The dainty: the aesthetics of female film stardom in the transitional period

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article discusses ‘the dainty’, an aesthetic category that rose to prominence in the trade and fan press during American cinema’s transitional era as a means of characterizing female stars like Lillian Gish, Mary Pickford, Marguerite Clarke, Billie Rhodes and Lois Wilson. The readiest reading of the dainty is that, like the stars the term often described, it was a throwback to an older, diminutive ideal of femininity that bore little relation to the ‘modern’ woman as she was emerging in the early twentieth century at the intersection of aesthetic modernism and industrial modernity. This article, however, contends that the dainty has more in common with paradigmatically modern aesthetics like ‘glamour’ than one might initially suppose. As I show, the dainty’s modernity is twofold. First, it lies in the category’s objective register, where its formal qualities, most notably its diminutiveness, afford it an unexpected affinity with modernist mandates of restraint and reduction. Second, it lies in the category’s subjective register, where its association with ‘fastidiousness’ suggests a calculating and discriminating form of aesthetic subjectivity that is peculiarly modern by virtue of its aesthetic reflexivity. In paying close attention to one of the specifically aesthetic categories that define female star images at this period, I join a small coterie of scholars, like Lea Jacobs and Rosalind Galt, who have set out to explore the aesthetic formations through which we evaluate and experience film and film-adjacent phenomena.