Betwixt and Between: How Male and Female Audiences Engaged with the "Magnetic Girl" to Complicate Fin-de-Siècle Gender Roles

Authors

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25071/2369-7326.40270

Abstract

Lulu Hurst was a young Gilded Age-era performer known for her demonstrations of uncanny physical strength. For the most part, Hurst’s performance involved challenging an audience member to wrest objects from her grasp. For a member of Hurst's predominantly male audience, matching her strength to his own was a means by which to prove his masculinity to his peers. The notion of masculinity being on trial was particularly significant in the late nineteenth century--a time when women were beginning to gain social power.  Elaine Showalter famously describes this period as being characterized by a "battle within the sexes" as well as between them (9). As such, I argue that Hurst’s “demonstrations of strength” are best understood within the context of what Marvin Carlson terms "resistant performance"--that is, a performance that subverts the status quo by exposing its underlying assumptions. Drawing on Victor Turner’s work on ritual and liminality, I argue that when the individual male agent separates himself from his peers in order to challenge Hurst, his gender identity temporarily becomes destabilized. However, while Hurst may have disrupted the status quo by troubling gender binaries, her performance also served to reify existing social hierarchies. This paradox is both a marker of resistant performance and of social change. For the postmodern reader, Hurst's performance is significant in that her demonstrations reveal the implications of resistant performance during a unique period of cultural transition in which gender identity was called into question. 

Author Biography

Elizabeth Lowry, Arizona State University

Elizabeth Lowry is a Lecturer in Rhetoric and Composition at Arizona State University. She holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Language from Arizona State and an MFA from New York University.

References

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Hurst, Lulu. Lulu Hurst (the Georgia Wonder) Writes Her Autobiography and for the First Time Explains and Demonstrates the Great Secret of Her Marvelous Power. Psychic, 1897.

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“Ladies’ Day with Lulu: The Georgia Girl Exhibits Herself to an Audience of Ladies.” New York Times, 17 July 1884, p. 2.

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Showalter, Elaine. Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle. Virago, 1992.

Thomassen, Bjørn. “The Uses and Meanings of Liminality.” International Political Anthropology, vol. 2, no. 1, 2009, pp. 5–27.

Turner, Victor. “Liminality and Communitas.” The Performance Studies Reader, edited by Henry Bial, Routledge, 2004, pp. 79–87.

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Published

2017-10-26

How to Cite

Lowry, E. (2017). Betwixt and Between: How Male and Female Audiences Engaged with the "Magnetic Girl" to Complicate Fin-de-Siècle Gender Roles. Pivot: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies and Thought, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.25071/2369-7326.40270

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Critical Articles