From Steam to Screen by Harrison Rebecca

Author:Harrison, Rebecca
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B. Tauris
Published: 2018-03-08T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.3Miss Froy writes her name on the window/screen to communicate with Iris in The Lady Vanishes (Gainsborough Pictures, 1938).

From Kate’s banishment from Pemberton’s home in Kate Plus Ten to Gilbert enforcing his unwanted presence in Iris’s hotel room in The Lady Vanishes, interwar railway films seldom represent female characters in public or private spaces over which women assert authority. Instead, women are sent and received between sites like men’s belongings. For example, Hannay promises Pamela in The 39 Steps that ‘I’ll see you’re sent back’ once he has finished using her, for she is a commodity that he initially assumes will become obsolete. Throughout the corpus, rail coaches offer modern women mobility and new perspectives, but deliver them into patriarchal control. Train travel in the films, therefore, represents the contradictory experiences of women in British culture, who negotiated public spaces simultaneously fraught with conservatism and transformation. The train, and by extension, the railway film, are sites that register women’s material experiences of modernity, for while the spaces are inclusive, they are also arenas in which men seek to control women’s interventions. Although women’s earnings increased their value to capitalist culture, and led state institutions to support their employment, the woman worker was contained within a hierarchical framework to appease existing male employees. The promise of improved mobility, expanded vision and new experiences offered by women’s work (and figuratively by the onscreen train) was limited by the narrow terms that set out the rules for women’s occupations.

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