When Romeo was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators (review)

When Romeo Was A Woman: Charlotte Cushman And Her Circle Of Female Spectators. By Lisa Merrill. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999; pp. 328. $37.50 cloth, $19.95 paper.

In her study of the performances and relationships in the life of nineteenth-century American actress Charlotte Cushman, Lisa Merrill asserts that, "[t]o some extent her greatness lay in her ambiguity: she served different roles for different audiences, each of whom might find some aspect of her to admire and with which to identify. Charlotte had become a popular cultural artifact--an icon who both embodied and disturbed her culture's dominant ideologies about gender and sexuality" (245). Merrill's meticulously researched account explores this paradox of Cushman's phenomenal ability to represent true womanhood and virtue, while transgressing the assumptions about women's position, power, and passion, both on and off the stage. Merrill begins with Cushman's own first journey to England and an unpublished diary that she kept on the transatlantic crossing. It is the image of Cushman on her first voyage to seek stardom, the record of her private thoughts about what might be ahead, and of the woman she left behind that allows Merrill to move backward and forward through Cushman's life. Crossing is a repeated image, with Cushman's cross-gender performances, traversing the stage between private and public venues, and crossing lines of convention while maintaining her image and gaining social acceptance.

Merrill scrutinizes the tiny journal kept by Cushman of this trip as a lesbian scholar who is "decoding" the text. The challenge of that task is daunting: she must sift through a wealth of material, particularly the hundreds of letters written by Cushman to the women in her life. Merrill's rigorous reading of Cushman's voluminous correspondence (as performative as her stage roles) is truly impressive. She attacks late-twentieth-century speculation about the nature of nineteenth-century lesbian desire, and has mined a plethora of provocative gems from Cushman's writing to support her position. The results of these efforts provide an interpretation of the code embedded in Cushman's words and performances and shed new light on Cushman's relationships with Edwin Forrest and Fanny Kemble.

The structure of the biography spirals in to core chapters on Cushman's portrayal of both male and female roles, then moves out to a discussion of the circle of women around her--friends, lovers, and what Merrill cites as the "virtual community" of women spectators who celebrated her. The multiple representations of Cushman are considered, from the signature roles to the public and private selves off stage, evidenced by her professional and personal relationships, particularly with the circle of "jolly female bachelors" who lived with or near her in Rome.

Cushman lived at a time where she could be perceived as being "chaste," despite being in the theatrical profession, precisely because she had no primary relationships with men. Romantic friendships between women, called "Boston marriages," were non-threatening, because women were rarely believed to possess the potential of sexual desire. Gender did provide women with a measure of cultural invisibility, which ironically worked to their advantage in being able to establish and maintain intimate and passionate relationships with other women. Cushman's letters, especially to Emma Crow, reveal an eroticism, tempered with both a fear of being discovered, and concern for propriety, as well as an ambivalent desire to be acknowledged. Cushman had significant long-term commitments, several of which were simultaneous. After the end of her somewhat volatile relationship with English writer Maltida Hays, Cushman discovered that her lover's feminism transformed into action; Hays threatened to sue Cushman for the sacrifice of her own career during the time they were together. Hays received several thousand dollars in a nineteenth-century version of a palimony settlement. Emma Stebbins, the devoted partner who survived Cushman, would later ensure...