Modesty Unshackled: Dorothy Jordan and the Dangers of Cross-Dressing

Abstract

Modesty Unshackled: Dorothy Jordan and the Dangers of Cross-Dressing* JEAN I. MARSDEN In or about the late eighteenth [century]," writes Thomas Laqueur, "human sexual nature changed."1 Laqueur's tongue-in-cheek allusion to Virginia Woolf identifies not physiological but sociological change, the emergence of a polarized conception of gendered behavior in which the two sexes were endowed with increasingly different qualities.2 This ideology allowed little or no overlap between the sexes; each sex was assigned its own sphere of influence and behavior, and relations between the sexes were predicated upon this restricted vision of masculinity and femininity. One obvious challenge to this rigid binary system was the phenomenon of female cross-dressing, of a woman pretending to be that which she, by definition, was not. Few women actually donned men's clothing and thus strayed outside the bounds of the feminine sphere, but cross-dressing routinely occurred in the theater when actresses portrayed men or boys. For much of the eighteenth century such behavior was readily accepted on the stage; however, by the end of the century it proved to be an increasingly disturbing spectacle. While much modern criticism has focused on the implications of fictional characters who cross-dress, such as Shakespeare's Rosalind, critics in the eighteenth and nineteenth century often concentrated on the women who actually portrayed these roles rather than the fictional constructs . Within the confines of the literary text, sexual ambiguity is 21 22 / MARSDEN resolved as the androgynous figure is resexed and absorbed into a more traditional gender role, usually through marriage. To critics, however, the actress herself represented the danger, for she experienced the traditionally forbidden pleasures of male garb.3 The question of how the experience of male attire and male behavior would affect an actress worried commentators and brought with it an implicit concern for the larger implications this experience could have for the women in the audience . The potential dangers of cross-dressing concerned critics and moralists alike, none more so than Leigh Hunt, poet, critic, and frequent spokesman for his age. Hunt condemns actresses not for usurping male authority or for engaging in masculine behavior but simply for wearing male attire on the stage. Cross-dressing, he declares emphatically, will unsex the participant: "if she succeeds in her study of male representation she will never entirely get rid of her manhood with its attire; she is like the Iphis of Ovid, and changes her sex unalterably."4 Hunt's declaration paints cross-dressing as a voyage through liminality, to an uncharted bourne from which no (female) traveller returns unchanged. We can chart the social mores transgressed by the cross-dressing actress by examining the reaction to one particular actress famous for her appearances in male attire. Dorothy Jordan, the focus of Hunt's diatribe against cross-dressing, was a brilliant comic actress of the late eighteenth century. Although an unfamiliar name in the twentieth century, Jordan was one of the most popular and well-paid actresses of her day, often cited as the comic equivalent to the great tragic actress, Sarah Siddons. She was also the age's most celebrated performer of breeches-roles, known for her portrayal of Peggy in Garrick's The Country Girl (an adaptation of Wycherley's The Country Wife), Rosalind in As You Like It, Viola in Twelfth Night, and at least a dozen others. This essay explores the disquiet Jordan's acting aroused and searches for its sources. To understand the implications of cross-dressing in the pre-Victorian era we must first determine why Jordan's portrayal of men and boys so deeply disturbed her critics, by examining both her acting and its effect upon her audience. From there we can determine what this tells us not only about Dorothy Jordan, but also about the definition of gender in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Even in the urbane world of the British enlightenment, cross-dressing off the stage and its resultant blurring of gender definitions raised hackles . Throughout the eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, women who wore male attire were viewed as criminals and treated harshly under the law. James Grantham Turner notes that "crossdressing...