Comment

No body ever simply appears on stage. Bodies are, rather, made to appear in performance, rendered visible as the encoded tissues interwoven by systems of ideological representation that mediate the anxieties and interests at play in specific historical moments. On stage, even the naked body represents not natural material, but the matter of history.

The articles in this special issue of TJ are all concerned with the ways in which performed bodies can be examined in historical context to reveal the contradictions and conflicts—the blemishes, as it were—of dominant discourses that seek to naturalize themselves in embodied representation. All but one of the articles focus on specific examples of such embodiment in reference to a quite specific historical moment—rarely more than a decade or two. I have tried to underscore this historical specificity by placing the articles in historical sequence; but the range of issues that can be compared back and forth between the articles also bears witness to both the persistence and mutation of anxiety and interest across broader historical periods.

James Peck’s examination of the actress Ann Oldfield in her performance of the character Lady Townly at a moment of crisis for Whig political economy in the 1720s provides a sophisticated display of methodological possibilities that are taken up in various ways by the following articles. Peck does not let Oldfield disappear into her character; rather, he reveals how much Oldfield herself participated in articulating “a version of the aristocratic female that proved enormously valuable to the Whig commercial imaginary.” Peck is particularly attentive to Oldfield’s skills in representing a woman of “fashion,” not least through the interpretational exhibition of her clothed, or costumed, body. His analysis derives its strength in part from its ability to sustain critical attention to three elements of performance that are too often discussed in isolation: actress, text, and spectator expectation.

Diana Paulin’s discussion is more focused on textual representation, but she wins from this focus a comparison between theatrical and narrative representation that those who work across genres will find particularly fruitful. Like Peck, Paulin is concerned to reveal how analysis of particular performances can be used to make more visible a broader set of overdetermined norms—and the social stakes at play in those norms. Her discussion of a “white” character declared black” and a “black” character raised and declared “white” also provides a compelling example of the degree to which a body’s “natural” identity results from the body’s performance within the contradictory conditioning of a spacious tissue of rules.

With Jane Goodall’s article, the issue’s focus shifts to theatrical performances unmediated by a dramatic text. As Goodall demonstrates, however, the seemingly direct display of women’s dancing bodies in popular performance across the turn of the century mediates a profound cultural anxiety in response to newly developing industrial technologies—an anxiety that has reappeared at the turn of our own century with the second stage of the revolution in control technology. Within the social imaginary Goodall examines, the human body often appears only to become visible as a representation of the machine; it embodies its own loss, the transfer of its own agency. Certainly, this is true for the spectatorial commentaries Goodall discusses—commentaries that produced the representations of performances by the Tiller Girls and others as surely as the performers themselves. At the same time, Goodall is equally concerned with the experience of those whose performing bodies were caught up in these representational systems, and her discussion reminds us that performers themselves participate in multiple systems of historical signification—and of historical materiality, including the material systems of wages and geographical mobility.

Angela Latham’s discussion of “leg shows” overlaps with Goodall’s, and Latham, too, is concerned with the contradictions between economic and ideological systems. At the same time, she complements Goodall’s discussion with a focus on gender and sexuality. Her examination exhibits ideology in the making and identifies the makers. Ziegfield and others naturalized a notion of “beauty” in representation by means of their power to determine what types of bodies would be made visible and what types would be...