Sarah Bernhardt's First American Theatrical Tour, 1880-1881 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Sarah Bernhardt's First American Theatrical Tour, 1880–1881 Anne M. Windholz (bio) Patricia Marks , Sarah Bernhardt's First American Theatrical Tour, 1880–1881 (Jefferson N.C.: McFarland, 2003), pp. x+212, $35.00 paper. Ours is a culture obsessed with celebrity life and lives, and Patricia Marks's new book Sarah Bernhardt's First American Theatrical Tour proves that in this we of the twenty-first century remain very much children of the Victorian Age. The mobbing fans, long ticket lines (replete with scalpers), and intrusive paparazzi following Bernhardt's journey through America show that the cult status of celebrities has changed little since the 1880s. Offering a blow-by-blow account of Bernhardt's exhausting U.S. tour that included the major cities of the East, South, and Midwest, as well as an amazing number of smaller towns, Marks analyzes the French actress's American reception through the familiar scholarly lenses of race, class, and gender, showing how she triumphed artistically and financially in spite of prejudices against her Jewish heritage, her unwomanly business acumen, and her status as a happily fallen woman. Marks's theorizing, strongly indebted to feminist scholars and Bakhtin, is less compelling than her rich culling of primary sources, a treasuretrove of more than ninety American periodicals. These run the gamut from eminent papers like the New York Times to obscure productions like the Oil City Derrick. Marks presents illuminating, entertaining, and occasionally distressing cartoons along with snippets of satire and parodic verse, set against serious theater reviews ranging from the rapturous to the vituperative. These reviews focus as much (or more) on the morality and economic impact of Bernhardt's performances as on their artistic worth. Indeed, it is apparent that Bernhardt frequently brought out all the worst in late-nineteenth-century Americans: their xenophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism, and hypocritical moralism. Certainly their reception of Bernhardt, as chronicled by Marks, says as much about their anxieties and preoccupations as about her – and the more prescient of them acknowledged it. Bernhardt, prototype of the New Woman, was nonetheless able to charm most American audiences, exposing those raised on the theatrics of melodrama to the subtlety of French realism. Marks's study does a fine job of showing the tensions between how [End Page 436] Bernhardt wished to present herself in the United States and how the American press chose to construct her. Marks's best chapters are perhaps her early ones, where her argument is freshest; the salient points of that argument are reiterated with fairly slight permutations throughout the rest of the book. If there is a weakness to this work, it is this kind of redundancy, and some observations – for example, that Bernhardt's success in one city didn't guarantee success in another – do not need repeating. This slim volume (which brings to mind the avalanche of jokes about its subject's skinniness) is densely packed with illustrations, quotations, and details comparing Bernhardt's visit to town A with her visit to town B. Such a comprehensive survey risks becoming tedious, and in some places the argument might benefit from a single representative example with summary. Marks keeps the narrative lively, however, with anecdotes about collapsing scenery, inconvenient snowstorms, and, not least, the hilarious shadowing of Bernhardt by a great Boston whale carcass that was making its grand tour of America at the same time she was. The book concludes with useful appendices listing Bernhardt's performances and her artistic exhibitions (she was a creditable sculptor and painter as well as an actress) and provides a valuable bibliography. All in all, Sarah Bern-hardt's First American Theatrical Tour is a gift to scholars of Victorian theater and women's studies, a model of thoughtful, thorough periodical scholarship. Anne M. Windholz Independent Scholar Anne M. Windholz Anne M. Windholz is an independent scholar whose articles on gender, transatlanticism, and the nineteenth-century periodical press have appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Periodicals Review, and a variety of reference works. She currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Midwest Victorian Studies Association. Copyright © 2005 Victorian Periodicals Review