Calculated Uncertainty: Georgian Theatre and the Construction of Feminine Identities

Abstract

Spectacular Flirtations: Viewing the Actress in British Art and Theatre 1768-1820 addresses the various and conflicting ways in which the image of the actress was constructed during this period, situating her shifting identity within contemporary developments, both in the theatre and in definitions of desirable femininity. Gill Perry's book builds on recent research that has used the transitional nature of eighteenth-century theatre to challenge and expand the existing analyses of the act ress's symbolic role. While feminist historians have long demonstrated a fascination with discourses emerging from proscriptive literature that designated the 'actress as whore', Perry's work examines a wide range of materials to reveal the often contradictory range of personae assumed by the female performer in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In addition to the classic association with whoredom, Perry introduces the more ambivalent notion of 'flirtation' to explore per ceptions of the actress's sexuality in this period as oscillating between submission and refusal, a concept to which the emerging genre of the theatrical portrait particularly lent itself. The actress's image in this period emerges as multifarious, ambiguous, and ever shifting. Yet, a constant theme in this work is her control over, and ability to negotiate, her own representation. Research into the image of the actress has focused on the eighteenth century as a period when definitions of acceptable femininity were particularly fluid. Though absorbing the 'actress as whore' discourse, the current work includes it as one of many possible symbolic roles available to the actress. Katharine Eisaman Maus's