Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696–1801 by Julia H. Fawcett

Abstract

Reviewed by: Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696–1801 by Julia H. Fawcett Tom Mole Julia H. Fawcett. Spectacular Disappearances: Celebrity and Privacy, 1696–1801. Ann Arbor: Michigan, 2016. Pp. x + 280. $65. Celebrities—whether they acquired their fame in the eighteenth century or the twenty-first—have always faced a dilemma. On the one hand, their existence as celebrated individuals, not to mention their income, depends on their fans. Their works, their images, and information about their lives need to be mediated to the largest possible audience for the celebrity apparatus to function. On the other hand, the public gaze can quickly start to seem intrusive. Private lives, details of love affairs, and even bodies are treated as public property. Celebrities thus find themselves caught between wooing public attention and resisting it, between inviting the public to get to know them more intimately and trying to preserve a sense of private selfhood. The fans that sustain celebrity also make it feel toxic; they like the opportunity to peer behind the celebrity's staged public image and are rarely content to consume only the image that is constructed for them. Instead, they want to supplement that image with an ever more intimate knowledge of the celebrity; every revelation of hidden selfhood spurs a desire for further revelations, and every attempt to keep the public at a distance simply whets its appetite for a greater sense of closeness. In recent years, a number of critics and historians have examined this dialectic of revelation and concealment and mapped its historical emergence. While they differ on the details of when and how our modern celebrity culture was born, many have looked to the eighteenth century for clues to its genesis. The emergence of a modern print culture, a theatrical star system, an enlarged reading and viewing public, and a modern conception of subjectivity all played their part, while celebrity in turn helped to shape the development of these cultural formations. Ms. Fawcett's distinctive contribution is to show how the rhetoric of revelation on which celebrity relies can also function as a strategy of concealment. She calls this "overexpression." It works like dazzle camouflage—the celebrities disappear behind the exaggerated marks of their visibility. The black page of Tristram Shandy provides an emblem of this strategy: it is so covered with ink, so overwritten, that it tells us nothing at all. The celebrities of stage and page examined in this book "exaggerate into illegibility the marks by which their spectators might recognize them." Ms. Fawcett traces the history of this strategy across the long eighteenth century, showing how it was used in distinctive ways, with varying degrees of success, by men and women, actors and writers. This study begins with Colley Cibber, whose foppish costumes and mannered performances were widely mocked, not least by Pope in The Dunciad. Ms. Fawcett argues [End Page 87] that Cibber had the last laugh; his autobiography, with its farrago of overwritten passages, misspellings, and malapropisms, left his critics unable to do anything but repeat Cibber's own self-representations. The lingua Cibberiana proliferated among his supporters and detractors equally. His signature prop—the huge wig he wore in the role of Lord Foppington in Vanburgh's The Relapse—became an unstable signifier that exaggerated a masculine accessory to the point where the wig connoted effeminacy. This kind of excess and instability of signification made Cibber much talked about but never really known. Ms. Fawcett persuasively shows how this strategy of overexpression was passed down throughout the century and adapted by its inheritors. David Garrick drew on some of Cibber's tricks, even as he developed an acting style that defined itself against Cibber's. His fans were divided between praising his 'natural' acting for the emotions that he felt during his performances and recognizing the professionalism of his technical ability to convey emotions he was in fact not feeling. Sterne, meanwhile, was conflated with his characters of Tristram and Yorick to such an extent that it was hard to tell where the "real" Sterne could be found. Overexpression was not equally effective for women. As Ms. Fawcett demonstrates, women such as Charlotte Charke and George...