Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (review)

Drawing upon larger-than-life figures such as Sarah Bernhardt, Eva Tanguay, and Sophie Tucker, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism explores powerful women in popular theatre whose performances, both on stage and off, communicated the upheaval of women's social roles during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Susan A. Glenn recognizes mainstream theatre as "a venue for acting out and staging cultural, social, and political assertions as well as the anxieties associated with the era of the New Woman," and examines serious actresses, vaudeville performers, and chorus girls as "agents and metaphors of changing gender relations" (3). Glenn's study reveals the numerous and interweaving means by which theatrical New Women performed the themes of early feminism in the years 1880 through 1918, a period nicely bracketed by Sarah Bernhardt's first and last U.S. tours. "Theatre licensed women to say not only 'look at me' because I am bizarre, funny, critical, graceful, melodic, or beautiful, but 'listen to me' because I have something to say about what it means to be a woman" (217).

While the book's title does not hint at it, Female Spectacle is quite specifically about American culture. Glenn's interest is the American New Woman, American theatregoing behavior, American politics, and American sociology. As is typical with historical studies of theatre in this period, Female Spectacle does not often stray from New York City. While such a New York-centric tone is understandable owing to the city's status by the turn of the century as a distribution center for American theatre, the reader is nonetheless aware of generalities about American society being derived from a New York sense of the fashionable. Given this geography, however, Glenn digs deeply into the story of entertainment culture, including the experiences of Jewish and African American women as both performers and performance. Glenn elegantly interweaves histories of the hidden and revealed Jewish identity of some female performers, an identity that stigmatized a group already marginalized as "other" by their profession.

Arguably, the most engrossing work in Female Spectacle is the analysis of mimicry by female vaudeville comics, a discussion which underlines the relationship of popular theatre to modernism's key issues of authenticity and subjectivity as well as to feminism's interest in the creation of personality. Comic mimicry "engaged both its practitioners and its audiences in a wider conversation about questions of selfhood, individuality, and creativity in the urban industrial age" (80). While presenting a comic imitation of another performer, comediennes were careful to establish and maintain their own identity. This required a concentrated act of self-definition—an act in harmony with feminism's goal for women's development of selfhood. Glenn brings the issue of self-creation back to Sarah Bernhardt, who seemed to never lose her "real" self in a role despite the emotional, psychological, and physical abandon with which she performed.

These complex issues of imitation also play out in Glenn's chapter on the early twentieth-century vogue for Salome dancers. For example, vaudevillian Gertrude Hoffmann made a big splash in New York with her mimicry of Maud Allan's sensational London performance of Salome. This capitalization on "Salomania" was, "like all of [Hoffman's] imitations, a way of placing her own vision and her own crucial perspective before the public" (103). The exotic and sexually-charged character of Salome was a symbol of female excess in many genres of American performance. Salome performances were common targets for parody by a variety of comedians, including white male comics in blackface and drag who frequently appeared on the same vaudeville bill as "straight" Salomes. Female impersonator Julian Eltinge also staged a transvestite Salome without the blackface and its accompanying grotesqueness. Eltinge's performance of Salome aimed at perfect imitation of idealized white womanhood, and the portrayal established him as a sexual object...