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

In Vanishing Women, Karen Beckman constructs a fascinating visual and cinematic cultural history through an examination of the disappearing and reappearing female body. Despite the book's classification as cinema studies, Beckman's subject is not restricted to the female image as shuttled through a projector; rather, Beckman is interested in the female body as it occupies space both on stage and in the world. In fact, Beckman demonstrates that the female body becomes subject to disappearance—or, at least, a collective fantasy of disappearance—just as it threatens to take up political space, and that film aids in this disappearance by blurring the boundaries between real and illusive bodies. But Vanishing Women is no simple narrative of women's oppression, because Beckman defines vanishing as "always in process" (19). The vanishing woman is neither fully absent nor fully present, which offers her a mode of resistance, if only to her own commodified visibility. Moreover, the vanishing woman always threatens to return. Thus, she "produces desire and longing but also unrest" (5), much like the cinema itself.

The book's methodology is varied, but Beckman's wide-ranging approach produces insights that would not have come had she stayed confined to a single period or discipline. Beckman admits that a reader might well wonder "how a book that begins with Victorian stage magic and ends with Bette Davis finds itself considering Nazi editing practices" (9), but these peculiar juxtapositions make this book valuable not only to a cinema studies audience but also to those interested in performance theory, stage magic, spiritualism, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory. It is a triumph of the book that Beckman makes these categories seem so mutually constitutive and overlapping.

Beckman explores these connections through five chapters, each of which close-reads a particular site of female vanishing. The first chapter, "Surplus Bodies, Vanishing Women: Conjuring, Imperialism, and the Rhetoric of Disappearance, 1851-1901," analyzes the hugely popular 1886 illusion known as "The Vanishing Lady." This trick, the first to feature a female assistant, was performed by a new generation of defiantly European magicians who rejected turbans and capes for top hats and tails. Beckman demonstrates not only that the desire to stage a woman's disappearance correlates with mid-century anxieties about Britain's surplus female population, but also that the vanishing and return of the white female body may "screen from view prior, and more permanent, disappearances" (7): namely, that of the colonized Indian male, so strongly associated in the British mind both with magic and—at least since the 1857 Rebellion—with mutiny. Thus, Beckman shows how Victorian stage magic connects colonial anxieties and feminist agitations. This chapter is one of the few academic studies of nineteenth-century performance magic, which remains an underresearched area. Recent works have been either dense histories (Simon During's Modern Enchantments, (2002)) or folksy chronicles (Jim Steinmeyer's Hiding The Elephant (2003)); this essay, with its excellent use of archival materials, begins to fill in the gap.

In her second chapter, "Insubstantial Media: Ectoplasm, Exposure, and the Stillbirth of Film," Beckman traces the influence of stage magic on cinema by examining two sets of proto-films: those of early magicians performing their tricks (including "The Vanishing Lady"), and those documenting female Spiritualists, many of whom were photographed and filmed producing ectoplasm—itself a synonym for "an image projected onto a movie screen" (78)—from their bodily orifices. Beckman argues that magicians may be responsible for creating a cinematic culture in which omnipotent filmmakers control both the reproductive female body and her replicating female image. Vanishing women challenge this control by questioning "the very possibility of presence" (68), thus raising film's anxiety about its own insubstantiality. Theoretically, this is familiar territory, following Peggy Phelan's Unmarked (1993), but Beckman dramatizes the relationship between women's bodies and film with her case study of Spiritualists, enriching the theoretical argument while shedding light on a neglected genre of female performance.

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