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

This book centers on what Julia Fawcett terms "overexpression," or the idea that during the long 18th century, Britain's celebrities strategically invited and disrupted the public gaze "by enhancing or exaggerating the features through which they might be recognized and evaluated by their spectators" until they seem so "impossibly excessive and spectacular" that the initial promise of intimacy afforded by such detail is overturned (3, 4). In essence, a blaze of excessive self-representation creates a blind spot of privacy, or at least unknowability, for celebrities who deploy "spectacular disappearances."

The book begins with a look at actor, manager, and author Colley Cibber, "the first celebrity to have produced his own autobiography" (4). Fawcett argues for Cibber's primacy in the history of celebrity, defining a celebrity as "a person as famous for what he performed in his private life as for what he performed on the public stage" (26). Rather than revealing an authentic private self, Cibber's autobiography, An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740), and his depiction of Richard III (in his own long-lived adaptation of Shakespeare's play) formed "part of the strategy he developed to frustrate his spectators' attempts to glean his private life from his public performances" (24).

The study then pursues Cibber's legacies of overexpression in print and performance in case studies of Charlotte Charke, Laurence Sterne, David Garrick, George Anne Bellamy, and Mary Robinson. Among the strategies of overexpression Fawcett identifies, beginning with Cibber, are self-representation by means of costume (wigs especially), by gesture, or by language and other textual apparatuses that draw attention to their own excesses and frustrate spectators' ability to interpret them. Each chapter is structured around the particular prop that was crucial to that celebrity's autobiographical performances, and each considers ways in which gender, genre, and individual circumstance influence the ways that subsequent celebrities adapt Cibber's techniques of overexpression.

The writing in each case study is well wrought and stylish. This is no mere collection of articles: there is a convincing through narrative, which even manages to integrate Sterne, the sole nonactor considered in the book, deftly: "In revealing so much about their inner lives that they reveal nothing at all, Sterne's hobbyhorsical characters betray a debt to [...] celebrity autobiographies" (110). The argument, however, sometimes stumbles on the issue of intent: to suppose that certain actions comprise a celebrity's conscious strategy of concealment, one must demonstrate that the celebrity intended those actions, and intended them to operate in the manner described. For instance, in the chapter concerning Mary Robinson, a fascinating figure of stage and scandal who has received much critical treatment of late, Fawcett argues that Robinson stages her "autobiographical performances as fashion plates" (200), onto which the viewer might project herself, in the manner of the fashion magazines then becoming popular. Fawcett writes, "in encouraging her readers to approach these passages [in her memoirs] as 'figures' they might 'dress by' rather than as spectacles they should judge, Robinson reconceives the relationship between a celebrity and her public until they want no longer to own or to contain her but rather to be her" (201). This is intriguing and plausible, but undersupported: one reference to Oliver Goldsmith's description of "figures" of fashion in the Lady's Magazine is the occasion for a close reading of the word "figure" in Robinson's memoirs, and the question of how much of her autobiography Robinson wrote (her daughter completed the memoir after Robinson's death) leaves Robinson's intent to represent herself as such a "figure" uncertain. Further, to suggest that this representation had an effect on readers without showing how readers' reception of the memoirs manifested that effect, as Fawcett does when she states that "Robinson's spectators slowly acquired and began to adopt...