Daughters of Eve: A Cultural History of French Theater Women from the Old Regime to the Fin de Siecle (review)

This fine study of representations of French theater women between the seventeenth century and the First World War treats actresses and other women performers as “barometers of the acceptance of women in the public sphere” (p. 240). Integrating social, cultural, gender, and political history, Berlanstein’s important and stimulating book also challenges familiar arguments made by some historians of women. His impressive array of sources includes novels and plays, periodical literature, memoirs and biographies, and archives of the Opera and Comédie Francaise.

Five political epochs provide an organizational scheme for the treatment of actresses, opera singers, popular performers, and dancers. The Old Regime, discussed first, appears, under close inspection, to include more than one phase in the relationship between theater women and the male public. By the early seventeenth century women performers were on the French stage and later entered Louis XIV’s royal troop that became the Comédie Francaise. Like male actors, theater women faced excommunication before the French Revolution, and images of immorality and sinfulness colored their public reputation. Nonetheless, argues Berlanstein, during the age of “Aristocratic Libertinism, 1715–1789” (Chapter 2), aristocratic men sometimes preferred liaisons with theater women to the dalliances with women of their own social rank that were more typical during Louis XIV’s reign. Such relationships between individuals from different classes he terms indicative of aristocratic “individualism” (p. 45), an assertion in private life of independence from the royal court. Whether the male aristocrat’s mistress was a noblewoman or a performer, the affair certainly remained a display of patriarchal power. Yet, Berlanstein also contends, aristocrats’ more numerous liaisons with theater women during the eighteenth century had two other noteworthy consequences. In some relationships a real affection developed that foreshadowed the greater emphasis on emotions and the importance of private life characteristic of the later eighteenth-century middle classes and the culture of Romanticism. Moreover, actresses often exercised a certain power over their lovers because they expected and required material support as a precondition for the liaison. Such female power, in turn, generated a backlash exemplified by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s diatribes against women’s influence on the stage as well as in salons.

The second political moment highlighted (Chapter 3) is the Revolutionary and Napoleonic era, which Berlanstein, like many other historians, treats as crucial for “defining the modern gender order.” Nonetheless, he challenges some arguments central to the work of Joan Landes (Women in the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, 1988) or Joan Wallach Scott (Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man, 1996), among others. Whereas Landes saw the Revolution’s formal exclusion of women from the new privileges of citizenship as a setback for women who had enjoyed social prominence in the eighteenth-century salon culture, Berlanstein emphasizes other aspects of the revolutionary context. Although revolutionaries distinguished sharply between men’s public roles as rational citizens and women’s private ones as tender wives and mothers, Berlanstein judges such emphasis on a complementarity of roles an advance over earlier assumptions about women’s lesser status. More importantly, he contends that the political empowerment of male citizens made women in general, and theater women in particular, seem less threatening to the social order and, therefore, more acceptable in some public roles. This highlighting of the Revolution’s positive aspects for theater women thus complements Carla Hesse’s findings on the significant increase after 1789 in the number of women writers able to publish (The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern, 2001). Although Napoleon Bonaparte soon imposed more controls on theaters, actresses were not noticeably disadavantaged.

Berlanstein’s treatment of the Revolution’s impact on theater women well illustrates his central thesis: “political organization and ideologies determined representations of theater women,” and changes in “the nature of the political...