Actresses and Whores: On Stage and in Society (review)
Four actresses—English players Betty Boutell (fl. 1667–1692) and Charlotte Clarke (1713–1760), trans-Atlantic burlesque star Lydia Thompson (1838–1908), and American dramatist and performer of stage and film Mae West (1893–1980)—constitute the chief case studies for this examination of reputation, along with the Irish madam Margaret Leeson (1727–1797) and a dozen sex workers in Madison, Wisconsin, during the 1990s. Leeson and the actresses are studied via memoirs, repertoire, and anecdotal evidence, and the Madison call girls are interviewed in a backstage view that fashionably goes by the designation of ethnography. The actresses were all undistinguished as artists but notorious for portraying cross-dressed (or in West's case, merely sexually charged) characters who, in their various genres and cultural contexts, stimulated anxieties about contamination of the collective moral and social body through their scandalous private conduct and because of erotic responses to their stage work.
West's maxim, "keep a diary, and someday it'll keep you," may have been anticipated by Leeson, who, in her late sixties and on the skids, produced a penitential memoir—construing her rise from abandoned lover to affluent cathouse keeper—as proof of her sexual self-determination.1 [End Page 443] Pullen links this contestation of victimhood to the rights activism of modern prostitutes, such as those in COYOTE, and, in turn, to modern prostitutes' view of themselves as actresses. Claiming kinship across history, Pullen legitimizes sex work through a sisterhood of gender transgressors. By this logic, the imputation of stage actresses as whores—unchaste and lewd to make a living and fornicating for pure pleasure—which was fully justified in the English Restoration and in France through the Second Empire, is turned about in recent years by the self-direction inherent in role play and deliberately bounded identities within sex work and private life.2
As McKenzie argues, performance is now such a widespread ascription that it accounts for the measurement, management, or assessment of machines, practices, or objects in engineering, business, or product testing as much as the mimetic pretense of stage acting.3 Pullen is seduced by this powerful trend. In the modern parlance of work effectiveness, the term "performance evaluation" describes quality, efficiency, and economy among people or systems in any job milieu. Pullen assumes that the neutralization of more than two millennia of prejudice about performance coincides with the eradication of suspicion about actresses' chastity. When sex workers in Madison describe how they "feign passion, simulate desire, represent sexuality, and impersonate a fantasy lover" (152), the smoke and mirrors of such an illusion calls upon the glamor of film acting. Pullen conflates the cachet of cinema with metaphors of theater, one of her many inconsistencies. More troubling, however, is that she makes too much of sex workers' preference for acting and make-believe as a workplace strategy and psychic valve. Nowadays who does not perform, and in what walk of life are theatrical metaphors not part of the common lexicon? Pullen insufficiently particularizes the associative claims about theater in order to tarnish "anti-porn" feminism—a term that she renders synonymous with anti-sex—and counters Marxist-inflected feminist ascriptions of false consciousness with female sex workers' claims to find their work liberating and freely chosen.
The material conditions and discursive constructs of acting and prostitution were certainly entangled in the seventeenth century, as they were in the twentieth. Pullen implies, however, that the stigma against actresses is a thing of the past—except, perhaps, among the straw figures of anti-porn feminists—and that self-fashioning can be accomplished through acting techniques as well by invoking actresses' milieu. Though figure-revealing actresses of the 1860s were, in some circles, as unnatural and monstrous as Bloomers and cross-dressed prostitutes, Pullen views West's...
