Imitations of Life: Fannie Hurst’s Gaslight Sonatas

4. Fashionable Shapes: Social Rhapsodies of the 1920s

t4 . FASHIONABLE SHAPES: SOCIAL RHAPSODIES OF THE I920S I must have more money! How can I get it? Thousands of women everywhere are saying that every day. Rents are food and clothing cost more. They economize every minute; they go without they need, and still they cannot quite make ends meet. Here is the answer.... BecOlTle a successful World's Star Representative and sell World's Star Hosiery.... Be independent.-Advertisement, Saturday Evening Post, August 2, 1919 Popular Freudianism is, perhaps, the most pestilential ofall the winds ofdoctrine.-Stuart P. Sherman, "The Point ofView in American Criticism," Atlantic Monthly, 1922 "A PETAL ON THE CURRENT" I n I92 3 Fannie Hurst achieved her ultimate of matic strategy with Lummox, the author's personal favorite, which she called the result "of my growing absorption in the fnilling masses," Her generally silent, inarticulate heroine Bertha, a struggling domestic, became for Hurst a literary archetype, "the woman with widespread knees and sagging breasts on a tenement stoop ... a composite of many soils, of many climates, of many lineages."1 Combining silent photoplay design with the 111elodramatic technique of her short stories, Lummox, whose episodic structure and photographic realism of detail caused a British critic to observe that "the method resembles a picture theater;'2 embodies a of vignettes depicting the seamy underside of urban American life and vividly dramatizing the vast social hiatus between the haves and the have-nots. With her stolid scrubwoman providing the narrative connection, Fannie Hurst brought about a fortunate confluence of character, form, and theme unifying into a single aesthetic structure the journey of the immi105 FASHIONABLE SHAPES grant in the New World, the plight of the woman-alone-in-the-city, the alienation of children from parents, the intimidating problem_s_ in modern marriage, poverty and "the social evil"-all portrayed against a meticulously accurate background, thoroughly detailed and camera ready, as it were, delivered in Hurstian fragmentized style, here appropriate to delineate the rapid scenic shifts and abrupt transitions of place and time. Minor characters rotating around Bertha are Dickensian , created within this tale of the grotesque for maximum cinematic possibilities, but what Fannie Hurst regarded as her major achievement in Lummox was that the novel "symbolized (her) complete breakthrough ... into a new social consciousness."3 While the novel is not a heated muckrake document,. Lummox, nevertheless, manifests Hurst's consummate skill as emotional manipulator and sentimental realist directed toward a valid question: how may people of good will work to eliminate contemporary social problems engendered by class divisions, poverty, and prejudice? Bertha, the "lummox:' too, enabled Fannie Hurst to final amalgam between her tale and the silent photoplay; the mysterious and enigmatic domestic possessing limited verbal skills reveals her character and strength as universal suffering Mother through action, as she would in the hands of a scenarist like Frances Marion. Bertha's story, metaphorically filmed in words by scenarist Hurst who heaped fact-upon-fact, picture-upon-picture to accomplish a veritism of the commonplace, ranges from the docks to the penthouses of New York. Scrupulous cinematic visualization embossed the reality of detail with romantic invention aimed directly at the heart of Hurstian devotees . Lummox was Fannie Hurst's full-length feature silent ITlovie novel. Eminently real and at the same time mystically symbolic, Bertha appears at the outset cloaked in unintelligibility yet suggestive of something profound, transcendental: Nobody quite knew just what Baltic bloods flowed in sullen and alien rivers through Bertha's veins.... There must have been a good smattering ofScandinavian and even a wide streak ofwestern Teutonic. Slav, too.... In her carpetbag ... were a bit of Bulgarian embroidery, a runic brooch, a concertina with a punctured bellows and an ikon in imitation mosaic. Old world.... Of no particular father ... and of a dead mother.... Born of a dead mother/Secrets of the grave you'll utter.4 I06 FASHIONABLE SHAPES To a prol11jnent metropolitan aesthete and poet, Bertha embodies "the poem of the woman whose feet are rooted in the secrets out of the soil ... a tower of silence that is buried under some sea." She becomes the inspiration of his acclaimed verse "The Cathedral Under the Sea:' a lyric extolling the "beauty" of "her silence," a spiritual quietude that seems linked to an ineffable knowledge whose secrets she serves (17). The drama ofBertha's wanderings, then, portrays wornan's collective journey toward identity and empowerment, the episodic movel11.ent revealing...