Actresses at Home and on Stage: Spectacular Domesticity and the Victorian Theatrical Novel

Abstract

Justin McCarthy's 1869 novel My Enemy's Daughter, opera star Emanuel Temple must choose between two women, the foreign-born Christina, talented and ambitious actress, and Lilla, the sheltered daughter of respectable London politician. Making his choice, Emanuel says of Lilla: In her I found woman who is all truth and simplicity; who has but no (344). That Lilla must belong to different class of women than the actress Christina is commonplace of Victorian novels set in and around the London theater. Yet Emanuel's description of Lilla as a woman ... who has but no self, indicates an elision of the two categories of females that is also intriguingly conventional. Domestic and theatrical women are not always so distinct as Emanuel claims-and as we might expect them to be-in novels about the theater. Emanuel means to describe Lilla as morally upright and selfless. Read with the novel's theatrical milieu in mind, however, character, but no might also describe Christina's negative capability. Like the most talented actresses in theater novels, her acting consists of an evacuation of self and an embodiment of character. Moreover, Lilla's character is also role-like so many other heroines, she performs the part of domestic ideal. Christina, who is morally upstanding in an inferior, non-English way, fails to link her acting ability with desire for the domestic. She accomplishes selflessness at will and on stage, rather than unselfconsciously at home. This flaw prevents her from becoming the happily married heroine of My Enemy's Daughter. fact, many essentially domestic novels of the Victorian period, quite enough to form respectable sub-genre, feature actress heroines who do make successful transition from stage to home, carrying with them the selfless quality that marks their characters. These include Silk Attire (1869) by William Black; Florence Sackville, or Self-Dependence (1851) by Mrs. E.J. Burbury; Pomfret; or, Public Opinion and Private Judgment (1845) by Henry Chorley; The Morals of Mayfair by Annie Edwards; Christopher Kenrick (1869) by Joseph Hatton; and A Mummer's Wife (1882) by George Moore--to name few.' While secondary actresses in these novels are almost always corrupt, selfish, and vulgar exhibitionists, the best actresses (talent and goodness go hand in hand) transcend the stage stereotype. The actress heroine is always the woman who winds up on stage by accident rather than design, who acts unselfconsciously with no view toward the audience, and whose deepest wish is not for fame or fortune but home in which she can more properly exercise and display her virtue. her perfect domesticity, the theater novel heroine resembles the heroine of stage