StarD_Bean_1910s_final

by Ellen Dawson

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  Lillian Gish (far right) in True Heart Susie (1919).

  who is to blame for Susie’s plight. He proves himself to be lacking in both virile masculinity and in manly self-control. The film begins with Susie and William as childhood sweethearts. But William does not have the courage to kiss Susie and consummate their relationship. As their lips are about to meet, he turns instead to carve their initials in a tree in what turns out to be an empty promise of eternal love. Ultimately, however, he succumbs to desire rather than exhibiting self-control when he chooses to marry the flirtatious Bettina instead of the true-hearted Susie.

  While immigration, the increasing politicization of African Americans, and shifts in women’s public behavior were felt by many as significant challenges to the future of civilized white society, an even greater obstacle emerged with the eruption of World War I. In the words of the Los Angeles Times, “Four years of war have accomplished as much as a century of time in obliterating the blonde” (“Good-bye, Golden Locks,” 2 August 1919, 2:4). The war posed a threat not only through its brutality and destruction but also because it represented a clash between the civilized nations rather than a march of civilized advancement on more primitive peoples. Gish appeared in several war films— Hearts of the World (1918), The Great Love (1918), and The Greatest Thing in Life (1918)—that, along with her Liberty

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  Loan appeal, were designed to rouse Americans to arms. In each of these films, Gish represents white femininity imperiled by a corrupt and morally bankrupt white, European masculinity. As the films’ titles suggest, the marriage of Gish’s characters to the films’ respective heroes suggests more than the couple’s personal happiness. Their love represents hope for the future of civilization. In Hearts of the World, for instance, Gish plays an American girl living in the French countryside on the eve of war. When the boy next door sees her scolding a recalcitrant duck, he is immediately smitten; once again, Gish’s nurturing of animals demonstrates that she is suited for marriage and motherhood. The boy and the girl are soon engaged, but their nuptials are interrupted by the war, and the girl puts aside “the wedding clothes she had sewed with white thread and whiter thoughts” (Julian Johnson, “Hearts of the World,” Photoplay, June 1918, 111). The boy joins the army, and after her town is bombed the girl wanders the battlefield, clutching her wedding veil. Eventually, she stumbles upon the boy who appears to be dead. She lies next to him and, instead of a wedding night, they spend the night in a barren embrace. When she awakens the next morning, the girl finds that the boy is gone. Luckily, however, he survives the war and ultimately rescues the girl from a band of vicious Germans who hold the women and children of their town hostage.

  Broken Blossoms (1919) arguably presents an even stronger indictment of war, though its narrative only refers obliquely to World War I. The film tells the story of the Yellow Man (Richard Barthelmess) who travels from China to London in order to “take the glorious message of peace to the barbarous Anglo Saxons, sons of turmoil and strife.” But the Yellow Man does not have the strength of will to survive in the London slums; lacking the self-control that is a marker of civilized manliness, he soon slips into opium addiction. His misery is relieved only by the sight of Lucy (Gish), a child of London’s Limehouse district. As the intertitles explain, “The Yellow Man watched Lucy often. The beauty which all Limehouse missed smote him to the heart.” An illegitimate child raised by an abusive father, Lucy knows nothing but blows. Unlike Gish’s other maternal heroines, Lucy’s barrenness is prefigured by the fact that she has no kittens or puppies to mother but instead dotes on an inanimate doll, a gift from the Yellow Man, which she clutches to her chest even in death.

  The family ideal that motivates the characters’ actions in Hearts of the World is nowhere in evidence in Broken Blossoms. Indeed, when a neighbor warns Lucy never to marry, we are encouraged to share her view of marriage and motherhood as a cause for misery. The woman slaves for five unkempt children and an idle husband, evoking eugenicist fears about the

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  proliferation of the fertile underclass. Moreover, in striking contrast to the adolescent girls Gish played in A Romance of the Happy Valley and True Heart Susie, girls who eventually put up their braids and lengthen their skirts as they prepare for marriage and motherhood, Lucy does not survive into adulthood. Instead she is beaten to death by her father after he finds her ensconced in the apartments of the Yellow Man.

  Broken Blossoms presents a dystopic vision of modern life, of a society drunk on violence. Far from being condemned for his brutality, Burrows is celebrated by cheering crowds as he pounds his opponents in the ring, and his apartment is decorated with publicity photos of various pugilists. Allusions to the war imply a direct relation between the ravages of warfare and the brutish violence of the working classes teeming in the London slums.

  Significantly, Battling Burrows’s boxing matches are performed for the benefit of the men working at a munitions factory, and when his friends rush to the police station to report that he has been shot and killed by the Yellow Man, they interrupt a policeman who is reading reports of the war in the newspaper; the officer comments that the situation is “better than last week—only 40,000 casualties.” While the deaths of Lucy, Burrows, and the Yellow Man may pale in comparison to such statistics, their deaths suggest a far more insidious carnage, the inevitable outcome of a society fascinated by the spectacle of violence.

  Despite his gentle pacifism, the Yellow Man does not offer a viable alternative to Burrows’s brutal masculinity. Just as the mammy’s masculinity in The Birth of a Nation—her ability to physically dominate black men—demonstrates the inferiority of the black race, so the Yellow Man’s femininity implies that gender is not sufficiently differentiated in the Asian race. After Battling Burrows has beaten Lucy, the child wanders into the street and faints in the doorway of the Yellow Man’s store. At first he thinks she is a vision produced by his opium-addled mind, but he eventually realizes that she is, indeed, real.

  He dresses her wounds, gathers the motherless child in his arms, and takes her to his apartment upstairs. There, he drapes her in silk robes and adorns her hair with ribbons. The nature of his adoration of Lucy is ambiguous. Are we to understand his interest in the child as platonic? Or does he feel sexual desire for the exquisite young girl enthroned on his bed? According to one critic, “He cares for the wounded child with the tenderness of a lover and the lack of desire for recompense of a mother” (Hazel Simpson Naylor, “Across the Silversheet,” Motion Picture, August 1919, 66). In other words, his sexual desire does not signal masculine virility; rather, he assumes a feminine, maternal position in relation to the child. Indeed, his caresses resemble those that Lucy lavishes on her doll. While Lucy sleeps, the Yellow Man rubs her

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  Lillian Gish in Broken Blossoms (1919).

  inanimate hand against his cheek in a manner that directly mirrors Lucy’s rubbing her cheek against the hand of the doll he gave her.

  Despite the Yellow Man’s gentleness and restraint, his relationship with Lucy suggests perversion rather than manly self-control; in the words of one reviewer, his is “a love so pure as to be wholly unnatural and inconsistent”

  (“Broken Blossoms,” Variety, 16 May 1919). Indeed, his gift of the doll stands as a substitute for the child the couple will never bear. Likewise, the ribbons with which he adorns Lucy’s hair are akin to the ribbon her mother left for her, “for yer weddin,’” suggesting that theirs is a perverse sort of marriage.

  There are two moments in the film when it appears as though the Yellow Man will be overcome by sexual desire, as though he were about to kiss the child. First, when Lucy initially faints in his store, he leans toward her, drink-ing in her scent. Lucy draws back in confusion and he moves away. Later, when she lies upstairs in his bed, his face looms over her in a menacing cl
ose-up—a shot that is echoed later when Burrows looms over Lucy as she cow-ers in the Yellow Man’s bed—and Lucy shrinks back in fear. One reviewer described this scene as one of the highlights of the film; Barthelmess

  “touched on one period of real greatness when he stood yearning over the couch of the sleeping child. All the starved longing of the world was in his glance” (Naylor 111). Rather than kissing the child’s lips, however, the Yel-

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  low Man bends his head to kiss the sleeve of her dress, and the titles assure us, “His love remains a pure and holy thing—even his worst foe would say this.” Ultimately his love is more spiritual, and feminine, than sexual.

  In contrast to the Yellow Man’s femininity, Battling Burrows embodies primitive masculinity, conspicuously lacking even a hint of civilized self-control. Indeed, Lucy’s working-class father poses a far greater threat to white womanhood than the Chinese immigrant does. This irony is highlighted through Griffith’s trademark cross-cutting. At the moment when Lucy seems most in danger from the Yellow Man, when he leans in as if to kiss her, the film cuts to Burrows’s exhibition fight at the munitions factory.

  As in The Birth of a Nation, the fragile embodiment of white femininity is under sexual threat. However, the men who might ride to her rescue are pre-occupied by Burrows’s fight. Rather than recognizing that a white girl is in danger, they remain distracted by the violent entertainment. It is only after the danger has passed and the Yellow Man has overcome his desire that the crowd of men rushes to her rescue. However, these men are less interested in preserving her chastity than they are in the spectacle of more violence, egging Burrows on in his rage at discovering his daughter in the bed of a Chinese immigrant. A second sequence similarly intercuts between the endangered Lucy and her would-be rescuer. This time Lucy is threatened by her father. As she pleads for her life, he savagely beats her. The Yellow Man rushes to her rescue, the film cutting between his race to save her and Burrows’s beating. However, whereas the Klan successfully saved Elsie from the clutches of Silas Lynch, the Yellow Man arrives too late to rescue Lucy.

  In this vision of endangered white girlhood, neither the degenerate white man nor the effeminate Asian man can effect her rescue, though white men in the audience are invited to imagine themselves in the role of rescuer. The film offers one glimpse of hope in the figure of the virile American sailors we see in the film’s opening sequence (Koshy 86). Unlike the Asian man, they are not weak and pacifist; they playfully fight among themselves. But neither are they bellicose like Battling Burrows; theirs is a good-natured scrap. Publicity for the film, too, offered an alternative vision of white male heroism.

  One publicity story describes cameraman Billy Bitzer’s response to Burrows’s beating of Lucy: “‘Say, if that brute doesn’t stop hurting that girl,’ he remonstrated, ‘I’m coming down there and beat him up!’” (Frederick James Smith,

  “The Lyric Lady,” Motion Picture Classic, September 1919, 88). Thus readers were offered extradiegetic assurance that there are white men in America who are both virile and chivalric enough to protect white womanhood.

  In Broken Blossoms, Lillian Gish enacts the role of a “white flower” that somehow blooms in the muck of London’s slums. However, the film

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  demonstrates that, without the self-control of civilized manliness and the protection of virile men, this flower will wither and die. No less than the future of civilization rests on her characters’ ability to fulfill their maternal role; they must survive and raise future generations of equally white and virtuous children if the race is to thrive. While Gish’s characters are as unchanging and dependable as time itself—as represented by Gish’s role as the Eternal Mother, endlessly rocking the cradle in Intolerance—their prog-eny must rely on the manliness and masculinity of the civilized white man, whose virility and self-control are often put to the test. In these films Gish is the embodiment of an ideal of white womanhood: delicate, domestic, virtuous. And the physical qualities associated with her whiteness—her petite frame and features, her pale skin and light hair—reinforce this understanding of ideal femininity and link it directly to her body.

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  ✩ A Pale, Perfumeless Lily

  Gish herself appears to have subscribed to this ideal of

  domestic femininity. In her letters to Becker, she describes the transformative effects of marriage on her former co-star, Mae Marsh: “Did you know Mae Marsh was married—to a very nice young man—it has changed her so much, she is so sweet and kind to everyone and she is going to have a little baby in time I think” (Gish, undated letter, 1919). In 1912, when Gish was performing in a Broadway play, Becker was newly married and pregnant with her first child. Gish’s assessment of their respective lives clearly demonstrates that she understood and shared in the exaltation of motherhood that characterized her films: “Your little sister will be a real actress yet if you don’t watch her. It is a wonderful art, Nell. But you, dear, think how much higher up you are than I—soon to have the most wonderful moment of your life. Think of it little woman, what you are soon to become. It is almost too sacred to write about” (Gish, 8 November 1912).

  For Gish, the “sacredness” of her friend’s pending motherhood casts a pall on stage life. In one particularly poignant passage, Gish describes breaking into tears in response to one of Becker’s letters: “I was reading in my dressing room and I happened to glance up at a mirror and there I sat all false with paint and cosmetics covering my face and it came to me what a distance it was from my life to yours” (Gish, undated letter, 1913). Gish assured Becker that she would not succumb to the artificiality of the stage:

  “I will come back to you as good and clean as I ever was. That life [of the theater] can be a small part of me—but I a part of it—never” (Gish, undated letter, 1912).

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  Clearly, Gish shared the belief that motherhood was sacred and that the life of an actress was potentially corrupting due to its artificiality. Ironically, she pursued an acting career because, as she explained to Becker, this was her only avenue to making a home for herself and her family. She and her mother and sister were poor, having been deserted by her alcoholic father.

  Again, writing to Becker, Gish explains, “I would like to make money enough to give D[orothy] a good education and build a house so we can have a home” (Gish, undated letter, 1912). For a young woman with a high school education, the alternatives to acting were hardly appealing. As a teenager, Gish had worked in a candy store, where she put in fourteen-hour days behind a cash register, a stultifying existence judging by her letters. She was fortunate to land even a small role in a prestigious stage production under the direction of famed impresario David Belasco. However, the promise of a steady income and the possibility of living with her mother and sister trumped her artistic aspirations, and she broke her contract in order to join the Biograph Company in California: “As I am offered more money with the Biograph and the three of us can be together, I think it is better for me to play sick here and go out there” (Gish, undated letter, 1913).

  Not surprisingly, these details were omitted from the many newspaper and magazine stories about Gish that were published during the teens.

  Rather than attributing Gish’s turn to film acting to economic need, which might expose the inadequacies of a gender system predicated on women’s economic dependence on men, publicity for Gish suggested that her peripatetic childhood and lack of formal education were the attributes of a glamorous childhood, not an impoverished one. Articles about Gish sidestep the fact that Lillian was often separated from her mother and sister while touring by suggesting that her labor was a sign of prestige and privilege: “Lillian . . . became a pupil in a Springfield dancing school. Almost immediately she was engaged as one of the fairy dancers with Sarah Bernhardt, then making
one of her American tours, lasting two seasons”

  (unidentified clipping). The schools she attended were described variously as finishing schools or convents, and, according to her publicity, upon graduation she “started east to finish her dancing lessons in New York” rather than seek employment (unidentified clipping).

  Notwithstanding such attempts to recuperate her biography, Gish’s stardom destabilized the ideology of her films in subtle ways. It was and continues to be a convention of star publicity to expose the “reality” behind the stars’ screen personae, to reveal to readers information that they could not derive through the stars’ screen performances alone. As Richard deCordova argues, “With the emergence of the star [in 1913 and 1914], the question

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  of the player’s existence outside his or her work in film became the primary focus of discourse. The private lives of the players were constituted as a site of knowledge and truth” (98). If filmgoers perceived one Lillian Gish—the

  “old-fashioned bit of sampler embroidery”—readers of popular periodicals were privileged to know what she really thought of these roles: “I want to play real women—not impossible heroines or namby-pamby girls” (Julian Johnson, “The Shadow Stage,” Photoplay, February 1919, 68; Julian Johnson, “The Real Lillian Gish,” Photoplay, August 1918, 24). If Griffith’s films centered on the preservation of white, maternal femininity against the threats of modern life, Gish’s star image celebrated an image of modern womanhood that was not defined by its relation to home and family.

  In contrast to the simplicity of the characters she portrayed on screen, Gish was described as sophisticated and ambitious. While her characters were often naïve and full of home-spun wisdom, Gish was fiercely intelligent, an “omnivorous reader,” a “‘lily maid of Astolat’ who reasons like a modern college professor!” (Smith 16). Her characters often represented the ideal of country life, living by the philosophy that “New York is a terrible place, no farms or nothing,” as Jennie declares in A Romance of the Happy Valley. In contradistinction, Gish was touted as “a smartly tailored New York girl type” who found the slow pace of California “deadening to ambition”