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“Self-Appointed Executioner”:

2012; Penn State University Press; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/intelitestud.14.2.0133

1524-8429

Rachael Zeleny,

Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics

As Claire Hirschfield notes, "The politically active or socially committed actress has become in recent years a familiar icon: today's actresses routinely lend support to candidates for political office, participate in anti-nuclear marches, and travel to third world capitals to promote a political agenda" (72). This situation was very different for much of the nineteenth century. Victorian actresses were struggling even to attain respectability and could hardly be considered influential leaders or models of what Hirschfield refers to as the "actress-as-activist" (73). In fact, historically, the actress was a symbol of what not to be.Since 1660, the year that women were permitted onstage in Britain, the occupation of the actress functioned within a public rhetoric that was degrading and dehumanizing for the women of the theater. Debates during the early seventeenth century, for example, claimed that women were "responsible for the theater's corrupting influence and more susceptible to it" (Nussbaum 149). In this vein, Jeremy Collier's famous attack on theatricality, A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), indicates that to allow women on the stage was "to make monsters of them, and throw them out of their kind" (Collier 185). In the eighteenth century, actress Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) challenged the negative stereotypes about the actress as a woman who expertly balanced her life offstage as a wife and mother while also becoming the "beau idéal of acting," as she was called by Lord Byron (qtd. in Manvell 299); however, she was the exception to the rule among her contemporaries, who included women such as Mary Robinson (1758–1800), who was known for her affair with the Prince of Wales, and Mary Wells (1781–1812), who was notorious for her transgressive performances and her alleged insanity.By the nineteenth century, as Kerry Powell notes, the actress was still conceived of as a product and a symptom of a male-dominated discourse, which "reconstructed the performing woman as more than an actress—as a renegade female, one fundamentally different from normative wives and mothers marginally 'feminine' if feminine at all, quite possibly inhuman" (3–4). Although the stage and the audience became increasingly populated by women, "for a large section of society, the similarities between the actress's life and a prostitute's life … were unforgettable" (Davis 70): "as long as the drama was devoid of literary merit or social relevance, and as long as performers were of lower class of itinerant theatrical backgrounds, the public readily believed in actresses' immorality and worthlessness" (73). Despite the longstanding negative associations with the theater and its performers, the quality of the plays and of theatrical locations gradually improved, thereby contributing to the improved reputation of the actress.The Theatres Licensing Act of 1843 forbade the sale of alcohol, and managers worked to police the atmosphere so that theaters "became more like homes and less like houses of prostitution, the carriages of respectable families could once again be seen stopping outside" (Powell 48). London venues such as Gilbert and Sullivan's Opera House (built in 1881), which was complete with private roads, electricity, and even smoking rooms, contributed to the respectability of theatrical entertainment for middle-class men and women alike. In addition, many of the actresses were no longer merely women on the stage, but paradigms of femininity. As Lindal Buchanan explains, "[Nineteenth-century] women were strongly associated with procreation, domesticity, virtue, sexual disinterest, and social retirement. These qualities—which were diametrically opposed to the actress's presumed sexuality, amorality, and desire for public display—were appropriated by female performers in order to construct ethos and refute misconceptions of the theater and its women" (Buchanan 2).In order to encourage the conflation of actress and domesticity, a female performer could find a respectable role as a middle-class woman in the increasingly popular "cup-and- saucer" dramas (plays such as Society [1865] or The Vicarage [1877]), which aimed for realism in the use of costumes, dialogue, and sets. Actresses not only constructed an ethos of femininity onstage but also offstage, providing blueprints for other women to follow. For instance, actresses such as Fanny Kemble (1809–1893) and Marie Bancroft (1840–1921) published their memoirs, while Rose Leclercq (1843–1899) and Alma Murray (1854–1945) gave interviews to newspapers, using these media to challenge the "ideological prescriptions about Bad women" by suggesting that they, too, could claim their rightful place as "respectable daughters, wives or mothers" (Davis 71).Even the transgressive actress, occasionally, was able to thrive. The legendary actress Ellen Terry (1847–1928), for example, had a number of well-known romantic relationships, one of which resulted in her two illegitimate children, but nonetheless, she became one of England's leading ladies. Unorthodox actresses such as Lillie Langtry (1853–1929), Marie Lloyd (1870–1922), and Mrs. Patrick Campbell (1865–1940) were also exempted from the association between the actress and the prostitute "due to their considerable and enduring popularity" (Davis 73).By the turn of the century, some British actresses and other female theatrical figures were indeed participating openly in social activism. For instance, playwright Florence Bell (1851–1930) demonstrates the extent to which a woman "could be a truly professional writer, a woman of letters, able to move from translations and adaptations of French plays, to children's literature, to sociological essays for the French journal La science sociale, and English journals on a variety of topics, from personal memoirs to informed and detailed studies of working-class reading habits" (Newey 170). While not overtly a suffragist endeavor, Bell's collaboration with the performer and dramatist Elizabeth Robins (1862–1952) on the translation and adaptation of the play Alan's Wife (1893) was certainly a means of furthering her own feminist agenda. Similarly, Florence Marryat (1838–1899) offers another example of a woman who merged respectability and the theater and who "typifie[d] the woman writer as entrepreneur," for "her stage career as playwright and performer was a part of a range of innovative literary activities" (Newey 180). Using a fictional character as a political mouthpiece, she played the "strong-minded, masculine" role of Hephzibah Horton in Her World Against a Lie in 1881. Horton is "an independent literary woman and advocate of women's rights who suggests to the heroine, Delia," that she obtain an order of protection "to stop her husband living off her earnings" (Newey 181). Riding on the success of her theatrical career, Marryat moved into yet another arena with her comic but pointed lecture in 1891, "Women of the Future (1991); or, what shall we do with our men?" (Newey 181). Theatrical suffragist landmarks of the early twentieth century included plays such as Elizabeth Robins's Votes for Women (1909) and Cicely Hamilton's The Pageant of Great Women (1909), as well as the establishment of a political organization such as the Actresses' Franchise League (est. 1908).While we can document the moments in which these women broke the mold of a public woman's role in society, little attention has been given to the texts that they produced. It is not surprising then, that British "New Woman" novels of the 1890s featuring actresses and their political interventions have been similarly overlooked. Some of these texts continue to be "dismissed as polemical, political and even shrill" (Stetz v). George Paston's (aka Emily Morse Symonds's) A Writer of Books (1898) for instance, remained "out of print throughout the twentieth century, consigned to the void along with so many of the other 'New Woman' works" (Stetz v) until it was republished by Academy Chicago in 1999. However, this text, like those produced by the contemporary New Woman playwrights, can better help us to understand how women were able attain power in the public sphere.Under the pen name George Paston, Emily Morse Symonds (1860–1936) issued A Writer of Books as her very last novel before embarking on a career as a dramatist. In this narrative, we find the heroine, a sheltered intellectual named Cosima Chudleigh, seriously pursuing a career as a novelist. Cosima's naïveté inevitably leads her on a path littered with obstacles: she finds herself in disreputable locations, in compromising situations, and, perhaps worst of all, married to a man whom she does not love. Trapped in a passionless relationship with her unsympathetic husband, Tom Kingston, the struggling novelist loses her impetus to write and becomes increasingly indifferent to the world around her. In earlier Victorian novels, such as George Eliot's Daniel Deronda (1876) and Charlotte Brontë's Villette (1853), the female performer is vilified and yet in this narrative it is the assertive actress, Bess Heywood, who helps Cosima take control of her own life and return to the path that will make her an artist.A review of Paston's novel in the November 1898 issue of the Bookman sang its praises: "This writer of books gives the author an opportunity of standing valiantly for the seriousness of fiction, the richest mine for the historian and the sociologist of the future. This is by far the best novel 'George Paston' has yet given us. It is exceedingly well written in its comment and in many of its characterizations [sic] It has stormed at some conventions, not always wisely, we admit, but with perfect justice" (Anon., "A Writer of Books" 56). If we, too, examine this novel as a "rich mine for the historian," it becomes a significant cultural production of the 1890s, simultaneously mirroring, modeling, and foreshadowing ways in which women could and did use their talents to further their own agendas. While this same review refers slightingly to Bess Heywood as "monomaniac," my work will trace the ways in which this figure deviates from earlier nineteenth-century discourses about the actress and becomes instead a positive figure and a precursor to the actress-as-activist with which we are familiar today.Textually and visually, the nineteenth-century actress was situated in opposition to the domestic ideal of Victorian writers such as Coventry Patmore (1823–1896), who coined the phrase "angel of the house." In Consuming Angels (1994), for instance, Lori Ann Loeb discusses how the actress as an erotic image became a norm for the Victorian consumer: "Risqué portraits in the late Victorian and Edwardian press highlighted the actress's distance from the maternal ideal," while "the actress in the advertisement [became] a siren, praised in the advertisement not only for her beauty, but also for the promise of sexuality she represents" (95). Novelists drew upon this popular understanding of the overtly sexualized body of the actress and penned descriptions of the actress that caricatured her physically as unhealthy or exotic. As Kerry Powell observes, "Actresses, even the greatest, were absorbed in this formulation, for in their supposed excesses performing women were represented as diseased or inhuman monstrosities, not women at all" (xi). Writing at the end of the century, "George Paston" deliberately undermined the negative representational conventions that shaped the public's assumptions about the actress, contributing to a more positive discourse surrounding the female performer. In particular, she used Bess Heywood as a fictional figure who radically asserted autonomy over her own life, who reflected the most admirable features of real-life female contemporaries on the stage, who foreshadowed the potential for actresses to realize their own political agendas.One of the most pervasive beliefs regarding the physiology of the Victorian actress was that exposure to theater life caused a physical degeneration of the body. For instance, Charlotte Brontë's fictional actress in Villette, Vashti, is a sickly presence, "pale like twilight and wasted like wax in the flame," with a face that "appears like a demoniac mask" (260). These descriptions of the fictional Vashti echo in contemporaneous responses to the real-life figure of Rachel Felix that reinforced associations between female performers and both moral and physical decline. As George Lewes observed in his 1850 review of Felix in the Leader, "Her appearance as she entered, wasting away with fire that consumed her, standing on a verge of the grave, —her face pallid, —her eyes hot, her arms and hands emaciated, filled us with a ghastly horror" (qtd. in Stokes 54). While the fictional Vashti and Rachel, the actual actress who inspired her, are both credited with their power as performers, these accounts suggest that women on stage were required to surrender their femininity, and perhaps their souls, to achieve theatrical success.In Daniel Deronda, George Eliot also renders her fictional woman performer, Contessa Maria Alcharisi, as morally and physically altered by her involvement with the theatrical world. When her son, Daniel, first sees her, he observes that her "worn beauty had a strangeness in it as if she were not quite a human mother, but a Melusina, who had ties with some world independent of ours" (548). With this, Eliot aligns the actress with the myth of a serpent—Melusina—who chooses to camouflage herself as a woman. Such a description of the female performer suggests that it became harder and harder for the actress to conceal the corrupt "monster" within her by means of costumes and makeup.This pattern of negative representation continued unabated into the later decades of the nineteenth century and even influenced works such as Oscar Wilde's novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Typically, scholars have focused on Wilde's sympathetic treatment of the young actress, Sybil Vane, in this fantasy, paying less attention to the figure of her mother, who is also an actress. Mrs. Vane, as a representative of the previous generation of actresses, is quite different from her daughter, a morally virtuous woman who is capable of love and sincerity. In Mrs. Vane, we find the older stereotype of a woman physically degenerating from her life onstage: she has "thin, bismuth whitened hands" and "crooked, false-jeweled fingers" (Wilde 50). Mrs. Vane belongs to the traditional notion of performers to which Dorian refers when he considers the actresses that Lord Henry has loved: "horrid people with dyed hair and painted faces" (43). Through this representation of the aging actress, Wilde reinforces the notion that there is a direct correlation between gaudy jewelry and the chemicals in makeup and hair dye and the moral and physical corruption of women in the theatrical world.Unlike her mother, Sybil Vane is a "natural" actress, authentic in virginal appearance and in sentiment: "a girl, hardly seventeen years of age, with a little flower-like face, a small Greek head with plaited coils of dark brown hair, eyes that were violet wells of passion" (42) and with "a reed-like throat" (43). Although Wilde's description of Sybil is more complimentary than were earlier literary representations of the actress, she is rendered as too physically fragile and too sensitive to survive amid the selfish, manipulative male aesthetes as embodied by Dorian Gray: "the moment she touched actual life, she marred it and it marred her and so she passed away" (84). Wilde's novel suggests that the performative, aristocratic society had replaced the theater as a source of corruption. By the late 1890s, the social sphere is the one in which young women will become physically and morally damaged, even if they have remained untouched in the theatrical one.Coming after this long tradition of negative representations, George Paston's 1898 novel alludes self-consciously to its predecessor texts, even as it changes the discourse around women in the professions in general and actresses in particular. As in Villette, we first see an actress through the eyes of another female character. Notably, Cosima Chudleigh, the protagonist, also ties Paston's novel with Brontë's, when the narrator describes her as being like "Lucy Snowe when she first arrived at Villette," for her way of seeing the world is one in which "everything feels strange and bewildering at first" (Paston 19). Because Cosima has limited experience with reality and most of her knowledge has come from novels, her reception of Bess reflects her curiosity, rather than her prejudice against actresses. In fact, it is Cosima, as a "scientific observer, a specialist, so to speak," who initiates conversation with Bess, as she believes that she needs to "learn something of all sides of life and all sorts and conditions of men" in order to be a novelist (45). Cosima does not judge Bess negatively for this experience or assume that it equals either corruption or degeneration.Cosima, the novice writer, first sees the actress figure not onstage, but in a sordid restaurant where Bess works as a barmaid. Even though her male companion warns Cosima that Bess is a "stuck-up cat" with bad manners, Cosima wishes to use Bess as an object for study and thus desires "a nearer view of the beautiful creature behind the bar" (Paston 43–44). Even before Cosima has the opportunity to speak to Bess, her first impression of the actress is a sympathetic one: "She was unusually tall, and her bearing was like that of a young empress made captive by barbarians. Her eyes were so dark and deep set that they seemed to shine out of heavy shadows, her complexion was of a dazzling pallor with a faint underglow of colour, and her profile was like an antique bronze. Her full lips were set in scornful curves, and her small head, with its crown of dusky hair, was held at an angle that might have been expected to overawe the most hardened haunter of public bars" (Paston 42).Perhaps echoing Wilde's critique of the social world in Dorian Gray, the bar and its masculine clientele are far more undesirable than the actress; Bess is a captive of barbarians, royalty among the men, to whom she refers as "plenty of human pigs with diseased appetites" (45). While Bess certainly deviates from physical descriptions of the angel of the house, she is neither degenerate nor satanic. With her shining eyes and glowing cheeks, she is no sickly character like Brontë's febrile Vashti. Bess's youth, strength, and proudly erect posture distinguish her from the images of faded and decaying figures we find for earlier literary actress-mothers, including Alcharisi and Mrs. Vane. And certainly, considering Bess's dominating height and stature, as well as her full lips with "scornful curves," we would be surprised to see her bested as Sybil Vane is by an egotistical, effeminate male aesthete like Dorian Gray. Indeed, Bess Heywood has the upper hand in all encounters with men.The physical descriptions of Bess do show the influence, however, of George Eliot's murderous Madame Laure in Middlemarch. Like Bess, Madame Laure is rendered as dark, exotic, powerful, and statuesque: "She was a Provençale, with dark eyes, a Greek profile and rounded majestic form" (112). Paston's frequent references to Eliot throughout A Writer of Books suggest that the author intends her own fictional actress to resonate with her audience's memory of Madame Laure's actions in Middlemarch. While Bess's campaign of retribution against men does conjure negative memories of the vengeful Madame Laure, we would be mistaken to assume that these two characters are alike in more than superficial ways. Paston is, in fact, also deliberately drawing from alternative, more positive modes of femininity as constructed by other women writers in order to create a new kind of actress figure, whose motives and actions are political and feminist in nature.While Bess's dark features and statuesque appearance suggest an allusion to Madame Laure, Paston's readers, especially her female readers, might also have recognized Bess's resemblance to the raven-haired improvisatrice from Germane de Staël's Corinne (1807). The improvisatrice is best defined as an exotic poet, well versed in languages, fine arts, spontaneous rhetoric, and acting. Cosima's description of Bess's "crown of dusky hair" evokes memories of the famous scene from de Staël's novel where Corinne is crowned in Rome for her genius, for proof that "she united all the talents most captivating to the fancy" (de Staël 23). In Corinne, we have a model and precursor for Paston's Bess Heywood: "Attired like Domenichino's Sybil, an Indian shawl was twined among her lustrous black curls…. Her whole costume was picturesque…. Her arms were transcendentally beautiful and her figure tall and as we frequently see among the Grecian statues rather robust" (de Staël 18).The character of the robust and vigorous improvisatrice appears not only in Corinne, but also in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh (1856), Felicia Hemans's "Properzia Rossi" (1828), and Letitia Landon's "Improvisatrice" (1825), among other works by women. Speaking to the popularity of Corrine in England and the likelihood that Paston draws upon it in her creation of Bess Heywood, we find George Eliot making a significant reference to it in The Mill on the Floss (1860), where Maggie Tulliver says, "I didn't finish the book … As soon as I came to the blonde haired lady sitting in the park, I shut it up, and determined to read no further. I foresaw that the light-complexioned girl would win all the love away from Corinne and make her miserable. I'm determined to read no more books where the blonde-haired women carry away all the happiness. I should begin to have a prejudice against them. If you could give me some story, now, where the dark women triumphs, it would restore the balance" (Eliot, The Mill on the Floss 337). Cosima refers explicitly to The Mill on the Floss as one of the "best work[s] of nearly all of our greatest novelists," but A Writer of Books also appears to answer Maggie's desire for a narrative in which the dark woman triumphs (127).As Maggie suggests in the passage above, the fictional improvisatrice is typically undermined by a society unprepared for a talented and assertive woman. In Corinne, the improvisatrice's untraditional lifestyle prevents her from marrying her conservative lover, Oswald; instead, Oswald marries the conventional feminine ideal of beauty, Corinne's fair and delicate half sister, Lucy. Corinne becomes physically weak, a mere shadow of her former self, as a result of losing her lover, and she dies. A Writer of Books rewrites this tale so that both Cosima and Bess are untraditional, talented women attempting to negotiate their interactions with men and navigate the public sphere. Indeed, when Cosima reads a review of her work by a man who actually appreciates her talent as a novelist, she first thinks of de Staël: "A few minutes before she had believed that, in the words of Madame de Staël, her life was 'terminée commé évenément,'1 and she was reconciled to the prospect of only existing 'commé souffrance.'2 But now the conviction slowly took possession of her that all was not lost, that life was not over" (341). However, while readers might expect Cosima to survive, as she veers less from traditional notions of femininity in her role as a writer, Bess's success in the novel is a surprise. The initial description of Bess as "like a young empress captured by barbarians" suggests a Corinne-like fate for the actress. However, Paston cleverly subverts this expectation by making the initial physical description and perception of her ironic: Bess is the captor and not the captive. She remains physically powerful, and she dominates the narrative whenever she appears until the novel's close.As Margaret Stetz observes, it would have been impossible for Paston's contemporaries to read descriptions of Bess Heywood without also thinking of Victorian England's professional beauty-turned-actress, Lillie Langtry (1853–1929).3 Langtry made her entrance into the social world with her unadorned beauty and became known for her repeated appearances in the same black dress and without jewelry. When Cosima visits Bess at home, readers cannot help recalling Langtry: "[Bess] was dressed in a plain black gown that hung about her splendid figure in long straight folds, and her black hair was parted down the middle, and coiled up in a heavy knot at the back of her head. There was not the slightest attempt at style of fashion in her attire, and therein Cosima felt that she was wise: as well put a Paris gown upon the Venus de Medici or a toque upon Niobe as try to turn this tragic-browed beauty into a fashionable young woman" (60). Although Langtry became an acknowledged leader of fashion later in her life, she was immortalized as a "natural" beauty—an accolade reinforced by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais, in his A Jersey Lily (1878), featuring the lovely woman in her signature black gown with white cuffs, holding only a simple white blossom.Like Bess, Langtry had not originally planned on a career in the public eye. Bess admits to Cosima, "No, I began as a governess, but my appearance was supposed to be against me in that profession" (25). As was true for so many women of the late nineteenth century, financial necessity required Bess and Langtry to take to the stage. With their faces and bodies as their only currency, women did what was necessary to survive. Paston's allusion would have reminded the audience that Bess does not artificially enhance her own appearance and that her theatrical career was primarily a means for obtaining an income; thus, A Writer of Books counters stereotypes of the actress as vain or inherently corrupt.Even more startling than Paston's descriptions of Bess's appearance are the frequent references to her intelligence, education, and independence. According to popular beliefs circulating at the time, as exemplified in short stories such as Arthur Symons's "Esther Kahn" (1905), it was the male playwright or producer who cultivated the talents of the actress or, more generally, the man who shaped the woman. However, in the case of Bess, she has no masculine mentor or other influence in defining her identity. Raised by a single mother, Bess received her education from this "clever and plucky" woman and from her own reading as an autodidact (96). Throughout A Writer of Books, Cosima serves as the reader's guide in how to respond properly to the other characters that Paston creates. Consequently, readers share Cosima's surprise on learning that Bess is an intellectual.Cosima's opinions are informed largely by her reading nineteenth-century novels; when she is first taken aback by Bess's sophisticated use of literary allusions, we realize that she is responding to things that she has read: novels such as Villette that provide unflattering representations of the actress. Cosima asks herself, "Had this wonderful barmaid really quoted Bacon, or was her choice of words more coincidence?" (45) and the reader wonders the same thing. As the novel progresses, it becomes more obvious that Bess's allusion to Bacon was not accidental but instead a deliberate and informed observation. With ease, Bess refers to classical literature and figures such as Dante, when she theorizes about the social injustices of men against women: "The wrongs done by the fathers are repaid with interest to the sons. And so it goes on till the end of time, like one of the circles in Dante's Inferno" (74). Later, when Cosima insists that her marriage is a happy one, Bess invokes Queen Gertrude from Shakespeare's Hamlet, saying, "Methinks the lady doth protest too much" (140). This quip is particularly astute, given the truth about her situation that Cosima wishes to conceal. Watching Cosima's unconvincing performance as a "tremendously happy wife," the actress situates herself as an observer, capable of assessing the authenticity of what she sees (140). Bess demonstrates that, like a professional critic or like a writer such as Cosima, she can use her experience and knowledge to assess accurately the world around her.The novel reinforces the idea not only that Bess knows of key intellectual figures but also that she reads their work. This is evidenced when she considers the fate in store for a man who hopelessly pursues her and whom she has targeted for punishment, after his abusive treatment of another woman. After a romantic game of cat and mouse with a man who has wronged her friend, Bess says that she now has her young suitor in the "torture-chamber" and contemplates the methods by which he might commit suicide. In doing so, she paraphrases the Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909), who was known for his theories relating to social Darwinism, physiognomy, and crime: "Isn't it Lombroso who says that women suicides usually drown themselves or take poison because those are the tidiest and most convenient methods, while men cut their throats or blow their brains out because they don't mind giving trouble and spoiling the carpet?" (190). Such a rhetorical question shows that she not only acquaints herself with the most current work in social psychology but uses it to challenge the rigid gender norms that victimize women.Bess demonstrates the most power, however, in recognizing her own position as both a public woman and a professional in society and as one who is subverting the norms associated with these roles. She is a "self-appointed executioner" in dealing with men who are not held accountable for their actions within the British legal system (181). Far from being the monomaniac described in the review in the Bookman, she acts always on behalf of her female friends, doing so c