Killing Mrs. Siddons: The Actress and the Adulteress in Late Georgian Britain

Abstract

THE SUBJECT OF ADULTERY AND DIVORCE IN LATE GEORGIAN BRITAIN poses a formidable challenge to orthodox disciplinary frameworks because it relates to many dimensions of late eighteenth-century life--marriage, the family, sexuality, gender, the law, morality, the regulation of the social order and the well-being of the nation, property, class, sociability, and social space--and also because it is locatable in a wide range of texts and media such as trial publications, newspapers and magazines, poems, plays and novels, as well as visual art. (1) Not only is it discursively permeable, late Georgian adultery is also epistemologically difficult: the slipperiness and intractability of its meanings confound explanations for human behavior based on distinctions between public and private selves, or between social and affective or psychological experience. (2) In the case of adultery, desires, emotions, and the sexual act itself have public, social, adulterated meanings: in some cases, moreover, these meanings are elusive and uncertain. As such, adultery goes against the grain of those trends in Enlightenment and Romantic culture that helped produce the very disciplinary frameworks in which it has been analyzed. This article attempts to negotiate some of these conceptual and methodological issues by proposing theatricality as one possible framework within which the amplitude of adultery's meanings in late eighteenth-century society might be gauged. In particular, I want to examine the link between the figure of the adulteress and the status of the actress Sarah Siddons, the consummate interpreter of the female outcast as tragic heroine in the Romantic period. My focus is the 1790s, when Siddons's appearance as an adulteress at Drury Lane coincided with the height of the panic generated by adultery, intersecting with legal and political discourses and threatening the iconic status of Siddons herself. As such, I hope to suggest not only a new way of configuring adultery in late eighteenth-century culture, but also a new perspective on Siddons and the Romantic theatre. I. The Theatre of Adultery The theatricality of late Georgian adultery is evident in the adultery itself, as represented in divorce trials and the print culture of the period. This story was often constructed dramatically around crucial incidents such as the discovery of the erring parties or confrontations and/or tearful partings between a wronged husband and wife. The role of servants in giving evidence of these incidents, either as spectators in the household or as active agents in detecting an affair, also highlights the status of adultery as a drama played out before interested spectators (in a way that reinforces Jurgen Habennas's observation that behavior, even in the intimate sphere of the conjugal family, was always audience-oriented). (3) The publication of adultery trials, many of which featured illustrations of curious or intriguing scenes in the affair, analogous to illustrations in contemporary dramatic texts or novels, also had the effect of theatricalizing adultery for the virtual audience of the reading public. (4) An additional element of the theatricality of adultery was constituted by the law. There were three main forums in which the adultery case could be tried in English law: the ecclesiastical courts, principally the Consistory Court and the Court of Arches at Doctors' Commons, which entailed the presentation by legal representatives of the parties of previously recorded depositions of witnesses before a judge who could record a sentence of separation from bed and board without the right of remarriage; the civil courts, in the form of a case for criminal conversation by which a husband could sue an adulterer for the loss of consortium in his wife; and finally, Parliament, where a husband could obtain a divorce by a private act which allowed for remarriage. Normally both an ecclesiastical divorce and a successful action for criminal conversation, or crim. …