Matinee Girl

A recent article by Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set, contemplating the waning interest in live performance, reminded me of the matinee girl, a type of audience member who was intensely interested in the stage. A fixture of urban theater culture in the late 19th century, matinee girls were young women who attended the cheaper afternoon performances of plays and, unlike "ordinary" audience members, found pleasure and meaning by engaging with the offstage personas of actors rather than the aesthetic content of the dramatic works. She was among the first widely-identified consumer types in American history, and, until the arrival of the flapper and then the bobbysoxer later in the 20th century, the most visible of America's female fans.

Charles Reade Bacon in "The Reporter's Nosegay" of 1896 said of matinee girls:

The eccentricities of the callow youths who haunt the stage doors of the theatres are well known. Most of them are regarded as harmless, and if they get any enjoyment out of ogling chorus girls as they leave the theatres it is nobody's business. There is another species of stage-door habitues, however, possessing far more interest, in the persons of matinee girls. The stage entrances to most of the Philadelphia theatres are located in dark, dirty and altogether uninviting alleys, but the environments do not deter hosts of nicely-dressed young women from repairing thither immediately after a Wednesday or Saturday matinee. Some of them are regulars, and they are slightly blase, unless some particularly strong matinee hero is the attraction. But it is amusing to watch the actions of those to whom the experience is novel. Their excitement is intense, and occasionally almost hysterical. The matinee stage door girl never speaks to the object of her adoration. She dreams of doing so someday, and in the meantime contents herself with writing him perfumed notes, which come in handy for shaving paper.

Bacon's description of backstage door culture raises issues that are still at work in contemporary fan culture--the hierarchy of more experienced fans and overly-excited neophytes, the reluctance to actually engage with stars, etc. Interestingly, it also pathologizes this kind of audience behavior in ways that are still current. While boys are just being boys while ogling chorus girls, women audience members who long for matinee heroes are portrayed as dreamy and deluded.

The matinee girl was a regular subject for derision in the press. Matinees were created by entrepreneurs in 1870s to move theater away from its reputation as an uncontrolled and dangerous environment and create new, safe entertainment. In fact, matinee performances were meant to help women fulfill the feminine ideal of Victorian culture and to develop their emotional sensibility through participation in the arts. Of course, this was a kind of trap; while it cultivated the feminine ideal, it also enforced that ideal. Genteel women easily slipped into the caricature of the overly-excitable, overly-emotional, easily-manipulated girl, given to romantic fantasy. And for male critics worried about the increasing emasculation wrought by industrialization and urban life in the late 19th century, female consumers were a symbol of everything that was wrong with America's commercialized society. Matinee girls made clear suspected associations between femininity, passivity, and lifeless bourgeois “Culture.”

However, there was also something else going on, here. For many women participating in theater at the turn-of-the-century, the matinee became a source of new power. It provided a rare shared space in which they could gather and express themselves freely in ways forbidden in everyday life—in Peter Rabinowitz’s phrase, with their “own dominant passions.” The matinee girl was commonly portrayed in the press as prone to fantasy and hysteria, but in reality she was also independent, single, unaccompanied by a male escort, and openly displaying desire outside of the usual prescriptions of middle-class courtship. Another thing I didn't know until recently was that apparently matinee girls were as equally fascinated by women actors as men. Thus a 1900 article in Metropolitan Magazine (Vol. XI, No. 6, 611) could state, "Margaret Anglin, the leading lady at the Empire, maintains that she is always at her best at a Saturday matinee. She declares that the sea of uplifted faces, eager, mobile, and attentive, is a source of inspiration...the real matinee girl is more deeply fascinated by young women who depict the lighter emotions of every-day life."

The rise and fall of "matinee girl" as a term between 1890 to 1940.

The height of matinee girl culture in the United States was around 1910. Of course, one can follow the matinee girl into cultural forms beyond theater, including film, popular music, and television. Fred and Judy Vermorel, writing in Fandemonium (1989), argued that the marked cultural position of “the girl” broadly serves as “the key sign for desire itself. The GIRL acts out for all of us our consumerist deliriums of possession and ecstasy.” Perhaps the recent blow-up about the problem of the tween girl audience for American Idol is a good example of that. “Matinee girls” will remain with us as long as public discourse links popular culture consumption and irrationality and then, in turn, portrays irrationality as a marker of nascent femininity.

Of course, girls themselves may have something else to say about it all, which remains an important area of fan research.

Classics of Fan History: Fandemonium!

Fred and Judy Vermorel's Fandemonium! The Book of Fan Cults and Dance Crazes, first published in 1989 and now out-of-print, continued the themes of their earlier work, Starlust (1985), by celebrating the excesses of pop culture fandom. While Starlust featured the sexual fantasies of fans for pop celebrities in the 1980s, Fandemonium! provided an historical context for that work, tracing the development of various kinds of public hysteria, celebrity cults, and dance manias in 20th-century Europe and the U.S. It was lavishly illustrated with images and press clippings, and designed with the cut'n'paste sensibility of a manic scrapbooker (as if the Vermorals could not keep up with the deluge of mass-mediated material coming at them).

The goal of the book was to highlight the "passions engendered by consumerism." Making loose connections to Tarantism and St. Vitus's Dance and modern forms of mania, the Vermorels focused on everything from the fan riots at the 1927 funeral of film star Rudolph Valentino to jitterbugging to Beatlemania to mosh pits. The "True Stories" chapter featured fragmentary descriptions of celebrity fans impersonating their idols, trying to touch stars, turning star-related merchandise into fetish objects, and stalking. Sections on rock'n'roll assessed the rise of "THE GIRL," a role of "no particular gender," defined by being excitable, vulnerable, and a "consumer idealist/ideal consumer." The book's visual content was intentionally provocative, highlighting the human body: people dancing wildly, fainting behind crowd-control barriers, or in various states of delirium and ecstasy at concerts.

When I first encountered this book, I was suspicious of the unabashed sensationalism of the Vermorels' approach. The connection they were trying to make between the "historical" and the "hysterical" seemed to me overly selective, ignoring less-demonstrative fans like book lovers or more-organized fans like baseball kranks. They used a definition of fandom that fully embraced the portrayals of journalists and other elitist critics of popular culture: fandom was about unruly mobs and stalkers rather than human enthusiasm and connection. And in a move typical of cultural studies work in the 1980s, it casually flipped Adorno-esque cultural critique on its head: the Vermorels asserted that fandom was not about control by the media and its star machinery but about resistance to that control.  Thus frenzy and chaos were specifically meaningful:

"But don't knock hysteria. It's not just an irrational force which sends people into self-destructive frenzy. It's also a problem-solving behavior which helps us make emotional sense out of cultural shock and social trauma. Through tis florid and erotic displays we symbolically negotiate our unspoken desires and quite literally 'shake off' constraints by affirming the instinct for pleasure.'"

Now, however, I recognize that this was one of the first works in fan studies to address the breadth of fandom's history, bringing together and juxtaposing diverse instances of fan-like behavior over time. Perhaps there is legitimate link between medieval epidemics, 19th-century manias, and modern fandom, even if it's only the discourses used to describe those behaviors. The Vermorels make that issue worth exploring in more depth. And while I still have serious reservations about the Vermorels' definition of fandom as simple fanaticism about stars and find their history distortedly selective, I can get behind some of their broader goals of doing fan history, as stated in their brief but brilliant "Afterword":

This book is about showbiz in its widest sense. It bypasses distinctions and truisms dear to particular tastes or specialisms. Like the difference between rock and pop. Or the origins of rock'n'roll somewhere between the blues and post-War teenage affluence...They all come out of a preoccupation with the stars' or industry's point of view. A history of kings and queens, coronations and abdications, which would seem ridiculously outmoded and woefully elitist in any other subject. 

Paradoxically, when you look at it from the consumer's vantage point, showbiz seems a more integrated phenomenon than is usually presented...Focusing on the pleasures, necessities and ambivalences of consuming popular entertainment, on all consumers of all popular entertainment, also creates a definition for showbiz beyond genre and fashion, even beyond particular media...

So often the critic/fan/prof is driven to imagine (or to wish) that the origins of showbiz fascination lie somehow or somewhere in the objects of this fascination....Whereas all the time it's only the fan who has the imagination and talent and tenacity to reinvent such fascinations every single day. The magic of stars is in the work of fans.

Fandom is wider and more significant than we thought, and history has a multiple vantage points. Can we continue to build new scholarship on those principles?