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Go West, Young Women!: The Rise of Early Hollywood (): Hilary Hallett: Books. This item:Go West, Young Women!: The Rise of Early. In the early part of the twentieth century, migrants made their way from rural homes to cities in record numbers and many traveled west. Los Angeles became a.
Go West Young Women!: Engaging with these critics at a more discursive level might have allowed Acts of Manhood to use the historical grittiness of the antebellum pe- riod to complicate the arguments critics such as these were making in the s. It might also have encouraged him to make crucial claims about the way theatrical performance is itself a privileged formal apparatus for probing the notions of masculinity.
Caught between the emotional extravagance of Forrest and the cerebral interiority of Booth, McCullough worked assiduously to transform his performance of masculinity. While successful, McCullough never attained the stardom of either Forrest or Booth. His fusion of Forrest's style with Booth's into a more middlebrow performance of masculinity mir- rored his audience's own middlebrow self-construction.
Yet, as Kippola points out, for this very reason McCullough's masculinity failed to captivate an audience who yearned for passion beneath the mask of gentility.
By noting the way that McCullough's acting style failed to capture his audience's full-throated approval, Kippola might have explored the popular theatre's cultural function as a taste-making enterprise at the end of the nineteenth century. While Acts of Manhood might have done more, it is nevertheless an important addition to the still understudied history of nineteenth-century theatre, made more vital by the in- triguing questions it frames for future studies. Kippola adroitly unpacks the frenetic, shift- ing notions of masculinity as they were instantiated onstage between Jackson and Lincoln.
His dynamic interventions into acting styles, class politics, and gender performance help shed new, provocative light on the vital role that theatre played in both consolidating and crafting what it meant to act like a man in the nineteenth century and beyond. Hallett, Go West, Young Women!
University of California Press, pp.
Hallett's pioneer story par excellence presents both a cultural history of Los Angles and a welcome account of the roles women played in shaping the institution and imagi- nary of Hollywood. She died several days later.
After two deadlocked juries, Arbuckle was acquitted of any wrongdo- ing. She provocatively concludes that the Arbuckle scandal marked a shift in Hollywood's relationship to feminism and women's sexuality that continues to resonate to the present day.
Thus, she has proposed a new origin story for Hollywood, one with white women and the era's changing sexual politics at its very core. This invention, Hallett argues, went hand-in-hand with the imaginary of women's emancipation in the s, producing a type of popular feminism that provides continuity with today's Third Wave feminism. For some, Hallett's position- ing of feminism will highlight how contentious the meaning and history of the term re- mains today. Hallett very persuasively argues that the gendering of the emergent star system in early Hollywood grew out of the nineteenth century stage, presaging both modern gen- der roles and our own celebrity-seeking culture.
The second part of the book chronicles the scandals and growing pains of Hollywood once the industry was established, including a reaction against Jews, bohemianism, and sex scandals. However, scholars of the period, and particularly those who are interested in the changing role of women in the early 20th century, will find this text enlightening and not overly filled with academic jargon.
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