Ciara Barrett
The Voice of a Girl: Adolescent Female Performance in Hollywood Musicals of the Late
1930s
Presented at the Irish Screen Studies Seminar 2014.
Full details at irishscreenstudies.ie

Charting trend towards the juvenation of the female musical star over
the course of the 1930s, which was both theoretical and literal

Representational paradigm shift: trend towards the individuation of
female musical stars with the concretization of the musical syntax
predicated on the “Platonic ideal of integration”

At the same time, increasingly conservative impulses of Hollywood
filmmaking practices and ideology created the need to downplay the
overt eroticism of female performances, thus the recourse to the girlchild whose erotic spectacularity can be disavowed by virtue of her
ostensible pre-sexuality

However, ultimately these girl-stars’s performances cannot fully be
contained within a traditionally gendered politics of viewing
o Temple explodes the myth of the spontaneous immanence of
the talented female performer
o Durbin and Garland’s representation show the instability of
the adolescent girl star as a coherent sign of generic meaning:
the visual and aural aspects of her performance-as-sign have
continually to be reconciled via her filmic representation
Between 1935 and 1938, when she was between the ages of six and ten,
Shirley Temple was the most popular film star in Hollywood. In less than a decade,
she generated hundreds of millions of dollars in box office receipts and merchandise
and almost single-handedly rescued Twentieth Century Fox from bankruptcy during
the Depression.1 As various film theorists and historians including Karen Lury, Lori
Merish, and Nadine Wills have established, Temple’s rampant popularity during the
mid- to late-1930s was indicative of a mass-cultural obsession with childhood and
children developed during the Victorian era and reignited in Depression-era America.
This trend towards “child-loving”, or fixation on childhood and children as
subject matter in art and popular culture bordered on the latently paedophilic
inasmuch as an obsession with, and desire for, children, images of children, and/or
childlike attitudes and behaviours is understood as derived from children’s real or
imagined association with innocence, freedom, and vulnerability. These qualities are
“Other” to physical and sexual maturity and are therefore theoretically eroticizable
and fetishizable in being constrained as “different.” Gaylyn Studlar has argued this in
her analysis of the silent star Mary Pickford, “’Oh, Doll Divine!’ Mary Pickford,
Masquerade, and the Paedophilic Gaze” from 2001. In this article, Studlar theorizes
Pickford’s performative juvenation, or what can be described as a sort of protracted
performance of youth and innocence both by Pickford in her films and extratextually
in promotional discourses. Studlar theorizes that as a mature film star, Pickford
willfully performed a juvenated version of herself in order to contain the potentially
threatening aspects of her success as a woman within the film industry and
maximize her popularity amongst both male and female audiences. In such a way,
Pickford was able to make “safe” and accessible her spectacularity as a female star
by feigning vulnerability, innocence, and self-effacement within a traditionally
gendered – and now also age-attendant – politics of viewing.2 And of course, I am
referencing a gendered politics of viewing associated with Classical Hollywood
Cinema as theorized by Laura Mulvey by which the female is represented as “to-belooked-at” and visually spectacular. Using the example of Mary Pickford, Studlar has
thus illustrated the crucial links between juvenility, vulnerability and femininity,
which are convergent in the figure of the female child or child-like performer. And it
is this theory I wish to put forward towards explaining the rise to prominence of the
musical girl-star in Depression-era Hollywood cinema.
1
Temple put her studio $30 million into profit by the end of 1940. Anne Edwards, Shirley Temple: American
Princess, (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1989), 129.
2 Gaylyn Studlar, “Oh, ‘Doll Divine’: Mary Pickford, Masquerade and the Pedophilic Gaze,” in A Feminist Reader in
Early Cinema, eds. Jennifer M. Bean and Diane Negra. Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2002.
Shirley Temple

Star image constructed around the Victorian ideal of the “priceless child”, as
noted by Studlar

Her talent both in films and in extratextual discourses is made to seem
spontaneously immanent (preserving the “myth of spontaneity” Jane Feuer
has theorised musicals try to develop around musicals) but also concealing
the labour behind her performance, its constructedness; Temple’s whole
image as a female star is about making her seem natural, as opposed to
talented

Her musical talent is fetishised and thereby contained within musical
numbers in which she is seen singing to an adult male diegetic audience; the
erotic aspects of her spectacular performance are, at the same time,
ostensibly denied by the fact of her physical immaturity and her situation
within the domestic

However, Temple, as a pre-adolescent child, may be seen rapidly physically
maturing by the end of the 1930s, as well as gaining awareness of herself as a
peformer, which explodes the myth of her spontaneous immanence and
exposes juvenation as performance
Deanna Durbin and Judy Garland

Their rise to stardom from around 1936 shows how the adolescent girlstar came to represent an idealised paradigm of femininity in the musical
because, on the onset, she could be contained more reliably within a
traditionally gendered politics of viewing: her body could be objectified
and spectacularised in an erotic/traditional way, but everything else
about her performance disavows this eroticism

Popular discourses surrounding female performance in the 1930s musical
shifted from a focus on the individual girl child to the fetishization of
female adolescence. This paradigm shift functioned as a means of
disavowing the essential problematics of female performative juvenation
within the musical syntax. Replacing those articles that expressed wonder
at the preponderance of “big pay babes” in movies from the middle of
the decade,3 in 1938 there was an explosion of literature in fan magazines
and trade journals on Hollywood’s so-called set of “young fry,” 4
adolescent stars like Mickey Rooney, Freddie Bartholomew, Deanna
Durbin and Judy Garland. As Gaylyn Studlar has noted, this was a direct
reflection of the extent to which the “teenager” had suddenly become an
object of “cultural fascination” in America.5

The fetishization of adolescent stars in popular discourse sanctioned
and sanitized the erotic appeal that had been denied or disavowed in
the
filmic
representation
of
Shirley
Temple.
Their
romantic
entanglements were a frequent object of speculation in the press,
functioning as an outlet for the expression of erotic interest in their
image, while their characters’ narratives in films tended to confirm their
pre-sexuality (if not their sexual interest) – a paradigm of representation
determined and closely guarded by Joseph Breen and the PCA. In such a
way, teenage stars of the late 1930s were fetishized for their liminality,
their poisedness-between-stages of life both physical and emotional,
between innocence and (sexual) precocity. This would be manifested in
the rise to prominence of Deanna Durbin and Judy Garland as leading
female musical stars at the end of the decade.

Durbin: containing the excesses of the classically trained female voice
through traditionally visually scopophilic means: Durbin’s physical
maturity-cum-pre-sexuality
allowed/made
possible
her
solo
individuation as a female musical performer within the phallogocentric
structures and strictures of the genre.

Garland: breakdown of the traditional visual representation of the great
female singer, aural affect surpassing the visual
3
“A Quartet of Big Pay Babes,” Op. Cit..
Sally Reid, “Young Fry Society,” Photoplay (July 1939), 24.
5 Gaylyn Studlar, Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema, Op. Cit., 95.
4