The "Female Martinet": Mrs. Harper, Gender, and Civic Virtue on the Early Republican Stage

Abstract

The "Female Martinet": Mrs. Harper, Gender, and Civic Virtue on the Early Republican Stage Jason Shaffer On 12 May 1788 in New York, the DailyAdvertiser ran a letter to the editor from "Z," a pseudonymous theater fan, commending one Mrs. Harper, an actress with the Old American Company of John Henry and Lewis Hallam Jr. "No actress deserves more esteem for her judgment,assiduity,and theatrical knowledge,"declares Z,who also lauds Mrs. Harper's frequent performance ofvirtuous roles—especially those of"aunt and mother." Z draws Mrs. Harper especially to the attention of the women in the audience ofthe Old American Company's John Street Theatre, since the onstage depiction of"the amiable virtues of the wife, the unspotted character ofthe private woman,must,or ought,to interest the sensibility and liberality of the fair."1 Whether Z intended for the women of New York merely to applaud the inherent good qualities of their sex as performed by Mrs. Harper or to use her onstage example for the betterment of their own characters is unclear. Z has, however, unmistakably singled out not merely a dramatic text or character—the usual vehicles of eighteenth-century arguments in favor ofthe theater's potential as a school for morality—but an actual performer as a model of female virtue in the early republic. For a critic in eighteenth-century America, this was a bold rhetorical move.2 To anyone familiar with the films ofJohn Wayne or the dual careers as actress and charity advocate of Angelina Jolie, the promotion of the (often sexualized) bodyofa performer as a symbol ofa specific model of gendered—and sometimes nationalized—virtue is probablyno surprise. Those familiar with the careers of nineteenth-century performers such 411 412Comparative Drama as Edwin Forrest, the living embodiment of virile Jacksonian democracy ,and JennyLind,the Swedish singer whom P.T.Barnum transformed into an angel in the house, maylikewise yawn.3 Nor is the phenomenon peculiar to the United States. The Whig-dominated public theaters that evolved in London after the Revolution of 1689 (and later gave rise to the American professional theater) embraced the figure of the professional "stage virgin"Anne Bracegirdle as a national symbol. Bracegirdle's persona helped to cement the symbolic equation of the perpetually threatened liberties ofthe bodypolitic and the physical form ofa woman threatened with sexual violation—a commonplace in Whig propaganda and the period's dramas—in the political culture ofthe BritishAtlantic.4 And although, as Kristina Straub observes, those eighteenth-century actresses who were not stage virgins were often assumed to be libidinous and sexually suspect, these stereotypes had weakened considerably by the 1780's, due in part to the shining star ofSarah Siddons on the London stage.5 The professional theater in North America during the 1780s, however , had to prove itselfworthy ofpatronage in the wake of the Revolution . In 1788, theatrical performances were still banned in many cities under a 1774 congressional edict; even in relativelytheater-friendlyNew York,Hallam and Henryhad encountered opposition when theyreopened the John Street in 1785. The marginal legal and moral status ofthe theater in the postwar public sphere, then, renders Z's remarks on Mrs. Harper's symbolic value to the public all the more noteworthy.6As historian Ruth Bloch notes, however, the 1780s saw a widespread shift in the symbolic representations ofAmerican public virtue from masculine to feminine forms as the political culture moved toward "a greater acceptance of institutionalizedpublic order."7As hadbeen the case in Englandafter 1689, framing the Revolution as the basis for an established state during the 1780s meant that the state needed a face. More often than not, that face was a woman's. Z's elevation of an actress into a freestanding symbol for virtuous womanhood, then, has political implications that reach beyond an aesthetic defense of Mrs. Harper from those he calls "the snarling critics."8 Z's particular choice ofMrs. Harper as the theatrical conduit for proper femininity is further complicated by the inevitable cross-pollination Jason Shaffer413 between the identities of popular performers and those of their roles. Mrs. Harper did play a number ofvirtuous aunts, mothers, and wives in NewYork, where she and her husband Joseph...