Four The Screen As Display Window: Constructing the

"New Woman"

Four
The Screen As Display Window: Constructing the "New Woman"

The "New Woman" as a Consumer

A sign of profound change regarding the Victorian practice of separate spheres for the sexes, the
term new woman first appeared in the 1890s in publications like North American Review and Outlook
that reported on public affairs. At the time, the "new woman" was alternately praised as a "more
independent, better educated. . . companion to husband and children" and condemned for having
failed "to prove that woman's mission is something higher than the bearing of children and bringing
them up." Confusion regarding the energetic, spirited, and self-reliant "new woman" who pursued
white-collar jobs and interests outside the home was not restricted, however, to late-nineteenth- and
early-twentieth-century discourse. Contemporary women's historians have applied the label to two
succeeding but contrasting generations: college-educated women who chose to forego marriage for
social activism and careers before the First World War, and boyish flappers who symbolized the Jazz
Age. Whereas the older women were emotionally invested in homosocial or sex-segregated
relationships, the younger women became pals in companionate marriages.[01] Yet, despite
differences in the character and priorities of these two generations, they both charted new paths
leading out of the privatized household. Whether social activist or flapper, the "new woman"
expected to function in both the public and private spheres despite controversy regarding the nature
of her role.
DeMille acquired firsthand knowledge about the enterprising "new woman" who ventured into
the public sphere because his mother, Beatrice, played such a role. Although he recalled that "she
never did anything publicly while father lived," the Philadelphia Record featured a story about her

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successful career as a theatrical agent in 1906. "Never before," the newspaper claimed, "have so
many women been seeking support in the business world. . . . A good illustration of what a woman
can accomplish in the world's work is suggested by Mrs. H. C. DeMille, the mother of the author of
'Strongheart' [a William deMille play]."[2] A laudable account of her professional achievement is
balanced by references to her contributions to family life. DeMille herself failed to differentiate
between private and public spheres, however, and spoke as if the theater were an extension of the
living room. She declared forthrightly in 1912:

This is the woman's age. . . . Every relation between the sexes has changed, because woman has changed. Hereafter, no
woman is going to be married without feeling that she is getting as much as she gives. . . . This theme— woman's equality
—lies very close to my heart. . . . Because I am thoroughly aroused to the vast and. . . incalculable effects of this
movement, I am anxious to make my contribution to it through the stage, because the stage gets the proposition to the
masses. In the present condition of society, with its widespread habit of theatregoing, one can scarcely overrate the value
of the playhouse as a means of propaganda.[3]

When her son Cecil abandoned the stage to become a filmmaker one year later, she witnessed
the growth of the cinema rather than the theater as a medium for articulating a redefinition of
womanhood.
What was the nature of early-twentieth-century discourse on changing sex roles signified by the
diminution of separate spheres based on gender? What was the relationship, in other words, of the
motion picture frame to the proscenium stage, department store window, and museum and world's
fair exhibits as sites for constructing the "new woman"? A preface to a discussion of specific DeMille
texts, such questions require an assessment of the changing role of women in middle-class families,
or the transformation of privatized households based on sentimental values. Although unimaginable
today, men once assumed responsibility for marketing chores in business districts configured as
strictly masculine terrain.[4] The feminization of shopping, or the conversion of women into retail
shoppers that began in the mid-nineteenth century was thus a sign of the increasing
interpenetration of home and marketplace. Stocked with an increasing abundance and array of
commodities, merchants in downtown establishments began to court female shoppers and effected a
redesign in urban topography. Chicago planners, for example, reconstructed not only the streets of
the Loop but the entire city, heretofore a male province, in order to provide women with access to
dry-goods stores operated by audacious entrepreneurs like Potter Palmer, Levi Leiter, and Marshall
Field. When Field expanded his department store in 1902, he built a lengthy facade of huge plate
glass windows that kept thirty to forty full-time trimmers busy year-round.[5] As

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signified by the display window, the redefinition of middle-class women as consumers meant their
decreased privatization at the cost of their increased commodification. The labor of thrift-conscious
wives in the social reproduction of middle-class families, in other words, was superceded by self-
theatricalization in elegant living rooms, lavish theater foyers, and sumptuous department stores.
Precisely how this transformation was effected, especially at the site of opulent shopping
emporiums, and what it implied in terms of psychic gains and losses for women will be explored here
before a consideration of specific DeMille texts.
A replication of drawing room society, the Henry C. DeMille-David Belasco melodramas, as
discussed in a previous chapter, were anticipated by upper-middle-class social rituals in which actors
engaged in a performance. Such forms of entertainment required a distinction between the living
room, or front region, where guests were admitted, and the private quarters, or back region, where
hosts need not remain in character.[6] The mechanism of social reproduction was thus carefully
disguised or hidden behind the drapery and walls of tastefully furnished houses. Genteel
preoccupation with appearances and performance rituals in effect constituted a form of reification in
which social relations became increasingly abstract. As Georg Lukács argues:

Reification requires that a society should learn to satisfy all its needs in terms of commodity exchange. The separation of
the producer from his means of production, the dissolution and destruction of all "natural" production units, etc., and all
the social and economic conditions necessary for the emergence of modern capitalism tend to replace "natural" relations
which exhibit human relations more plainly by rationally reified relations.[7]

An emphasis on display that disguised the means of production and social reproduction
characterized not only genteel homes, but department stores like A. T. Stewart's Marble and Cast
Iron Palaces as sites of consumer capitalism.[8] Within these pleasurable shopping emporiums, all
traces of the manufacturing of goods and the conduct of business were kept out of sight so that
objects became invested with exchange rather than use value.[9] Dry-goods merchants exploited the
interdependence of cultural forms, especially the legitimate theater as highbrow culture, so that
commodities became signifiers of genteel status. Accordingly, middle-class familiarity with theatrical
conventions was manipulated in retail literature referring to the stage, store windows decorated as
tableaux vivants, plush merchandise displayed in simulations of living rooms, and elaborate staging
of concerts, fashion shows, and pageants. Particularly noteworthy was the attempt to create an
atmosphere of cultural refinement. As summed up by Zola's description of the department store as a
cathédrale du commerce moderne , merchants transferred the experience of spiritual uplift in
sentimental

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culture to consumer goods and the retail environment.[10] A suggestive label, Zola's term also
expresses the moral contradictions inherent in modern consumption as experienced by respectable
middle-class women.
Edith Wharton's rephrasing of the stricture, "Never buy anything you can do without," to
describe shopping as "the voluptuousness of acquiring things one might do without" was a measure
of the change in personal identity and ethics required in a consumer culture.[11] Granted, middle-
class families had begun to define their status in terms of consumption so that their homes were
equipped not only with modern conveniences like electricity, indoor plumbing, and central heating
but also with symbols of refinement such as the piano. Signifying the reversal of an earlier
movement away from urban congestion and into the confines of the privatized family, the middle-
class home now began to resemble the marketplace and vice versa. When John Wanamaker unveiled
a second department store in New York in 1907, an exhibit titled "The House Palatial" consisted of a
summer garden and twenty-two rooms decorated in the latest styles and with period furniture.[12]
Commenting on this erosion of public versus private spheres in The American Scene (1907), Henry
James observed that the home and the market, both stocked with gleaming consumer goods, looked
remarkably alike. A decade earlier, Edith Wharton pointed out the darker side of this analogy in The
Decoration of Homes (1897) when she asserted that the drawing room, far from being a safe haven,
reproduced the clutter, untidiness, and instability of the marketplace.[13]
A sign that consumption as self-gratification represented a moral crisis, retail strategy not only
appropriated sentimental uplift but also exploited Orientalist images of exotic lands associated with
luxury and sensuality, if not debauchery. During the second half of the nineteenth century,
Americans expressed a fascination with travel in their enthusiasm for museum and world's fair
exhibits, postal cards, magic lantern slides, stereographs, panoramas and dioramas, Hale's Tours,
actuality footage, and so forth. As realist representation of the urban scene demonstrated, touring
exotic territory was equivalent to voyeurism rationalized in pedagogical terms. What accounts for
this insatiable curiosity about foreign lands and peoples? Why was Orientalism, as Edward W. Said
argues, "a Western projection" or a hegemonic discourse that expressed "a systematic accumulation
of human beings and territories" in theatrical form?[14] As significant aspects of genteel middle-class
culture, the degree of self-control required in the performance of social rituals and the desire to
travel to strange, alluring places were surely not unrelated. Orientalism, in other words, was a sign
not only of psychic repression but of chronic frustration resulting from the inability to interpret the
meaning of coded forms of social intercourse. Wharton, for example, described upper-middle-class
life as "a hieroglyphic world where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only
represented by a set

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of arbitrary signs."[15]As a result, the mysteriousness of impenetrable social observances was
projected onto the enigmatic terrain of the "Other." Wharton's use of the term hieroglyph to describe
coded rituals in privileged society implies that this psychological projection involved complex visual
forms. The pictorial aesthetic of Victorian culture was in effect translated into Orientalist images of
exotic and voluptuous civilizations. Vachel Lindsay, not coincidentally, had earlier used the label
hieroglyphic to describe the explosion of visual imagery in American culture as a whole and in the
cinema in particular.[16]
Within exotic shopping emporiums, the installation of hieroglyphic signs required theatrical
merchandising displays such as those described by Zola in Au bonheur des dames . A site of
consumer desire, the department store in the novel was based on the Bon Marché, an edifice with a
new wing fittingly located on a street christened Rue Babylone. A carefully staged orchestration of
seductive sights greeted crowds of enthralled shoppers:

[A] sumptuous pasha's tent was furnished with divans and arm-chairs, made with camel sacks, some ornamented with
many-colored lozenges, others with primitive roses. Turkey, Arabia, and the Indies were all there. They had emptied the
palaces, plundered the mosques and bazaars. A barbarous gold tone prevailed in the weft of the old carpets, the faded
tints of which preserved a sombre warmth, as of an extinguished furnace, a beautiful burnt hue suggestive of the old
masters. Visions of the East floated beneath the luxury of this barbarous art.[17]

Spectacular displays based on the color, texture, and shape of commodities engulfed sets
featuring the domes and minarets of the Middle East. A sheer accumulation of goods labeled "chaotic
exotic" by Rosalind H. Williams, such exhibits broke down consumer reserve by appealing to
fantasies of a luxurious, sensuous, and effeminate Orient. (The Victorian term for orgasm, it should
be noted, was spending .) Although Orientalism was "a theatrical stage affixed to Europe" in an
appropriation of the Middle East, as Said argues, in fact most of the entire non-Western world was
construed as Eastern. The terms Near, Middle , and Far East implied that cartography was a
scientific practice dominated by the vantage point of the West. Contrary to British and French
intoxication with the Middle East, Americans became fascinated with Japanese art objects exhibited
in world's fairs pavilions. Indeed, Tiffany's capitalized on a passion for Japanese artifacts, such as
ceramics, lacquer ware, and bronzes, by importing goods that genteel women purchased to decorate
their homes.[18] Understood within this context, DeMille's The Cheat , as will be discussed, assumes
significant historical dimensions as a drama of gender and race relations in a consumer culture.
As the first important group of shoppers to be seduced by modern consumption, middle-class
women, whose families had in the past depended on their economic reserve, now flocked to palatial
department stores. Genteel

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consumers responded to the allure of spectacular displays behind expanses of plate glass, ready-to-
wear fashions and home furnishings illuminated by electric lights, staged extravaganzas
accompanied by orchestral performance, courteous and attentive service rendered by uniformed
staff, and social life conducted in elegant tea rooms and restaurants. As the privatization of women
in the domestic sphere had earlier signified the acceleration of industrialism, the erasure of the line
between work and leisure in shopping emporiums now represented the rise of consumption. Such a
momentous transition to consumer capitalism was not easily accomplished, however. Actors in a
powerful drama compared to seduction and rape, women in department stores encountered a site of
moral contestation where the "old" middle-class values of self-denial were démodé but not as easily
discarded as last year's frocks. Octave Mouret, the entrepreneurial hero of Zola's Au bonheur des
dames , put the matter succinctly, "the mechanism of modern commerce" depended upon "the
exploitation of women."[19]
Although the contest of power ultimately proved unequal, middle-class women engaged dry-
goods merchants in the arena of the department store by capitalizing on the slogan, "the customer
is always right." Within the opulent environment of emporiums, they demanded courtesies and
services lacking in their own homes. Abandoning their scruples, an alarming number of them bought
goods their husbands refused to pay for, returned used merchandise, and indulged in theft. As early
as 1857, Harper's Weekly referred to a "dry-goods epidemic" and "shopping mania. . . as a species
of absorbing insanity" to discuss the compulsive and irrational dimension of consumption.[20]
Significantly, respectable women arrested for shoplifting were unacknowledged as a sign of the
moral contradictions of a consumer culture because the courts dismissed charges against them on
the grounds of illness. A disease attributed to female sexuality and emotional instability, kleptomania
was the result of medical discourse that provided a rationale for the ethical lapses of genteel women.
[21] Albeit gender-biased, this pseudo-scientific dialogue in effect suggested that aberrant shoppers

were engaging in a form of commodity fetishism, that is, the transference of desire from human
beings to objects. Such conduct was a sign not only of individual pathology but of the increasing
abstraction or reification of social relations in consumer capitalism.[22] A drama of frustrated desire
involving repressive definitions of gender, class, and ethnicity, consumer behavior became the focus
of some of DeMille's most acclaimed films in the 1910s and remained an obsession through the
1920s.

Cinderella on the Lower East Side: the Golden Chance

Toward the end of 1915, DeMille began to work increasingly with scenarist Jeanie Macpherson on
original screenplays, rather than adaptations, and

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scored impressive hits with both The Cheat and The Golden Chance . A move that secured his claim
to authorship, the decision to collaborate with a scriptwriter rather than to purchase rights to
existing works was also cost-effective: Macpherson received $250 for the script of The Golden
Chance , whereas playwright and novelist Charles Kenyon was paid an advance of $2,000 against 10
percent of the royalties for the adaptation of Kindling .[23] As critical acclaim for The Cheat and The
Golden Chance foreshadowed, DeMille's collaboration with Macpherson would be extraordinarily
productive during the silent era. The director later summed up their working relationship as follows:
"She was not a good writer. She would bring in wonderful ideas but she could not carry a story all
the way through in writing. Her name is on many things because she wrote with me. I carried the
story and she would bring me many, many ideas."[24]
Due to studio personnel and scheduling problems, DeMille worked simultaneously on The Cheat
and The Golden Chance by filming around the clock in two shifts. Production on The Golden Chance ,
which had commenced on October 26, 1915, was first delayed because of an unsatisfactory script
and then halted as a result of difficulties with both the initial director and leading actress. Lasky
explained to Goldwyn, "The Goodrich picture. . . has been held up on account of the scenario. . . .
Cecil finally gave up trying to put the scenario into shape and he and Jeanie wrote an original which
looks very good." As for the leading actress, he remarked, "Cecil claims that Goodrich is often under
the influence of liquor and is altogether very stupid." DeMille, who had begun filming The Cheat on
October 20, decided to assume direction of The Golden Chance , as well, to meet a scheduled
release date, replaced Edna Goodrich with Cleo Ridgley in the lead, and started shooting the film on
November 5. Completed first on November 10, The Cheat was released to enthusiastic reviews on
December 13. The director continued to work on a tight schedule so that The Golden Chance ,
concluded on November 26, was premiered a mere six weeks after the domestic release of The
Cheat .[25] Within a relatively short period of time, The Cheat was enshrined as part of the canon of
silent cinema, especially by enthusiastic critics in war-ravaged Paris. Although overshadowed by the
éclat of the earlier feature, The Golden Chance also received critical acclaim. Indeed, the two films
are comparable in that the moral dilemma represented by women as consumers is displaced onto
lower-class and racial components in the body politic. The Golden Chance also shows striking
parallels with earlier films about tenement life such as Chimmie Fadden and Kindling . DeMille in fact
recycled the set of the Schultzes' apartment in Kindling as a slum dwelling in the later release.
According to realist conventions exploited in the earlier texts, The Golden Chance serves as an
exercise in middle-class voyeurism with the heroine in the mediatory role of a tourist. As such, it
draws a moral lesson from a conventional juxtaposition of urban rich and poor, whereas The Cheat
not

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only focuses on the problematic intersection of race and gender but also prefigures consumption as
Jazz Age spectacle.
An updated society drama, The Golden Chance introduces the characters during the credits in a
succession of medium shots in low-key lighting: Mr. and Mrs. Hillary, (Ernest Joy and Edythe
Chapman), identified as members of the "Smart Set," are playing chess; Roger Manning (Wallace
Reid), shown with his valet, is "A Millionaire" in formal dress and top hat; Jimmy the "Rat" (Raymond
Hatton), dangling a cigarette from his lip, is obviously a Bowery bum. Appearing last in the sequence
in separate shots are a husband and wife who, in contrast to the first couple, are clearly
differentiated with respect to social class and moral standing. Steve Denby (H. B. Carpenter) is
introduced in a shot in which a large beer sign dominates a darkened screen until a light gradually
reveals him awakening from a drunken stupor. Mary Denby (Cleo Ridgley), identified as "His Wife,"
appears in a shot that, unlike the rest of the credits, is photographed from a slightly oblique angle to
show her leaning out the window of a tenement building to enjoy a ray of sunshine. She waters a
scraggly geranium in a pot that shares space on the fire escape with milk bottles and laundry draped
over a railing.
An actress who began her career at Universal, Cleo Ridgley typifies the blond, stately,
aristocratic woman who starred in director Lois Weber's feature films.[26] Appearing rather
incongruous as a slum woman in The Golden Chance , she is, according to an insert, a judge's
daughter who eloped with a "young city man of questionable reputation." A sentimental heroine in
the tradition of country maidens seduced by city slickers, Mary lives to regret her decision. All too
predictably, she becomes destitute and faces empty cupboards in a tenement building in a
disreputable neighborhood. According to the script, Steve engineers a sex role reversal when he
sneers in a dialogue title that was altered in the film, "You needn't think because you're a Van
Cortlandt, that you're too good to work!" (The Van Cortlandts were Chimmie Fadden's Fifth Avenue
employers in the comedy series.) Steve "indicates angrily—she is to look for a job—and right away—
She says nothing, but looks straight in front of her showing the hurt and humiliation of everything
he has said. He turns at the door, just as he is about to leave, to ask her emphatically if she
understands what he has said about working."[27]
Contrary to the script, Mary herself decides in the film to become a seamstress at the Hillarys'
residence, a turn of events similar to the plot of Kindling . But, whereas Maggie Schultz expresses
outrage at the disparity between rich and poor, Mary is seduced by a sumptuous decor and
fashionable gowns and jewelry. Aptly titled the "House of Enchantment," the mansion becomes a site
of self-theatricalization and replicates a department store in its enticing display of goods. When she
applies for employment,

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Mary follows the maid into a living room photographed in an extreme long shot that shows a richly
carpeted floor, a writing table next to an elegant floor lamp, a uniformed butler awaiting the
instructions of his seated mistress, and a grand staircase with a landing between two flights of
stairs.[28] After a brief interview, Mrs. Hillary leads Mary up to the second floor, or the back region of
the house, where she will assume her duties as a seamstress. Already enchanted by the decor, the
young woman peers curiously about her while ascending the stairs. A tapestry decorates the rear
wall of the staircase, and a female statue suggestive of a manikin stands conspicuously in the
foreground on the newel post of the bannister at the foot of the landing. The role of the manikin, as
Stuart Culver argues, is to mediate between "consumer and commodity by tempting people to
confuse themselves with things," surely an example of the reification of human consciousness
articulated by Georg Lukács. The plate glass window thus "becomes a stage for the performance of a
specific drama of desire."[29] An enactment of just such a drama occurs in The Golden Chance as
the screen becomes a department store display or a site for the construction of the "new woman."
The transformation of Mary into a showpiece dramatizes a convergence of desire expressed in
terms of exchange value in the reification of social relations; that is, human beings are commodified
as objects, on the one hand, and objects are invested with human qualities, on the other. Signifying
the dominance of the commodity form, the destitute heroine wears fashionable gowns and
accessories that represent romance, the millionaire pursues a beautiful woman befitting his status,
and the upper-middle-class couple convert social engagements into business deals. Downstairs, in a
long shot in front of a large, gilt-framed painting, the Hillarys initiate these transactions by luring
Roger Manning to their home with the prospect of meeting "the prettiest girl in the world" as a
dinner guest. Paralleling the casting dilemma of the film, in which Cleo Ridgley replaced the female
lead, the evening's entertainment requires a substitute for "the prettiest girl," who is indisposed.
Upstairs, in the bedroom where she has finished sewing, Mary drapes a beaded gown against her
body in a dimly lit shot that enhances her mood of reverie. A cut to the Hillarys, now shown in a
closer medium shot, reveals their disappointment about the turn of events. Suddenly, Mrs. Hillary
remembers Mary upstairs. Confronted with the proposal that she become a substitute guest as she
is leaving the back region, Mary is incredulous and calls attention to her threadbare clothes. As the
script indicates, "Mrs. Hillary sees gown, and watching Mary shrewdly holds up the dazzling silk
against Mary—indicates how pretty she would look in it, etc. She watches this effect on Mary's face
(the lure of things beautiful for a woman) as Mary capitulates."[30] DeMille cuts back and forth
between front and back regions of the mansion as a prelude to the evening's entertainment in which

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all signs of labor will have vanished. A sense of unreality thus pervades performance rituals as the
effortlessness of appearances attests to genteel control of the stage, if not the backstage, as a site
of social reproduction.
As "The Substitute," Mary is showcased in an impressive entrance in a full-length gown with
train, as lateral and frontal shots of her descending the grand staircase are intercut with shots of
Roger, including a close-up in profile, mesmerized by her beauty. Upon their introduction, Mary and
Roger are immediately linked as a romantic couple in two-shots before, during, and after dinner.
DeMille himself sketched camera placements on the script to show the dinner sequence from angles
that would emphasize how much the couple are absorbed with each other, as the camera pans left
and right to show a guest unable to intrude on their conversation.[31] At the end of the evening's
performance, however, Mary confronts her personal dilemma in the back region of the upstairs
bedroom. DeMille moves his camera in for a closer medium shot as she removes a borrowed silk
slipper and compares it with her worn shoe. As disembodied parts of herself, the footwear
symbolizes the role that Mary will enact in the plot, that is, the tenement woman who resumes her
former status as a socialite after an unhappy sojourn on the Lower East Side.
The drama of social appearances as an indecipherable hieroglyph continues when Mrs. Hillary
hires Mary for a return engagment so that her husband may conclude a business deal with Roger. A
revealing shot shows Mr. and Mrs. Hillary playing chess in the foreground and observing the young
couple through a draped doorway in the background. DeMille is obviously staging a play-within-a-
play in a complicated parlor game that escalates into a moral dilemma when Mary and Roger fall in
love. At the end of the evening, Mary looks into the mirror as she is seated before a dresser and
gazes at successive reflections of Roger and then her husband, Steve. A woman's personal identity
and social status, in sum, is dependent upon the commodities that a man's income secures for her.
During the following sequence, which is photographed in extreme low-key lighting and includes
striking reverse angle shots in suspenseful moments, Orientalist fantasies about illicit sexuality and
luxury abound. Goaded by Jimmy the "Rat," Steve startles Mary in a poorly executed robbery
attempt by sneaking into her room in the middle of the night. Fingering her jewels and expensive
lingerie with a leer, he asks, "Who's the Guy?" A blackmail scheme that further substantiates the
paranoia of the rich regarding the urban masses lures Roger, now informed about Mary's plight, to
the Lower East Side, but results in a fatal injury for Steve. When Roger tells Mary in a medium two-
shot that her husband is dead, she responds by looking away from him to her left before the final
fade-out. With her own demise as a worn-out tenement woman, Mary may now be resurrected as a
socialite in a process that rep-

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[Full Size]

19. As Cinderella in an upper-class drawing room, Cleo Ridgley enchants

20. After playing the role of a socialite at an elegant dinner, Cleo

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licates fashion cycles. Fashion, according to Walter Benjamin, "is the eternal return of the new."[32]
Critic Peter Milne, who later praised DeMille in Motion Picture Directing , noted that the lighting
in The Golden Chance resulted in "subdued" backgrounds against which "the characters in the
foreground stand out in stereoscopic relation." Comparing the film's mise-en-scène to the stereo-
graph, a device that heightened the spectator's sense of voyeurism and illusion of reality, Milne
described the director's practice of using black drops to illuminate characters in the foreground.[33]
W. Stephen Bush also called attention to "wonderful lighting effects [that] lend an indescribable
charm and lustre to numerous scenes in the play. Never before have the lighting effects, i.e. the
skillful play with light and shade, been used to such marvelous advantage. The highly critical
spectators who saw the first display of the film were betrayed into loud approval by the many and
novel effects." Acknowledging that he was at a loss for hyperbole, Bush compared DeMille's mise-en-
scène with the paintings of Titian and Tintoretto.[34] Since most of the scenes in The Golden Chance
take place indoors or at night, a high percentage of the shots were in low-key lighting that enhanced
the dreamlike experience of the heroine and, given the Victorian trope of darkness and light,
rendered performance rituals morally ambiguous. Further, as critics acknowledged, the lighting casts
a luminous glow on sets such as "The House of Enchantment" and "picturesque" slum dwellings as
images for middle-class consumption. DeMille's lighting effects, in other words, conveyed moral
ambiguity, as opposed to a schematic representation of good and evil, by enhancing desire for
commodities that included cinematic images for visual appropriation.
The Golden Chance serves as a primer on the construction of the "new woman" and thus
comments on the compromised role of women who are seduced by goods and are themselves
commodified in an unending cycle of exchange. According to F. Scott Fitzgerald, the "new woman" in
the guise of a flapper was "lovely and expensive and about nineteen."[35] As a consumer, she
constituted a threat to male breadwinner status due to an insatiable appetite for material goods.
Charles Dana Gibson, whose shirt-waisted Gibson girl was superceded by the flapper, shows such a
woman gloating as a man drowns in a Life drawing titled "In the Swim Dedicated to Extravagant
Women."[36] As historians point out, the word consumption originally meant "to destroy, to use up,
to waste, to exhaust" and thus signified tuberculosis in the medical lexicon.[37] Despite respectable
middle-class status, the "new woman" as consumer was linked to a sinful world of luxury associated
with the demimondaine. Although she symbolized modernity with her carefree manner and
streamlined dress, the flapper could trace her silent-screen lineage to the vampire who devoured
men without

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conscience to satisfy extravagant whims in films such as The Vampire (1913) and A Fool There Was
(1915).[38]
A discourse on the "new woman," The Golden Chance displaces anxiety about female behavior in
a consumer culture onto degenerate lower-class males like Steve and Jimmy the "Rat." According to
the script, Mary must be shown as a wife "who does not neglect Steve—no matter how bad he is."
[39] Steve, however, typifies the irresponsible drunkard censured by temperance crusaders

concerned about the welfare of families. Audience reaction to his characterization should be gauged
with reference to the fact that by 1911, the Women's Christian Temperance Union had become the
largest women's organization in an era characterized by social activism.[40] Steve's decadence not
only exculpates Mary for being deceitful but also justifies the existence of social hierarchies. But the
heroine is not completely without guilt. A pawn used to attract a millionaire in both the Hillarys'
business deals and her husband's blackmail scheme, Mary attempts to retain her integrity but is
nevertheless compromised. When Mrs. Hillary offers her a bonus— "You have played your part
admirably. Will you accept this as a token of my appreciation?"—she rejects this commodification of
a romantic experience. Still, her refusal to accept an additional payment implies that to the extent
she was not playing the role of a socialite, she was being false to her marriage vows. Despite the
scapegoating of drunken, lower-class men, DeMille's resolution of the moral ambiguities of a
consumer culture as confronted by women is equivocal. Significantly, the final shot of the film shows
Mary looking away from Roger when he tells her that Steve is dead and thus renders the ending
inconclusive.
A brief consideration of DeMille's remake of The Golden Chance , titled Forbidden Fruit (1921), is
chronologically out of order in assessing his career but instructive with respect to filming upper-class
consumption as spectacle. The Mallory (previously Hillary) mansion now has an arched vestibule
with glass doors, gigantic potted plants, and a sunken garden, an elegant space that must be
traversed before gaining entry to a high-ceilinged living room that dwarfs its occupants. Mary
Maddock (formerly Denby) is still married to a shiftless bum named Steve, but she is no longer the
daughter of a judge. Persuading her to play the role of a dinner guest, Mrs. Mallory (Kathlyn
Williams) orders her maid to "phone Celeste—tell her to open her shop and send me her best
selection of gowns, lingerie, slippers, stockings, gloves, and fans." A parade of uniformed bell boys
subsequently arrives with huge packages as Mary (Agnes Ayres) receives the attention of several
maids. She is seated at a semicircular dresser in an elegant boudoir with slender columns encircling
a bed on a circular carpet. Unrestrained by scruples, the seamstress is delighted by the finery,
removes her wedding ring, and admires a large solitaire. She also manages to pass the "ordeal by
fork" with minimal

― 100 ―
assistance and plays the role of a socialite with aplomb. During one sequence, she and Nelson
Rogers (formerly Roger) even attend a play-within-a-play titled Forbidden Fruit . DeMille interrupts
this Cinderella fantasy with an even more sumptuous fairy tale in the form of flashbacks to a
magnificent eighteenth-century court that is a feast for the eyes. Indeed, Mary wins forgiveness for
her deception by confessing that she could not resist playing Cinderella because she was "unhappy
and lonely and heart-hungry," an admission that serves as a pretext for one of the film's glittering
flashback sequences. After Steve's death, an epilogue titled "Life's Springtime" provides a resolution
when Nelson (Forrest Stanley) arrives with a slipper to claim his Cinderella and kisses her while
holding her foot.
What conclusions may be drawn about the nature of a consumer culture from this brief account
of the remake in comparison to The Golden Chance? First, DeMille escalates the level of conspicuous
consumption in Forbidden Fruit so that historical flashbacks are required for more ostentatious
spectacle than those afforded by contemporary life. Consumption, in other words, represents an
endless cycle in which time is but another dimension of waste as history itself becomes
commodified. Second, the characters evince little or no compunction about the enjoyment of luxury,
although Victorian sentimentalism dictates moralizing attitudes as well as didactic intertitles. Third,
Mary Maddock appears to move in the smart set with relative ease, signifying that social mobility is
a result of cash rather than cultivation. And last, the commodification of film spectacle, especially in
extravagant and outré flashback sequences, leaves very little to the imagination of spectators for
whom visual appropriation serves as a substitute for material gratification. DeMille's film language in
effect is translated into a readable hieroglyph for a mass audience that is increasingly female and
that has limited access to luxury goods as displayed on the screen. Whereas The Golden Chance
demanded some input from the spectator in response to its moral ambiguity and inconclusive
ending, Forbidden Fruit simply requires an awestruck audience.

The "New Woman" Versus the New Immigrant: the Cheat

Since the heroine of The Golden Chance is familiar to readers of sentimental literature, DeMille's
articulation of the moral contradictions of a consumer culture goes further in The Cheat , an original
screenplay by Hector Turnbull and Jeanie Macpherson.[41] Far more than class distinctions, the
significance of racial difference in early-twentieth-century America clarifies the ethical dilemma of
remapping gender roles at the site of emporiums laden with Orientalist fantasies. A narrative of an
interfacial relationship in which a wealthy Japanese merchant (Sessue Hayakawa) brands a socialite
(Fannie

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[Full Size]

21. DeMille used low-key lighting and set design with a Japanese shoji
screen to dramatize an interracial relationship in The Cheat (1915), acclaimed as
one of the great films of silent cinema. (Photo courtesy George Eastman House)
Ward) with a hot iron bearing his trademark, The Cheat still inspires frisson. Since Japan fought
on the side of the Allies during World War I, the villain's ethnic, if not racial, identity was altered in
the 1918 reissue that is presently in circulation.[42] An intertitle in the credits preceding a shot of
the Japanese actor thus reads, "Haka Arakau, a Burmese Ivory king to whom the Long Island smart-
set is paying tribute." DeMille, interestingly, changed the shot of Hayakawa described in the script:
"Tori (the Japanese name of the character) is discovered seated near tables, reading magazine or
newspaper, and smoking. He is dressed in smart American flannels." According to changes pencilled
on the script, the director called instead for a "Scene dyed Red —Black Drop—oriental lamp—brazier
of coals—Tori takes iron away from object he is branding—turns out light—replaces iron in brazier—
his face shown in light from coals—when he puts lid on brazier screen goes black."[43] Tori,
costumed in a Japanese robe, is shown in low-key lighting as he inscribes his mark, a shrine gate,
on an objet d'art. (Curiously, the Japanese term for a shrine gate is torii .) The film thus emphasizes
the racial "Otherness" of the Asian merchant, who is both fascinating and repulsive, in the first of
several dramatically lit shots that won critical acclaim. Further,

― 102 ―
this scene, illuminated by the glow of the brazier on the desk and an offscreen light, was to be tinted
red (as opposed to amber in the George Eastman House print) to emphasize the character's
dangerous sexuality.
Richard Hardy, "a New York Stockbroker" (Jack Dean), is also seated at his desk in the credit
sequence, but the shot is tinted blue rather than red or amber. Although the background has been
darkened by a black drop, the character, who is feverishly poring over ticker tape and
correspondence, is less dramatically lit. The businessman is thus represented as a rather pedestrian
and unimaginative character. While the Japanese merchant enjoys wealth and leisure, the American
stockbroker has yet to make his mark; he confides to friends who urge him to spend more time
away from his desk, "It's for my wife, I'm doing it." An accepted social practice among the elite, the
sexual division of labor in a consumer culture dictated that men earn and women spend as a sign of
genteel status. Characteristic of middle-class marriage at the turn of the century, as Thorstein
Veblen argues, was the role of the woman as a lady of leisure:

It is by no means an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work with the utmost assiduity, in order that
his wife may . . . render for him that degree of vicarious leisure which the common sense of the time demands. The leisure
rendered by the wife . . . invariably occurs disguised under some form of work or household duties or social amenities,
which prove . . . to serve little or no ulterior end beyond showing that she does not and need not occupy herself with
anything that is gainful.[44]

Such a division of labor, it would appear, was based on traditional gender roles, but the
distinction between private and public spheres was collapsing in an era of self-sufficient and
energetic "new women." Mrs. Potter Palmer, for example, annexed business circles to Chicago
society, in fund-raising activities and thereby outmoded the practice of separate spheres for the
sexes. Yet heterosexual relations in an elite social setting that contrasted with the sex-segregated
world of Victorian culture were not necessarily based on equality.[45] Although DeMille represents
Richard Hardy as the victim of his wife's extravagance in The Cheat , such a narrative strategy
disguises actual control of the purse strings. As Veblen concludes, the wife is "still unmistakably . . .
chattel in theory; for the habitual rendering of vicarious leisure and consumption is the abiding mark
of the unfree servant."[46]
Significantly, the script of The Cheat juxtaposes the figure of the glamorous socialite with her
maid in the credits. "Dressed in smart evening gown—Maid fitting the gown to her . . . Edith
revolves slowly to get effect as though standing before a mirror. She must be pleased and happy."
Although the maid is a minor character likely to be overlooked, her presence in the film is
undeniably a reminder of the wife's analogous status. The uniformed servant, in other words, is a
stand-in occupying the domestic

― 103 ―
space appointed for the housewife.[47]
As if to underscore this reality, the maid interrupts Edith in
the act of taking Red Cross funds to gamble on the stock market in a scene that occurs early in the
film. The socialite is seated in front of a dresser, but the mirror shows a reflection of the maid as she
brings in folded laundry. DeMille deleted the servant in the credits, however, and introduced Edith in
a long shot in which she is seated on an upholstered wicker chair and pets her dog, an animal that
Veblen described as a useless and thus ideal token of wealth. So that women in the audience could
get a closer look at her feathered headdress and jeweled bodice, Edith stands, advances toward the
camera, and greets an unseen guest, a stand-in for the spectator. A bracelet winding up her right
arm is molded in the form of a serpent. Although the leisured woman is clearly aligned with the
vampire, her fashionable wardrobe and surroundings disguise her actual status both in the home
and in a consumer culture.
DeMille's casting of Fannie Ward to play the self-indulgent socialite in The Cheat capitalized on
the cult of celebrity that was well established in big-time vaudeville, theater, and opera before it was
typified by film stars. A stage actress whose career had been interrupted by marriage to a British
multimillionaire, described as "actually rolling in gold," Ward personified conspicuous consumption.
According to news and magazine articles, "her jewels and gowns created a furor" during the years
she graced British society as the mistress of a country house and a London mansion. When she
decided to return to the United States in 1907, the actress had in tow "three maids, two
automobiles, five dogs, and a wardrobe that, with her jewels, cost a million dollars." Appearing once
again on the American stage, Ward dazzled the audience with her elegant attire. "From a purely
fashionable standpoint," reported Theatre , "the costumes worn by Fannie Ward . . . are both a
sensation and an inspiration. They are the last word in modishness. They typify the light hearted
woman of fashion with a love for beautiful things and the means to gratify that love." As a film star
relocated on the West Coast, Ward acquired a Florentine villa touted as "the most sumptuous
photoplayer's domicile in the world." The actress apparently indulged her taste for luxury without
experiencing the moral constraints of sentimental culture. Fittingly, she wrote an advice column in
which she counseled women, "Express your own personality in every way. And let the world feel you
are going to do this because of the individuality of the clothes you wear."[48]
Publicity regarding the details of Ward's elegant attire and villa illustrates the extent to which
personal identity and celebrity status were based on commodities acquired in a fashion cycle. That is
to say, the Protestant notion of character based on individual ethics and social commitment was
being superceded by a modernist concept of personality defined in terms of consumer goods. Such a
development further weakened the traditional

― 104 ―
distinction between home and marketplace, or the Victorian practice of separate spheres for the
sexes. Since respectable middle-class women in privatized households did not expect to function
outside the domestic sphere, character remained a manly attribute.[49] When personality became a
product of consumption, however, women assumed significance in the public sphere but at great
cost to themselves. As the embodiment of com-modification in theatrical spectacles designed to
stimulate acquisitive behavior, they occupied center stage but played a perverse role in the
enactment of Orientalist fantasies. According to Williams, the "chaotic exotic" display of department
stores was based on sheer accumulation that "becomes awesome in a way that no single item could
be." An exotic decor, moreover, is "impervious to objections of bad taste"—taste being an Arnoldian
concept with moral as well as aesthetic implications in genteel culture. Such a decor "is not ladylike
but highly seductive . . . and exists as an intermediate form of life between art and commerce."
Similarly, Said defines Orientalism as "a systematic discipline of accumulation."[50] Williams's
distinction between "art and commerce" has limitations in a postmodernist age, but her argument
about exotic decor, sensuality, and accumulation is well taken. Zola, for example, compares the
orgiastic buying sprees of women on the sales floor with the obsession of an entrepreneur for a
virtuous maiden in scenes in Au bonheur des dames that exemplify parallel editing. The impassioned
relationship between buyers and commodities, in short, is one of temptation, seduction, and finally
rape, a drama rendered even more titillating by the taboo of interracial desire in The Cheat .
DeMille borrowed an old plot device about gambling used in Lord Chum-fey and in The Squaw
Man to precipitate the series of events leading to seduction and rape in The Cheat .[51] As treasurer
of the Red Cross, Edith gambles with funds meant for Belgian refugees, the film's only reference to
the events of World War I, so that she may ignore her husband's plea for economies and splurge on
fashionable gowns. Symbolically, the Red Cross ball is held at Tori's mansion, described in the script
as a "gorgeous combination of modern luxury and oriental beauty." Guests must traverse a Japanese
bridge in a richly landscaped garden to leave the mundane world behind and to enjoy the pleasures
of an emporium. Although her upper-class home has a living room accented with a dark, velvety
portiere, plush upholstered furniture, and a grand piano, Edith is captivated by Tori's mansion, a site
replicating exotic displays in department stores. Upon arrival, guests congregate in a large living
room decorated with art objects that include a statue of a Buddha in front of a folding screen.
Architecturally distinctive, the room is dominated by a magnificent hanging lantern and supported by
dark columns with heavy gold ornamentation in Oriental design. Assuming the role of a dry-goods
merchant or a museum guide, Tori attempts to seduce Edith with priceless objets d'art during a
private tour of

― 105 ―
the back region or "Shoji Room." According to a report in Motion Picture News , this set was filled
with "novelties," including a bronze Buddha and "mysterious panels" borrowed from wealthy
Japanese in Los Angeles and San Francisco.[52] As detailed in the script:

This room is the typically Japanese room—In it are Shoji Doors—The Shrine of Buddha—A cabinet where Tori keeps his
treasures—A gold screen against which stands silhouetted sharp as an etching, a tall black vase full of cherry blossoms—
Near the screen stands the treasure cabinet—and a brazier of coals with small branding iron which has Tori's seal on the
end—This brazier has a cover to it—On a table are several artistic curios—Over a seat is thrown a woman's gorgeous
kimono—plainly a treasure of great worth—etc.[53]

As Tori opens a sliding door and extends his arms in welcome, Edith enters the room, lit in very
low-key lighting, and advances to the foreground where she becomes a showpiece by posing self-
consciously like a manikin draped with an exquisite kimono. She refuses, however, to accept the
costly garment as a gift in what is obviously a ritual of seduction. As opposed to the ballroom scene
tinted in blue, the shots in the Shoji Room are tinted amber to lend the objects a more lustrous
glow. Consistent with the architecture of the house which features sliding shoji screens, the couple's
movement is lateral as they occupy a series of contiguous but fragmented spaces. As Tori gestures
left, they exit the frame and retreat further into the interior of the room. A cut to a medium shot
shows them standing before Tori's desk laden with exotic objects. Edith is captivated by the bibelots
on display, but when her curiosity about the branding tool elicits an explanation—"That means it
belongs to me"—she is palpably uncomfortable and shrinks back. A cut to a longer shot of the same
scene effects a change in scale that creates depth as Edith moves to the rear of the room to
continue her excursion. A folding screen in the background stands beneath a vase containing a large
branch of cherry blossoms whose petals rain down on her.
As if to break the spell of enchantment to anticipate a disastrous turn of events, DeMille
suddenly cuts to an extreme long shot of the couple photographed from a slightly oblique high angle
that is unsettling. A succession of medium shots are then intercut to show events as they occur in
the front region of the ballroom and in the back region of the Shoji Room. Jones, whom Edith has
entrusted with the Red Cross funds, is searching for her among the ballroom guests. A cut back to
the Shoji Room shows Tori flicking on a light switch to give Edith a better view of the Buddha seated
before an incense burner releasing puffs of smoke into the air. Suddenly, Jones intrudes on this
backstage tour with devastating news that the charity funds have been lost. Stunned, Edith faints in
front of the statue of the Buddha. Switching off a series of lights, Tori renders the interior completely
dark as the film is now tinted in blue instead of amber. A cut to a blank screen, the

― 106 ―
 [Full Size]

22. Agreeing to "pay the price" in The Cheat (1915), Fannie Ward accepts a
ten thousand dollar check from Japanese art collector Sessue Hayakawa
to avoid a ruinous disclosure. (Photo courtesy George Eastman House)
left half of which is part of the shoji panel, represents an adjacent space outdoors. Gradually,
Tori enters the frame as he carries the socialite's body and steals a kiss before she revives. While
Edith confides her dilemma to him, suddenly a light in the interior projects the shadows of Richard
and Jones, who are conversing inside, against the shoji screen on the left. A reverse angle shot
shows the two men on the opposite side of the screen. Richard informs his friend, "I wish I could
help you—but I couldn't raise a dollar tonight to save my life." Fearful of disclosure, signified by
garish newspaper headlines that appear on the darkened screen to her right, Edith agrees to "pay
the price" in exchange for ten thousand dollars. DeMille makes brilliant use of lighting effects, color
tinting, set design, and variations in scale and angle of shots to dramatize a ritual of seduction
symbolizing the moral contradictions of a consumer culture.
The Shoji Room, at first an exotic spectacle, continues to be the scene of disastrous
transactions. As opposed to coded social rituals in genteel drawing rooms, the back region remains a
site where financial deals, violent

― 107 ―
emotions, and sexual desire are undisguised. After learning that her husband's stock investments
have yielded a fortune, Edith attempts to renege on her deal by offering Tori a ten thousand dollar
check. When he insists, "You cannot buy me off," a violent struggle ensues during which Edith
brandishes a samurai sword. Tori brutally seizes her and brands her on the left shoulder with the
mark of his possessions. The enraged socialite retaliates by grasping a gun and inflicting a similar
wound on her assailant. A startling correspondence between these two antagonists divided by race
and gender underscores the film's representation of modern consumption as a form of Orientalism or
Western hegemony. Albeit the villain, Tori, like Edith, is a victim whose desire is thwarted by the
arousal of desire in others in an unending cycle of exchange. Aside from the symmetry of their
wounding each other on the left shoulder, the two characters are shown in matching high angle
shots that show the diagonal of their fallen bodies intersecting with the line of the tatami mat. When
Richard arrives on the scene moments after Edith's departure, he bursts through the shoji screen
with explosive force to find Tori clutching a piece of chiffon torn from a gown. Unquestionably, this
violation is a counterpart of the rape that has just occurred and is perpetrated, not coincidentally,
against the Japanese merchant by an enraged husband. Attempting to shield his wife from her
crime, Richard too engages in duplicity as he assumes blame for the shooting and is imprisoned.
When Edith visits him in jail, DeMille projects the shadows of the characters and the vertical bars of
the cell onto the rear wall in a succession of riveting shots. As in the scenes in the Shoji Room, the
positioning of the figures in terms of light and dark areas of the frame signifies emotional states
corresponding to ethical dilemmas. Paralleling this melodrama, it should be noted, were equally
histrionic events that blurred the line between reality and representation. Jack Dean and Fannie
Ward were married after a lawsuit in which Dean's first wife accused Ward, then a widow, of
alienation of affection.
Within the historical context of urban immigration and resurgent nativism in the early twentieth
century, what does the dramatic courtroom conclusion of The Cheat signify? Specifically, what
message is being conveyed in the form of Orientalism as a Western discourse regarding American
relations with an emergent Japan? Although Americans responded enthusiastically to Japanese
exhibits of precious objets d'art at world's fair pavilions in Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, and
Saint Louis, their fascination was a sign of profound ambivalence. As Neil Harris argues, Americans
projected their own equivocal response to modernization, industrialism, and immigration onto Japan,
a nation whose artwork was still the product of exquisite craftsmanship even as its government
began to Westernize.[54] Given anti-Asian sentiment on the West Coast, where the Chinese had long
been brutally oppressed, admiration for Japanese artifacts

― 108 ―
did not translate into a welcome for new immigrants. A negotiated Gentlemen's Agreement with
Japan, therefore, restricted further entry, of Japanese laborers, and state legislators barred Japanese
immigrants from land ownership and citizenship.[55]
The tense courtroom drama that concludes The Cheat is highly charged with the politics of
nativism and racism characteristic of the era. At the beginning of the proceedings, the camera pans
across the jury box to show twelve white men in three-piece suits as representatives of the status
quo. As the trial progresses, DeMille uses a number of masked medium close-ups of the principals to
reveal their emotional reaction to crucial testimony. During a sensational moment following the
announcement of a guilty verdict, Edith proclaims her guilt and disrobes to reveal the scar that
vindicates her actions. The sympathetic courtroom crowd, which has become all male in the final
shots, erupts in anger and surges forward in a scene recalling a lynch mob. In fact, the script
characterizes the situation as a "riot" in which the audience shouts, "Lynch him! Lynch him!"
(referring to Tori) and urges men to "right the wrong of the white woman."[56] As noted in Moving
Picture World , "the wrath of the audience bursts forth with elemental fury and there ensues a scene
that for tenseness and excitement has never been matched on stage or screen." Equally impressed,
the New York Dramatic Mirror described the courtroom scene as "one of the most realistic mob
scenes that has ever been produced upon the screen."[57]
Since DeMille himself pencilled on the script the clichéd intertitle, "East is East and West is West,
and never the twain shall meet," the message of the film about race relations is clear. In sum, The
Cheat is a statement about the impossibility of assimilating "colored" peoples, no matter how
civilized their veneer, and warns against the horrors of miscegenation. When the courtroom crowd
attempts to attack Tori, it recalls lynch mobs that murdered blacks with impunity in a segregationist
era of Jim Crow laws. Within the context of early-twentieth-century demographics, protest against
Asians and African Americans also represented paranoia about the new immigrants from southern
and eastern Europe. At the time, Congressman Oscar Underwood called for a literacy test to restrict
immigration by claiming that the nation's purity was being threatened by the mixture of Asiatic and
African blood coursing in the veins of southern Europeans.[58]
Although nativism and racism are obviously linked in The Cheat as a response to the new
immigration, the relationship of these political developments to the "new woman" as a consumer is
more complex. As homologous threats to the social formation, women and racial groups may be
substituted for each other in considerations of the-body politic. A lurid aspect of Orientalism as a
Western discourse, moreover, is the characterization of the East as effeminate and subject to colonial
rape. A sign of their correspondence, Edith and Tori wear similar costumes in the film's early
 ― 109 ―
sequences. During an outing, for example, the socialite appears in a striped coat lined with fabric in
a bold, checkered pattern, while Tori wears a striped shirt and dons a plaid cap. Yet Edith is
rehabilitated as a repentant wife through objectification of her body as a courtroom spectacle, a
strategy that reinforces sexual difference to offset the diminution of separate spheres in Victorian
culture.[59] Consumer behavior as a sign of modernity, in other words, is recuperated by
sentimental values. Such a narrative strategy displaces anxiety about the "new woman," which was
considerable, onto the racial "Other." Nevertheless, women's extravagant behavior was stereotyped
as childish, if not deceitful. According to the script, when Richard reprimands Edith for a bill totalling
$1,450 worth of gowns and negligees, he "indicates some displeasure, but his attitude is that of one
talking to a spoiled child—not angry."[60] Yet women's inability to resist merchants and advertisers
who lured them to department stores, labeled an "Adamless Eden," surely provoked disquieting
thoughts about the nature of female sexuality.[61] Discourse on kleptomania as a function of the
womb was, therefore, a symptom of larger concerns regarding the viability of traditional definitions
of gender. Attempts to regulate sexual behavior and the body, including the medical categorization of
women as kleptomaniacs, were part of tactics to impose order on a pluralistic urban environment. As
women's historians demonstrate, such policing attempts intensified during periods of rapid social
change and upheaval.[62]
If Edith's questionable behavior is interpreted as a woman's response to her ambiguous role in a
consumer culture, what, then, may be said about Tori as a Japanese merchant and art collector?
According to Grant McCracken, "the cultural meaning carried by consumer goods is enormously more
various and complex than the Veblenian attention to status was capable of recognizing."
Commodities do not necessarily constitute the locus of irrational and ungovernable desires, nor are
they merely objects acquired during lapses of ethical judgment.[63] Granted, this may be the case
today, but a discussion of Progressive Era consumption that does not account for the legacy of
sentimentalism and evangelical Protestantism is an exercise in decontextualization. Yet McCracken's
observations are useful in decoding the actions of the Japanese merchant as a hieroglyph that
requires an investigation of meaning invested in objects. Genteel familiarity with world's fair exhibits
as an intertext in middle-class culture accounts for the characterization of Tori as an art dealer. Since
his enormous wealth renders consumption meaningless, Tori is no longer a consumer but a collector
of rare objets d'art ritualistically branded with the mark of his possession.[64] Although department
stores, museums, and world's fairs were interchangeable in terms of architectural design and
displays meant to spur consumption, these institutions also served as social agencies with a mission
to educate public taste. According to this logic, the Japanese merchant has

― 110 ―
learned his lesson well and seeks assimilation in American society. For him, Edith is not simply prized
as a beautiful woman who represents a tabooed relationship; as the ultimate bibelot, she symbolizes
his acceptance as an art collector in an elite society that marks him as alien.[65] Anticipating their
rendezvous, Tori is even more sumptuously arrayed than the fashionable socialite. Consequently,
when Edith reneges on her bargain, he possesses her by force in accordance with an established
ritual signifying ownership. When she later changes her mind and offers herself willingly so that
charges against her husband will be dropped, Tori replies impassively, "You cannot cheat me twice."
Edith is labeled "The Cheat" because she has denied the Japanese merchant assimilation into
privileged white society.
Unquestionably, the enthusiastic reception accorded The Cheat was in large measure due to
Hayakawa's riveting screen presence. Film critics unanimously singled out his subtle acting style,
described as "the repressive, natural kind, devoid of gesticulation and heroics," because it not only
contrasted with the melodramatic stage posturing of Fannie Ward and Jack Dean but rendered the
villain a complex character. As Hayakawa stated in a fan magazine interview, "If I want to show on
the screen that I hate a man, I do not shake my fists at him. I think down in my heart how I hate
him and try not to move a muscle of my face. . . . The audience . . . gets the story with finer shades
of meaning than words could possibly tell them." The Japanese actor in effect triumphed over the
racist characterization of Tori in a script that stereotyped him as bowing with "oriental deference,"
having "a slow Oriental smile" or an "enigmatic smile," registering "sinister satisfaction," and
crouching like an animal with "eyes narrowing" and "nostrils breathing hard."[66]
Catapulted into stardom, Hayakawa became one of the most important male stars on Famous
Players-Lasky's roster and preceded Rudolph Valentino as an exotic matinee idol for female
filmgoers.[67] Predictably, his screen persona remained charged by the fiendish role he played in The
Cheat , a part that aroused protest in Japan and in Japanese-American communities. Publicity
stories emphasized his bellicose nature and gave detailed descriptions of the ritual of hara-kiri.
Photo-Play Journal informed readers, "You can 'take it from us,' this popular Japanese artist can
scrap. His efficiency in the art of belligerency may be due to his fondness for it. In fact, he'd rather
fight than eat any day. . . . Sessue is a formidable rival either at boxing or jui-jitsu [sic ]." Motion
Picture Classic claimed, "in his customs and manners and conversation he is American to the finger-
tips, but one always feels . . . there is the soul of some stern old Samurai."[68] Ultimately, the
Japanese were unassimilable, not least because Japan's rise to global power was perceived as a
threat to the United States in violation of Orientalism as a hegemonic discourse.[69]

― 111 ―
Since canon formation is a political enterprise, an inquiry into reasons for recognition of The Cheat ,
as opposed to other titles in DeMille's filmography, further illuminates the issue of the new
immigration in relation to the "new woman." Aesthetic considerations with respect to visual style,
such as low-key lighting with dramatic use of shadows or mise-en-scène including a high ratio of
medium shots, were obviously significant in the film's reception at a time when the industry sought
cultural legitimacy.[70] Critics singled out the film's sensational lighting. According to Moving Picture
World , "the lighting effects . . . are beyond all praise in their art, their daring and their originality."
A reviewer for Motion Picture News claimed that "the picture should mark a new era in lighting as
applied to screen productions." Sociological issues, however, were hardly negligible in the film's
reception and elevation to canon status. The Photoplay critic focused on The Cheat as "a melodrama
. . . full of incisive character touches, racial truths and dazzling contrasts"; he rightly predicted that
the story was so novel it would appear before footlights.[71] Charting a reversal of the usual
trajectory, The Cheat was adapted for the legitimate stage in the United States and as an opera in
France (where it was retitled Forfaiture ). Paramount remade the film twice, and a French filmmaker
shot a European version as an homage that also starred Hayakawa.[72] Without minimizing DeMille's
superb achievement, the enormous success of The Cheat must be understood within the context of
an era of rapid urban change that provoked discourse on the "new woman" and the new immigration
as ideologically charged subjects.
As a footnote, it should be observed that the acclaim accorded The Cheat may well have profited
from hindsight. William deMille stated in his account of the early silent film era that The Cheat
became "the talk of the year." Yet an examination of trade journal literature shows that Carmen
(1915) received far greater publicity as a result of the screen debut of Metropolitan Opera soprano
Geraldine Farrar. Samuel Goldwyn recalled in his autobiography that The Cheat catapulted DeMille
"to the front" rank of film directors and "was a first real knockout after a number of moderate
successes." Again, trade journal literature and DeMille's financial statements indicate otherwise. But
The Cheat did earn foreign receipts that were considerably higher than those posted for DeMille's
earlier features, an indication that overseas reception of the film was quite exceptional. At the time
of its release, Jesse L. Lasky did claim that The Cheat had "equalled if not surpassed" Carmen and
rated the film as "the very best photoplay" his company had produced. Indeed, he had written to
Goldwyn, "At last we have a picture with a wonderful, absorbing love story, with plenty of drama,
and original in theme. Cecil has surpassed all his other efforts as the direction is absolutely perfect."
Possibly, William deMille and Goldwyn were influenced in their recollections by French critics like
Louis Delluc whose

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response to The Cheat was nothing short of adulation comparable to reception later accorded
Battleship Potemkin (1925). Astonished by DeMille's brilliant achievement, French intellectuals
began to consider film as a serious art form. And as a further sign of bourgeois respectability, The
Cheat drew crowds for ten months at a theater on the fashionable Boulevard des Italiens.[73]
The Sentimental Heroine Versus the "New Woman": the Heart of Nora Flynn

After filming two more adaptations, Temptation (1916) and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine (1916),
DeMille again collaborated with Hector Turnbull and Jeanie Macpherson on The Heart of Nora Flynn
(1916). The New York Times , interestingly, praised the feature as "an excellent example of the
modern photodrama as opposed to the film founded on a story or stage play." DeMille, however,
expressed the contradictions involved in the studio's transition from adaptating intertexts in genteel
culture to filming original screenplays for a broader audience. Since he was in the habit of personally
inspecting exhibition venues, the director called attention to the need to update film titles as
marquee attractions. As he wrote to Lasky, "we are inclined to be a little too high-brow. I have noted
two pictures . . . playing opposite each other. . . . Going Straight has been jammed all week and A
Gutter Magdalene has been starving to death. The Heart of Nora Flynn proved to be an awful lemon
as have the titles of many of our recent productions."[74] Whatever the merits of its title, which was
indeed sentimental, the film marks a transition in the director's body of work during the Progressive
Era. As such, it may be read as a sequel to The Cheat in its representation of gender, class, and
ethnicity as these intersect in a consumer culture.
The screen in The Heart of Nora Flynn , as in The Cheat , simulates a display window for the
well-to-do whose conspicuous consumption conflicts with personal ethics. During the credits, all the
characters, with the exception of playboy Jack Murray (Charles West), are lit against black drops in
medium shots as they fantasize about desired objects in a mood of reverie. Mrs. Brantley Stone
(Lola May), obviously a lady of leisure, reclines on a chaise longue with a lap dog and takes tea from
a silver service. A cut to an extreme close-up shows the details of her lustrous pearls and lace-
trimmed negligee as she stares at an image of Jack inside her teacup. By contrast, Brantley Stone,
described as "A Man of Means" (Ernest Joy), is introduced in a shot similar to that of Richard Hardy
in the credits of The Cheat . Seated at his desk, he is busily poring over ticker tape and
correspondence, but he smiles when miniature figures of his wife and children appear on his desk.
Unfortunately, his happiness evaporates when his wife sends the toddlers away and greets

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her friend Jack. Appearing next in the credits are the two Stone children, Anne (Peggy George) and
Tommy ("Little Billie" Jacobs), seated on a wicker chair and looking at an album. Nolan, a hot-
tempered chauffeur (stage and vaudeville actor Elliott Dexter), is working behind the hood of a
stately and well-polished limousine. Finally, Marie Doro, a comedienne whose theatrical career was
promoted by Charles Frohman, appears in the role of Nora, the "Irish Nurse Maid." Preparing the
children's bath, she appears rather wistful. A cut to a medium close-up shows her holding a child's
outfit while the superimposed image of the man she hopes to marry, Nolan, appears to her left. (In
fact, Doro and Dexter were married for a brief period in real life.) Since the lady of leisure and the
Irish maid are the only characters privileged with close-ups, the film announces itself not only as a
morality tale about the ethics of the domestic sphere but also as a drama about female desire.
A film that may be construed as The Cheat narrated from the viewpoint of the maid standing in
for the wife, The Heart of Nora Flynn contrasts the self-absorbed "new woman" with the sentimental
heroine. At the beginning, Nora instructs Anne, who preys on goldfish, "Have all the fun ye want,
darlin' but don't get it by hurtin' someone else"—a lesson the child's self-indulgent mother must
learn as well. While Mr. Stone devotes long hours to business deals, Mrs. Stone neglects the children
and engages in a dangerous flirtation with Jack. An obliging "man about town" who has just acquired
a luxurious, cream-colored roadster, he sends her notes that read, "I've a perfect peach of a new car
. . . take a little spin with me. It's the color you like." Unhappily, this situation escalates into a
sensational turn of events one evening when Mrs. Stone decides to abandon her husband and
children and to abscond with her lover. As in The Golden Chance and The Cheat , DeMille uses
dramatic low-key lighting to construct a tableau that dramatizes the moral dilemma of the
characters. Indeed, he specified lighting effects in the script for some of the film's most impressive
scenes.[75] A medium long shot of the living room, for example, is lit only by the glow of a table
lamp illuminating the lower half of the screen as the couple secretly meet and prepare to depart. A
cut to an exterior long shot shows the headlights of Mr. Stone's chauffeured limousine as it speeds
toward the house. A cut back to the interior shows the headlights flash through the window and
briefly illuminate the surprised guilty couple. Startled, Jack turns off the table lamp to plunge the
room into darkness.
Practically exposed with her lover, Mrs. Stone appeals to Nora to hide Jack: "The future of my
home—my babies—everything is in your hands!" Unfortunately, Jack takes refuge in Nora's room in
the back region upstairs while Nolan, infuriated by what he construes as a betrayal, breaks down the
door and shoots the scoundrel. As in The Cheat , a jealous man spends the night in jail, but the
scene is pedestrian compared to the dramatic use of

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low-key lighting and shadows of despondent figures in the earlier film. DeMille appears in this
instance to be quite uninterested in quoting from his own work. Upon his release, Nolan is tailed by
reporters who ask, "Did it ever occur to you that your sweetheart has been used as a 'Cat's-paw'?"
Despite the chauffeur's entreaties that she reveal the truth to newsmen, Nora appears willing to
sacrifice not only her reputation but her employment for the sake of the children. Discharged by an
employer who tells his wife, "I won't have her kind of woman contaminating you and the children,"
Nora at first pleads with Mrs. Stone, "You've got to tell Nolan it's you and not me that's bad."
Confronted with Mrs. Stone's own desperation at being exposed, however, the maid consoles her in a
medium two-shot that conveys an intimacy impossible between two women who are not social
equals. A medium shot invites sympathy for Mrs. Stone's dilemma because she is next shown alone
in a room with a gilded bird cage. After dismissing the re-porters, Nora tells her mistress, "I don't
want any thanks, ma'am but you've got to promise not to see him again!" Silently witnessing the
pact between the two women, the wounded "man about town" hovers in the extreme lower right
hand corner of the frame, a sign of his irrelevance. A cut to the neglected children shows them
waiting in the hallway; in the next shot, Mrs. Stone embraces them for the first time in the film.
As for Nora, her real loss is neither her reputation nor her employment, but Tommy. A delightful
child, he is inconsolable when she leaves the mansion and he gives her his favorite toy, a wooden
duck, as a token of his affection. DeMille orchestrates a heart-wrenching farewell sequence by
intercutting medium shots of the sobbing child staring into dappled sunlight, long shots of Nora and
Nolan as they walk away from the estate, and a reverse angle shot of Tommy as he lays crumpled
on the bench window seat inside his room. The director was so skillful in eliciting performances from
child actors that their absence from his later work is regrettable. In the final shot of the film, Nolan
comforts an equally desolate Nora by offering her a branch with orange blossoms to signify their
future together.
DeMille singles out The Heart of Nora Flynn rather than The Cheat in his autobiography as a film
that "was praised for its lighting effects. 'An auto-mobile charging along a dark street, with only the
lights and the reflection of the street lamps on the pavement visible' seems commonplace now,"
recalls the director, "but it was deemed worthy of special mention in The Motion Picture News ."[76]
A film that relies heavily on intertitles in addition to lighting to convey a moral lesson, The Heart of
Nora Flynn dramatizes the contradictions of a consumer culture according to a conflicting visual
strategy. A scrutiny of the reviews shows that the critics themselves were divided about ambiguities
in the film. As the New York Dramatic Mirror complained, "one or two of the subtitles could have
been greatly improved, as they lent

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a decidedly false note to an otherwise realistic production." Variety described the film as "one of
those self-sacrificing yarns, on the 'Peg' lines, in which a little Irish maid . . . saves her mistress
from being compromised." The Motion Picture News concluded, however, "it is needless to speak of
artistry where the DeMilles are concerned. There seems to be a deftness about their touch . . .
understood by persons who never even heard the word 'art.' " Moving Picture World concurred: "Of
the splendid lighting effects, the superb settings and realistic atmosphere it is not necessary to say
much on a Lasky production."[77]
Signifying contradictions involved in the redirection of the privatized family outward toward
consumption and commercialized leisure, DeMille's discourse on the "new woman" endorsed the
values of the "old" as opposed to the "new" middle class. Such ambiguity permeated the film's
narrative strategy. As critics observed, the director relied heavily upon the use of intertitles to
convey a sentimental message that conflicted with a technically advanced visual style. Although
DeMille's mise-en-scène drew upon the legacy of Victorian pictorialism as an intertext, lighting
setups not only reinforced moral lessons but also enticed spectators by imparting a luster to
expensive commodities like home furnishings and automobiles. The representation of material
goods, in other words, was seductive and contradicted didactic intertitles. Silent cinema, like other
cultural forms in the genteel tradition, privileged sight as the key to spectacle in an era of increased
conspicuous consumption.[78] As symbolized by the self-indulgent "new woman" in The Cheat and
The Heart of Nora Flynn , however, the pleasures of self-gratification were not as yet unambiguously
inviting. Guilt was thus displaced, on both a literal and symbolic level, onto the working-class,
ethnic, and racial "Other" while the "new woman" was recuperated according to sentimental values.
DeMille later maintained, in his role as a cultural steward, that the cinema promoted
understanding across class and ethnic, if not racial, barriers; he asserted: "the screen has made
good progress in teaching the lower grades of society that every rich man is not purse-proud and
heartless and in disabusing the minds of the upper ten of the belief that every laboring man goes
home . . . and beats his wife and children."[79] Yet his Progressive Era films preserved class, ethnic,
and racial hierarchies in an articulation of genteel middle-class ideology. To be sure, the traditional
line between separate spheres based on gender was also redrawn according to Victorian social
practice. As demonstrated by The Golden Chance, The Cheat , and The Heart of Nora Flynn ,
however, the "new woman" was constructed as spectacle for display in the front region through
spatial exile of the urban "Other" to the back region. Although the Irish, or old, immigrants—unlike
the Japanese, or new, immigrants—were assimilable in a future increasingly

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dominated by popular rather than genteel culture, the director's work attests to fault lines in the
body politic during a period of rising nativism and racism. Apart from describing the terrain of the
respectable middle-class home as a site of self-theatricalization, the terms front and back region also
serve as a useful metaphor for exploitive class, ethnic, and racial relations in consumer capitalism.

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Four The Screen As Display Window: Constructing the