Charlotte Charke Research Articles

‘Playing at Bo-peep with the world’ The Author/Actor in Charlotte Charke’s Narrative

The article re-examines The Narrative of the Life of Mrs Charlotte Charke (1755), the first autobiography by a female actor (albeit one who consistently specialised in male roles) in terms of the strategies it deploys for showing, and hiding, the author’s physical person and authorial persona. As the youngest daughter of Colley Cibber, Charke was a member of London’s most influent theatrical family, and led a life marked by spectacular misfortune and neverending optimism. To claw her way out of the exclusion from acting that was the outcome of the Licencing Act, she undertook an extraordinary sequence of different careers, worked as a strolling player for nine years, and attempted a reconciliation with her father through her autobiography, which, deeply inscribed by the theatre in terms of both content and style, highlights the interaction between spontaneity and premeditation. Feelings seem not only expressed, but shaped through drama; memory becomes the bodily memory of interpreting a role, represented on the outdoor theatre of her many professional endeavours and ultimately in the pages of her book. Charke’s second ‘coming on the Stage’, her appearance, that is, in the guise of author, is marked by both gender and genre indeterminacy. As a ‘cartaceous’ remediation of her innate and unstoppable passion for the theatre it shows a precocious understanding of the newborn ‘cult of celebrity’ and the possibilities for self-promotion offered by the expanding print market. Ultimately, it aims to counter theatrical censorship by educating Charke’s audience/readership to a more critical awareness of the relationship between actor/role, gender/clothes and author/character.

Klein, Ula Lukszo. Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature

Klein, Ula Lukszo. <i>Sapphic Crossings: Cross-Dressing Women in Eighteenth-Century British Literature</i>

Pleasant Disruption: Queer Theory, Entrepreneurship, and the Memoirs of Charlotte Charke

Abstract: This article explores the intersection of entrepreneurial studies and queer studies as it appears in Charlotte Charke's A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke , examining the relationship between Charke's queer identity and labor history. I come to the conclusion that the queer "catallactic" capitalist is an antinormative identity that queers the space around it; queer capitalism becomes a type of applied queer theory that operates in a space I refer to as the bazaar.

Occupational Cross-Dressing in the Autobiographies of Hannah Snell and Charlotte Charke

This paper addresses the craft of disguise and spatial mobility through the reading of two eighteenth-century autobiographies. The Life and Adventures of Hannah Snell (1750) deals with the life story of a woman who dons male garb and joins the Royal Marine. A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755) features an actress and author notorious for cross-dressing both on and off the stage. Broadside ballads that deal with narratives of cross-dressing began to be printed at the end of the sixteenth and became greatly popular in the next century. While the autobiographies of Charlotte Charke and Hannah Snell partly follow the customary patterns of printed ballads, their narratives diverge from them in that Charke and Snell’s clear self-identification as laboring woman allows their crossover into economic agents. The ruses they employ to traverse out of traditional boundaries and to participate in exclusively male domains are examined in this paper with respect to the transforming definition of industriousness and women’s labor at the mid-century. While the second half of the eighteenth century witnessed the rise of domestic subjectivity based on the secluded private space, the two autobiographies signal that an antithetical type of identity also arose by using spatial mobility to breach the rigid division. The tradition of broadside ballads and popular literature must be investigated alongside the domestic novel in order to fully envisage the contemporary bounds of women’s work.

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

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...

Partial Histories: A Reappraisal of Colley Cibber by Elaine McGirr

Reviewed by: Partial Histories: A Reappraisal of Colley Cibber by Elaine McGirr Diana Solomon Elaine McGirr. Partial Histories: A Reappraisal of Colley Cibber. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Pp. x + 210. $99.99. It is high time that we had a few kind words for Colley Cibber. Someone who evoked strong feelings on all sides during his lifetime, Cibber since his death has remained fixed atop Pope’s Throne of Dulness, where most readers first encounter him. He has fared better with theater scholars, who value his foppish performances, several of his plays, and his colorful reckoning of London’s star players in An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber. But even this assessment is, Ms. McGirr suggests, inadequate. Her book expands our sense of Cibber’s achievements by looking beyond the fop and considering Cibber’s tragic characters, Shakespearean adaptations, and theatrical family. And in the process, it advocates for a more critical application of archival documents to make such figures as Cibber more than exemplars of a “partial history.” The mental image one conjures up of Cibber the actor is likely the one in Giuseppe Grisoni’s portrait, featuring him clad as The Relapse’s Lord Foppington taking a pinch of snuff. But Ms. McGirr argues that we have both overemphasized Cibber’s fops at the expense of his villains, and misinterpreted the fop character. Fewer than one-fifth of Cibber’s characters were fops, and the large number of performed villains indicates his success in those parts, despite critics’ mockery. Fops, moreover, were more rakish and dangerous than we tend to consider them, and here Ms. McGirr offers a helpful reassessment of that character type. Regarding Cibber as comanager of Drury Lane Theater, a post he held for nearly a quarter century, the anecdotes of his apparent mismanagement originate from those whom he rejected, like Fielding, not from those who worked with him. Ms. McGirr’s arguments for a new assessment of him as actor and theater manager are important not only for the fresh light they cast on Cibber—he comes across as a more versatile performer and a more capable manager—but also for their measured approach to the archive. The prior “partial history” of Cibber has concentrated on the most popular aspects of his biography at the expense of a more comprehensive assessment. Ms. McGirr demonstrates that attending to the anecdotes’ originators and their personal beefs with Cibber occasions a more equitable assessment of his career. The discussion of how Shakespeare became Shakespeare continues apace in eighteenth-century studies, and to this debate Ms. McGirr’s work on Cibber contributes significantly. One of the ongoing questions within this field is when eighteenth-century audiences stopped preferring adaptations of Shakespearean plays to the originals. His adaptations of Richard III and King John, and their supposedly poor receptions, have prompted some scholars to identify Cibber as the catalyst. In countering this perspective, Ms. McGirr identifies later writers such as Garrick and Tate as still adapting Shakespeare, reclaims the merits of Cibber’s Richard III (something she does elsewhere for his version of King John), and cites the popularity of his performances of Richard, including in-demand performances that brought him out of retirement. Ms. McGirr also reconsiders Cibber’s family. In recent years Charlotte Charke, Cibber’s youngest daughter, has garnered the most positive press, including her reissued autobiography, an essay collection, and Katherine Shevelow’s popular biography. To this state of affairs Ms. McGirr poses a significant counterargument. While acknowledging the compelling nature of Charke’s voice, especially in a time when actress studies and [End Page 78] queer studies are thriving, Ms. McGirr reminds us that in detailing her break with her father Charke tells only one side of the story, omitting her own contribution to that rupture: her portrayal of “Lord Place,” a mean-spirited lampoon of Cibber, in Fielding’s Pasquin. Cibber saw Charke’s debut—the first of over sixty performances—and never forgave her. Ms. McGirr’s discussion of his relations with his other theatrical child, Theophilus, is not as substantial but there is not as much to correct. More illuminating is her discussion of Cibber...

Charlotte Charke’s Gun: Queering Material Culture and Gender Performance

This essay juxtaposes readings of material culture and gender performance in Charlotte Charke’s Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke (1755). It argues that the transient relationship Charke has to the objects in her life mirrors the fluidity of her gender. The essay ultimately uses Charke’s narrative as a case study in a questioning of a binarized gender matrix. The thesis suggest that, though we lack language to fully describe it, characters and historical figures like Charke move beyond and explode gender binaries.

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole by Joel Schechter

Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole by Joel Schechter Seth Wilson Eighteenth-Century Brechtians: Theatrical Satire in the Age of Walpole. By Joel Schechter. U of Exeter P, 2016. Cloth $85.00, Paper $34.00. 288 pages. Joel Schechter may have written the perfect book for this historical moment. His purpose is "a mapping of paths to future theatrical satire and activism, through a survey of earlier routes explored by Brecht and his precursors in England" (3). Schechter locates these precursors, as his title suggests, in the eighteenth century. He offers a framework for evaluating British theatre artists like George Farquhar, John Gay, Henry Fielding, and Charlotte Charke, among others, as pioneers of the techniques that Bertolt Brecht would later use in forging his Epic theatre. Combining methodological approaches from theatre history, literary studies, performance studies, and historical fiction, Schechter clearly demonstrates Brecht's debt to the eighteenth-century British stage as he forcefully advocates for the importance of today's theatre drawing on the same techniques in service of speaking truth to power. Schechter brings a lively and highly readable style to Eighteenth-Century Brechtians, which makes the daunting task of teasing out the parallels between two seemingly disparate aesthetic movements easy to follow. The breadth of the connections that Schechter makes is impressive: he weaves together Brecht with eighteenth-century satirists like Fielding and Gay, performers like Charke and David Garrick, later twentieth-century writers like Dario Fo, Vaclav Havel, and Carl Grose, and the contemporary social protest of the Occupy Wall Street movement. The most successful section of the book, and one that illustrates Schechter's methodology clearly is chapter 21, where Schechter puts James Boswell, William Hogarth, Garrick, and the comic book artist R. Crumb into creative tension with one another. Beginning by discussing Hogarth's prints of Macheath, Schechter then positions Crumb as a latter-day Hogarth whose comics are a similar type of visual satire. Examining Crumb's pornographic comic illustrations of Boswell, Schechter discusses the idea of extra-theatrical social performance before transitioning to the debate between Boswell and Johnson over Garrick's relative merits as an actor. Schechter concludes by reading Boswell's defense of Garrick as an early example of Brechtian Epic theatre wherein the actor's presentation of the character is meant to disrupt a total identification. Throughout, Schechter makes a complex thread lively and easy to follow, and uses the Brechtian theory to enhance his readings of each object. Another similarly successful case study, chapter 5, details the relationship between John Gay and his patron, the Duchess of Queensberry, as she champions his work and becomes, in Schechter's estimation, a real-life Polly Peachum. Chapter 9 positions Fielding's work with his Great Mongol company at the Haymarket as analogous to Brecht's Berliner Ensemble, while chapter 10 uses the Brechtian conceit of the book to offer novel readings of The London Merchant and Fielding's The Covent-Garden Tragedy, concluding that Fielding's satirical take on domestic tragedy prefigures the ways in which late capitalism will commodify human beings. Finally, chapter 16 uses both Brecht and Marx to analyze the precarious nature of the acting profession in the eighteenth century through a number of labor disputes. Obviously, in each of these chapters, he teases out a number of threads; nonetheless, Schechter's writing remains lucid throughout. The result is a clear, [End Page 147] nuanced, novel reading of theatrical events and plays that demonstrates their vitality and relevance today. The most striking feature of Eighteenth-Century Brechtians is the frequent historical fiction interludes that Schechter employs. These serve both to creatively fill in gaps where the historical record is incomplete, and to offer an example to practitioners interested in taking up the mantle of the eighteenth-century Brechtians. Seven of the chapters are imaginative reconstructions of various items, including "lost" Messingkauf Dialogues, the fictional memoirs of Macheath, imagined diary entries, and dramatizations of the historical personae going about the business of mounting productions. One additional piece is a fictional future press release that hopefully imagines a day when the National Theatre—under the command of Cate Blanchett—stages Gay's Polly and prepares...

Charlotte Charke, a Shilling, and a Shoulder of Mutton: The Risks of Performing Trauma

Charlotte Charke, a Shilling, and a Shoulder of Mutton: The Risks of Performing Trauma

Julie Park The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century EnglandThe Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England. Julie Park. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Pp. xxix+275.

<i>Julie Park</i> The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England<i>The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England</i>. Julie Park. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Pp. xxix+275.

Charlotte Charke's Tit for Tat; or, Comedy and Tragedy at War: A lost play recovered?

ABSTRACTThis article proposes that Charlotte Charke's lost play, Tit for Tat, may have been her own pirated version of Henry Fielding's The Covent-Garden Tragedy.

The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England (review)

Reviewed by: The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England Nicholas Hudson Park, Julie. The Self and It: Novel Objects in Eighteenth-Century England. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. xxix + 275 pp. $50.00. As Julie Park details in The Self and It, the eighteenth century marked the rise of fascination with animate and inanimate reproductions of human beings. This was an age when dolls, automata, and puppet-shows were not merely the playthings of children, as they would become in the nineteenth century, but the serious pursuit of ingenious inventors and an absorbing source of interest for educated people, including its writers. The leisure activities of eighteenth-century people included the admiration of waxwork portraits of famous people and fictional characters. Burney's Evelina was just one in a large crowd to visit Coxe's Museum of mechanical objects. Henry Fielding and Charlotte Charke were keen amateur puppeteers. Park's project in this book is to link this fashion with larger cultural and epistemological phenomena and changes that characterize the eighteenth century. The fascination with human-like objects corresponds with the rise of consumerism and the increasing identification of people with what they wore and bought. This commercial objectification of personal identity in turn profoundly affected notions of the "self," which began to be decentered towards external appearances and sensations. In literary production, the novel (as the emergent name of this genre indicates) was driven by the consumer craving for novelty. The novel is, moreover, rather like a doll-show, puppet-show, or exhibition of ingenuous automata. It cunningly reproduces the illusion of real human behavior—though this illusion, like the consumer and mechanical illusions around it, also became a place where readers modeled their understanding of "true" inward identity. As this synopsis suggests, Park's book zeroes in on an interconnected range of psychological paradoxes that proliferated in the eighteenth century, and that remain, she claims, the paradoxical experience of modernity. The "Enlightenment" (a historical category that I will shortly question) valued itself for demystifying irrationality, a rationalistic drive exemplified by its manufacture of animate phenomena with springs and wheels rather than souls. Yet its experiments produced precisely the kinds of irrational wonder and magical "fetishizing" that reason was meant to dispel. Park deploys the term "fetish" in both its Marxist and Freudian senses. In the Marxist sense, this consumer age obviously invested objects with value abstracted from their material production. It also fixated on automata and puppets that, like Marx's famous moving table, appeared to possess their own animating power. The same delusion characterizes that literary consumer object, the novel, whose cast of characters seems to engage in all kinds of human behavior autonomously and without the manipulation of a creator. The novel thus participated in a more general desire for "the effacement of boundaries between person and thing, subject and object" (38). In measuring and shaping their identities against "things," including the artificial world of novels, the outward became indistinguishable from the inward. Park's use of Freud's meaning of "fetish" is rich in connections. It is worth noting that Park's return to Freud, a figure repressed in much recent scholarship, feels uncanny, though she treats, or even castrates, Freud as the heir of Enlightenment delusions and paradoxes rather than as a paternal authority. Turning Freud on his head, Park advances the ingenious and entirely plausible thesis that the female, not the male, became the primary model of human selfhood during the eighteenth century. The Freudian (male) fetishist fantasizes over parts or detached accoutrements of a woman to fill her lack of an unseen, and nonexistent, penis. In Clarissa, Lovelace is a fetishist who dwells on parts of the heroine in a desperate search for her genitalia that even rape cannot consummate. Indeed, his creator Richardson is also a fetishist who imagines his doll-like [End Page 350] angel, his fictional automaton, only though the detached excrescence of her letters, or how she is perceived outwardly by others. Clarissa illustrates the male perception of women as essentially automata, painted figures animated mechanically by sensations. But this perception underwrites an uncanny male return to painted female objects, paradigmatically the prostitute, pointing...

The Chameleon, Cross-Dressed Autobiography of Charlotte Charke (1713–1760)

The Chameleon, Cross-Dressed Autobiography of Charlotte Charke (1713–1760)

The Theatrics of Self-Sentiment in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke

(2009). The Theatrics of Self-Sentiment in A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Charlotte Charke. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 24, No. 2, pp. 194-209.

Closeted Writing and Lesbian and Gay Literature: Classical, Early Modern, Eighteenth-Century (review)

Reviewed by: Closeted Writing and Lesbian and Gay Literature: Classical, Early Modern, Eighteenth-Century Sophie Tomlinson Robinson, David M. , Closeted Writing and Lesbian and Gay Literature: Classical, Early Modern, Eighteenth-Century, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2006; hardback; pp. xx, 295; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9780754655503. To people unfamiliar with the term, 'LGBT Studies' may sound as mysterious as 'BLT' on the café blackboard. However, it denotes the academic field from within which David Robinson writes, namely Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies, or as he phrases it more broadly, 'LGBT Studies and the History of Sexuality' (p. 25). This book revives a practice which Robinson describes as 'supposedly retrograde' (p. viii), seeking out closeted homosexual writing from past eras. As he explains in his Preface, from the vantage-point of 'differentist' scholarship, itself founded on the Foucauldian premise that homosexuality was an 'invention' of the nineteenth century, such a focus may seem 'naively anachronistic' (p. vii). But Robinson argues bravely for the validity of 'continuist' approaches (p. x), re-engaging the once discredited notion of authorial intention, along with historical contextualisation and close reading, to illuminate poetry, fiction and drama from his clustered classical, Early Modern and eighteenth-century periods. His central contention is that 'if we remain open to similarity … instead of only identity and difference, we can more productively explore the longstanding Western awareness that people often selectively conceal and disclose same-sex love and desire' (p. 10). The three parts of the book are entitled: (1) Intentionality: Closeted Homosexual Writing; (2) Intentionality: Closeted Homophobic Writing; and (3) Continuity. In his strong third chapter, 'The Closeting of Closeting: Cleland, Smollett, Sodomy, and the Critics' Robinson juxtaposes an astonishingly animated and, he argues, realistic, depiction of sodomy between 'two young sparks' in John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure with examples of 'Gay Bashing Eighteenth-Century Style' (p. 51) drawn from Smollett's Peregrine Pickle and Charlotte Charke's Henry Dumont. The last two texts form a prelude to Robinson's analysis of 'Smollett's textual homophobia' in Roderick Ransom (p. 58), where he shows convincingly that Smollett 'condemns sex between men, in order to present what matters most to him: love between men' (p. 77). The writing here displays Robinson's lively engagement with other criticism attentive to homosexuality as it impacts on these writers' texts and identities, whereas, when arguing for the satirical anti-lesbian thrust of Delarivier Manley's New Atlantis in Chapter 5, his differences from the pro-lesbian readings of feminist critics produces less supple prose and some unwieldy footnotes. In [End Page 180] criticism too, similarity more often produces interesting textual possibilities than absolute difference. After a chapter on metamorphosis and homosexuality in Ovid's 'Iphis and Ianthe' and related tales, Part III culminates in a chapter exploring variations on this myth in six Early Modern dramas ranging from the well-known – John Lyly's Gallathea (1592) – to the obscure – Charles Hopkins' Friendship Improv'd; Or, The Female Warriour (1700). Curiously, Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen, with Emilia's narrative of her twin-like love for her girlhood friend Flavina, rates not even a passing mention. The discussion gains coherence from the Ovidian myth the plays hold in common, and Robinson's tracking of the plays' varying processes of 'rejecting or unknowing' (p. 250) female and male homosexuality (excepting Gallathea) is at once persistent and playful, responsive to theatrical context as it might determine meaning. It is a fine, close to an impressive, provocative study. Sophie Tomlinson Department of English University of Auckland Copyright © 2008 by the Author

The genius of parody: imitation and originality in seventeenth and eighteenth-century English literature

Introduction 'We Cannot Think of What Hath Not Been Thought': or, How Critics Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Literary Parody Parody as Plague: Ben Jonson and the Early Anxieties of Parodic Destabilization Minding True Things by Mock'ries: The Henry V Chorus and the Question of Shakespearean Parody John Dryden and Homeopathic Parody in the Early Augustan Battleground Parodying Pope's Eloisa to Abelard : Richard Owen Cambridge's An Elegy Written in an Empty Assembly Room Parody, Autobiography and the Novel: Charlotte Charke's The History of Mr. Henry Dumont, Esq., and Miss Charlotte Evelyn Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society (review)

Reviewed by: Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society Kim Marra Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society. By Kirsten Pullen . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; pp. xii + 215. $60.00 cloth, $24.99 paper. This book is a rich, theoretically invigorated study of the cultural connections between actresses and whores from the seventeenth century to the turn of the millennium. Rather than a comprehensive history, Pullen presents a range of case studies illuminating the ways women in the public professions of acting and prostitution used performance to negotiate prevailing constructions of female sexuality and moral stigma. Excluding male actors and prostitutes as well as non-Western contexts, Pullen opts for the cultural specificity of focusing on white women in Britain and the United States whose histories build on one another, as nineteenth-century actresses draw on the experiences of their Restoration forebears, and contemporary prostitutes claim affinity with historical actresses. She productively analyzes critical and biographical treatments of Mae West to introduce some of the advantages and limitations of occupying the "whore position" that the other women in her study encounter to varying degrees: "As West aptly demonstrates, theatrical performance, performance in everyday life, and Butlerian performativity suggest how both actresses and prostitutes employ a variety of strategies to intervene in their discursive representations" (21). For her case study of the first generation of actresses on the English-speaking stage, Pullen chooses Elizabeth (Betty) Boutell, a "mid-range" actress who specialized in breeches roles. Her analysis challenges commonplace assumptions that Restoration actresses were whores subjugated to a system of stage display for the enticement of clients and husbands. While actresses such as Boutell were viewed as low class and sexually available in their day, many subsequent accounts, Pullen contends, "have used the whore stigma to virtually erase considerations of her longevity, innovation, and popularity." Pullen finds in Boutell a counter-narrative of an actress who "used her epithet in order to draw attention to her own (and by implication, other women's) potential sexual agency" (27–28). To account for that agency, Pullen astutely reads against the grain of leading histories of marriage, family, and theatre and reinterprets the dynamics of Restoration breeches performance. Whereas Boutell, like many of her contemporary actresses, apparently left no written record of her own experience—a void allowing others to construct and marginalize her for her reputed whorishness—Charlotte Charke and Margaret Leeson in the eighteenth century each wrote substantial autobiographical [End Page 320] narratives. In a complex and compelling chapter, Pullen places these narratives side by side—the one by the cross-dressing actress daughter of Colley Cibber (Charke), and the other by a working prostitute (Leeson)—to map the literary, theatrical, and social stages on which each entered the public sphere and performed her sexual and gender identity amid a culture of ubiquitous masquerade. Although Pullen is not the first scholar to examine these documents, she adds to the discourse by comparing them as first-person accounts penned from the "whore position." Leeson subverts that position, Pullen argues, by self-consciously deploying established tropes of prostitute autobiography and asserting her right to sexual pleasure. In contrast, Charke disrupts putative whorishness with tales of passing as a man to seek employment and pursuing female community rather than heterosexual desire. The book's nineteenth-century case study involves Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes who became an overnight sensation with their 1868 New York debut. Pullen views the ensuing moralistic outrage as a reaction not simply to the Blondes' hypersexual feminine image, but also to their style of cross-dressing, frank sexual speech, and usurpation of a formerly all-male genre. Wearing tights, short pants, and corsets, "Thompson talked like a man but walked like a woman," Pullen writes (95). In so doing, the Blondes presented a more threatening sexuality that "defied strenuous attempts . . . to insert them into traditional feminine ideology, either as prostitutes or feminists" (132). Regarding Thompson's infamous revenge on anti-burlesque critic Wilbur Storey with a horsewhip in a street confrontation, Pullen cautions that seeing her chiefly as a prototype of the emancipated woman (as Lois Banner, for example, does in American Beauty, 1985) elides her conscious...

Actresses and whores: on stage and in society

List of illustrations 1. Prostitution, performance, and Mae West: speaking from the whore position 2. Betty Boutell, 'Whom All the Town Fucks': constructing the actress/whore 3. Memoir and masquerade: Charlotte Charke, Margaret Leeson, and eighteenth-century performances of self 4. Burlesque, breeches, and blondes: illegitimate nineteenth-century cultural and theatrical performance 5. 'We need status as actresses!': contemporary prostitution and performance 6. Afterpiece: millennial prostitution Bibliography Index.

Listening to the “Wives” of the “Female Husbands”

SUMMARY This article treats two of the central queer texts of eighteenth-century Britain, the autobiographical narrative of Charlotte Charke, a well-known cross-dressing actress who spent a portion of her life as a husband to another woman, and Henry Fielding's pamphlet, The Female Husband. Focusing on these texts, this study moves away from the traditional subject of such work-the female husbands themselves- and instead centers on the wives and lovers of these figures. In this way, the author offers a model of what she calls a project of imaginary coalition-building across time between contemporary femmes and the differ-ently-but still queerly-desiring feminine women in Charke's and Fielding's texts. Tracing two models of queer but gender-normative feminine subjectivity in these texts, the “wife” in a same-sex companionate marriage, and the “duped woman,” this article challenges assumptions by mainstream as well as queer scholars about just who should be our subjects of study and why, ultimately calling into question definitions of both “heterosexuality” and “queer.”

Representations of the self from the Renaissance to Romanticism

Introduction Patrick Coleman 1. Revising Descartes: on subject and community Timothy J. Reiss 2. The 'man of learning' defended: seventeenth-century biographies of scholars and an early modern ideal of excellence Peter N. Miller 3. Life-writing in seventeenth-century England Debora Shuger 4. Representations of intimacy in the life-writing of Anne Clifford and Anne Dormer Mary O'Connor 5. Gender, genre and theatricality in the autobiography of Charlotte Charke Robert Folkenflik 6. Petrarch/Sade: writing the life Julie Candler Hayes 7. A comic life: Diderot and le recit de vie Stephen Werner 8. Letters, diary and autobiography in eighteenth-century France Benoit Melancon 9. Portrait of the object of love in Rousseau's Confessions Felicity Baker 10. Fichte's road to Kant Anthony J. La Vopa 11. Mary Robinson and the scripts of female sexuality Anne K. Mellor 12. After Sir Joshua Richard Wendorf Index.