Abstract
During the nineteenth century, theatregoing became the favoured entertainment of both the lower and upper classes in London. As Davis (1994, 307) suggests, the plays were a “mirrored reflection” of society, and they had the ability to reflect important socio-political issues on stage, while also influencing people’s opinion about them. Thus, by turning to the popular stage of the mid-century we can better understand social issues like the Woman Question, or the tensions around imperial policies, among others. As such, this article scrutinises the ways in which Victorian popular drama influenced the period’s ideal of femininity by using stock characters inspired by real women’s movements. Two such cases are the “Girl of the Period” and the “Fast Girl”, protofeminists that would go on to influence the New Woman of the fin-de-siècle. We analyse two plays from the mid-century: the Adelphi’s Our Female American Cousin (1860), by Charles Gayler, and the Strand’s My New Place (1863), by Arthur Wood. As this article attests, popular plays like these would inadvertently bring into the mainstream the ongoing political fight for female rights through their use of transgressive female characters and promotion of scenarios where alternative feminine identities could be performed and imagined.
Highlights
When we think about literature during the Victorian period in England, we often forget about popular drama
As Buszek (2006, 56) explains, the author Henry James commented on Linton’s description of the modern woman and compared her to the professional woman—to actresses, more precisely—who were “accustomed to walk alone in the streets of a great city, and to be looked at by all sorts of people”. Against this idea of a sole definition of the “Girl of the Period”, Fraser et al (2003, 22) argue that the “Girl of the Period” is an example of “a multiform being”, or in other words, she represents the multifaceted nature of women from the mid-century as well as the decade’s efforts to debunk simplistic definitions of “woman”
As we have previously seen, The Girl of the Period Almanack had warned about the multiplicity of the “Girl of the Period”
Summary
When we think about literature during the Victorian period in England, we often forget about popular drama. After the lifting of restrictions in 1843, other theatres were allowed to perform various dramatic genres and a shift from a “legitimate” culture to an “illegitimate” culture occurred (Moody 2000, 10; Newey 2005, 6) It was not until the 1850s and 60s that the economy allowed for the creation of new theatrical venues around London, which, combined with the rise of the music hall, favoured the proliferation of the popular genres (Davis and Emeljanow 2004, 94; Bratton 2011, 57-58). Performative culture during the mid-century turns to music and playful representation, perhaps as a way of processing the period’s changing social and political reality It is, in the end, the period in which “more performances in more theatres were seen by more people than in any other period” (Shepherd and Womack 1996, 219). The final section summarises the main ideas and questions raised in this article, further establishing the characters from our case-studies as comic figures that simplify the efforts of their real-life, middle-class female contemporaries, who were attempting to find their place in a rapidly changing society
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