Looking for Mabel Normand

 

In 1923 the first wave of feminism had already sweep the country; “the war to end all wars” had placed women into the economic portion where they had become independent humans.  The New Women was voting and working, also escaping parental authority and was still able to remain a respectable participant within her culture.  As Rob King so articulately contends in his brilliant book, “The Fun Factory” (the Keystone Film Company) the middle-class woman and her blue-collar and immanent sisters were free to find leisure activates. She found the characters depicted on the stage and in movies were no longer just the domestic feminist of the Victoria stories found in the “Secrets” by Rudolf Besier. Although Heywood Broun in the little article below deals only with a rather small aspect of this emergrning change in the attitudes and portrayals of women in the stories told, he does have an interesting take on feminism during this exciting, electrifying  era at the vary time it was occurring.

He refers in his article to the work of Rudolf Besier, a play entitle “Secrets”, it was also turned into a Norma Talmege film and 10 years later Mary Pickford played the lead.   It was one of those tales of romance, which starts out in England travels to the U.S. West in 1860’s and winds up back in England years later.  The school girl elopes with her father’s clerk and they sail off to America.  And as a young wife and mother, in a Wyoming cabin she battles a band of outlaws, losses her first born.  Back in England in the 1870s she fights to save her husband from disgracing himself and saves her children and home from a notorious beauty. And as the aged, wrinkled, white-haired but still lovely woman fights off death and succeeds to save her husband once again. This is a man telling the story of the steadfast love of a good wife.  Besier is most remembered for his “Barretts of Wimpole Street.”  

The other movie Broun refers to is “Will Shakespeare” by Clemence Dane, who was really Winifred Ashton, the pioneering feminist and, said to be the most successful writer in England between the First and Second World Wars. In 1946, her screenplay “Vacation from Marriage” won an Oscar.   Her friend, Noel Coward used her as inspiration for Madame Arcati in his “Blithe Spirit.”  Her fantasy was about Will Davenant, the godson of William Shakespeare; set on the eve of Shakespeare's last birthday, as Will and his friends prepare for a special performance of “Midsummer Nights Dream.” This is a woman telling the story of the love of godson for a dieing genius.

 The readership of Broun would have been familiar of these authors’s work and of course, Mabel Normand would have known but I did not.

 

CLASSIFICATION OF DRAMA

BECOMES MORE DIFFICULT

 

“… FEMINISM THE DIVIDING ROCK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DRAMATIC STREAM.”

By Heywood Broun

New York, January 6, 1923

(Press Publishing Company)

 

Transcribed by

Marilyn Slater

Looking for Mabel

October 27, 2009

 

FEMINISM IN THE DRAMA

 

… There is today one system of classification which is not in the least difficult.  Almost every play which comes along may be put in one or the other of two groups.  It is either a play which sees life as woman-led or man-led.  Feminism is the rock in the middle of the current which sends drama to the left or the right.  It would be much simpler if every play by a woman represented the feminist point of view and each man who wrote celebrated the dominant male.  It is not so easy as that.  Shaw, for instance, almost invariably writes of the ascendancy of the woman.  Caesar is almost the only Shavian hero who is a free agent.

 Fortunately the division into two classes does not apply merely to high brow plays.  The same divergence appears in less lofty drama.  Within the last week there has been an interesting example of each school.  “Secrets” by Rudolf Besier and Edgington, is devoted entirely to the theory that the best interests in the race depend upon a woman’s ability to respond with a prompt and cheerful “yes” to each claim and demand made by one selected male person.  In the other school is Clemence Dane’s ‘Will Shakespeare,” which advances the contention that genius is a sort of squeak which comes out of a man when a woman steps upon him hard enough.

 

We would like if Mercutio will pardon us, to say.  “A plague on both your houses,” but seemingly there is not even standing room for neutrals.  The rock in the middle of the stream is far too slippery a spot to provide a perch for any critic.

 

THE LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN.

 

The theory of the woman-led world is not nearly so modern as it sounds. After all this has been the fundamental notion upon which most of the popular plays of the last fifty years have been founded.  The theater has been active in propagandizing for the belief that battles are lost and won gigantic corporation floated, salvation achieved, each and all for the love of some good woman.

 

During the long reign of civil war drama the spectator could hardly have been blamed for coming away from the theater with the impression that the conflict was fought to preserve the union.  We mean of course, the union of the hero, Major Tom Putnam of Massachusetts and the lovely Annabelle Lee of Fairoaks, VA.  In the theater Grant’s claim to fame does not rest upon his military reputation but upon the fact that he was the greatest matchmaker the world has ever known.

 

The late war was dramatized according to much the same plan.  When the hero declared at the end of the second act that he was ready to die for France, England or America he actually meant Mtte. Fifi, Lady Manners, or Margaret.

 

There are few breaks in this transition which includes “Macbeth” and also “The Ladies.”  No line in dramatic literature has done so much to shape the point-of-view of all succeeding playwrights as “Give me the dagger.” The big scene in 75 percent of all plays in some variation of this notion that in the most important crises of life the will and the decision of the moment come from a woman.

 

HERE DOMINATES “SECRETS.”

 

In fact, upon second thought, it is hardly fair to classify “Secrets” as anti-feminist without certain reservations.  Even in this play the peak occurs when an outlaw is creeping up behind the hero only to be slain as the heroine stops rocking the cradle, picks up a gun and fires.  And she hits him.  A certain license must be granted to dramatists.

 

Still the anti-feminist side has a working majority in “Secrets.”  The hero is much more dominating than usual.  Always upon entering a room he seeks the chair farthest removed from the heroine, who is also his wife, and once comfortably seated he says, “Mary, come here, I want you.”  She always goes, which probably explains why the play is advertising under the caption “The sweetest love story ever told.