It started 100 years ago with a woman in a box. A man had tied it to the wrists and ankles, had threaded the ropes through holes at each end of the coffin-shaped structure, and had tied them again to the outside of the box, making movement – and even less escape – impossible. The man sealed the container, which was supported by a pair of wooden platforms, and pushed glass and metal sheets through pre-cut slits and, apparently, through the woman’s body. Then the real work began: he used a large saw to laboriously divide the box into two halves. When the sawdust set in, he opened the box and cut the ropes. The woman came out unharmed.
When you think of traditional stage magic, there’s a good chance an iconic illusion will come to mind: the act of sawing a woman in half. The trick was first performed a century ago, at London’s Finsbury Park Empire theater, by a British magician whose stage name was PT Selbit. In the decades that followed, it became one of the inescapable illusions of magic. One version of the trick even caused panic in 1956, when BBC viewers thought a magician known as PC Sorcar had actually sliced a woman in half on live television.
It’s not just women who find themselves on the professional side of a magician’s saw. The first time the tour was performed in America by Horace Goldin, the “victim” was a hotel bellboy. In the 1980s, superstar magician David Copperfield sawed off himself in two in an elaborate setting he titled, with his trademark subtlety, “The Death Saw”. But when it comes to being cut in half on stage, it’s no coincidence that women are overwhelmingly the victims of choice. When the creator of the trick launched it in January 1921, he wanted the Woman Under the Saw to be one of the country’s most famous feminist activists.
A new kind of magic
The horrors of World War I had changed the face of popular entertainment, influencing everything from Lon Chaney Sr.’s legendary makeup and prosthetic applications to the gruesome Parisian theater of the Grand Guignol, known for its shockingly violent productions. The magic of the stage was no exception: after a war that killed some 40 million people, watching an adult play with silk handkerchiefs seemed hopelessly picturesque. The audience was ready for something darker, and Selbit gave it to them.
Selbit was already an accomplished illusionist who had made several contributions to the craft. Born Percy Thomas Tibbles in 1881, Selbit discovered stage magic during a youth apprenticeship with a goldsmith who rents his basement to a magician. According to magical lore, Selbit would walk away from the shop and choose the lock in the basement so that he could watch the magician practice his craft. He arrived at his stage name by spelling his last name backwards and was performing professionally at the age of 19; he began writing and editing for magical journals soon after. Selbit is the author of a 1907 publication titled Conjuration patter– basically a collection of daddy jokes for wizards, with subsections like “Water Witticisms” and “Bits About Bottles”. In 1919, he helped organize a shoot that succeeded in deceiving Arthur Conan Doyle. (Although, in all fairness, Doyle was also deceived by two children who cut out illustrations from a children’s book, photographed them, and insisted they were real fairies.)
Selbit also had a knack for self-promotion. When it was time to get interested in his “Saw Through a Woman” routine, Selbit had stagehands toss buckets of fake blood into the gutter outside the theater between shows. “Nurses” were stationed in the theater lobby and Selbit hired ambulances to travel around London and announce his show.
But there was another social phenomenon that supported the success of the illusion. Selbit first performed the trick just three years after British female landlords over 30 were granted the right to vote. British suffragists did not win the vote easily. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 was passed after years of tireless, sometimes militant, campaigning by feminist activists. And in 1921, Selbit, still the showmaster, invited one of the movement’s most controversial leaders to be his professional victim.
“Elusive Christabel”
Christabel Pankhurst was the eldest daughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, with whom Christabel and her sister Sylvia founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1903. Sylvia supported a more measured approach to women’s suffrage, but Christabel had no patience for long-drawn-out politics. maneuver. She was first jailed in 1905 after interrupting a Liberal Party meeting to deliver an impassioned speech on women’s suffrage. His brutal treatment by the police – not to mention his fiery reaction, which included spitting on two policemen and assaulting one of them – was widely covered in the press, and from that point on, Christabel favored militant activism.
She was a polarizing figure and the cause of many torturers in early 20th century England. There was even an optical toy called “Elusive Christabel”, produced in 1912, which satirized the inability of the police to find the activist while she was wanted for a conspiracy. So when Christabel placed newspaper ads seeking “non-personal employment” and “paid, non-political work” just days after Selbit launched his trick in 1921, the illusionist must have seen a golden opportunity to exploit public concerns about the controversial women’s rights movement.
According to theater historian and magician Dr Naomi Paxton, Selbit wrote to Pankhurst and offered him “an engagement to star in [his] performance. “He would pay her £ 20 a week – an amount equal to about £ 1,000 in today’s market, or over $ 1,375 – if she accepted the job for the full engagement.” The work is non-work in nature. policy, ”Selbit wrote,“ and on top of that, all travel expenses would be paid. ”
Selbit had to inform the local press about his offer, as it was widely covered by contemporary newspapers. But Pankhurst didn’t take the hook. London Daily News her laconic response reported: “The term Finsbury Empire is not the kind of job I’m looking for.”
According to Paxton and other historians, Selbit’s insistence that the work was “non-political in nature” was misleading; sure there would have been political overtones to a show that involved men restraining and dismembering one of the most vocal defenders of First Wave feminism. Paxton even compares the imagery of Selbit’s sawing illusion to depictions of force-fed women – a brutal practice used by authorities on hunger-striking suffragists – citing a “macabre pleasure in seeing a female body restrained in Danger”.
Joanna Ebenstein, founder of Morbid Anatomy, seems to share this assessment. As she told Brooklyn Magazine in 2015, “There is a real connection between anxiety over the changing power of women and wanting to see them as two in public, to the delight of hundreds of thousands of people. “
A legacy in two parts
The stuff caused a stir, but it wasn’t Selbit who popularized it in America. When the British magician arrived in the United States to tour his show in the summer of 1921, he discovered that several illusionists, including Horace Goldin, were already performing their own versions of the trick.
Goldin was particularly aggressive in claiming ownership of the illusion. He insisted he made it up (most historians doubt Goldin’s claim) and spent years suing the other magicians who executed him. Capitalizing on the popularity of such acts, Selbit went on to develop other illusions involving the distortion or destruction of the female body, including “Stretching a Girl” of 1922 and “Crushing a Woman” the following year, although ‘he never achieved great fame in the United States.
But her tour de force has become a staple of modern stage magic and a classic example of the often problematic treatment of women with magic. As with so many illusions, it’s the one cut in half that does most of the work, often twisting to partially squeeze into some sort of hidden chamber, while the one wielding the saw receives the applause. Magicians’ assistants, regardless of gender, are highly skilled performers who often do much of the proverbial heavy lifting while the magician devotes his energy to making dramatic gestures, but we rarely even learn their names.
For the record, when Selbit publicly performed the trick for the first time, it was a woman named Betty Barker inside the box.