D. W. Griffith | The Planter's Wife / 1908

the conventional tomboy

by Douglas Messerli

 

D. W. Griffith (screenwriter and director) The Planter's Wife / 1908

 

D. W. Griffith’s 1908 short film The Planter’s Wife, is mostly a film that concerns heterosexual female infidelity, focusing on a woman living as a farmer’s wife with a child; she is absolutely bored with her life and close to depression. Still a young girl herself, a fact clearly made evident, if not through the acting of Claire McDowell who plays Mrs. John Holland nonetheless through the long synopsis provided by “Moving Picture World.” That synopsis describes her situation, “The wife’s sister is an innocent, good-natured tomboy who never for a moment [had] dreamed that her sister’s low spirits were due to anything else than ill-health; no more did John.” In 1908, it is apparent, low spirits (depression) was not considered an issue of health, and good health itself for farm wives was defined through the hard work of cooking, housecleaning, yard and farm duties, and caring for children that often wore them down even in their youths.

     As opposed to her daily life, Mrs. Holland has created a romantic fantasy with the help of a local, Tom Roland (Harry Solter), a mustachioed villain just a step up from the melodramas of the late 1890s and the amateur stage productions represented in movies such as Show Boat (1936). Griffith actually expands on the simple melodramatic tropes of the first few frames with a meeting up of the housewife and her lover by a nearby river that is far more sophisticated and moves this early film closer to German writer Theodor Fontaine’s 1895 fiction, Effi Briest, the latter work transformed precisely because of its brilliant melodramatic conventions into the 1974 film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. 

      The husband, John Holland (Arthur V. Johnson, reputed to be Griffith’s favorite actor) is presented as a young, lean, boyish farmer, clueless about his wife’s condition, just as, so the synopsis has told us, is her sister Nellie (Florence Lawrence, in real life married to Solter with whom she established Victor Studios, later sold to Carl Laemmle to become University Film).

      It is Tomboy Nellie, Florence Lawrence, of course, who explains this film's appearance in this book, providing as she does the slightest of interest to LGBTQ viewers. When she discovers that her sister has run off with the rotter Roland, leaving her baby in the hands of the gentle John and herself, Nellie suddenly comes alive, pulling out her gun, putting on her chaps, and hefting herself quickly upon a horse as she races after the phaeton carrying Roland and her sister.

      A bit like the world of F. W. Murnau’s 1927 film Sunrise, the only route to freedom seems to be over a body of water, and the villain and his willing maiden beat Nellie to the boat. Nothing will stop Nellie, however, as she takes the boat owner by gunpoint and forces his to row after them, finally confronting her sister and her lover, demanding that Roland jump into the water and swim home, while she takes her unwilling sister back to her farmer’s cabin, only then revealing her actual identity.

     Startled by the revelation of her own sister being her abductor and now totally confused and frustrated in her emotions, Holland’s wife—as evidence of her lack of identity and importance only as a housewife, not even given a name—holds the gun to her sister, actually attempting to kill her as Roland returns home (all in front the baby I might add). Failing in her acts, she perceives the terrible mistakes she has made in hooking up to a violent outsider, and now willing to kill her beloved sister to escape with him.

     But what is most important about this film is that the Tomboy sister, a predecessor of many other female tomboy and male sissy characters in these early movies, in this film is the biggest supporter of the male heteronormative society in which she lives.

     Surely Nellie will never allow herself or be allowed to live a heterosexual life, unless she were to play out the absurd dreams of a cowwoman like Texas Guinan in her tomboy heterosexual fantasy The Night Rider (1920). Yet she supports the normative. 

      Of course, in some respects this allows the audiences of the day to feel totally comfortably about and even support women who in this period were increasingly representing themselves as figures who could not only survive without the help of males but often were able to overcome the paternalistic societies in which they lived without gender definition.. By kidnapping her sister and bringing her back to her senses and purportedly good health, Nellie succeeds in distracting her audiences and her fellow characters from having any fears about her own clearly queer behavior. The Holland baby will surely grow up loving his odd auntie Nellie as much as his own distracted mother and totally clueless farmer dad. 

 

Los Angeles, July 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).