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Apparitional Girlhood: Material Ephemerality And The Historiography Of Female Adolescence In Early American Film, Diana Anselmo-Sequeira

Diana Anselmo-Sequeira

At the turn of the twentieth century, the figure of the adolescent girl emerged in popular culture, her amorphous specter haunting the American screen. For the next two decades, psychologists, scientists, columnists, and filmmakers would struggle to visualize a figure that was - physically, intellectually, and spiritually - defined by the ephemerality of transformation. Further, shaped by a deep-seeded cultural tradition that equated young femininity with mysticism, the adolescent girl became quickly visualized as a liminal figure, the uncanny mediator between the living and the dead.

Focusing on D.W. Griffith’s "What The Daisy Said" (1910), Thanhouser’s "The Portrait of Lady …