Authentic performance in theatrical women's fiction of the 1870s

Abstract

This article both uncovers a forgotten genre of women's writing and intervenes into recent critical debates about the status of the actress in Victorian literature and culture. In the 1870s and early 1880s a number of women's novels were published that presented acting as a noble and ennobling profession. Such texts didactically engaged with traditional portrayals of theatrical life as dissolute and depraved and described it instead as a profession requiring all a woman's powers of endurance and self-sacrifice. The novels appear, therefore, to incorporate rather than challenge conservative mythologies of womanhood; the article argues, however, that the challenge to those mythologies comes precisely from the texts’ refusal to accept that public life taints a woman. The novels compound their attack on ideals of domestic, compliant femininity through sympathetically evoked scenes of self-directed acting: authentic female performance emerges as the self-governed expression of the insurgent impulse to act. Such texts therefore represent an intriguingly nuanced contribution to Victorian debates about the “essential” nature and appropriate sphere of women.