I believe Guy deployed these meanings deftly, with the inexplicable mix of unconscious instinct and intentional gesture frequently called artistic talent or genius. As McMahan and others have documented, in the years between 1900 and 1907, Guy was recognized as a leader and innovator in the field. Although The Cabbage Fairy and First-Class Midwife are early works in relation to the unusual longevity of her career, her persistent success with vulgar visual punning strongly suggests that we attribute the popularity of her cabbage fairies to her knowing and meaningful play with the Sapphic cultural zeitgeist.
See Gretchen Schultz, Sapphic Fathers: Discourses of Same-Sex Desire from Nineteenth-Century France (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015). On the visible geographies of lesbian cruising in nineteenth-century Paris, see Lowry Martin, "Nymphomaniacs and Polymorphic Monsters: Imagining Lesbianism in Nineteenth-Century France," Paper presentation, Queer History Conference, San Francisco State University, June 18, 2019.
Tami Williams, Germaine Dulac: A Cinema of Sensations (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 89.
Tomadjoglou, "Alice Guy's Great Cinematic Adventure," 102-103.
Susan Potter, Queer Timing: The Emergence of Lesbian Sexuality in Early Cinema (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019), 43.
McMahan connects First-Class Midwife to Pierrette's Escapades when she describes the costumes of the couple in the cabbage patch: "Guy's costume resembles a Pierrot costume, and Germaine Serrand, who plays the wife, is dressed like Columbine" (112). For a description of a relevant intertext, the 1898 "Pierrot in Lesbos" by Lucien Merlet, see Albert, Lesbian Decadence, 51-52.
Florence King, "Democrazy," chap. 8 in Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1990), 95.
The concept of a cinema of citations underscores the way that film form functions through conventions: it is citational. This reading inverts Charles Musser's productive conception of early cinema's "aesthetics of discernment," which is oriented toward spectatorship. In distinction, what I call the cinema of citations emphasizes authorship, following Judith Mayne's assertion that "lesbian and gay readings take citation and replacement as central strategies." See Charles Musser, "A Cornucopia of Images: Comparison and Judgement Across Theatre, Film, and the Visual Arts During the Late Nineteenth Century," in Moving Pictures: American Art and Early Film, ed. Nancy Mowll Mathews (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2005), 6; Judith Mayne, "A Parallax View of Lesbian Authorship," chap. 8 in Framed: Lesbians, Feminists, and Media Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 155.
My formulation of the femme fairy follows Patricia White's paradigm of the "femme film" as "women's pictures that sustain lesbian inference." White, Uninvited, xviii.
See Rhonda, K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller's Performance of Modernism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Bud Coleman, "The Electric Fairy: The Woman Behind the Apparition of Loie Fuller," in Staging Desire: Queer Readings of American Theatre History, eds. Kim Marra and Robert A. Schanke (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 311-337; Tom Gunning, "Loie Fuller and the Art of Motion: Body, Light, Electricity, and the Origins of Cinema," in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucinda: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, eds. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 75-89.
As case in point, the dancer most closely associated with the genre, "Annabelle the Dancer," was the first Gibson Girl of the Ziegfield Follies. On the Gibson Girl in relation to the New Woman, see Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfield Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 76-78. On Annabelle the Dancer, see Paul C. Spehr, "1890-1895: Movies and the Kinetoscope," in American Cinema 1890-1909: Themes and Variations, ed. André Gaudreault (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 35-36. On the racialization and "Imperial Gaze" of Fuller's work, see Garelick, Electric Salome, 63-117.
For more on Fuller's patent, see Garelick, Electric Salome, 41.
Potter, Queer Timing, 102. Potter argues that Fuller's erotic identity and performances are not intelligible in terms of contemporary concepts of sexuality including lesbianism, gender inversion, or Sapphic communities. This is important to her larger argument about the emergence of modern sexual identities and the sexuality effects of cinema. See pages 110-111.
McMahan, Alice Guy Blaché, 51, 211-212. Ballet Libella begins this video compilation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGjZB9bJQJQ.
Mme. Bob Walter's chosen name in the title/listings suggests the significance of her star persona to any reading of the film. I have found little material on her in English. See "Madame Bob Walter-A Notorious Arranger of Elopements," The Old Motor, June 14, 2014, http://theoldmotor.com/?p=121472.
This methodology follows feminist and queer work on scrapbooks by Leslie Midkiff DeBauche and Diana W. Anselmo. See Leslie Midkiff DeBauche, "Memory Books, the Movies, and Aspiring Vamps," Observations on Film Art, February 8, 2015, http://www.davidbordwell.net/blog/2015/02/08/memory-books-the-movies-and-aspiring-vamps/; Diana W. Anselmo, "Made in Movieland: Imitation, Agency, and Girl Movie Fandom in the 1910s," Camera Obscura 94, vol. 32, no. 1 (2017): 129-165.
All three of the cards discussed are from my personal collection.
Vicinus, "'A Strenuous Pleasure': Daughter-Mother Love," chap. 5 in Intimate Friends, 113. See also Carolyn Tate, "Lesbian Incest as Queer Kinship: Michael Field and the Erotic Middle-Class Victorian Family," Victorian Review vol. 39, no. 2, Special Issue: Extending Families (Fall 2013): 181-199. My own archival findings corroborate the discourse of "Mother-love," but suggest a more diverse and ironic interpretation than that of Vicinus or Tate.
Matthew Wills, "Hollywood Froze Out the Founding Mother of Cinema," JStor Daily, March 13, 2019, https://daily.jstor.org/hollywood-froze-out-the-founding-mother-of-cinema/. See also Toniann Fernandez, "The Forgotten Mother of Cinema," The Paris Review, December 7, 2018, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/12/07/the-forgotten-mother-of-cinema/; Marcia G. Yerman, "The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché, the Mother of Cinema," NextTribe, May 3, 2019, https://nexttribe.com/alice-guy-blache/.
Jodie Foster and Pamela B. Green, The Close-Up, Film at Lincoln Center Podcast #223, April 17, 2019, https://www.filmlinc.org/daily/the-close-up-pamela-b-green-and-jodie-foster-talk-be-natural/.
The rescue narrative has been the dominant framing of Guy's career from Francis Lacassin, "Out of Oblivion: Alice Guy- Blaché," Sight & Sound vol. 40, no. 3 (Summer 1971): 151-54, to A.O. Scott, "'Be Natural' Review: Rescuing Alice Guy Blaché, a Film Pioneer, From Oblivion," The New York Times, April 25, 2019, C10, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/25/movies/be-natural-untold-story-alice-guy-blache-review.html.
See, for example, Elena Nicolaou, "This Fact Will Make You View the Cannes Film Festival Differently," Refinery29, May 8, 2018, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2018/05/198577/lack-of-women-representation-cannes-film-festival; Foster and Green, The Close-Up. For an overview of recent statistics and the EEOC investigation, see Martha Lauzen, "Gender Ratios Are Improving in Indie Films, but Visibility's a Greater Goal," Variety, July 11, 2019, https://variety.com/2019/voices/columns/gender-ratios-indie-films-improving-1203263005/.
White, Uninvited, xii.
Loveday, Kiki. "Do You Believe in Fairies? Cabbages, Victorian Memes, and the Birth of Cinema: Seeing Sapphic Sexuality in the Silent Era." In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall'Asta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2019. <https://doi.org/10.7916/d8-f1sh-k143>