The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought by S. E. Jackson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought by S. E. Jackson Ellwood Wiggins The Problem of the Actress in Modern German Theater and Thought. By S. E. Jackson. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2021. Pp. xiii + 232. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 9781640140868. S. E. Jackson's fascinating monograph opens by connecting Nietzsche's "Problem of the Actor" to his problem with women (1). This brilliant move heralds her exploration of the centrality of gender to performance and performers in fin-de-siècle Germany. Actresses are not just a side issue or specialized topic when it comes to modernist theater. The questions posed by performing women instead point to the most pressing theoretical and practical issues of the day. Jackson's book is a veritable treasure trove of materials, narratives, and perspectives from German-language sources around 1900. It should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in gender, performance, or theater history in German modernism. The Problem of the Actress successfully straddles intellectual history and theater historiography by showing how intimately related conceptual debates (about issues as seemingly disparate as femininity and temporality, for instance) were to influential stage performances in the early 1900s. In the process of this back and forth between pseudo-philosophical publications (such as the repulsive misogynist Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter) and "paratheatrical writing" (production reviews, memoirs, and metatheatrical fiction), the book unfolds a striking cultural history of Wilhelmine Germany. Especially impressive is the way Jackson has marshaled a rich collection of little-known (and never-translated) contemporary treatises on acting and reviews of performances to paint a thickly textured portrait of the age. The first two chapters lay out the conceptual oppositions that both animated theoretical debates and constricted the practical conditions of female performers. These are followed by three chapters that use close readings of texts and performances to open up explorations of wider themes. All five chapters explore the creation of identity as a site of negotiation between heteronomous subjects who must respond to the ineluctable gender expectations of others. One admirable strength of the book is the way it weaves the longer tradition of German performance history into its lively account of Wilhelmine theater. Jackson [End Page 579] clearly demonstrates her reliance on previous scholarship about women in performance in the long eighteenth century both as methodological models for her own project and to outline the powerful continuities between acting traditions. Too often studies of modernism present the era as radically new and fail to notice the prevalence of older forms of thought even in what seem to be reactions against the past. Jackson avoids this trap by tracing the transformations of established paradigms in the new age. Her frequent citations of Mary Helen Dupree's groundbreaking study of Enlightenment and Romantic actress-writers, The Mask and the Quill (Bucknell University Press, 2011), in particular, show how abiding were the paradoxical demands of naturalness and artifice constructed around performing the feminine. In many ways, Jackson's study can be read as an exciting sequel to Dupree's, carrying the same incisive and sensitive readings of women's performance and women's writing forward into the next century. It is heartbreaking to see how little had changed for women in the intervening years. Jackson sums up a 1928 novel by the actress Tilla Durieux, for instance, by saying that it "presents the obligatory performance of femininity as destructive for women" (149). This quote could easily function as a precise digest of Mary Wollstonecraft's argument in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). But Jackson's acknowledgement of continuity simultaneously allows her to showcase even more precisely the very real novelties in intellectual concepts and theatrical practice that make the early twentieth century such a momentous era in European history. This achievement of the book becomes most evident in the final chapter. By focusing on the actress Gertrud Eysolt's 1903 performance of Elektra, Jackson persuasively shows how the character and in fact the entire drama would have been inconceivable without the actress's creative contributions. In a way, the book invites a recasting of the three-way antagonism between actor, writer, and director—all...