Dangerous flirtations: politics, the parlor, and the nineteenth-century victorian amateur actress

Abstract

Parlor drama has been largely ignored by existing theatre history scholarship—a remarkable fact given that this genre had its own scripts, both published and non-published, its own theatre architecture, its own acting styles, its own evolution, an entrenched culture specific to parlor drama, a vast following (at least among those of a particular class and social status), and the ability to convey ideological concerns that forced ruptures in the social fabric of Victorian female social norms. A likely reason for this glaring absence is rooted in the fact that unlike other forms of nineteenth-century American theatre, parlor drama was both ideologically and physically situated within the domestic sphere, a historically under-valued, feminine space. For the most part, parlor drama focused on the experience of middle-class white Victorian women and conveyed reflections on that experience to mixed-gender audiences. While parlor drama limited its purview to the privacy of the home, the act of middle-class, white Victorian women peforming a range of identities in these amateur dramas had both public and radically feminist implications.