Karen Beckman,
Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism.
Duke University Press. 2003.
ISBN 0 8223 3074 1
256pp
US
(Review copy supplied by Duke University Press)
With the aid of trapdoors, mirrors, elevators, photographs and film, female vanishing acts occupy a prolific and highly political position within the genesis of Western visual culture. In Vanishing Women: Magic, Film and Feminism Karen Beckman explores the spectacle of “vanishing women” from their inception in Victorian stage magic, through to their conjunct development in photography and cinema. In utilizing a series of nineteenth and twentieth century examples, Beckman explores the ways in which the newly emerging visual technologies of photography and film came to project anxieties surrounding reproducibility and instability onto the vanishing female form. The result, as Beckman argues, was an image of female corporality that was both volatile and continually prone to evaporation.
Drawing on histories of magic and spiritualism, as well as cinema studies and psychoanalytic theory, Beckman spotlights specific textual/ performative moments of female disappearance and questions what it means for women to “vanish”. Vanishing, as Beckman concedes, is a phenomenon perpetually haunted by the specter of “otherness” and death, violence and resurrection. It is a spectacle based upon an implied threat of irreversible eradication.
It is precisely this “dark edge” that makes Vanishing Women such a fascinating contribution to cultural theory. From the grotesque and seemingly macabre contortions of female bodies within Victorian magic shows, through to spiritualist photography’s search for ghostly images, and on to a consideration of more serious female disappearance, Beckman contends that although the vanishing woman initially exposes and appears to resist “a certain misogynistic desire to make women go away, she may also act as a prop for the very patriarchal violence that she appears to withstand.”(6) Concomitantly, one of the most interesting concepts raised in Vanishing women is Beckman’s astute observation that the public spectacle of female vanishing coincided with the rise of early feminist movements; an era in which “obstinately present females (were often) fantasized as going away, usually in spectacular ways”(5).
Vanishing Women is divided into five key chapters, with each chapter working to problematise the role of the vanishing female body within nineteenth and twentieth century visual culture. Chapter one explores what Beckman describes as the performative tactics of “conflation and confusion” whereby the disappearing female form is used as a stand-in for a series of other “invisible” (and also highly political) bodies. The most notable of these being the Indian male body, which when equated with a vanishing white female, enabled a dualistic playing out of British anxieties surrounding male authority at home (in the face of an increasingly empowered female population) as well as imperial authority abroad.
While seeming to privilege the disappearance of the material body, chapters one to four also utilize narratives of female eradication in the psychic realm.
Chapter two focuses on the efforts of French spiritualist medium Eva C who was renowned for her ability to make ghosts “visible” during séances by way of excreting a white ectoplasm (a mucous like substance) from her mouth, nipples, nostrils and vagina. Beckman traces this phenomenon alongside a series of obsessive (but generally failed) attempts to capture the occurrences on film.
Chapter three addresses notions of psychic disappearance. In following the work of psychoanalysts such as Freud (who talked at length about maternal presence and absence), and Juliet Mitchell, Beckman addresses the puzzling notion of patients who seem to struggle against the threat of their own psychic disappearance. This is evidenced in the following quote from Mitchell:
[Mrs. Peters] disappeared in my company. This is hard to describe, but I could see her physically vanishing. First her voice faded, then I found myself wanting to stretch out to stop her falling. She went down a psychic Black Hole. (14)
Chapter four follows the “violent vanishings” of women within twentieth century cinema. Drawing primarily on Hitcock’s The Lady Vanishes (UK, 1938) and Harlan’s Verwehte spuren (Germany, 1938) Beckman spells out the ways in which the vanishing female form commonly stands in for far more sinister social and political realities. In Verwehte spuren, for example, a budding romance plot requires the inevitable disappearance of the mother in order for the heterosexual union to mature. As Beckman contends, this narrative device doubles as a useful justification for the Nazi state’s “necessary eradication” of all socially unwanted bodies.
Drawing directly from arguments established in chapter two, chapter five considers Hollywood’s fascination with fading film stars. Here, Beckman turns towards Hollywood icon Bette Davis who appeared in four films about fading female stars and who has also been at the center of much academic debate surrounding questions of female identity and display in cinema. Throughout this chapter, Beckman claims that it is precisely within the “fallen-star” genre that the most explicit negotiation between film, being and female visibility take place.
In dealing directly with notions of “female as spectacle” and “female visibility”, Vanishing Women provides a welcome corrective force to hyperbolic theorizations of “woman” as either pure spectacle or total absence. As Beckman asserts, the importance of vanishing exists precisely in its capacity to hover between the ostensibly stable positions of both absence and presence. In this way, Vanishing Women offers an important contribution to the fields of film history, gender and spectatorship. It provides a fascinating and insightful glance into a technologically developing culture that was both thrilled and unnerved by the possibility of female disappearance.
Leanne Downing
Massey University, New Zealand.
Created on: Tuesday, 4 May 2004 | Last Updated: 4-May-04