Mabel's Legacy

By far the topic that unites almost all scholarship on Normand’s career is an explanation of her decline in popularity and the diminishment of her legacy, yet there is no work exploring the legacy itself. This page presents a comparison of the frequency Normand’s name occurs over time in two different pools of data. The first are trade papers and movie magazines from the Media History Digital Library, using the Arclight search tool. The second is Google’s N-gram book and print data. By putting these results against each other we see trends in Normand’s Popularity.

Bringing these lines together drives the point home that Normand, up until the mid-twenties (in the trade papers at least) was mentioned nearly as often as Chaplin and Sennett.

But things look a little different outside the industry...

A Google N-Gram search reveals that within the Google Book Corpus, Charlie Chaplin is by far the most popular during Normand’s lifetime and beyond. This somewhat unsettles the opinion that only legacy making work like autobiography accounts for Normand’s lesser regard today. Further comparison with Chaplin and Sennett’s filmographies might offer better insight into their inequities that have not yet been quantified.

Still, another possible suggestion that one might draw from the difference between Lantern and Google’s account of Normand is that the film industry in its emergence presented more opportunity and regard for women than publishing at large. While a version of this claim is posed in similar projects about women’s roles in film’s first few decades, compiling similar information about other stars and film workers will be necessary.