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Body Language, the Idea of the Actress, and Some Nineteenth-Century Actress-Heroines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Julie Hankey
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Abstract

The actor, as a reminder of personal mutability, has always provoked the condemnation of absolutist philosophers and churchmen. Historically, this anti-theatrical prejudice has pressed even harder on the actress, for in her case ‘personal’ connotes sexual mutability. In Victorian times, when purity was enjoined on Woman for Man's sake as well as her own, the actress's situation was further complicated. In the following article, Julie Hankey examines the treatment of actress-characters in certain novels of the nineteenth century – Wilkie Collin's No Name, Geraldine Jewsbury's The Half-Sisters, George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, and Henry James's The Tragic Muse, among others – exploring in particular their peculiarly physical system of representation, a system which reproduced the social and moral attitudes of the day on a more visceral level of irrational prejudice. Irrespective of their artistry or sympathies, authors were remarkably consistent in their use of the same relatively narrow but at the same time powerful range of signals – dress, pose, interiors, gardens, flowers, and so on – clearly confident that by this means the actress could be adequately expressed. Julie Hankey is presently co-editor of the ‘Plays and Performance’ series, now published by Cambridge University Press, and has herself prepared the individual volumes on Richard III and Othello.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 8 , Issue 31 , August 1992 , pp. 226 - 240
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1992

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References

Notes and References

1. Collins, Wilkie, No Name (1862), Vol. I, p. 67–8Google Scholar. Hereafter, references in the text are to page numbers of this three-volume edition.

2. Davis, Tracy C., ‘Actresses and Prostitutes in Victorian London’, Theatre Research International, XIII, No. 3 (Autumn 1988), p. 221–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Davis's research establishes that there was no basis in fact for confusing the two professions, but that the parallels were compelling in the popular mind, especially between lower-status actresses and prostitutes. This in itself was generally damning for ‘when aspersions were aimed at a lower status group, a ripple effect implicated all other female performers: the distinctions between chorus singers, ballet dancers, supernumeraries, and principal players that were so important to the profession, were of little concern to the general public’ (p. 222).

3. John Ruskin, ‘Of Queens' Gardens’, in Sesame and Lilies. The lecture ‘Of Queens' Gardens’ was given in 1864. I quote from the Everyman edition of 1907, p. 59.

4. Wilkinson, Tate, The Wandering Patentee (1795), Vol. IV, p. 170Google Scholar.

5. Jewsbury, Geraldine, The Half-Sisters (1848), p. 96Google Scholar: this and subsequent references in the text are to the Paris edition of 1850.

6. See Carlisle, Carol Jones, ‘The Critics Discover Shakespeare's Women’, Renaissance Papers, 1979, p. 59–73Google Scholar; Jackson, Russell, ‘“Perfect Types of Womanhood”: Rosalind, Beatrice, and Viola in Victorian Criticism and Performance’, Shakespeare Survey, XXXII, p. 15–26Google Scholar; and Hankey, Julie, ‘Helen Faucit and Shakespeare: Womanly Theatre’, in Novy, Marianne, ed., Cross-Cultural Performances: More Women's Re-Visions of Shakespeare (forthcoming, 1992)Google Scholar.

7. Faucit, Helen[a], On Some of Shakespeare's Female Characters (1885), p. 364Google Scholar.

8. Quoted in Martin, Theodore, Helena Faucit (1900), p. 125Google Scholar. Hereafter abbreviated to Martin.

9. Toynbee, Arnold, ed., The Diaries of William Charles Macready, two vols. (1912), Vol. II, p. 97Google Scholar.

10. Robins, Elizabeth, Both Sides of the Curtain (1940), p. 164Google Scholar. Hereafter page references are indicated in the text.

11. Nead, Lynda, Myths of Sexuality: Representations of Women in Victorian Britain (1990), p. 171Google Scholar.

12. Bronte, Charlotte, Shirley (1849), Chapter 29. My quotation is from Penguin edition of 1975, p. 490Google Scholar.

13. Martin, p. 338. Martin transcribes Faucit's record of a conversation with Eliot: ‘I told her how grateful I was to her for Klesmer's lecture on Art and Artists in Daniel Deronda. She said she thought of me while writing it.’

14. For a more general account of theatricality in Daniel Deronda, see Marshall, David, The Figure of Theatre: Shaftesbury, Defoe, Adam Smith, and George Eliot (Columbia University Press, 1986). Chapter 8, p. 196–205Google Scholar, concentrate on Gwendolen and Mirah.

15. Chapter 45. Hereafter references in the text are to the Penguin edition of 1970.

16. Kemble, Fanny, the niece of Sarah Siddons, made a note in her journal of the habit among actresses of acting ‘unvirtuous or unlovely characters…as ill and looking as cross as they possibly could’, The Journal of Frances Anne Butler, two vols. (1835), Vol. I, p. 149Google Scholar. This was in order not to be indentified with them personally. Helen Faucit's interpretation of Lady Macbeth as a loving wife, concerned only for the welfare of her husband, is an example of another stratagem for dealing with unvirtuous characters. On the subject of women and comedy, Jameson, Anna defended Shakespeare for not having written a female Falstaff, for example, on the grounds that ‘any such compound of wit, sensuality, and selfishness, unchecked by the moral sentiments and affections…would be a gross and monstrous caricature.… It would be essentially an impossible combination of faculties in a female’, Characteristics of Women (n.d., first published, 1832), p. 24Google Scholar. Kemble, Fanny defines the differences between tragic and comic acting in terms that explain how little comedy squared with womanliness, whose emphasis was on sympathy and feeling: tragedy, she writes, may be ‘tolerably achieved by force of natural gifts, aided but little by study; but a fine comedian must be a fine artist; his work is intellectual, and not emotional and his effects address themselves to the critical judgement and not the passionate sympathy of the audience’, Record of a Girlhood, two vols. (1879), Vol. II, p. 330Google Scholar.

17. See Wade, Allan, ed., The Scenic Art: Notes on Acting and the Drama 1872–1901 (1949)Google Scholar. For a thorough and illuminating account of the English-French theatrical divide, see Gordon, D. J. and Stokes, John, ‘The Reference of The Tragic Muse’, in John Goode, ed., The Air of Reality: New Essays on Henry James (1972), p. 133–8Google Scholar. James's description of acting as a mystery – ‘like the ancient arts and trades’ – is quoted on p. 137.

18. Chapter 26, p. 285. References are from the Penguin edition of 1982.

19. The ambience of Balaklava Place is described chiefly in Chapters 30 and 37.

20. ‘I can play a comedy part, of course’, she says' – every actor ought to be able to – but I don't feel at home in it, and it never gives me pleasure to act’ (p. 100). References are taken from the 1896 edition. For a discussion of Miss Bretherton and its position within the context of theatrical debate in the serious journals of the 1880s, see Stokes, op. cit., p. 120–32.

21. See Shaw's preface to St. John, Christopher, ed., Ellen Terry and Bernard Shaw: a Correspondence (1931), p. xGoogle Scholar.

22. See Raymond Blathwayt, Does the Theatre Make for Good? An Interview with Mr. Clement Scott, reprinted with replies from the profession, the press, and the clergy, from Great Thoughts, 1 January 1898.

23. Moore, George, Mummer Worship: Impressions and Opinions (1891)Google Scholar, reprinted, with the Confessions of a Young Man, in the Windmill edition of 1933.

24. My references in the text are to the Heinemann edition of 1918.

25. Moore, op. cit., p. 61. There is an interesting conversation in Elizabeth Robins's novel, The Convert (1907), during which one woman's manner of walking and sitting is being discussed by two other women. ‘I'd rather see her walking than sitting’, says one character, to which the reply is: ‘You mean the way she crosses her legs?’ ‘But that too’, the second woman continues, ‘it seems like so many other things, a question only of degree. Nobody objects to seeing a neat pair of ankles crossed – it looks rather nice, and early Victorian. Nowadays lots of girls cross their knees – and nobody says anything. But Sophia crosses her – well, her thighs' (p. 56).

26. Jonas Barish gives a much more sympathetic account of the novel on p. 391–5 of The Anti-Theatrical Prejudice: ‘What is remarkable, and admirable, about the story is the balance Moore succeeds in maintaining between the two ways of life, and the degree of imaginative sympathy he manages to extend to both’ (p. 394). I think this leaves out of account the sheer energy of disgust that the sordidness of both ways of life provoke in Moore – whether of the ether-filled sickroom of Kate's husband in the tiny dark house she abandons, or the sweaty dressing-rooms she embraces.

27. Robins, Elizabeth, Theatre and Friendship: Some Henry James Letters with a Commentary (1932), p. 98Google Scholar.