Edna Ferber's Hollywood: American Fictions of Gender, Race, and History

3. Making Believe: Show Boat, Race, and Romance, 1925–1957

three three S how Boat is perhaps Ferber’s best-known work of historical fiction, but ironically, most Americans remember the Oscar Hammerstein–Jerome Kern musical adaptation rather than Ferber’s original text. 1 Apart from selling Florenz Ziegfeld the musical rights to her novel in 1926, Ferber had no role in the creation of the libretto, but because of her business foresight, her name would always be linked with any publicity for the musical and subsequent films. Ferber ’s novel of Magnolia Hawks Ravenal’s experience in the post–Civil War South considered three major issues that held Hollywood’s attention for decades : romance, race, and performance. In Ferber’s novel and, to a certain extent, Hammerstein’s libretto, “making believe” leads to unhappiness and loss of independence. Magnolia’s transformation from a romantic, compliant young wife into a mature, self-reliant single mother, artist, and businesswoman following her abandonment by husband Gaylord Ravenal represents Ferber’s demystification of the southern belle myth. Show Boat’s critique of traditional romance and marriage was an odd choice for Broadway and HolMaking Believe SHOW BOAT , RACE, AND ROMANCE, 1925–1957 E D N A F E R B E R ’ S H O L L Y W O O D 72 lywood producers, who during the 1920s depended on a steady crop of contemporary love stories. However, the original Broadway production (1927) and the first two Hollywood adaptations, released by Universal in 1929 and 1936, retained much of Ferber’s narrative about the performance of romance and the presence of working women in vaudeville and on Broadway. Ferber ’s chronicle of Julie Laverne’s experience as a mixed-race woman and her exploration of the post–Civil War segregation of African Americans posed additional problems for Hollywood screenwriters intent on challenging the censors. Part of Show Boat’s uniqueness in American cultural history lies in Ferber’s treatment of the tragic mulatta—Magnolia’s childhood friend and showboat actress Julie Laverne. American literature is populated with many mixedrace heroines, some of them extraordinarily beautiful and courageous, like James Fenimore Cooper’s Cora Munro (The Last of the Mohicans, 1826), but all of them doomed to loneliness, exile, or death. The trope persisted after the Civil War, made more painful by the historical realities of racism and segregation in the North and South. 2 Julie partly conforms to the traditional stereotype, which was increasingly visible because of the popularity of southern historical fiction between 1880 and 1926, but like Ferber’s southern belle, Magnolia, she also possesses revisionist elements. For a few years, while they live and work aboard the Cotton Blossom, Julie and Magnolia are like sisters, and Ferber explores the full implications of their lives after Julie’s expulsion from the troupe for violating southern miscegenation laws. Ferber’s twin heroines— both thin, graceful, dark, and romantic; both actresses with gifts for singing African American music—reveal the instability and cruelty of race as a marker of American difference. In many ways, it is tempting to compare Ferber’s historical novel and its popular visual legacy to Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, begun shortly after the publication of Ferber’s novel in 1926, but published ten years later, which was also when James Whale made the second of Show Boat’s three film versions. 3 Mitchell’s heroine, Scarlett O’Hara, also shares close relationships with African Americans and racial and class hybrids in the antebellum and postbellum South, and she too was dark, unconforming, and passionate. 4 But Ferber’s work has another connection with the history of American women’s fiction in its similarities to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Following the publication of Show Boat, many critics compared Ferber to Stowe, whose best-selling narrative of slaves’ lives was the greatest publishing 73 Show Boat, 1925–1957 phenomenon of the nineteenth century. Like Stowe, Ferber was a best-selling writer who capitalized on an expanding publishing market fuelled largely by female readers. They also shared a belief in history’s ability to affect contemporary society. Film historian Linda Williams even argues that Ferber’s characters mirror Stowe’s melodramatic racial types: Magnolia is Little Eva grown up, Jo and Queenie are like Uncle Tom and Chloe, and Julie is “an amalgam of the ravaged Cassie and the passing-to-escape Eliza.” 5 While Stowe created dramatically exaggerated racial types...