ABSTRACT

This chapter examines the films that demonstrate the continuation of the gendered politics of female musical performance in Western Europe during the Elizabethan period throughout the nineteenth century. It addresses the issue of cinema's representation of diva heroines in comparison to that of instrumentalist heroines, paying particular attention to the gendered identity of vocal and instrumental music. The chapter examines how a gendered representation of instrumentalist versus diva heroines in certain films corresponds to a gendered dichotomy between vocal and instrumental music. It then focuses on the films that deal with fictional divas rather than biopics, the former group to be a more intriguing representation of the gendered difference from instrumental heroines in terms of their music-making. The relative stability of the feminine gendering of vocal music is supported by the prominence given to public performance by film divas, as compared to that by instrumentalist heroines, suggesting that cinema has also encoded vocal music as a feminine domain.