Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism (review)

[T]here is more to vanishing than meets the eye.

(Beckman 2003:6)

In Vanishing Women: Magic, Film, and Feminism, Karen Beckman performs a bit of her own magic: she looks past the hypervisible woman toward the spectacle of "the woman who disappears" (4), tracing the trope of the vanishing woman from 19th-century magic shows to early cinema, to key films by Alfred Hitchcock and Veit Harlan, and, finally, to the fading female star as played repeatedly by Bette Davis. Throughout, Beckman demonstrates the interplay between the representation of vanishing women and contemporaneous political, philosophical, and psychoanalytical discourses, showing the connection between the woman who disappears at the whim of the magician or the filmmaker and other disenfranchised peoples made to disappear by dominant cultural forces.

Beginning with L. Frank Baum's 1900 department store window display of a "vanishing lady"—a mechanical mannequin that would disappear and reappear in new outfits—Beckman questions the public's fascination with woman as spectacle of desire and repudiation, whom she pictures teetering on the edge of visibility, materializing and dematerializing in accordance both with dramatic imperatives and with cultural narratives. For Beckman, Baum's "window stages a profound ambivalence about female presence" (6). Beckman's own ambivalence becomes apparent as she traces the spectacle of the vanishing woman from magic shows in the middle of the 19th century to the recurrent narrative of the fading star in mid-20th-century Hollywood films.

At the point where Beckman's analysis is most acute, the woman again disappears. Reworking ideas developed by Peggy Phelan in Unmarked (1993), Beckman triangulates the performative transaction. She looks away from the woman at the center of the spectacle to point the reader not toward the gaze of the dominant culture, but toward other disappeared ones: such as the native of the British Empire, the Jew in Nazi Germany. Ultimately, as in her examples, Beckman appears less interested in the fate of women than she is in these unmarked others, so that she appears to reiterate rather than repudiate the woman's disappearing act. Since on the stage and in film the lady doesn't really vanish, our concern must lay not with her, nor with the colonizer or the fascist, but with these others.

From Baum's turn-of-the-century shop window, Beckman looks back to 1851, the year the number of women exceeded the number of men in England. She painstakingly explores the links between the emergence of the vanishing woman in magic shows and "the surplus woman problem" (19), for which the solution, many then thought, was to transport women to the New World and to the Antipodes where they were needed as domestics and wives: "If the surplus woman did not disappear, British men might, or so they feared" (35). Beckman makes effective use of contemporary polemics and other accounts of the surplus woman problem, setting the staged performance of disappearance against dramatic tales of rebellion, massacres, and cannibalism, which effectively reiterated the terror of the dematerialized (male) body.

In the 19th-century magic show, according to Beckman, the spectacle of a body that could be sent away and then recalled by the wave of a wand and a nonsensical incantation offered the British public a site on which to represent "both its fears and its solutions to those fears" (42). By the century's end, however, the magic show was itself displaced as early film took up the obsession with the problem of the material body:

The vanishing lady provides such a compelling figure to filmmakers because, as a result of her ability to make a spectacle out of the vanishing body, she emerges as a perfect emblem for the cinematic image, which constantly wrestles with the difficulty of fixing bodily presence on the screen.

(66)

At the same time, the cultural anxiety about women's bodies, the longing and panic provoked by their disappearance, and the reassurance and repudiation at their return, comes to be...