Fashion and Fantasy: Elinor Glyn’s Contribution to Hollywood’s Debate about Marriage

Abstract

During the 1920s, Elinor Glyn worked in Hollywood and adapted her books for the cinema. These versions of her narratives about marriage and fulfilment reached an even wider audience. The films became part of an already existing cinematic genre of the social comedy, which contributed to a public debate on the American concept of the companionate marriage. This discussion considers the role of fashion in these films and how it is used to accentuate models of female sexual identity. It draws on an analysis of Beyond the Rocks, which was released in 1922, and the performance of Gloria Swanson as Glyn’s heroine. The style of dress that Swanson wears as a rich and fashionable married woman is known as ‘straight line’, which avoids accentuation of the waist. It was popular in the early 1920s, but also seen as a dangerous unflattering and unfeminine style by the contemporary fashion commentator Sir Basil Liddell Hart, whose archive has been consulted. Straight line allows Swanson to represent the glamour, aesthetic and pleasure of a mature woman’s respectability without compromising the respectability of romance on screen. As a fashion of the early 1920s, straight line is most remarkable due to the contrast with the raised hemlines of the adolescent flapper style which displaced it. A consideration of the contribution film costume makes to Glyn’s dramatization of her work demonstrates the cultural resonance of the ideas that she promotes about women’s maturing sexual and social identity.

Keywords:

• Elinor Glyn
• Basil Liddell Hart
• Alma-Tadema
• straight-line fashion
• film
• magazine
• Gazette du Bon Ton

ORCID

Nickianne Moody http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0461-8903

Notes

1 See www.ljmu.ac.uk/microsites/library/special-collections-and-archives/special-collections.

2 The version of the letter in the folder shows his proof copy and correction of ‘abominable’ to ‘abnormal’.