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"It was Olga Nethersole in quite another atmosphere than the public sees her—a healthy, air-loving woman with a mentality strong enough and broad enough to grant her healthy views upon an unhealthy subject." This description of British actress-manager Olga Nethersole appeared in the Detroit News on January 1, 1900. In just a few short weeks, her theatrical production of Sapho would explode onto the national stage, making her the most famous actress in America and culminating in her arrest for public indecency.1 In the calm before the coming storm Nethersole is quoted as follows:
First of all … we must bring ourselves to understand and admit that there is good in everyone. This is true, I believe, of all that class of women who is held at arm's length. It is this one thing which makes these women what they are to literature and the drama. … For such women are human, they have hearts and souls and flesh and blood, and can suffer as much, if not more than their sisters whose lives extend but little beyond the home.2
What do we make of Nethersole's appeal to sisterhood in this preemptive defense of Sapho? What might this seemingly innocuous Victorian voice tell us about the meaning of Sapphic sisterhood in the era of cinema's so-called "birth"? In 1989, Teresa de Lauretis decried "the sweeping of lesbian sexuality … under the rug of sisterhood."3 Yet, in the second half of the nineteenth century, sisterhood was being aggressively mobilized by Olga Nethersole, and other artists, to make public lesbian meanings that radically challenged the patriarchal family and social structures of the Victorian Era. Nethersole's call for sisterhood in the passage above activated a broader lesbian discourse of Sapphic kinship that was a crucial component of lesbian culture at the time and that I contend is central to understanding the lesbian pleasures of the silent screen.
Consider the following mid-nineteenth-century Staffordshire figurine of the prototypical star-crossed lovers Romeo and Juliet. Modeled on an 1846 drawing of famed American actress Charlotte Cushman playing Romeo opposite her sister Susan as Juliet, these mass-produced artifacts ostensibly commemorate the Cushman sisters' performance.4 Lisa Merrill has persuasively read the figurines as a mark of Charlotte Cushman's