Lawrence Rainey
CONTACT
- Tel 44 1904 434716
- Email lr9@york.ac.uk
- Fax 44 1904 433372
CURRENT RESEARCH
Office Politics: the Secretary in Film and Fiction, 1890-1940 (America, Britain, France, and Germany)
Nothing did more to transform the lives of twentieth-century women than the development of modern office culture. Hitherto restricted to careers in teaching or nursing, women could now achieve a new, if precarious independence, and for the first time they found themselves working alongside male colleagues. Almost overnight, Victorian conventions regulating contact between the sexes were rendered obsolete, and even the appearance of that basic unit of urban life, the street, was wholly transformed. "Not many years ago," wrote one observer of New York in 1894, "it was rather an uncommon thing to see girls or women employed in business offices. . . . Today . . . the great industrial army that morning and evening throngs the streets on its way to and from the workshops and offices, is largely composed of women."
The sudden ubiquity of the secretary or typist formed part of what business historians have called "a veritable revolution in communication technology" which took place between roughly 1890 and 1910, a revolution that transformed the office into a nexus of formal communication flows sustained by an interlocking grid of new communication and storage-and-retrieval technologies--typewriters, telephones, dictaphones, adding machines, duplicators, loose-leaf ledgers, carbon copy papers, card indexes, and vertical filing systems. The typist stood at the centre of that grid--modernity incarnate, a demotic counterpart to those more exotic and celebrated contemporaries, the aviator and the automobile racer, figures who embodied all the allure and danger of modern freedom. But while the cultural discourses that surrounded these male figures have been extensively studied, scholars have scarcely acknowledged the vast quantity of novels and films that have a secretary as their central protagonist. This study will assess 120 novels and 100 films produced in America, Britain, France, and Germany between 1890 and 1940, mapping what can only be described as a lost continent of modern consciousness.
The emergence of the secretary, whether viewed as a socio-historical phenomenon or as an elaborate cultural fable, coincided with the rise of recognisably modern media culture. In 1895, the first film for public exhibition was shown in Paris; one year later the first tabloid newspaper made its appearance (The Daily Mail), and already by 1902 it was selling more than one million copies a day, then the largest circulation in the world. Competitors against and collaborators with the novel, these new media were voracious consumers of narratives meant to address a mass audience. Consider three examples. In 1921, American newspapers found that a new comic strip about a secretary, "Tilly the Toiler," proved a remarkable success. It was hardly long before Tilly became the pretext for eight books and even a Hollywood film (1927). The principal character of the English novel Sally Bishop: a Romance (1908) evidently fascinated British readers, so much so that they watched her story transformed into film in 1916, 1923, and again in 1930. Chickie, an American novel by Elenore Meherin, appeared first as a syndicated newspaper serial, then as a novel tied in to a contemporary film (1925).
Inadvertently, my remarks until this point have suggested that the secretary was a protagonist in a single kind of novel (popular romance) and its cinematic counterpart (romantic comedy). But that was not the case. Those these types do predominate and were widely consumed, typists also featured in numerous other genres, including detective fiction, melodrama, serious realistic fiction, and even experimental fiction. The fictional or cinematic secretary was not a single type, nor even a stable body of plot conventions. She was, instead, a highly contested figure, one whose significance varied enormously in different times and national contests, variability that also stemmed from a rapidly changing geopolitical context.
In 1890, when typists were first beginning to appear in banks and insurance firms in London and New York, the undisputed world power was Great Britain. Its financial services sector situated in the City had made Britain the biggest investor, banker, insurer, and commodity dealer in the global economy, and by 1914 its overseas investments were equal to some 43 percent of the world's foreign investments. Though contemporary France also possessed sizable foreign investments (second only to Britain's), its financial services were not nearly as robust as New York's. With the outbreak of the Great War, American financial institutions inevitably surged to dominance (together with the new office culture that enabled them to function). But in France and Britain, that process was contemporary with another, more visible one: because neither country took steps to protect its film industries, and because audience demand for films actually increased during the war years, Hollywood swiftly dominated the French and British markets. Even Germany's film industry, which until 1922 was protected by wartime embargos that had continued in effect, suddenly found itself confronted with a formidable competitor. It was in France and Germany especially, the two countries most ravaged by the Great War, that contentious debates about "Americanization" became prominent features of interwar culture. The typist, young and single and independent, became the index for a way of life at once alluring and threatening, the sign of a much larger crisis in traditional beliefs and practices allegedly shattered by the war. Whether in film or fiction, the secretary of the interwar years was never simply the neutral reflection of some pre-given historical reality; but a figure called upon to perform symbolical labour, to serve as index and metaphor of a modernity that was seemingly shared and universal (and rendered in the universal language of film), but irreducibly local, particular, and contingent.
Little wonder that a typical plot convention of novels about typists entailed recounting the events which propel the young protagonist to leave her home in a small town and journey to the bewildering metropolis (London, Paris, Berlin, New York). They were fables of modernity, allegories of a shared journey into the modern experience. And since that experience has entailed a continual testing and retesting of the boundaries of sexuality, typist novels and films relentlessly explored borderlines of consensual sex and questions of sexual harassment. Changing notions of sexuality and gender roles; technology, capital, and new communication systems; the status of the individual in a new world shaped by systematic management; a media culture and the status of narrative--all the motifs of today, in short, are to be found in nucleo in this forgotten continent of the modern imagination.
RESEARCH SUPERVISION
Lawrence Rainey has recently supervised theses on a range of issues in modern poetry, covering authors such as T. S. Eliot, Seamus Heaney, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, John Ashbery. Others have taken up questions connected with modern fiction: James Joyce and medical culture, the crowd in modernist writing, the question of shame and modernism. He would welcome applications from candidates on any topic related to his research interests.
PROFESSIONAL ACTIVITIES
Lawrence Rainey is the founding editor of Modernism/Modernity, the foremost journal in its field and most recently the winner of a Phoenix Award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. He also edits a series of William McBride Studies in Modernism for Yale University Press.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Futurism: a Reader and Visual Repertoire. Yale University Press, forthcoming, 2007.The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot's Contemporary Prose. Yale University Press, 2005.
Revisiting "The Waste Land." Yale University Press, 2005.
Modernism: An Anthology. Blackwell Publishers, 2005
With A. Walton Litz and Louis Menand, Modernism and the New Criticism. Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. Yale University Press, 1998.
A Poem Containing History: Textual Studies in the Cantos of Ezra Pound. University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Ezra Pound and the Monument of Culture. University of Chicago Press, 1991.