Pearl, the Swift One, or the Extraordinary Adventures of Pearl White in France

The social blueprint for Pearl White’s film persona has often been identified in the figure of the American New Woman, as it emerged in the popular press during the 1910s. For instance, as has been noticed, Pauline Marvin’s craze for adventure and thrills in The Perils of Pauline stands as a perfect equivalent for the bravery exhibited by those famed “plucky girl reporters,” whose daring exploits were offered to the audience in the form of first-person, highly sensational articles in contemporary newspapers. Much in the same vein, in an intertitle in the first episode of the serial, Pauline Marvin declines her guardian’s request that she marry his son Harry, not because she is not in love with him, but because she is unwilling to renounce to her “adventurous spirit” and her “desire to live and realize the greatest thrills so that I can describe them in a romance of adventures.” So there is no doubt that for the American audience Pearl White simply represented a hyperbolic transfiguration of an already familiar, but still quite novel, feminine type that was then emerging both in society and in popular media. But what if the most immediate model of her character were not American, but French? After all, when The Perils of Pauline was put in production, the American branch of Pathé was still under the management of Louis Gasnier, a French director who had been sent to New Jersey in 1912 by Charles Pathé to set about production in the United States. Though the story of the serial is attributed to Charles Goddard (who was actually the author of the tied-up novelization that was published in the Hearst syndicated papers), and the screenplay to George B. Seitz, one cannot exclude that the idea of the character came from Gasnier or some other French member of the crew. This is actually what seems implied in Gasnier’s own reconstruction of his work on Pauline as reported by Georges Sadoul, when he recalls how he not only was “to direct the installments, but also to invent all those improbable adventures. Each episode ended in a quite anguishing way for the spectator. I was forced to always imagine ‘what was going to happen,’ which was not easy.”