Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society Kim Marra Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society. By Kirsten Pullen . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; pp. xii + 215. $60.00 cloth, $24.99 paper. This book is a rich, theoretically invigorated study of the cultural connections between actresses and whores from the seventeenth century to the turn of the millennium. Rather than a comprehensive history, Pullen presents a range of case studies illuminating the ways women in the public professions of acting and prostitution used performance to negotiate prevailing constructions of female sexuality and moral stigma. Excluding male actors and prostitutes as well as non-Western contexts, Pullen opts for the cultural specificity of focusing on white women in Britain and the United States whose histories build on one another, as nineteenth-century actresses draw on the experiences of their Restoration forebears, and contemporary prostitutes claim affinity with historical actresses. She productively analyzes critical and biographical treatments of Mae West to introduce some of the advantages and limitations of occupying the "whore position" that the other women in her study encounter to varying degrees: "As West aptly demonstrates, theatrical performance, performance in everyday life, and Butlerian performativity suggest how both actresses and prostitutes employ a variety of strategies to intervene in their discursive representations" (21). For her case study of the first generation of actresses on the English-speaking stage, Pullen chooses Elizabeth (Betty) Boutell, a "mid-range" actress who specialized in breeches roles. Her analysis challenges commonplace assumptions that Restoration actresses were whores subjugated to a system of stage display for the enticement of clients and husbands. While actresses such as Boutell were viewed as low class and sexually available in their day, many subsequent accounts, Pullen contends, "have used the whore stigma to virtually erase considerations of her longevity, innovation, and popularity." Pullen finds in Boutell a counter-narrative of an actress who "used her epithet in order to draw attention to her own (and by implication, other women's) potential sexual agency" (27–28). To account for that agency, Pullen astutely reads against the grain of leading histories of marriage, family, and theatre and reinterprets the dynamics of Restoration breeches performance. Whereas Boutell, like many of her contemporary actresses, apparently left no written record of her own experience—a void allowing others to construct and marginalize her for her reputed whorishness—Charlotte Charke and Margaret Leeson in the eighteenth century each wrote substantial autobiographical [End Page 320] narratives. In a complex and compelling chapter, Pullen places these narratives side by side—the one by the cross-dressing actress daughter of Colley Cibber (Charke), and the other by a working prostitute (Leeson)—to map the literary, theatrical, and social stages on which each entered the public sphere and performed her sexual and gender identity amid a culture of ubiquitous masquerade. Although Pullen is not the first scholar to examine these documents, she adds to the discourse by comparing them as first-person accounts penned from the "whore position." Leeson subverts that position, Pullen argues, by self-consciously deploying established tropes of prostitute autobiography and asserting her right to sexual pleasure. In contrast, Charke disrupts putative whorishness with tales of passing as a man to seek employment and pursuing female community rather than heterosexual desire. The book's nineteenth-century case study involves Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes who became an overnight sensation with their 1868 New York debut. Pullen views the ensuing moralistic outrage as a reaction not simply to the Blondes' hypersexual feminine image, but also to their style of cross-dressing, frank sexual speech, and usurpation of a formerly all-male genre. Wearing tights, short pants, and corsets, "Thompson talked like a man but walked like a woman," Pullen writes (95). In so doing, the Blondes presented a more threatening sexuality that "defied strenuous attempts . . . to insert them into traditional feminine ideology, either as prostitutes or feminists" (132). Regarding Thompson's infamous revenge on anti-burlesque critic Wilbur Storey with a horsewhip in a street confrontation, Pullen cautions that seeing her chiefly as a prototype of the emancipated woman (as Lois Banner, for example, does in American Beauty, 1985) elides her conscious...