Conclusion and Bibliography

Katharine Hepburn in a photoshoot from Sylvia Scarlett, by Ernest Bachrach.

Through their performances, the members of the Sewing Circle changed what it meant to be desired. To be an ‘object.’ They paved the way for new and enduring beauty standards that accepted androgyny as a way to appeal to both men and women. By the end of the 1930s, half of the highest paid actresses were involved in sapphic romances, and this was visualized in their signature looks. 

They didn’t make themselves available to the male subject—their vulnerability was only recognizable to the other women who had felt it. Stereotypical images, like all aspects of culture, change and evolve over the years. Queer women in classical Hollywood films often appeared as spinster aunts or prison matrons, but by the 1970s, they were often being represented as vampires, a trope that turned same-sex love and affection into something cruel and monstrous. By the twenty-first century, a wide variety of openly queer people and queer “looks” has made it more difficult for the mass media to create new stereotypes, but traces of the old ones can still be discerned. Many of these stereotypes originated in the Golden Age, despite what the Hays Code would have you believe. The Sewing Circle created a distinctly female gaze both with their performances and costume design, almost like a secret language for film loving sapphics. Their secret is safe with me.

Bibliography:

Madsen, A. (2015). The Sewing Circle: Hollywood’s greatest secret– female stars who loved other women. Open Road Media.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism : Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999: 833-44.

Modelski, Tania. “Introduction.” Essay. In The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory, 1–14. Methuen, 1988.

Modelski, T. (1988). Femininity by Design. In The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory 89–101. Methuen, 1988.

Queen Christina. United States: Loew’s Inc., 1933.

Pommer, Erich, Carl Zuckmayer, Vollmöller Karl, Robert Liebmann, Rittau Günther, Hans Schneeberger, Friedrich Hollaender, et al. The Blue Angel, 1930.

Double Indemnity. United States: Paramount, 1944.

Queer Costume Design in Der blaue Engel

The Blue Angel (1930) follows the torrid love affair between a conservative professor and a cabaret performer, Lola Lola, played by none other than Marlene Dietrich. The professor eventually resigns from teaching to marry Lola, despite his problems with the cabaret lifestyle. Marlene’s Lola is a lot like herself—promiscuous, independent, funny, and performative. Viewing her interactions with the professor, it seems obscenely obvious that there is zero sexual chemistry. There is a sort of sensual lethargy in every interaction. Lola is at her best when performing at the cabaret, where she is the center of attention and an object of affection for men and women. The most important aspect of her character by far is the costume design. After deriding director Josef von Sternberg’s original costumes as ‘stupid – uninteresting, boring – nothing to catch the eye. Blank! Bo-o-o-oring!’, Dietrich’s husband asked von Sternberg if she might make her own (‘Try it – see what she comes up with. Let her put it together’), a request that was soon approved. Dietrich’s inspiration for Lola’s look came from a Berlin ‘transvestite’ Dietrich knew, who originally wore the top hat and garter. Her image in the film marks a reflection of a contemporary gender play already in existence in the film’s wider culture. Lola is feminine, yes, but with a hyper-femme, camp distinction. She really does embody a sort of drag queen persona, and this is only solidified with her comedic, over-the-top performance. This is what makes it almost impossible for her to be a male sexual fantasy—she is overtly sexual, but with a deep inner life that Marlene portrays subtly yet beautifully. The film portrays her growing discontent with the professor. His overbearing personality is endearing at first but soon becomes overbearing and suffocating. He hinders her sexual freedom. This progression is visualized through the growing ridiculousness of her cabaret costumes. 

The Blue Angel marks a change in what characterized a strong female character. No longer was she a woman scorned, someone for female viewers to see as a cautionary tale. She became a sex-loving, independent vamp type, someone that young women would see on screen and wonder: do I want to be her, or be with her? In her off-screen life, Marlene would be described in a similar fashion. The legendary film star’s daughter, Maria, probably put it best: her mother used her sexuality against men as a weapon to manipulate and control them– but with women, her romantic nature surfaced and she was sincere.

Greta Garbo’s Androgynous Mystique

The chronicles of Garbo’s disdain for men

My first case study will focus on a scene from the 1933 film Queen Christina, starring Greta Garbo. Before filming, Garbo had taken an eighteen-month hiatus away from Hollywood, and Christina was the character that drew her back. Salka Viertel, a writer on the film and rumored lover of Garbo, sent her future star a presentation on the real-life Swedish queen, and Garbo immediately felt a kinship with the woman. Christina was a confirmed bisexual, but was ultimately married to her work. Her father raised her as if she were a boy, and so she would often be seen wearing men’s clothes and she was given the education and responsibilities of a male heir. Garbo clearly takes this into account in her performance. There is a certain swagger she has. It’s almost as if dressing in such a masculine manner gave her all the confidence she needed for this role. Christina Vasa became king (not queen) of Sweden at the age of five in 1632. She was brought up as a boy and became a noted intellectual, debating with René Descartes and inspiring a resurgence in the arts. Her efforts as an administrator were less impressive. By 1654, she was fed up with her government, and it was fed up with her. She abdicated, converted to Catholicism, and spent the rest of her life travelling around Europe dressed as a man. The film isn’t too focused on historical accuracy, however, as it quickly becomes a historical romance. She abdicated not to live her life freely but to be with… a man?

Garbo could have played this character unremarkably, but there is simply something about her face that pulls you in and gets you to care about her. Even with a miniscule movement of her eyebrow, or a slight shift in her stance, the viewer can tell what she’s thinking. And of course, she’s beautiful, but in this role she is androgynously stunning. Watching, you get the feeling that she knows something you don’t and never will. Her staircase scene in Queen Christina is quintessential Garbo: standing alone atop her palace staircase, she faces a mob of rampaging peasants and, armed only with her moral confidence and power of personality, persuades them to leave. In the final scene of the film, her lover Antonio dies in her arms (the one she converted for), and we expect to see melancholic defeat. Garbo doesn’t allow this for her Christina. She allows herself a moment of tears, but she is clearly holding back for the sake of keeping the respect of her men. It is the male thing to do: repressing your emotions in a show of strength. She decides to sail on, regardless of Antonio’s death, and there lies resounding hope in her facial expressions. The film then cuts to her walking toward the front of the ship. She pauses, takes a breath, and the camera zooms in for a close-up shot. It is a shot fit for a hero, not a heroine, which is appropriate, I suppose. Christina was crowned King, after all, not Queen. 

This onscreen androgyny doesn’t fit the male gaze. Christina suffers internally, of course, especially in this scene. The love of her (fictional) life has died. However, nobody is finding pleasure in her suffering, because she doesn’t allow it to shine through. What does come through is her strength.

Also, this film has a queer kiss in it, with Garbo in the masculine role. So make of that what you will.

Conceptualizing the Female Gaze

Scholarship by Laura Mulvey and Tania Modleski

Gif series from Stage Door (1937), Katherine Hepburn putting a drunk Ginger Rogers to bed

In 1975, Laura Mulvey coined the term “male gaze,” and changed film theory forever. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema argues that men’s enjoyment in watching movies stems from their position as subject and viewer while women are the objects in film who suffer for the purpose of entertaining men. She uses Hitchcock films and psychoanalysis as evidence since many of his films encapsulate the themes of voyeurism and male subjuectivity. In her findings, Mulvey concludes that movie-watching is an inherently voyeuristic experience. Actresses, particularly during the Golden Age of Hollywood, were sexualized on-screen and off, and much of their success was reliant on adhering to the beauty standard. Men, as consumers of cinema, get off on this sexualization, this erotic passivity. Mulvey herself says it best:

“In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”

Women are sexualized in film—nobody is disputing this fact, least of all me. However, Mulvey does ignore the giant elephant in the room. What about female voyeurs? Women who derive pleasure from women in the same way that straight men do. Lesbians. Where do they fit into the male gaze? Greater consideration of audience dynamics surely would illustrate that there are various opportunities for women to gain visual or erotic pleasure, either via a heterosexual gaze focused on male characters, or a lesbian female-to-female gaze. Paired with the knowledge that a number of famous actresses engaged in homosexuality from time to time, Mulvey’s analysis falls short. Tania Modleski responded to Visual Pleasure with The Women Who Knew Too Much, which considers female film spectatorship. In it, she argues that Hitchcock films often do have the female viewer in mind, and any sapphic who has seen Grace Kelly in Rear Window would probably agree with this. 

So what does this mean for my film analyses? Ultimately, I am searching for the female gaze in these performances.

Mapping the Ladies of The Sewing Circle

Joan Crawford with three of her rumored lovers: Dorothy Arzner, Claudette Colbert, and Barbara Stanwyck (left to right)
Claudette Colbert presenting masculine in 1938

For the purposes of my research, I knew that I would be conducting film analysis in order to determine the sapphic impact on visual culture, but I underestimated just how many women engaged in homosexual behavior. I could not conceivably analyze each of their performance; I needed to narrow it down. This process involved creating a social network map of the Sewing Circle members, and identifying those who were…most active, if you will.

https://kumu.io/abbyburn/sewing-circle -Here is a link to the map, since the quality here isn’t great.

The definitive Casanova of sapphic stardom was Mercedes De Acosta, who was far more famous for her lesbian love affairs than her poetry. Near the end of her failing career, she released a memoir, Here Lies The Heart, which details many of her lesbian affairs. The actresses who were surrounded by the largest hubs of activity were Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, who not only had a disasterous affair with each other but with other stars as well. After finishing up this research, I concluded that I would analyze a film from Garbo and Dietrich each. Since Barbara Stanwyck was also quite popular with the ladies, and immortalized the femme fatale as a queer icon, I decided to take a look her film Double Indemnity, as well.

INTRODUCTION

Hays Code Blues

“A slender body, hands soft and white, for the service of my delight, two sprouting breasts round and sweet, invite my hungry mouth to eat, from whence two nipples firm and pink, persuade my thirsty soul to drink, and lower still a secret place where I’d fain hide my loving face”

-Excerpt from a letter by Isadora Duncan to Mercedes de Acosta


Photos (above and below) of Marlene Dietrich taken by her lover, Mercedes De Acosta

With the invention of the “talkie,” which most Hollywood stars were beginning to understand would stick around, censorship became a new issue that Hollywood producers had to consider. Will Hays, the newly elected president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), decided that creating a guideline for producers and stars to follow would solve this issue. The infamous Hays Code was born, and with it an era of puritanical facade for the city of sin. The code prohibited profanity, suggestive nudity, graphic or realistic violence, miscegenation, and ridicule of the clergy. Most famously, it banned any form of sexual perversion, which includes any sort of homosexual activity. How ironic, then, that some of the highest-paid actresses of the time engaged in sapphic relationships. The Sewing Circle (a name coined by Alla Nazimova) referred to this group of actresses, writers, directors, dancers, and entertainers active in Golden-Age Hollywood. It does not matter whether these women identified as lesbian, bisexual, or even just bi-curious; if a star loved women in any capacity they could not be open about their love for fear of losing their careers. However, I believe that these women expressed their sexualities in different ways, if not explicitly then at least through their art. Actresses like Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Barbara Stanwyck took great measures to queer their film performances, through costume design and subtle acting techniques, and in the process changed Hollywood’s visual culture.

“Daddy always warned me about men and alcohol, but he never said a thing about women and cocaine.” -Tallulah Bankhead