Chastity and the Stage in Mowatt's "Stella"

Abstract

At the end of her brief but illustrious theatrical career, the actress and playwright Anna Cora Mowatt returned to a genre she had worked earlier in her life, fiction, in order to convey some ideas she had about stage life. Her collection of three long stories, Mimic Life; or, Before and Behind the Curtain, appeared in 1856, approximately a year and a half after she had married William Foushee Ritchie, her second husband. Mowatt, born Anna Cora Ogden, had in younger days dabbled in amateur theater. When her first husband, James Mowatt, began to lose money and through illness grow increasingly incapable of earning a living, Anna Mowatt turned to public reading,(1) then to writing, to make up the loss of income. When her 1845 play Fashion proved to be a hit at the Park Theatre in New York, she was encouraged to act as well. Her immediate success as an actress only three months after the opening of Fashion led to an astonishing career both in the United States and in England. With the death of her husband, Mowatt continued to act, to considerable acclaim, in order to support herself Her marriage to Ritchie, subsequently unhappy, gave her the leisure to retire from the stage in 1853. From her experiences in the United States and abroad, Mowatt understood the stage in ways few of her fellow fiction writers could appreciate, and turned to print, rather than public appearance, to share her observations. Mowatt's choice of medium is itself of interest. As a woman, she understood the prevailing sentiments toward her sex and its relationship to the stage. From a socially prominent New York family, Mowatt had to resist the idea that women of her class could not be seen in public entertainments. Those women who did take up a theatrical career might be praised for their work, but as working women, they had to be on guard always for imputations of sexual impropriety. Despite having an exemplary career on stage, Mowatt seems to have carried with her a lingering concern about the reputation of women on stage. Herself childless, she took her role as a potential model to other young women quite seriously. In reaching those who might follow her, Mowatt understood the demographics of culture. She would have recognized that for all the young women in her audiences -- and by midcentury there would be a sizable number of escorted women in the audiences of large urban playhouses -- she could touch many more in the reading public. Without much more direct knowledge of stage life than an occasional visit with a parent to a play or perhaps only reading in the press about a performance, this large audience of female fiction might still feel the allure of the theater. To them Mowatt aims Mimic Life. Mowatt's publisher Ticknor and Fields no doubt hoped to capitalize on her national notoriety and on the success of her previous volume, Autobiography of an Actress; or, Eight Years on the Stage (1854). In fact, the opening pages to Mimic Life include a number of blurbs praising the earlier book. One in particular catches one of Mowatt's own intentions: The tone is and unaffectedly religious; and while the author vindicates the profession which she is about to quit, she mingles words of counsel with her farewell, which cannot fail to benefit those for whom they are intended. -- Dollar Newspaper. For unfamiliar with the particulars of nineteenth-century dramatic production, both books have great value as sources of information on the nitty-gritty details of behind-the-scenes life. At the same time, the high tone in Mimic Life offers another perspective in recreating theatrical culture in the 1840s and 1850s: by urging upon the morality of the stage, Mowatt is able to speak some of the unspoken constraints under which theater people function. Her purpose in writing these stories would be achieved, she says in her Preface, if the book's readers will receive a more correct impression of some unlaurelled laborers for the public amusement than is generally entertained. …