Vanishing Women

Magic, Film, and Feminism

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by Karen Beckman

Duke University Press

Due/Published May 2003, 206 pages, paper

ISBN 0822330741

With the help of mirrors, trap doors, elevators, photographs, and film, women vanish and return in increasingly spectacular ways throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Karen Beckman tracks the proliferation of this elusive figure--the vanishing woman--from her genesis in Victorian stage magic through her development in conjunction with photography and film. Beckman reveals how these new visual technologies projected their anxieties about insubstantiality and reproducibility onto the female body, producing an image of "woman" as utterly unstable and constantly prone to disappearance. 

Drawing on cinema studies and psychoanalysis as well as the histories of magic, spiritualism, and photography, Beckman looks at particular instances of female vanishing at specific historical moments--in Victorian magic's obsessive manipulation of female and colonized bodies, spiritualist photography's search to capture traces of ghosts, the comings and goings of bodies in early cinema, and Bette Davis's multiple roles as a fading female star. As Beckman places the vanishing woman in the context of feminism's discussion of spectacle and subjectivity, she explores not only the problems, but also the political utility of this obstinate figure who hovers endlessly between visible and invisible worlds. Through her readings, Beckman argues that the visibly vanishing woman repeatedly signals the lurking presence of less immediately perceptible psychic and physical erasures, and she contends that this enigmatic figure, so ubiquitous in late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, provides a new space through which to consider the relationships between visibility, gender, and agency.

"This highly original and beautifully crafted study explores feminist film theory, psychoanalysis, and cinema through a cultural history of the vanishing woman figure--from nineteenth-century prestidigitation and mediumship to early cinema and across the twentieth century. In positing the vanishing woman as a significant corrective to feminist film theory's staple readings of woman as 'absence or lack,' or hypervisible spectacle, this book offers a fascinating and provocative treatment of enduring discussions that have shaped this field."--Sharon Willis

"Karen Beckman has written an eye-opening book, one that travels across a richly diverse group of texts in order to reveal the vanishing woman's historical underpinnings and cultural work."--Sabrina Barton

Contents

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Surplus Bodies, Vanishing Women: Conjuring, Imperialism, and the Rhetoric of Disappearance, 1851-1901
2. Insubstantial Media: Ectoplasm, Exposure, and the Stillbirth of Film
3. Mother Knows Best: Magic and Matricide
4. Violent Vanishings: Hitchcock, Harlan, and the Politics of Prestidigitation
5. Shooting Stars, Vanishing Comets: Bette Davis and Cinematic Fading

Afterword

Notes
Works Cited
Filmography
Index