As media scholars have demonstrated, the early-twentieth century was a period of rapid change and proliferation within media technologies. The resulting social and cultural implications are emphasized in critical works such as Lisa Gitelman’s Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture (MIT, 2006) and David Trotter’s Literature in the First Media Age: Britain between the Wars (Harvard, 2013). These works demonstrate how various media encoded specific cultural practices which were communicated in ritualized forms. This rapid expansion of mass media has also been of interest to scholars of modernism and celebrity, particularly during the last fifteen years. Key twentieth-century critical works include Aaron Jaffe’s Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (John Hopkins, 2006) and Jonathan Goldman’s Modernism Is the Literature of Celebrity (University of Texas, 2011), as well as an essay collection edited by Jaffe and Goldman, Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity Modernity Culture (Ashgate, 2010).
Gitelman, Trotter, and other media scholars have acknowledged the gendering of technological engagement and its implication for women’s lived experiences and their exercise of agency. But despite individual chapters on well-known women writers and “stars,” recent celebrity criticism has emphasized individual self-production and promotion rather than the role media played in shaping women’s public performance and reception. As a result, the cultural practices that shaped women’s use of media, and the corresponding implications for female agency, reputation and identity, remain underdeveloped. Faye Hammill’s Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture Between the Wars (University of Texas, 2007) provides a notable exception; this panel’s premise builds on her criticism, even as it expands beyond the chronological and generic limits of her work.
These papers consider how female celebrities negotiated their identity within the public sphere through various media and how they asserted or were divested of agency as a result. It spans generic, temporal, language, age, and class boundaries even as it examines the celebrity’s entanglement with technological forces from the autobiography and telephone to film and radio. The texts and figures considered are loosely collected within a temporally expansive definition of modernism, but the focus is on the development of the female celebrity persona up through the 1940s, with an emphasis on its roots in the nineteenth century.
Dantzel Cenatiempol’s “Dressing Up the Truth: Sarah Bernhardt as ‘little Madonna’” is on the late-nineteenth-century French actress Sarah Bernhardt and how she mediated her reputation; it considers the intersections between her celebrity reputation as an international superstar and her 1907 memoir Ma double vie,which casts Bernhardt as the intimate protégée of the Virgin Mary. Conscious of new forms of media that could immortalize her star status, Bernhardt instead chose autobiography as the medium for her performative self-redemption. She was thereby able to reshape her societal Otherness—as a Dutch Jew, a convert to Catholicism, and an unwed mother—into an identity characterized by national and cultural in-group belonging.
The fraught negotiations of female agency in relation to the media through which celebrity is disseminated is also the topic of Krista Daniel’s paper, “Gossip and Mass Media in Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies (1929),” which considers the intersections of gender, technologically mediated gossip, and celebrity in Evelyn Waugh’s novel. It focuses Waugh’s ambivalent portrayal of the media-savvy Agatha, who initially leverages the telephone and newspaper to expand her celebrity branding. But as the narrative progresses she increasingly loses control over how her reputation circulates.
Jennifer Jodell’s paper, "Make Them Live: The Female Media Celebrity of the Science Fiction Pulps," focuses on how pulp period science fiction (1930s-1940s) imagined the female celebrity (actress, diva) as a performer-turned-cyborg who mediates state and corporate power in order to manage the "life" of populations through her affective bond with a global audience. Her interpretation builds upon Jill Galvan's analysis in The Sympathetic Medium (2010) of the 19th-century trope of the "mediating woman," a figurative embodiment of emerging media technologies, and is informed by affect, media, and biopolitical theory, as well as by recent scholarship regarding the impact of film and radio on the yet-coalescing science fiction pulps. Jodell's analysis includes discussion of late 19th-century fantastic fictions such as George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894)--itself the impetus for the year-long media craze known as the Trilby Boom--to better understand how the science fiction pulps transformed the "mediating woman" and the female celebrity into a cyborgian construct that both mediates and resists control over the management of "life."
These papers demonstrate how the gendered expectations and rituals associated with various media impacted the celebrity's public performance, reception, reputation, and even ontological status. Each paper will be fifteen minutes long, which will leave ample time for discussion. We hope for a robust conversation.