"Irreproachable Women and Patient Workers": The Memoirs of Victorian Leading Ladies

Abstract

When Victoria ascended throne, respectable society anathematized those men, women, and children for whom theater was both a workplace and a way of life.1 The middle classes viewed stage, in critic Mary Jean Corbett's words, as the last refuge of disgraced younger son or 'fallen woman/ a sort of domestic foreign legion (118). Actress, manager, and memoirist Marie Bancroft (1839-1921) acknowledges that acting was a profession that respectable society preferred keep at a distance. Describing her childhood in a roving theatrical family, she writes in 1888, to be an actor meant exile from home, family, friends, and general respectability (2). A woman who went on stage was still further ostracized by polite society; she was regarded as fallen or soon be fallen. Bancroft's use of past tense implies that she would like her readers view themselves as having shed anti-theatrical prejudice of past, although her memoir, like that of other leading ladies, is an attempt establish her claim approbation in mind of respectable society. In her study of Victorian and Edwardian autobiographies, Corbett argues persuasively that Bancroft, together with actresses Fanny Kemble and Madge Kendal, do not challenge middleclass ideal of womanhood, but seek perform it, onstage and off (107). I contend that Victorian actresses portray themselves as ordinary, respectable women, but at same time they are also concerned with establishing an image of themselves as skilled professionals who by their own efforts have earned right public acclaim and financial success. In short, these texts aim create an image of a new type of respectable woman, working professional. By 1880s Victorian society was beginning distinguish actress from fallen woman, in part because fictional actresses infiltrated circulating libraries. Novelists created a new, appealing image of actress, usually as an unworldly young woman forced by familial financial disaster support an aged parent or handicapped sibling. After a brief spell on stage, during which she resisted all onslaughts upon her