My Sisters Telegraphic: Women in the Telegraph Office ... - Monoskop

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WOMEN TELEGRAPHERS IN LITERATURE AND CINEMA
the relatively permeable class barriers of nineteenth-century America to become
Dr. Childers’s wife, Henry James’s telegraphist knows that for persons
of her class, “it was something to fill an office under government, and she
knew but too well there were places commoner still than Cocker’s”; her real
escape was to be found at Chalk Farm with Mr. Mudge.
Women Telegraphers in the Cinema
D. W. Griffith
While working for Biograph Studios, the American director D. W. Griffith
was seized by the possibilities of the image of the female operator at her
lonely outpost and made it the central focus of two of his earliest featurelength
films, The Lonedale Operator and The Girl and Her Trust. The Lonedale
Operator was the earlier of the two films; it was made in 1911 and starred
Blanche Sweet. She is the telegraph operator at a remote western railroad
station; even the name “Lonedale” suggests her isolation. When the station
is attacked by bandits, she defends herself by wrapping a monkey wrench
with a handkerchief, fooling the bandits into believing that it is a gun. She
successfully holds them at bay until help arrives.
The Girl and Her Trust, made the following year and starring Dorothy
Bernard, is essentially a remake of The Lonedale Operator incorporating some
of the technical advances that Griffith had made in the year between the
filmings of the two pictures. The plot of The Girl and Her Trust is more sophisticated
and has better continuity; Griffith adds a chase sequence in
which a moving camera mounted on a car follows a speeding train, creating
an image of great speed.
Dorothy Bernard’s character, Grace the telegrapher, must deal not only
with bandits, who are trying to steal a company payroll, but also with several
prospective suitors. The first is a pathetic and ill-dressed character played
by Griffith himself in a cameo role; he attempts to ingratiate himself with
the operator by offering her a soft drink. She rebuffs his overtures, however,
and orders him out of the office; clearly she has learned how to deal with
what Nihil Nameless referred to as “men of the rudest, most uncultured
type,” who tended to hang around the local depot. She also must fend off
the advances of the station agent, who attempts to steal a kiss from the unsuspecting
operator when she offers him a drink of her soda.
Grace’s adventure begins when she receives telegraphic notice that a