Girls Will Be Boys

Laura Horak

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813574844
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

2016  Choice  Outstanding Academic Title Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn all made lasting impressions with the cinematic cross-dressing they performed onscreen. What few modern viewers realize, however, is that these seemingly daring performances of the 1930s actually came at the tail end of a long wave of gender-bending films that included more than 400 movies featuring women dressed as men.
 
Laura Horak spent a decade scouring film archives worldwide, looking at American films made between 1908 and 1934, and what she discovered could revolutionize our understanding of gender roles in the early twentieth century. Questioning the assumption that cross-dressing women were automatically viewed as transgressive, she finds that these figures were popularly regarded as wholesome and regularly appeared onscreen in the 1910s, thus lending greater respectability to the fledgling film industry. Horak also explores how and why this perception of cross-dressed women began to change in the 1920s and early 1930s, examining how cinema played a pivotal part in the representation of lesbian identity.
 
Girls Will Be Boys excavates a rich history of gender-bending film roles, enabling readers to appreciate the wide array of masculinities that these actresses performed—from sentimental boyhood to rugged virility to gentlemanly refinement. Taking us on a guided tour through a treasure-trove of vintage images, Girls Will Be Boys helps us view the histories of gender, sexuality, and film through fresh eyes.   

Part I

Cross-Dressed Women as American Ideals (1908–1921)

1

Moving Picture Uplift and the Female Boy

In 1915, the thirty-two-year-old Broadway star Marguerite Clark appeared in a film adaptation of The Prince and the Pauper as the two boy protagonists (fig. 2). The New York Day raved, “Marguerite Clark performs the most artistic work of her entire stage and screen career and renders an interpretation of characters containing at once so much poetry and power, so much force and beauty, that it will inevitably rank with the few greatest characterizations yet contributed to the screen.”1 Film critics around the country heaped praise on Clark and the film. The Detroit News pointed out that “Miss Clark is building up a following of men, women and children whose enthusiasm for film attractions has been a matter of luke warm enduring [sic] until the elfin leading woman thrust her personality into their world.”2 It was precisely this following that cinema’s female boys aimed to attract.

Figure 2. Marguerite Clark as both prince and pauper in The Prince and the Pauper (1915), from Film Fun (January 1916).

Around 1908, the American film industry worked to “uplift” moving picture culture in order to avoid government regulation, attract middle-class audiences, and establish the movies as a legitimate art form.3 Filmmakers adapted literary and theatrical works already consumed by genteel audiences and innovated formal methods to communicate moral judgments, while exhibitors forged alliances with cultural institutions and improved the decor, safety, and air circulation of exhibition spaces. Middle-class women were deemed particularly central to this project: their presence was imagined to endow theaters with a sense of respectability, and they were likely to bring their husbands and children with them. Exhibitors courted middle-class women through matinee screenings, prize giveaways, and “ladies’ nights.”4

Filmmakers also courted middle-class women by adopting practices from theater, including actresses in male roles. Casting actresses as boys was not a minor, anachronistic practice. Actresses appeared in male roles in more than one hundred films during the silent era, made by “quality” companies like Vitagraph, Biograph, and Thanhouser, as well as “school of action” companies like Kalem, Selig, and Keystone. The characters they played were almost exclusively young, white boys.5 Critics sometimes referred to these roles as “girl boys,” but for clarity I call them “female boys.”6 More than three-quarters were played by girls aged seven to thirteen. Female infants and toddlers also sometimes played boys. Additionally, thirteen films—the most highly publicized of the group—starred women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-eight playing young boys. These included two adaptations of The Prince and the Pauper (Edison, 1909, and Famous Players, 1915), two adaptations of Oliver Twist (General, 1912, and Lasky, 1916), Hansel and Gretel (Edison, 1909), Treasure Island (Maurice Tourneur Productions, 1920),7 Little Lord Fauntleroy (Mary Pickford Productions, 1921), and Peter Pan (Famous Players–Lasky, 1924). Many of the films starred actresses famous for their work on stage, such as Cecil Spooner, Marie Doro, and Marguerite Clark.

Female boys connected moving pictures to centuries-old theatrical traditions. Furthermore, they made a specific appeal to middle-class mothers and grandmothers by embodying a sentimental ideal of boyhood. Female boys were considered more expressive, more beautiful, more innocent, and more vulnerable than boys played by male actors. By modeling and inspiring sympathy, female boys demonstrated that moving pictures could function as sentimental moral education. These films show that the work of the female boy was not limited to the nineteenth-century stage. They also reveal that cross-gender casting did not necessarily undermine the dominant gender system, as scholars like Chris Straayer have suggested.8 While one might argue that cross-gender casting in cinema was short-lived because it contradicted the medium’s penchant for realism, I argue that the decline of female boys was a result of the increasing stigmatization of the sentimental boy and the demand of the emerging star system that female performers be readily recognizable and consistently attractive. In the 1920s, female boys like Mary Pickford’s Fauntleroy tried to balance sentimental and “red-blooded” boyhood, but by this time only “real” boys, like the child actor Jackie Coogan, could successfully embody these contradictory ideals.

While theater and cultural historians like Elizabeth Mullenix and Katie Sutton have argued that casting women in boy roles was a reactionary attempt to delegitimize women’s political demands, I argue that these roles also performed a sentimental politics, showing how the adult world of capitalist individualism could be remade through a child’s expression of empathy and generosity.9 These roles also created the opportunity for female bodies to help produce and affirm cultural ideals of masculinity. The contribution of female masculinities to masculinity as such is regularly overlooked, as transgender theorist Jack Halberstam has observed.10 The early twentieth century was a moment in which female performances of masculinity were central to the cultural production of boyhood.

Female Hamlets and Comic Opera Ladies

As explored in the introduction, moving pictures had an array of theatrical cross-gender casting practices to choose from. The American stage had a rich lineage of women in dramatic Shakespearean roles, and in musical theater, comic opera, burlesque, pantomime, and ballet, attractive young women often played male roles in revealing tights and tunics. Finally, girls and young women played boys in hundreds of melodramas, tragedies, children’s stories, and comedies. Given all these choices, why did American filmmakers gravitate exclusively to the sentimental female boy?

I suspect that women playing dramatic male roles were too politically volatile by 1908 for the American moving picture industry. The beloved Peg Woffington and Charlotte Cushman had built their careers on dramatic male roles in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; but when Bernhardt resuscitated this tradition in the 1890s, American critics responded with disbelief and derision. The most hyperbolic response came from New York Journal critic Alan Dale, who wrote a full-page article in 1898 titled “Why an Actress Cannot Wear Trousers Like a Man.”11 Dale argued that biological sex was so fundamental that it was impossible to disguise: “In real life sex is a distinctly dominant quality that is born and not acquired. It triumphs over clothes, wigs and caps.” Even if a woman could convincingly look and act like a man, the effect would be grotesque: “If it were possible to secure an actress who could infallibly present the eccentricities of the other sex, we should have no use for her whatsoever. She would repel us, and we should insist that she was vulgar and objectionable.” Dale’s warning echoes conservative American physicians and religious leaders who described political women as physiologically monstrous.12 Regarding Bernhardt’s earnest attempt to render masculinity, Dale asserted, “Sarah was cornered, flabbergasted and utterly demolished by the inexorable deficiencies of her sex.” He argued that women playing dramatic male roles were received as little more than the leg shows of musical theater: “Women play male roles because in this way they are enabled to be more graphically womanly than ever. And audiences go to see them because this is the case. They deceive none but the idiots in the cast, and managers don’t propose that they shall ever try to do so.”

Though most American critics were more favorably disposed to women in dramatic male roles, they sometimes connected actresses’ desire to play serious male roles with women’s entrance into politics, business, and higher education. “The women of the stage are growing constantly more aggressive in their usurpation of men’s parts,” stated the American Journal Examiner in 1901.13 Two years later, the New York Morning Telegraph insisted that “roles written for men” could “be properly represented only with an attitude of authority which no womanly woman can assume.”14 This statement puts cross-cast women in a double bind: either the characters they performed would lack authority, or their own womanliness would be denigrated. Like Dale, many critics dismissed Bernhardt’s male performances as a version of chorus girls’ tights and tunic roles. Considering this widespread ridicule, it is not surprising that American moving pictures shied away from adult women in dramatic male roles.15 One rare exception was Mathilde Comont’s portrayal of the Persian Prince in Thief of Bagdad (Douglas Fairbanks Productions, 1924). But in this case the actress’s ample, feminine body calls into question Persian masculinity. In general, casting adult women in dramatic male roles seems to have been too controversial to appeal to American moving picture makers.

One would think that the “graphically womanly” performances of women in tights and tunic roles would be better suited to the moving pictures, considering the medium’s emphasis on the display of the female body. Onstage, these performances ranged from children’s pantomimes and féerie extravaganzas like The Wizard of Oz stage show to sexualized, parodic burlesque performances in the vein of Lydia Thompson’s “British Blondes.” When Thompson and her troupe first arrived in the United States in 1869, literary critic William Dean Howells famously complained, “[T]hough they were not like men, [they] were in most things as unlike women, and seemed creatures of a kind of alien sex, parodying both. It was certainly a shocking thing to look at them with their horrible prettiness, their archness in which was no charm, their grace which put to shame.”16 In response to public pressure, mainstream burlesque became less sexual and less political, while a sexualized form of burlesque migrated to all-male working-class venues. By the turn of the century, tights and tunic roles had become fairly mundane. Even Dale, in his 1898 polemic, admitted, “The comic opera lady can don tights whenever she feels like them, and the public has grown so accustomed to it that it has almost ceased to interest.”17 Six years later the New York Herald observed, “The appearance of actresses in male parts in the comic opera is common to the point of monotony.”18

Although European films regularly featured women in tights and tunics, American films did not. The few American examples are L. Frank Baum’s Oz films and Fox’s all-children fairy tale films.19 It is likely that American filmmakers did not produce many films with tights and tunic roles because French companies like Pathé Frères and Gaumont had already cornered the market in these genres and American studios could not compete with their extraordinary color processes. American filmmakers may also have avoided these roles because the costumes were too revealing or because of their associations with sexualized burlesque. Film historian Richard Abel has documented the way American studios pushed Pathé out of the domestic film market by criticizing sexually explicit foreign productions.20 If Americans studios at first failed to capitalize on the stage popularity of women in tights and tunics, they may have later shunned this “European” practice as part of their broader strategy of Americanizing domestic film exhibition. Filmmakers instead turned to a third form of cross-gender casting—the female boy—which was perfectly suited to their needs.

The Appeal of the Female Boy

Women playing boy roles had been common in nineteenth-century theater, but by the turn of the twentieth century they were believed to appeal only to mothers and grandmothers. Theater historian Elizabeth Mullenix has shown that in colonial America, actresses played boys only when there were no young male players in their company; in the eighteenth century, actresses played pages and young princes; and in the nineteenth century, women played weightier, melodramatic, boy protagonists.21 According to Laurence Senelick, “the outcast gamin, . . . played by small women, became a virtual line of business in the nineteenth-century theatre”; on the American stage, he adds, “street-wise news vendors and errand boys were almost exclusively the property of actresses from the 1850s onward.”22

While women played a range of boy roles, the most celebrated were vulnerable youths in whom the ideals of the Romantic child, sentimentalism, and melodrama converged. A good example is the following review of a woman playing a peasant boy in an 1832 production in New York: “Her resignation to the will of heaven, the noble assertion of her innocence, her air, voice, and manner, was—we cannot express it. The eye gazed, the mind exulted, and the heart sympathized with the suffering boy.”23 As this review suggests, the female boy was considered particularly capable of expressing pious resignation, nobility of spirit, and suffering. S/he could generate an intense affective response from spectators. In contrast to Puritan and Enlightenment conceptions of the child as fallen or flawed, the Romantic child was innocent, spiritual, and wise. The child’s beauty attested to its goodness. The ideal was essentially androgynous, but was considered somewhat feminine because it was cultivated by mothers within the domestic sphere. Romantic children were common role models in nineteenth-century sentimental literature, in which the innocent child, like Christ, suffers and dies to redeem the wicked and powerful.24 Sentimental heroes modeled enlightened empathy with the suffering of others and elicited the reader’s empathy (and tears) for their pitiful fate. For some sentimental novelists, the cultivation of empathy through fiction had the potential to remake the world into a place ruled by empathy rather than selfishness and greed. Theatrical melodrama incorporated many elements of the sentimental ethos, including the suffering of innocents and the solicitation of the audience’s empathy and tears. Melodrama also used gesture, posture, music, and mise-en-scène to express the linguistically inexpressible. While actresses playing girls also embodied these ide...