“Self-Appointed Executioner”:

Abstract

As Claire Hirschfield notes, “The politically active or socially committed actress has become in recent years a familiar icon: today’s actresses routinely lend support to candidates for political office, participate in anti-nuclear marches, and travel to third world capitals to promote a political agenda” (72). This situation was very different for much of the nineteenth century. Victorian actresses were struggling even to attain respectability and could hardly be considered influential leaders or models of what Hirschfield refers to as the “actress-as-activist” (73). In fact, historically, the actress was a symbol of what not to be. Since 1660, the year that women were permitted onstage in Britain, the occupation of the actress functioned within a public rhetoric that was degrading and dehumanizing for the women of the theater. Debates during the early seventeenth century, for example, claimed that women were “responsible for the theater’s corrupting influence and more susceptible to it” (Nussbaum 149). In this vein, Jeremy Collier’s famous attack on theatricality, A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), indicates that to allow women on the stage was “to make monsters of them, and throw them out of their kind” (Collier 185). In the eighteenth century, actress Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) challenged the negative stereotypes about the actress as a woman who expertly balanced her life offstage as a wife and mother while also becoming the “beau ideal of acting,” as she was called by Lord Byron (qtd. in Manvell 299); however, she was