Garbo - Sailing Beyond The Frame

Greta Garbo: Sailing beyond the Frame
Author(s): Betsy Erkkila

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Jun., 1985), pp. 595-619
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343419 .
Accessed: 21/03/2013 18:51
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp
.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
The University of Chicago Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Critical
Inquiry.
http://www.jstor.org
This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
Greta Garbo: Sailing Beyond the Frame
Betsy Erkkila
Greta Garbo named herself. It was she who invented the name "Garbo"
and officially registered the change from Greta Gustafsson to Greta Garbo
at the Ministry of Justice in Sweden on 4 December 1923. The name
had the metonymic virtue of suggesting the nature of her screen presence.
The Swedish meaning of garbo, "wood nymph," suggests the association
with otherworldly forces that became part of her image; while the Spanish
meaning of the word, "animal grace sublimated," combines the animal
passion and spiritual grace that were part of her power.' And yet in most
accounts of Garbo's life and work the legend still persists that it was
Swedish director Mauritz Stiller who named her after a seventeenth-
century Hungarian king.2 The extent to which the legend has obscured
Garbo's initial act of self-naming is symptomatic of the larger tendency
in film theory and criticism to mask the creative power of the actress by
treating her as the blank sheet upon which the director inscribes his own
signature.3
What is particularly misleading about the Svengali metaphor as it
has figured in studies of Garbo is that it so deliberately masks the evidence.
In her article "Gish and Garbo: The Executive War on the Stars," Louise
Brooks suggests that the popular image of Garbo-the "dumb Swede"
transformed by Stiller's art-was perpetuated by Hollywood executives
eager to play down the very real power that Garbo already exhibited in
the rushes for her first American film, The Torrent (1926). "The whole
I would like to thank Nina Auerbach, whose friendship and scholarship have been an
inspiration. This article is dedicated to her.
Critical Inquiry 11 (June 1985)
?1985 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/85/1104-0004$01.00. All rights reserved.
595

596 Betsy Erkkila Greta Garbo
MGM studio, including Monta Bell, the director, watched the daily rushes
with amazement as Garbo created out of the stalest, thinnest material
the complex, enchanting shadow of a soul upon the screen."4 Although
recent accounts of Garbo's life and work have advanced beyond the
"dumb Swede" publicity of Photoplaymagazine, critics still reveal a similar,
almost vampish determination to deprive Garbo of her creative power.
"Her contribution," states Kenneth Tynan, "is calm and receptiveness,
an absorbent repose which normally, in women, coexists only with the
utmost vanity. Tranced by the ecstasy of existing, she gives to each onlooker
what he needs" ("G,"p. 347). Comparing Garbo to a "watermark in a
blank sheet of paper," David Thomson says in an essay in honor of her
seventy-fifth birthday: "She must be no one in herself if she is to signify
so much to so many others.... All the moods and moments of love are
encompassed because the appearance is hollow. We are to inhabit it, to
flesh it out."5 In these accounts, Garbo is presented not as an active
shaping power but as a passive female vessel, ready to receive the impress
of male voyeuristic fantasy.
The evidence of Garbo's films and the reports of directors, actors,
screenwriters, and cameramen who worked with her indicate that Garbo
was anything but a blank page upon which director and audience might
inscribe their collective will. In fact, Garbo's need for artistic concentration
was at times such that not only the crewmen but the director himself
was asked to step behind a black screen so as not to interfere with her
re-creation of a character or a scene. Erich von Stroheim, who worked
with her in As YouDesire Me (1932), saw Garbo's power of concentration
as the source of her dramatic genius: "It is the personality that projects
beyond the characterization. She throws a sort of aura around herself,
an illusion that does not come from costumes or make-up or any device
that impresses only the eye. She strikes you with a mental power, perhaps
a magnetism. Every slight gesture, every inflection, is precisely correct
for every nuance, every delicate shade of meaning. She needs no direc-
tion."6Richard Boleslawski, director of The Painted Veil (1934), was struck
not only by Garbo's transformative power but also by her immense se-
riousness as an artist: "She was so completely thorough in her art, that
one found her almost as marvelous as the camera itself" (G, p. 213).
Clarence Brown, who directed seven of Garbo's films, including Flesh
and the Devil (1927), Anna Christie(1930), and Anna Karenina (1935), was
equally impressed with Garbo's artistic perfection: "Garbo is the kind of
Betsy Erkkila, assistant professor of English at the University of

Pennsylvania, is author of Walt Whitmanamong the French: Poet and Myth
and editor of Ezra Pound: The CriticalReception.She is currently working
on a book, Whitmanthe Political Poet, and a collection of essays, American
WomenPoets Musing.

Critical Inquiry June 1985 597
actress who simply cannot ever play a part wrong, who never makes a
mistake. She was not only a great star with a rare power to charm. She
had an intuition that no one else in films has possessed" (G, p. 14).
According to poet and playwright Mercedes de Acosta, Garbo's intimate
companion during her Hollywood years, Garbo was, ultimately, self-
directing, perfectly embodying the principles of Method acting without
having studied the theories of Konstantin Stanislawski: "Like Duse, in a
manner of speaking, she is vibrantly intuitive. Greta was practically never
directed in a scene. She would go on a set and, knowing the character
she was to play, she would simply and completely becomethat character.
She would not act or play at being this character, she would be it. Like
Duse, she could make the character come alive and live before your very
eyes."7
These accounts suggest something of the self-generating and trans-
formative power that Garbo exerted in making her films. Her willful
determination as a woman and an artist to script her films-and ultimately
her life-according to principles of her own devising locked her in a
power struggle with Hollywood executives that did not end until she left
MGM in 1941. Ignoring what Brooks described as the negative conse-
quences to "any actress who might presume beyond sex and beauty,"
Garbo continually presumed beyond her sex and her beauty; her films
during her Hollywood years bear the traces of her presumption and
defiance.8 What stands out in Garbo's performance in film after film is
not her passivity but her active presence as a tension, a resistance, an
opposition within the film text. This dissonance in Garbo's screen image
has been noted by the critics. In "The Face of Garbo," Roland Barthes
says: "Garbo's face represents this fragile moment when the cinema is
about to draw an existential from an essential beauty, when the archetype
leans toward the fascination of mortal faces, when the clarity of the flesh
as essence yields its place to a lyricism of Woman." Commenting on a
similarly double quality in the Garbo heroine, Carl Eric Nordberg char-
acterized her as a "virtuousfemmefatale";Norman Zierold said: "As a love
object she combined the sensual with a spiritual appeal, femininity with
a mannish quotient."9 Critics have failed to note, however, the way this
double-voiced intonation in Garbo's characterizationsfunctions as a strategy
of subversion and transgression. Embodying both fleshly and otherworldly
powers, Garbo's screen characters often seem to exist both within and
outside the film frame. Through this simultaneous existence within and
beyond the film text, Garbo engages in a critique of the dominant discourse
of the Hollywood film at the same time that she suggests the possibility
of alternative scripts.
"Always the vamp I am, always the woman of no heart," Garbo
complained to Louis B. Mayer after her first two films, The Torrentand
The Temptress(1926).10 But even in these early films we find signs of
Garbo exercising her power to transcend and transform the vamp plots

in which she was cast. "Of all actresses of whom I have any knowledge
in the theater," said Parker Tyler of Garbo, "she was by far the most
mercurial; I mean she just naturally, under certain conditions, transformed
herself."" In The Torrent,in which Garbo transforms herself from amorous
adolescent to diva, to vamp, to woman alone, she reveals not only her
plastic and mercurial power but her capacity to shape the film in her
own self-generated image. Garbo eroticized the stylized unreality of the
film vamp and radicalized the mere surface freedom of the 1920s' flapper,
creating the powerful image of a passionate and worldly woman who
seemed ultimately disillusioned by the romantic adventures to which she
was irrevocably doomed. The Torrent, in which the male lead (Ricardo
Cortez) rejects Garbo's cosmopolitan diva for the domesticity of the nice
girl, establishes a narrative pattern that is repeated in several films. In
these vamp plots, Hollywood seems to demonstrate over and over again
its simultaneous fascination with and desire to contain or destroy the
erotic power of the female. "Garbo was the only one we could kill off,"
J. Robert Rubin of MGM once said of the endings of Garbo's films
("GHG,"p. 46). But if narrative closure in Garbo's films, most of which
were written by women, is brought about by rewarding the devotion of
the good woman and punishing the passion of the bad woman, Garbo
projects an infinity of desire and yearning that transcends the exigencies
of the vamp plot. While the plot seems to contain or kill off Garbo's
power, Garbo continually reinscribes her potency by evoking the possibility
of something beyond the frame and the ultimate inadequacy of the
system that seeks to contain her. Even when Garbo dies in these early
films, as she does at the end of both Flesh and the Devil and Love (1927),
her death seems not so much a punishment as a judgment of the world's
inadequacy. It may be this sense of reaching toward some larger human
vision that Tynan had in mind when he said of Garbo's screen image:
"She seemed to be pleading the world's cause, and to be winning, too.
Often, during the decade in which she talked to us, she gave signs that
she was on the side of life against darkness: they seeped through a series
of banal, barrel-scraping scripts like code messages borne through enemy
lines" ("G,"p. 348).
Paradoxically, Garbo's moments of reaching toward some larger frame
are most intense when she appears to be most entrapped in the toils of
romantic love. In the lovemaking scenes in The Torrent, The Temptress,
and Flesh and the Devil, Garbo encircles with her arms, her body, and her
lips a seemingly mesmerized male figure, projecting the hungry and
devouring passion that was to become one of her film signatures. Com-
menting on Garbo's interaction with her screen lovers, Richard Whitehall
said: "Just as there is a species of female spider which feeds upon the
male so there is a species of female star who swamps her leading men"
("GHG," p. 47). In her lovemaking scenes, Garbo appears to swamp not
only the leading actor but the film itself; her sexual being assumes an
otherworldly largesse that ultimately bursts the film frame and undermines

CriticalInquiry June 1985 599
the petty-bourgeois respectability and happily-ever-after domesticity of

those who inhabit the plot. Substituting a male for the female figure of
Sleeping Beauty, Garbo's lovemaking scenes inscribe self-reflexively the
nature of her power: her ability to mesmerize lover, director, and script
as she directs her energies away from the erotic plot toward an other
female being beyond the frame (fig. 1).
Asked by a New YorkTimesreporter in 1929 what role she would like
to play, Garbo responded "Joan of Arc." And she added: "I would like
to do something unusual, something that has not been done. I would
like to get away from the usual. I don't see anything in silly love-making.
I would like to do something all the other people are not doing" (G, p.
153). If Garbo could not play Joan of Arc in her films, she could and
did do something unusual in her life. In scripting her own life, she
vigorously resisted the romance plot, creating a powerful countermyth
of "woman alone." "Marriage?" she said in her last formal interview, "I
have told many times, I do not know. I like to be alone: not always with
the same person" (GP, p. 88). To her legendary solitude she added the
quality of silence when, after 1928, she refused to have any further formal
contact with the press or the public. And thus, while others continued
to speak in her name, fabricating interviews that never occurred and
signing her name to articles that she had never written, Garbo's silence
became another kind of potency, continually suggesting a word beyond
the word, just as her screen image suggests a female script beyond the
filmic and cultural script that seeks to contain her.
Commenting on the interaction between an actress and the characters
she plays, French critic Edgar Morin said: "The star is not only an actress.
The characters she plays are not only characters. The characters of her
films infect the star. Reciprocally, the star herself infects these characters."12
By the late 1920s, Garbo's personal myth began to enter into her films,
creating a subtle inflection in character and script. Garbo's solitude and
silence are written into-and, indeed, work against-the marital plot of
The Single Standard (1929), in which Garbo plays the unlikely role of a
faithful wife and devoted mother, Arden Stuart. In several scenes, Arden
is seen walking alone in the rain; at one point she tells another character,
"I am walking alone because I want to be alone." She has her first romance
with Packy Cannon (Nils Asther), who looks like John Gilbert and who
owns a yacht named The All Alone. (During his famed offscreen romance
with Garbo, Gilbert named his yacht The Temptress.)These allusions to
Garbo's offscreen refusal of love and preference for solitude, combined
with the aloofness that she brings to her on-screen roles as lover and
wife, create a filmic articulation that points once again toward an other
standard beyond the single standard of love and marriage that has been
used as the measure of the female life.
But there is another and more subtle way in which Garbo's personal
myth of solitude enters into her films. Ironically, Garbo performs her
most passionate scenes as acts not of heterosexual consummation but of

"V
e1 ..,
li ,: .
t.
j. :

self-confirmation. In fact, some of Garbo's most memorable love scenes

are played not with men but with objects: in these scenes, the male figure
is either not present or not pertinent. We see an early instance of this
in Flesh and the Devil when Garbo, partaking of the communion service,
carefully turns the cup to sip from the place her lover's lips have touched.
Drinking from the cup as if it were the wine and blood of her love, Garbo
transforms physical passion into a form of spiritual communion that is
most intense when the male figure is not its immediate object. A similar
moment of imaginative transcendence occurs in A Womanof Affairs(1929);
here, in what Richard Corliss has described as "one of the most majestic
transformations in cinema," Garbo addresses a bouquet of roses as if it
were her lover.'3 In this scene, as well as in the communion scene in
Flesh and the Devil, Garbo releases both herself and the film from the
romantic structures that entrap the female heroine; at the same time,
these scenes in which Garbo transfers her emotions from men to objects
become another personal signature, inscribing Garbo's offscreen dedication
to her art-her determination to direct her creative energies toward art
rather than toward men. By converting romantic love into self-creation,
and the doomed adulteress into woman alone, Garbo becomes, in effect,
the author as well as the actress of her own myth.
The coming of sound in the 1930s intensified the nature of Garbo's
appeal: to the power of gesture and movement was added the intonation
and accent of a throaty, foreign voice that underscored the alien, oth-
erworldly aura of Garbo's screen characters. But sound did little to alter
the vamp roles in which she was cast. "Gimme a whisky wit yinger ale
on the side, and don't be stingy, ba-bee!" Garbo's first words in her first
sound film, Anna Christie (1930), are still the words of a world-weary
prostitute. And yet, Garbo was able to use her offbeat inflections to
undermine the discourse of her sound films at the same time that she
used her power as an actress to shape their action and direction. Marie
Dressier, who costarred in Anna Christie,commented on the transformative
effect Garbo had on those who worked with her: "Greta works almost to
the point of exhaustion, and her capacity for work is contagious. The
fact is, an actor must put forth every ounce of effort, every minute of
his working time, or his role will fall short miserably in comparison to
Garbo's uniformly splendid work. There are several actors, for this very
reason, who have risen to great heights when playing opposite Garbo,
only to fall back to their natural levels when appearing in other casts"
(GP, p. 115). According to photographer Cecil Beaton, Garbo had a
similarly powerful effect on her directors: "In many ways Garbo is in a
position to, and does, dictate to the directors of her films, but in regard
to the plots she plays, they are adamant. They know the financial success
of Garbo as a vamp" (GP, p. 120).
If Garbo was not in a position to refuse the vamp plot, she continued
to resist its adamantine structure within the film text: she could, and did,

through the power of gesture, movement, intonation, and inflection,

place herself, ironic and Mona Lisa-like, beyond the film frame. This
cool removal in Garbo's screen characters, which seems to intensify in
the early 1930s, did not go unremarked by her public. In a "Letter to
Garbo,"which appeared in TheaterArtsMonthlyin 1937, Mary Cass Canfield
criticized Garbo's performance in several early 1930s' films: "Your fas-
cination and your finesse, in short your glamour, although it exercised
an almost hypnotic influence on your public, could not quite hide the
fact that, for some years, your acting was curiously uneven. And that in
such films as Anna Christie,Mata Hari and GrandHotel, your playing was,
more often than not, a highly finished piece of somnambulism. You were
clever and sophisticated; but emotionally, Miss Garbo, you were walking
in your sleep."'4 The emotional removal that Canfield sensed in Garbo's
performances at this time was in fact a sign of Garbo's growing discontent
with the plots of "silly love-making" that continued to circumscribe her
destiny as a screen heroine. In 1932, when Garbo's contract ended, she
registered her discontent publicly by refusing to return to MGM unless
she was granted more power over her films; ultimately, Garbo was vic-
torious. The terms of her new contract with MGM, which have just
recently been disclosed to the public, gave her more power than any star
had ever had in the filmmaking process. Not only did she gain ultimate
control over the selection of script, director, and costars, but she was also
given Canyon Productions, her own production company within the
MGM complex (see GP, pp. 132-33).
The first film that Garbo chose to make with her own production
company was Queen Christina,a film focusing on the seventeenth-century
Swedish queen. In making Queen Christina,Garbo realized her dream of
doing "something unusual ... something all the other people are not
doing." For the first time in a Garbo film-indeed, for one of the few
times in an American film-the heroine was able to move beyond the
romantic structure of the Hollywood plot and prevail triumphantly; what
before had been a female subtext in Garbo's films became in Queen
Christina the film's main text. With more power and more control than
she would ever have again, Garbo was at last in a position to author her
own film and inscribe her own myth. Her signature is evident not only
in story, cast, and direction but in visual image and mise-en-scene.
Garbo had been considering making a film about the Swedish monarch
for some time. Dressier claims to have originally suggested the idea to
Garbo when they were making Anna Christie together. Remembering
Garbo at this time, she says: "I have never known her exhibit a lively
interest in anything, except when I suggested the life story of Christina,
Queen of Sweden, as a splendid Garbo vehicle. She was really enthusiastic
about that" (GP, p. 115). Garbo remembered the idea, and, having read
a biography recommended by her friend Salka Viertel, she encouraged
Viertel to write a screenplay.'5 Viertel's treatment became the basis for

the film script of Queen Christina,which was written in collaboration with

H. M. Harwood.
For director, Garbo selected a relatively new talent, Rouben Ma-
moulian, whose innovative and intelligent work she admired. With the
cooperation of Mamoulian, the script of her close friend Viertel, and
the collaboration of photographer William Daniels and costume designer
Gilbert Adrian (who both had worked with her on several other films),
Garbo insured that in the making of Queen Christina she would become
no mere instrument of directorial will; if the film were to have a personal
signature, it would be her own.
The story of Queen Christina (1626-1689) was an ideal vehicle for
Garbo. Raised as a prince, Christina reigned in Sweden from 1644 to
1654, when she mysteriously abdicated at the age of twenty-eight. Christina
was known for her independence, intelligence, lesbianism, and aversion
to marriage. But the story of Queen Christina was essentially a pre-text
for Garbo's own personal script: within the story of QueenChristina,Garbo
inscribes her own ideas about life, love, marriage, sexual roles, the arts,
politics, war, and the uses of power. The central conflict in QueenChristina,
the conflict between self and society, woman and queen, reflects Garbo's
own conflict not only with Hollywood executives and the American public
but with the broader cultural script that entrapped the female life. At
the same time, the conflict between Queen Christina and the Viking
"spirit of the North" suggests a more mythic battle between the sexes
over such larger issues as female identity, freedom, power, and fate within
and outside the patriarchal order. As a projection of Garbo's vision of
female experience and female possibility, Queen Christinais at once both
personal and mythic: history is collapsed into autobiography and auto-
biography is transformed into fable as Garbo enacts the story of a mythic
and self-creating queen.
In her book The Kindness of Strangers, Viertel describes the process
by which MGM executives, insisting that "all the audience wants is a good
love story," sought to shape Queen Christina into the "very Hollywood
vehicle Garbo had hoped to escape."'6 While the ultimate fable of Queen
Christina is the quest for female sovereignty, the film is also a kind of
palimpsest, revealing the traces of Garbo's continued struggle with the
Hollywood power structure. The film has, in effect, two narratives: the
first, the female quest narrative, inscribes Garbo's fable; the second, the
romantic narrative, inscribes the will of the Hollywood power structure
and continually threatens to trap the questing heroine in the erotic
plot. Here again, however, largely through the power of her perform-
ance, Garbo is able to redirect the romantic narrative, with its focus on
men, love, and marriage, into a female quest narrative, with a focus on
women, power, and destiny. By the end of the film, it is the sovereign fe-
male self rather than the subordinate romantic heroine who emerges
triumphant.

The film begins where the film ends, with the death of a male figure
giving rise to a figure of female power. In the opening scene, the death
of Christina's father, King Gustavus Adolphus, transforms the girl child
into queen of Sweden. By the final scene of the film, female power is
self-created and self-defined, but in these first scenes, Christina's power
is still circumscribed by the patriarchalorder. "Our king is dead,"announces
the lord chancellor (Lewis Stone), "but his spirit lives in us in his child
Christina. Her father, our king, brought up this child as a boy, accustomed
her to hear the sound of cannon fire, and sought to mold her spirit after
his own." The repetition of masculine nouns and pronouns in this speech
underscores the fact that Christina exists as a vessel of male ego and
male will. When the girl child enters, we see her in a long shot, dwarfed
and encircled by the male powers who place the crown upon her head.
After this opening scene, the film leaps ahead in time and space to
present us with a cavalier figure on a horse, rushing at a full gallop
through the countryside. We see this figure, accompanied by two dogs,
dashing up the steps of a palace, two and three at a time, to arrive in a
room full of men. It is here for the first time that this figure turns toward
the camera, and we realize that what we thought was a young man is in
fact Christina the queen. No longer dwarfed by male advisers, Garbo's
face fills the screen in an extreme close-up as she takes command of the
room and the film she has just entered.
The queen's cavalier attire reminds us immediately of the extent to
which Garbo writes herself into the person of the queen. Offscreen,
Garbo, too, often wore traditionally male attire-oxfords, slacks, vest,
and tie. For Garbo, as for the queen, the male attire was both a disguise
and a means of asserting the freedom and mobility that men exercised
and that women needed to appropriate. Garbo's cavalier queen is the
antithesis of the doomed vamp and world-weary artist roles she had
played in earlier films. In fact, the extent and the risk of this reversal in
the eyes of Hollywood executives is suggested by a story Garbo's friend
de Acosta tells about Irving Thalberg's reaction when he was presented
with a script which called for Garbo dressing in male attire: "I simply
won't have that sequence in," Thalberg said. "I am in this business to
make money on films and I won't have this one ruined.... We have
been building Garbo up for years as a great glamorous actress, and now
you come along and try to put her into pants and make a monkey out
of her.""7Thalberg's words notwithstanding, Garbo's masculine attire in
QueenChristinabrought to the surface an underlying current of androgyny
that was latent even in her earlier screen characterizations. Seeking to
define this quality in 1929, Adela Rogers St. Johns observed: "It is mis-
leading to call Garbo mannish. Or masculine. But it is difficult to find
exactly the right word to describe a certain something about her which
calls those words to mind. Perhaps bigness will do. She is a big person,
mentally and physically, and she likes bigness."'8

Garbo's cavalier queen represents one of the earliest screen ap-

pearances of a new type of androgynous woman who, like Virginia
Woolf's Orlando, reflects some of the breakdown in traditional gender
divisions in the post-World War I period (fig. 2). The mannish attire of
these androgynous screen figures-most frequently played by Greta Garbo,
Marlene Dietrich, and Katharine Hepburn-was no mere costume but
a sign of undiscovered dimensions of the female character that undermined
traditional sexual roles by suggesting their arbitrariness.'9 Neither petite
and girlish like Lillian Gish and Mary Pickford, nor cute and fluttery like
the flapper of the 1920s, Garbo's cavalier queen projects a powerful and
empowering image of a spirited and athletic woman seeking to possess
herself and repossess the world.
According to producer Walter Wanger, Garbo "kept insisting on
playing Christina as she really was, namely, with a hooked nose and a
hunched back!"20If Garbo had to compromise on the issue of the queen's
appearance, she made certain that her lesbian infatuation with her lady-
in-waiting, Ebba Sparre (Elizabeth Young), was present in the film. "Don't
dally, your majesty," says Christina's male-maid Aage (C. Aubrey Smith)
suggestively as he departs and Ebba arrives in the queen's bedchamber.
In the way of loving that is Garbo's screen signature, she cups Ebba's
face in her hands, as if about to drink, and plants a fullmouthed kiss on
her lips. When Ebba complains that the queen is "surrounded by musty
old papers and musty old men," Christina promises to spend a few days
in the country with her. Subtle enough to be missed by the Swedish
historical adviser and the censors, the scene nevertheless succeeds in
inscribing not only the queen's but Garbo's own bisexual nature.
Having discovered a screen persona through whom she could enact
her own legend, Garbo plays the role of the cavalier queen with an
unusual degree of warmth, commitment, and verve. From the moment
the adult queen appears, she is, like Garbo in Hollywood, poised in
opposition to the patriarchal powers who seek to impose their will upon
her. The demands of the "kingdom of the fathers" are summed up by
the lord chancellor at the outset of the film: "The parliament clamors
for more war. They clamor for a Swedish marriage for your majesty.
They clamor for an heir of Swedish blood." The queen responds in a
spirit of resistance and defiance, "In short, chancellor, they clamor," as
she begins moving toward a refusal of male laws and the symbols of male
power in order to give birth to herself.
As Queen Christina moves toward self-realization, she absorbs the
potency of the Viking spirit but strips it of its militaristic and life-denying
aspects. In her, the Viking spirit is transformed into a will toward life
rather than death, peace rather than war, creation rather than destruction.
As her advisers, the parliament, and the church clamor for more war,
she responds: "Spoils, glory, flags and trumpets. What is behind this
high-sounding rhetoric? Death and destruction. Dead men, crippled men

.
S^ -
.:s -,4
* <-?e;
t.
r I

... I tell you I want no more of it. I want for my people security and
happiness. I want to cultivate the art of peace, the art of life. I want
peace, and peace I will have." As a female monarch opposing the warlike
mentality of her countrymen, Garbo, no less than Woolf in ThreeGuineas
(1938) and H. D. in Trilogy (1944-46), suggests the connection between
patriarchy and war. Reflecting the post-World War I tendency even
among such male modernists as James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot,
and Ernest Hemingway to look to the female as a source of personal and
cultural renewal, Garbo proposes a benignant use of female power, not
merely as a biological function but as a creative and intellectual force.21
Christina's struggle against the warrior codes of the patriarchy ul-
timately centers upon her refusal to marry the national hero, Prince
Charles (Reginald Owen), who has just returned triumphant from the
Thirty Years' War. "He's a hero," proclaims the chancellor. "There are
varieties of heros," replies the queen. "His only interest is fighting, and
fighting is boring. His only interest is the sword." When the chancellor
reminds her that "the sword has made Sweden great,"the queen responds:
"Yet do we not exalt it much too much." The phallic suggestiveness of
the sword and its association with the state emphasize the connection
between male sexual power and a public culture of violence. The urgency
with which Garbo in Queen Christinautters her opposition to the Viking
spiral of death and destruction suggests that she, like the queen, is at-
tempting to use her power to transform the warrior mentality of her
own age-an age in which the spread of fascism, militarism, and violence
was also leading the world toward another war.
The queen's refusal to marry the prince is not only a protest against
the warrior codes of the patriarchy; it is also a protest against the marital
script of the female life. Seeking to persuade Christina to marry the
prince, the chancellor warns: "But Your Majesty, you cannot die an old
maid."The queen responds triumphantly: "I have no intention, chancellor.
I shall die a bachelor." Her response, which was taken from one of Garbo's
personal letters, sums up her refusal to define herself in the negative
terms of the patriarchy.22 The image of the old maid-a negative and
privative image of musty, unchosen virginity-has no male counterpart.
Having no gender-specific word to describe her own self-chosen, sexually
active, single state, the queen appropriates the more positive term "bach-
elor," a term that originally referred to a wandering knight and thus
reflects something of the queen's-and Garbo's-own mobility of spirit.
The conflict between Christina and the Swedish patriarchs intensifies
when she meets and falls in love with the Spanish envoy, Antonio (John
Gilbert). In the romance between Antonio and the queen, which has no
basis in history, Hollywood executives, like the Swedish patriarchs, seek
to impose on their unconventional heroine a conventional romantic des-
tiny. Through her power both on and behind the screen, however, Garbo
unravels and ultimately transcends the conventions of the romantic plot.

In casting the part of Christina's Spanish lover, Garbo rejected Laurence

Olivier in favor of Gilbert, a choice that weakened considerably the role
of the male romantic lead and gave to their romance a personal, and
ultimately subversive, modulation. Their entire relationship works against
the grain of the traditional romance narrative. In their first encounter,
traditional male-female roles are reversed: Christina is literally and sym-
bolically in the saddle. It is the male rather than the female who is in
distress; and it is the cavalier queen who rescues him. The role reversals
are stressed in the way the scene is shot: the camera, like Christina, peers
down on Antonio, enclosed in his carriage, which is stuck in the snow.
In the reverse angle shot, the camera is at a low angle, as Antonio seeks
help from Christina, who towers above him on her horse; it is she, rather
than he, who directs the operation of pulling him out of the ditch.
Enclosed in his carriage and wrapped in furs, Antonio appears more
feminine than the errant queen who comes to his rescue-a point that
is underscored by the fact that Antonio mistakes her for a boy.
Christina's mistaken identity promotes the continued revising and
reversing of conventional courtship rituals. When Antonio encounters
Christina once again at an inn, the relationship between them develops
first as a homosocial friendship and only later as a heterosexual romance.
As they exchange views on "men and countries, love and marriage," it
becomes clear that while Antonio shares the queen's interest in the "art
of living," it is he rather than she who defines himself and the world in
relation to love. Christina counters Antonio's celebration of the art of
love with her own philosophy-a philosophy that might serve as a coda
for Garbo's own screen romances: "A great love, a perfect love, is an
illusion. It is the golden fable of which we all dream. But in ordinary
life it doesn't happen. In ordinary life one must be content with less."
The queen's words, which seem to allude to Apuleius' GoldenAss, provide
a key to Garbo's reweaving of the romance plot. Like the mythical reunion
of Eros and Psyche recounted by Apuleius, the romance between Christina
and Antonio is transformed, in the hands of Garbo, into a golden fable
of female self-creation.23
It is not until they arrive in the bedroom-where they are to share
a bed so large that, according to the host, "you might both lie in it and
never know that you are not alone"-that Antonio, hitherto blind like
Cupid, discovers that his "male" companion has the body of a woman.
And it is here that Garbo takes hold of the strands of the romantic plot
to begin her own mythmaking. Having suggested to Mamoulian that her
love scene with Gilbert be played in a low emotional key, Garbo redirects
the understated and indirect emotions of the scene into an act of self-
making.
In Reinventing Womanhood,Carolyn Heilbrun suggests ways that tra-
ditional female myths and texts, such as "Sleeping Beauty"and "Cinderella,"
might be reread and reinvented as tales of female possibility. Garbo
engages in a similar act of reinvention by transforming her lovemaking

scene with Antonio into a myth of female awakening. Lying with her
back on the floor, Garbo fondles and caresses a bunch of grapes-which
Antonio tells her are "warmed and ripened in the Spanish sun"-with
an emotional intensity that suggests an act not of heterosexual consum-
mation but of autoerotic self-awakening. This process of awakening con-
tinues as Garbo rises in silence and solitude to direct her emotions away
from Antonio and toward the objects in the room. To the beat of an
offscreen metronome, Garbo circles the room in a kind of mystical dance,
transforming each object in the room into an actor in Christina's drama
of self-awakening. As she moves about the room touching and magically
transforming each object, she pauses to look into a mirror, which reflects
both her face and the face of Antonio gazing up at her: here, as throughout
the scene, Antonio appears to be a reflection of a masculine dimension
existing inside rather than outside Christina.24 In fact, the entire space
within which this sequence takes place is full of round and oblong objects-
touched and untouched by Christina-which suggest not only the erotic
sources of female power but the masculine and feminine sources upon
which Christina draws in the act of self-creation. At one point, she runs
her fingers around the outer edge of a spinning wheel, turns it gently,
and then caresses an elongated coil of yarn that juts upward at the side
of the wheel. Transformed by Garbo, these objects project not only the
sexual but the metaphysical dimension of the queen's awakening. Associated
with the act of weaving, Christina, like a goddess of fate, takes command
of her destiny, just as Garbo takes command of the romance plot to
weave her own tale of female creation (fig. 3).
Garbo completes the process of transforming heterosexual lovemaking
into autoerotic self-making as she consummates the erotic sequence alone
on the bed. Here again, Garbo touches and takes possession of the contents
of the bed, transforming the bed into a site of mystical awakening and
eros into an inner dimension of psyche reborn. The solitary nature of
the process is accented by the camera, which moves in for a final close-
up of Garbo's face. Eyes closed, Garbo appears to commune with some
spiritual force that draws her beyond the frame, as if, having touched
some undifferentiated unity of male and female powers, she has made
contact with the divine. This divine dimension is accentuated as Garbo,
dressed in a nunlike robe and emanating a patina of light, rises from
the bed to trace with her fingertips the haloed figures of three saints in
a painting.25 She compares herself to God on the first day of Creation:
"This is how the Lord felt on the first day of Creation, with all his
creatures breathing miracles." Having recovered the primal potency of
the female self, Christina stands, like God on the first day of Creation,
with all the world lying before her as it waits to receive the impress of
her breath and spirit.
But it is not Garbo alone who subverts the conventions of the romantic
plot. Even on the narrative level, the romance between Christina and
Antonio begins to work toward rather than against the quest for female

K A:
.. g, i
FIG. 3.

autonomy. From his first appearance at court, Antonio becomes a factor

in Christina's-and Garbo's-critique of patriarchy. Her relationship
with Antonio strengthens her determination not to marry Prince Charles,
and thus not to be defined by the values of the Viking patriarchs. In
fact, as if to emphasize Antonio's existence as a means to rather than an
end of the queen's autonomy, the question of marriage between them
never arises.
Christina's utterances in the final scenes of the film clarify the con-
nection between her romance with Antonio, her rejection of patriarchal
codes, and her quest for female autonomy. To her country's refusal to
accept her romance with Antonio, Christina responds: "What strange,
foolish practice is this that calls me ruler and yet in what concerns me
most nearly tells me I am to have no voice. This is intolerable. There is
a freedom which is mine and which the state cannot take away. To the
unreasonable tyranny of the mob and to the malicious tyranny of Protestant
priests I shall not submit." Christina's assertion of personal freedom
against the claims of the state-an assertion that once again had particular
relevance in the 1930s-is evident not only in her verbal utterances but
in the visual composition of this scene. Surrounded by her advisers,
Christina stands under a painting of a horse and rider who appear to
emerge out of her head. Like Pegasus rising from the blood of Medusa,
the image projects the inner springs of power that resist and ultimately
release her from the will of the patriarchy.
This shot foreshadows Christina's abdication, for it is to release herself
from the kingdom of the fathers into her own self-created and self-
creating destiny that Christina abdicates the throne. "I have grown up
in a great man's shadow," says Christina on the eve of her abdication.
"All my life I have been a symbol. A symbol is eternal, changeless, like
a statue. A human being is multiply changeable, with desires and dreams,
hopes and despairs. I am tired of being a symbol. I long to be a human
being. This longing I cannot suppress." Christina insists on the ultimate
sovereignty not of the king's self but of her self: "One must live for oneself.
After all, one's own life is all one has."
While Christina's abdication might seem to follow the typical Hol-
lywood pattern in depicting a powerful female handing over her power
to a male in order to pursue a romantic destiny, the photography and
staging of the abdication sequence foreground the quest for female au-
tonomy. As enacted by Garbo, Queen Christina's abdication suggests a
triple abdication: an abdication of Christina from the throne of Sweden,
of Garbo from Hollywood, and of women from the patriarchy. The queen
begins her abdication by announcing her decision not to marry Prince
Charles; she will provide an heir not by marrying the prince but by
naming him as her successor to the throne of Sweden. When the court
protests, she once again asserts her primary responsibility to her self and
her destiny: "I am grateful for your loyalty, but there is a voice in our

souls which tells us what to do and we obey. I have no choice. Here are
the emblems of power which herewith I present to you before God and
mankind." As Christina removes the emblems of power-first her scepter,
then her royal robe, and finally her crown-she removes from herself
the artificial emblems of male power in order to return to the primal
potency of her female self. Dressed in a long white robe, the woman
beneath the male emblems is a virginal figure, reminiscent of the radiant,
spiritual being who emerged in the bedroom sequence. Unwritten upon
by male will, she appears to reclaim the original sense of the word "virginity":
to belong to oneself. This process of returning to some primal potency
of the female, beyond the male-conferred signs of power, is suggested
visually. When Christina removes her crown, the shot is framed in such
a way that the crown which is etched into the throne appears to sit on
her head, and as Christina leaves the court, the people fall to their feet
in an attitude not only of loyalty but of worship. And thus even the name
"Christina"is significant, for in removing the crown of the fathers, Christina
not only reclaims a kind of inner queenship of the female self, she also
reclaims the original significance of her name. As an emblem of female
self-creation, she represents the possibility of regenerated female lives.
In the final scene of the film, Christina, dressed again as a cavalier,
charges forth on her horse to meet her destiny. When she arrives at the
ship where she has arranged to meet Antonio, she finds him dying of a
wound he received in a duel with Count Magnus (Ian Keith). Given the
quest for female autonomy that is the ultimate fable of Queen Christina,
Antonio's death seems almost inevitable; he exists in the script not to
circumscribe Christina's destiny in love and marriage but to become part
of her own self-creation. "Yousaid goodbye to your country,"says Antonio
when he sees her. "Yes,"responds Christina, "to everything but you." The
film's abdication of romantic closure marks Christina's final abdication
in her movement toward her own self-created destiny. Here again the
scene is richly inflected: as she bids farewell to her dying lover, Garbo
too moves beyond the romantic plot; and insofar as the relationship
between Antonio and the queen inscribes dimensions of her former
relationships with Stiller and Gilbert, her farewell also marks the assertion
of her own self-creating power.
As Christina rises from the dead body of Antonio and moves toward
the prow of the ship, she completes the movement beyond romantic
closure and a male-centered destiny toward an autonomous female being
with an open-ended script. In her rising, she reverses the romantic potency
of the prince: Christina's awakening is completed not by the arrival of
the prince but by his death. Moving beyond the tragic ending of the
romance plot toward the beginning of a voyage, Christina evokes in the
viewer not the fear and pity of classical catharsis but a sense of exhilaration
and triumph. "Do you still want to sail, Your Majesty?" asks Aage. "Yes,
Aage, we will sail," Christina responds to the male servant who will ac-

company her once again on her voyage into the world. As Christina
advances to the head of the ship, a sense of forward motion and power
is projected by the horizontal tracking of the camera and the shots of
billowing sails, crewmen preparing to depart, and riggings thrusting
beyond the frame. Taking command of her destiny, Christina places
herself, like a mythic Viking figure, at the prow, where the ship itself
suggests a uterine shape as the circular etchings of the prow curve into
Christina's body (fig. 4). With open access to the sea, and gazing beyond
the frame, Christina appears to enter a spatial, experiential, and meta-
physical realm beyond patriarchal structures. After Antonio's death, the
final sequence (like the bedroom sequence) is enacted in silence, which
stresses Christina's existence on the boundaries of patriarchal discourse.
The sovereign female emerges outside the verbal structures that might
trap her in the legends of the patriarchy.
As Christina stands solitary, sovereign, and silent at the prow of the
ship, ready to launch herself into her own self-created and self-creating
destiny, the camera focuses on her face, held in extreme close-up for
several seconds. For this final and justifiably famous shot, Mamoulian
reports that he told Garbo: "I want your face to be a blank sheet of paper.
I want the writing to be done by every member of the audience. I'd like
it if you could avoid blinking your eyes, so that you're nothing but a
beautiful mask."26Nothing buta beautifulmask.The very phrase has become
a clarion cry not only of Garbo studies but of critical discussions of women
and film. The actress is treated as a beautiful passive object, inscribed
with the will of the director and acted upon by the fantasies of the
audience.
Nothing but a beautifulmask. If this is indeed the direction that Garbo
received, then once again she transcends the will of her director. In fact,
Garbo's face in the final shot reverses the iconographic tradition of the
female as a static beauty who gives meaning to others but is nothing in
herself. Acting rather than acted upon, self-directing rather than directed,
Garbo projects the forward-moving and transcendent energies of the
entire sequence: she is a transforming figure who possesses and mobilizes
the imaginative possibilities of the audience. The only blankness in this
scene is the blankness not of Garbo's face but of a female destiny that
has moved beyond romantic and patriarchal inscriptions. Like the Vestal
figure without a Child whom H. D. invokes in her Trilogy, Christina
carries "the blank pages / of the unwritten volume of the new."27Projecting
a potent female being in the process of writing herself into the script of
the world, Garbo lifts the audience into the process of her own self-
making. In the generative power of this final image, Garbo, rather than
the audience or the director, writes the final script of Queen Christina.
After the completion of Queen Christina, Garbo complained: "I tried
to be Swedish, but it's difficult in Hollywood to be allowed to try anything.
It's all a terrible compromise. There is no time for art. All that matters

00r 11
l/
I
..
a.
FIG.4.

is what they call box office" (G, p. 211). While Queen Christinabears the
traces of Garbo's compromise with the Hollywood power structure, in
the end she created better than she knew. At the height of her career,
in 1933, Garbo used her power to create her most challenging role and
to reverse the romantic imperative of the female story. Working against
the grain of the typical "women's picture" of the Hollywood years, Garbo
was able to imagine a female heroine who did not move toward either
marriage or tragedy. In tracing the movement of a female figure-a
queen-beyond romance and patriarchy toward the open sea, where she
is about to embark on a solitary quest for a life that has yet to be written,
Garbo created a new kind of female heroine and a new kind of female
plot.
But while Garbo was inscribing in her films and in her life a myth
of sovereign solitude, the American public, like Christina'scourt, clamored
for a "royal" marriage, if not with a real prince, then with a princely
man. Clare Boothe Brokaw voiced the public sentiment in her article
"The Great Garbo" which appeared in VanityFair in 1932: "History has
never reserved a place for a beautiful woman who did not love, or who
was not loved by at least one interesting, powerful, or brilliant man." She
continues by asserting that "the only way a woman can gloriously succeed
in impressing herself upon her age-the way of love-Garbo has, until
now, failed in."28Garbo, of course, did clear a space for herself in history
through the power of her art and the legend of her life; but to her fans,
at least, Garbo's life seemed almost unimaginable without a prince. And
thus, in the early 1930s a rumor developed that Prince Sigvard was about
to carry Garbo off to Sweden for a royal marriage.29 In fact, when Garbo
returned from her trip to Sweden to make Queen Christina, the press
questioned her on the subject of marriage: "Are you in love? What about
the Prince? Are you engaged to him? Why don't you get married?"30
In the context of the public clamor for marriage, Queen Christina
seems like a conscious attempt on Garbo's part to counter the popular
dream with a dream of her own. The film, like Garbo herself, worked
against the spirit of the times. While Queen Christinawas generally well
received by the critics, it was the first of Garbo's films to show a sizable
decrease in box office returns. As America began to move out of the
Depression, toward Roosevelt, recovery, and a return to traditional values,
and films began to urge Mr. Deeds to have faith in the system and women
to have faith in their men, Garbo's autonomous queen must have seemed
not only unwomanly but un-American. Like Queen Christina's defiance
of her court, Garbo's Queen Christina was the first step in Garbo's own
movement toward abdication.
Confronted with changing times, declining box office returns, and
the stricter Production Code of 1934, MGM executives engaged in a
concerted effort to transform Garbo's image. Canfield comments on this
transformation in her "Letter to Garbo": "After having seen you, in Queen

Christine[sic], soar into the blue like some liberated bird, the masters of
your fate, at the factories of make-believe, could think of nothing to do
but drop you, with ThePainted Veil, straight down into the commonplace."31
Inverting the empowering myth of female self-sovereignty enacted in
Queen Christina,Garbo's next films, ThePainted Veil (1934), Anna Karenina
(1935), Camille (1937), and Conquest (1937), reinscribe the patriarchal
myth of female self-sacrifice. Each of these films stresses the necessity of
female sacrifice, even unto death, in the service of the man. One of the
ironies of Garbo's film career is that Camille, the film for which she has
been most critically acclaimed, is also the film in which she is most under
the control of the director, most entrapped by the conventions of the
erotic plot, and least resistant to the codes of the patriarchy. Ninotchka
(1939), which was publicized as a film in which "Garbo laughs," was an
even more deliberate attempt to remake the Garbo myth. Most interesting
in the opening scenes-when Garbo refuses to laugh-the film parodies
Garbo's legendary refusals in the character of Ninotchka, who ultimately
turns away from her Spartan life as a Soviet commissar to embrace the
joys of love, marriage, and the bourgeois script; to be uninterested in
romantic love is, within the discourse of Ninotchka, to be un-American.
The "Americanization" of Garbo is continued in Two-FacedWoman(1941),
where Garbo plays an "oomph"girl trying to revive her husband's affections
by impersonating her sexy twin sister. "This is the woman," wrote Cecilia
Ager in PM, "so unique in the movies that she's no longer a person but
become now a symbol, a legend, whom Two-FacedWomandoes everything
it can to destroy.... It makes Garbo a clown, a buffoon, a monkey on
a stick."32And yet even here Garbo's power to subvert and redirect the
energies of the Hollywood plot is suggested by the protest registered by
the National Legion of Decency. While the narrative moves predictably
and inevitably toward reaffirming the bond of heterosexual love and
marriage, the legion found the film dangerous to public morals, criticizing
its "immoral and un-Christian attitude toward marriage and its obligations;
imprudently suggestive scenes, dialogue and situations; suggestive cos-
tumes" (G, p. 254).
Faced with a changing cultural script and a decrease in her power
to impose her will on the Hollywood complex, Garbo chose to exercise
her final power of refusal: after the completion of Two-FacedWoman,she
abdicated. Like Queen Christina, Garbo refused to remake herself in the
image of Hollywood or the American public. Turning renunciation into
an act of self-preservation, Garbo has maintained this stance of refusal
in the face of repeated efforts to bring her back in such roles as George
Sand, Dorian Gray, Joan of Arc, and Saint Francis of Assisi. While one
regrets the loss of Garbo in these roles, one is at the same time challenged
by the courage of her refusal and the legendary autonomy that is at its
source.

Seeking to define the qualities of the female heroine, Lee Edwards

says: "The heroic age seems always to be past, and yet, whatever time
we live in, we seem always to need heroes: figures who attract and capture
our imaginations, whose thoughts and actions cut new channels, whose
lives matter because they occupy new territory or suggest alternatives to
the cramped dailiness of ordinary existence. The hero, in this view, is
not so much a god, a warrior, or giant as a human being living at the
furthest extreme of the possible."33Having refused the old scripts in her
art and in her life, Garbo, like her queen, cut new channels at the furthest
extreme of the possible. As if responding to the destiny she had imagi-
natively enacted in Queen Christina, Garbo has taken up the script she
began writing at the end of the film. Finally, it is in the image of her
own mythic queen, sailing beyond the frame, that Garbo continues to
exert her power to transgress and transform by making her audience
imagine the possibility of alternative female scripts and alternative female
lives.
1. In his essay "Garbo,"Kenneth Tynan says: "I used to think the Spanish 'garbo' an
insult to her, having heard it applied to matadors whose work seemed to me no more than
pretty or neat. A Hispanophile friend has lately corrected me: 'garbo,' he writes, 'is animal
grace sublimated-the flaunting of an assured natural charm, poise infected by joie de
vivre, innate, high-spirited, controlled, the essentially female attribute (even in bullfighters)"'
(Curtains [New York, 1961], p. 349; all further references to this work, abbreviated "G,"
will be included in the text). And see Fritiof Billquist, Garbo:A Biography, trans. Maurice
Michael (London, 1960), p. 29.
2. See, e.g., John Bainbridge, Garbo(New York, 1955), pp. 49-50 (all further references
to this work, abbreviated G, will be included in the text), and Richard Whitehall, "Garbo-
How Good Was She?," Films and Filming 9 (Sept. 1963): 4 (all further references to this
work, abbreviated "GHG," will be included in the text). See also Robert Payne, The Great
Garbo (London, 1976), p. 42, and David Thomson, "Waiting for Garbo," AmericanFilm 4
(Oct. 1980): 50.
3. Even feminist film critics tend to focus on the director and treat the actress as a
mere sign of patriarchal discourse. Molly Haskell's pioneering study, From Reverence to
Rape: The Treatmentof Womenin the Movies (New York, 1973), rigorously follows auteur
theory in methodology. More recently, critics have sought to incorporate Marxist, structuralist,
and psychoanalytic methodologies into feminist film theory, criticism, and practice. These
methodologies succeed in dis-covering the ideological structure of the female image; but,
like auteur theory, they also tend to mask the creative and potentially transgressive power
of the woman by presenting women as signs of capitalist, patriarchal, or phallic discourse.
See Julia Lesage, "Feminist Film Criticism: Theory and Practice," Womenand Film 1 (1974):
12-19; ClaireJohnston, "Women's Cinema as Counter-Cinema," in Noteson Women'sCinema,
ed. Johnston (London, 1973), pp. 24-31; Laura Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema," Screen 16 (Autumn 1975): 6-18; and Annette Kuhn, Women'sPictures: Feminism
and Cinema (London, 1982). The lack of critical attention to the shaping power of the
actress is particularly evident in E. Ann Kaplan, Womenand Film: Both Sides of the Camera
(New York, 1983); in chapter 2, "Patriarchy and the Male Gaze in Cukor's Camille (1936),"
Kaplan analyzes the patriarchal discourse of the film without once mentioning the fact of
Garbo's presence and performance in the role of Camille.

4. Louise Brooks, "Gish and Garbo: The Executive War on the Stars,"Sight and Sound
28 (Winter 1958-59): 15.
5. Thomson, "Waiting for Garbo," pp. 50, 52.
6. Erich von Stroheim, clipping, Greta Garbo Clipping File, Theater Collection, Phil-
adelphia Free Library.
7. Mercedes de Acosta, Here Lies the Heart (New York, 1960), p. 232.
8. Brooks, "Gish and Garbo," p. 16.
9. Roland Barthes, Mythologies,trans. Annette Lavers (New York, 1972), p. 57; Carl
Eric Nordberg, "GretaGarbo's Secret,"Film Comment6 (Summer 1970): 30; Norman Zierold,
Garbo (New York, 1969), p. 13.
10. Garbo, quoted in Alexander Walker, Garbo:A Portrait (New York, 1980), p. 11;
all further references to this work, abbreviated GP, will be included in the text.
11. Parker Tyler, "The Garbo Image," in The Films of Greta Garbo, comp. Michael
Conway, Dion McGregor, and Mark Ricci (New York, 1963), p. 12.
12. Edgar Morin, The Stars, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1960), p. 37; for other
essays on the subtle cross-references between stars and the characters they play, see Lawrence
Goldstein, "Familiarity and Contempt: An Essay on the Star-Presence in Film," Centennial
Review 17 (Summer 1973): 256-74; Leo Braudy, "Film Acting: Some Critical Problems
and Proposals," QuarterlyReview of Film Studies 1 (Winter 1976): 1-18; and Maurice Yacowar,
"An Aesthetic Defense of the Star System in Films,"QuarterlyReviewof Film Studies4 (Winter
1979): 39-52.
13. Richard Corliss, Greta Garbo (New York, 1974), p. 66.
14. Mary Cass Canfield, "Letter to Garbo," TheaterArts Monthly 21 (Dec. 1937): 952.
15. See Salka Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers (New York, 1969), p. 152; de Acosta
says that she, too, was working on a film script of Queen Christinafor Garbo (see Here Lies
the Heart, p. 251).
16. Viertel, The Kindnessof Strangers, p. 183.
17. Irving Thalberg, quoted in de Acosta, Here Lies the Heart, pp. 232-33.
18. Adela Rogers St. Johns, "Garbo: The Mystery of Hollywood," LibertyMagazine, 27
July 1929, p. 22.
19. Approaching film from a psychoanalytic perspective, Johnston and Mulvey interpret
these figures of women in male attire as further signs of patriarchal discourse in which
the female is fetishized as phallus (see n. 3 above). Within the broader context of Western
European culture in the early twentieth century, however, these androgynous figures which
appear in the art, literature, and film of the period reflect a more general breakdown of
traditional gender roles; for a discussion of the significance of cross-dressing in literature,
see Sandra M. Gilbert, "Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern
Literature," Critical Inquiry 7 (Winter 1980): 391-417.
20. Walter Wanger, "Miss Garbo Still Reigns," Greta Garbo Clipping File, Theater
Collection, Philadelphia Free Library.
21. In For Whom the Bell Tolls (New York, 1940), Ernest Hemingway himself makes
the connection between Garbo's image and the desire to return to the female as a redemptive
force when, on the eve of the battle of Pozoblanco, Garbo appears to Robert Jordan in a
dream vision of female benevolence (see p. 137).
22. See Raymond Durgnat and John Kobal, Greta Garbo (New York, 1965), p. 44.
23. For readings of the Eros and Psyche myth as a tale of female development, see
Erich Neumann, Amor and Psyche: The Psychic Developmentof the Feminine, trans. Ralph
Manheim (Princeton, N.J., 1956); Carolyn G. Heilbrun, Reinventing Womanhood(New York,
1979), pp. 140-44; Rachel Blau duPlessis, "Psyche, or Wholeness," MassachusettsReview 20
(Spring 1979): 77-96; and Lee R. Edwards, "The Labors of Psyche: Toward a Theory of
Female Heroism," Critical Inquiry 6 (Autumn 1979): 33-49.
24. Nancy Miller discusses the feminist implications of a remarkably similar sequence
in Lafayette's La Princesse de Cleves, in which Mme de Cleves internalizes a portrait of her

lover. "This autoeroticism," says Miller, "would seem to be the only sexual performance
she can afford in an economy regulated by dispossession" ("Emphasis Added: Plots and
Plausibilities in Women's Fiction," PMLA 96 [Jan. 1981]: 42).
25. From Plato's theory of the egg to T. S. Eliot's Tiresias to Adrienne Rich's 'androgyne,"
writers have linked androgyny, homosexuality, and divine powers. See Mircea Eliade, The
Two and the One, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York, 1969), and Heilbrun, Towarda Recognition
of Androgyny(New York, 1973).
26. Rouben Mamoulian, quoted in Corliss, Greta Garbo, p. 112.
27. H. D., "Tribute to the Angels," Trilogy (New York, 1973), p. 103.
28. Clare Boothe Brokaw, "The Great Garbo," VanityFair 37 (Feb. 1932): 63, 87.
29. In 1931, Felix Cleve spoke of the "rumor that for some time has been current,
that this youthful dream of Greta Garbo is soon to be fulfilled. The report that a Swedish
prince is thinking of taking this film queen home with him will not down" ("Greta Garbo,
the Woman Nobody Knows," The Living Age 340 [June 1931]: 372).
30. Viertel, The Kindness of Strangers, p. 189. At this time, too, Garbo's name was
signed to an article entitled "Why I Will Not Marry,"in which she expresses her ultimate
devotion to Stiller and her fear of causing her husband to lose his identity: "With a male
star, perhaps, it is different. When he marries, convention expects that his wife shall
subordinate her interests to his.... How embarrassing, on the other hand, is the situation
of the non-film-acting husband married to a famous film star! He is bound to lose something
of his own identity. Imagine a man being known as 'Mr. Garbo'-just that and nothing
more!" (The AmericanMovie Goddess,ed. Marsha McCreadie [New York, 1973], p. 13).
31. Canfield, "Letter to Garbo," p. 955.
32. Cecilia Ager, PM, quoted in The Films of Greta Garbo, p. 154.
33. Edwards, "The Labors of Psyche," p. 33.


Garbo - Sailing Beyond The Frame

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Garbo - Sailing Beyond The Frame

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Greta Garbo: Sailing beyond the Frame

Author(s): Betsy Erkkila

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

Betsy Erkkila, assistant professor of English at the University of

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

the petty-bourgeois respectability and happily-ever-after domesticity of

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

self-confirmation. In fact, some of Garbo's most memorable love scenes

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

through the power of gesture, movement, intonation, and inflection,

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

the film script of Queen Christina,which was written in collaboration with

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

Garbo's cavalier queen represents one of the earliest screen ap-

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

In casting the part of Christina's Spanish lover, Garbo rejected Laurence

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

autonomy. From his first appearance at court, Antonio becomes a factor

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

Seeking to define the qualities of the female heroine, Lee Edwards

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

This content downloaded from 130.58.248.213 on Thu, 21 Mar 2013 18:51:49 PM

You might also like