My examination of Mabel Normand
and fashion hopes to then build on and with luck complicate Bean as well as
Slater’s discussions.   Before I get explicitly to the question
of fashion, I want to make a fast detour and sketch out a brief taxonomy of
early film performance for women stars as a way to situate the uniqueness of
Mabel’s style and persona.  
Often lumped (and at times dismissed) as part of the knockabout
tradition, Normand’s performance is I would argue a rather quite different and distinct
style that might help us to expand on notions of mimesis and the performative
that Bean’s essay raised.  Normand’s
style, which I will label a “performance of infelicities” (a kind of failed
performative, marked by willful mis-use of the act/utterance) propels us beyond
the world of the uncertain and into the possible.  It is a style not so much “caused by” her work as a model
and poses she may have learned, but the context of fashions she wore and was
associated and the process and logic of modeling itself.