Reading Mabel Normand's Library

An investigation of popular accounts of Mabel Normand's library considers the convergence of the intellectual and the star. Normand's persona as a working-class woman and movie star enabled her claim to new forms of cultural authority in the 1910s, in turn rapidly attenuated by the implementation of regulatory discourses about motion pictures and other products of mass culture, making those products subject to various forms of verification and institutional certification.