For one reason or another, lately I've been reading a lot about the history of vaudeville and late 19th/early 20th century stage entertainment. It's a pretty fascinating topic that really resonates with modern pop-culture and the questions of race and gender, which is something I'd like to read (and write) more about in the future. I ran across a pretty amazing (and kinda surprising) example of this reading Jim Steinmeyer's "Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented The Impossible And Learned To Disappear", an informal history of stage magicians. For me, the most interesting part of his book was a discussion of the famous "Sawing a Lady In Half" trick.
The cliche of the tuxedo'd magician sawing his Beautiful Assistant in half really is what I think of when the word "magician" is uttered, though. As Steinmeyer points out, and as should be obvious, these visual tropes don't spring from the ether; they're the result of discrete historical events that introduce these stereotypes into the pop culture mythos. The man in the evening wear is one such trope; in the earlier history of stage magic, rampant orientalism and exoticism meant that most performers were swaddled in robes and crowned with turbans. However, the success of a few fairly spectacular showmen, including the father of modern magic (and the namesake of Houdini) Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin, that presented their acts in evening wear reshaped the field and resulted in the trend we've come to expect today. This topic is unexplored in the works I've read thus far. Does the switch from The Exotic Orient to Western Gentleman's Attire in magic shows signal a response a need to clarify the dominance of western empire over its colonial subjects? It would be an interesting topic to explore.
Similarly, the "Lovely Assistant" really came into being only in the early 20th Century. Having left (finally!) Queen Vic behind, stage productions (and popular entertainment in general) became racier, both in terms of sex and violence. The ultraviolent spectacles of the Grand Guignol in Paris are perhaps the most famous of these "new" entertainments, and included fairly intense displays of brutality, murder, and sexual violence in their playlets that apparently left patrons shocked and titillated. Shock and titillation are, then as now, money-makers in terms of pop culture and entertainment, and their advent on the stage resulted in an arms race that pushed the boundaries of what "respectable society" would tolerate. You can see a similar evolution in vaudeville, where early acts (1870s onward) were billed as wholesome family fun; it was only in the later evolution of vaudeville that competition with new forms of entertainment and media consumption forced vaudeville to adapt to the new appetites of the audience. Thus, by the late teens and early 20s, shapely young women in revealing clothes became a part of the spectacle of the magic show.
What is striking, however, is how the Magic Show changed alongside the cast. Early magical entertainment of the 19th Century seemed to focus on manipulations, things like card tricks, coin tricks, billiard balls, etc. Things were appeared or disappeared, of course, and there were marked visual illusions that required complex apparatuses and staging. However, reading Steinmeyer's book, I'm struck with the view of the Magic Show as an almost bastard brother of the scientific lecture. Many of the descriptions of magic shows are couched in terms of public experiments, with the Magician in the role of scientist. This makes sense in early magic shows often shared a lot with the spiritualist movement, either overtly offering spiritualist phenomena with purposefully obfuscated provenance (supernatural, or just clever trickery?), although the same experimentalist approach seems, to me at least, to have persisted well beyond table knocking and ectoplasmic vomit. However, the evolving marketplace of entertainment ideas drove magicians to seek more and more spectacle in their shows, including bigger and bigger illusions and more daring tricks. Into this fast-pasted world of competing magicians and magic shows, steps Englishman P.T. Selbit and his trick "Sawing Through A Woman" in 1920.
The trick is just what it purports to be: Selbit straight up saws a lady in half, while people watch. Yet, for some reason, it sets off an explosion of imitations, some gruesome, some playful, that quickly spread throughout the Magic Show world. In fact, the idea of "torture illusions" becomes a thing for performers, and are almost always specifically about torturing a lady while people watch. As Steinmeyer points out, these types of illusions come to dominate Selbit's career too. By 1922, he'd returned to England, and spent his career building a repertoire of "X a Lady" style illusions, including "Destroying a Girl", "Crushing a Woman", and "Stretching a Lady", among others.
As Steinmeyer points out, the timing of the development of this trick and its rocketing to pop culture prominence is no coincidence. In England, women's suffrage had only been awarded in 1918, while the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 in the US. Misogyny, then, was only recently removed from the official structure of two of the English-speaking world's largest governments, and even a cursory perusal of anti-suffrage publications, cartoons, etc, can show the vehemence that had been directed against the individuals advocating for Women's rights. Misogynists, then, would be looking for revenge wherever it could be found, and even the fictional revenge of pretending to mutilate a lady could salve the wounds that Patriarchy had been dealt by allowing women to vote.
Amazingly, Steinmeyer writes that Selbit, the originator of the Sawing illusion, originally had challenged prominent badasses Sylvia and Christabel Pankhurst to be the victim in his trick. That's amazing! Challenging important and well-known feminist "agitators" to be "sawed" in half for his illusion!? Selbit was lucky Sylvia didn't punch him in the balls for that. Of course, neither of the Pankhurst sisters took him up on his offensive idea, although it gave him quite a bit of publicity regardless. A review of Selbit's show at the time apparently commented how wonderful it would be for Selbit to be able to say that "he has actually 'sawn off' the redoubtable 'Sylvia'!" (Steinmeyer p. 293), which kinda just says it all, really. Even if she wouldn't get actually murdered on stage for the amusement of the crowd, the very act would "saw her off", reducing her (and by extension, the movement she championed) to a legless thing of mockery.
Unfortunately, Steinmeyer's goal in writing his book is not to explore the role of gender in stage entertainment, so he doesn't get much farther into it than pointing out the relationship between anti-suffrage and misogynistic audiences/culture and the stage. He also points out how the general theme of expanding violence and torture in entertainment may also be a response to the horrors of World War I, although he merely asserts this as an idea rather than demonstrating it historically. Steinmeyer, of course, is not a trained historian, and the point of his book is much more focused on tracing the lives of the men who developed and shaped modern stage magic.
Still, it's a breath of fresh air for a popular writer to point out instances of blatant misogyny, and the particular instance of "Sawing a Woman in Half" is just absolutely bonkers. I mean, it really is a perfect example of the intersection of misogyny, feminism, and popular culture. It's outside of my academic bailiwick, so I don't know if anyone has written a specific article or book on the subject, though I'd love to see an academic historian's take, or a gender studies take, on the issue. There must be absolutely crazy sources, lots of weird playbills and posters that you could really mine in a material cultures sort of way to explore the suffrage and women's rights movements in the early 20th Century.
And, of course, as an example, it's just so amazingly (or, sadly, not so amazingly) relevant to modern culture and the anti-feminist backlash visible in modern pop entertainment. Female endangerment is a staple of entertainment, whether it's modern TV, Movies, Video Games, or just standing around a stage watching a magician saw a woman in two.
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