“Self-Appointed Executioner”: The Late Nineteenth-Century Actress and George Paston’s A Writer of Books

As Claire Hirschfield notes, “The politically active or socially committed actress has become in recent years a familiar icon: today’s actresses routinely lend support to candidates for political office, participate in anti-nuclear marches, and travel to third world capitals to promote a political agenda” (72). This situation was very different for much of the nineteenth century. Victorian actresses were struggling even to attain respectability and could hardly be considered influential leaders or models of what Hirschfield refers to as the “actress-as-activist” (73). In fact, historically, the actress was a symbol of what not to be.

Since 1660, the year that women were permitted onstage in Britain, the occupation of the actress functioned within a public rhetoric that was degrading and dehumanizing for the women of the theater. Debates during the early seventeenth century, for example, claimed that women were “responsible for the theater’s corrupting influence and more susceptible to it” (Nussbaum 149). In this vein, Jeremy Collier’s famous attack on theatricality, A Short View of the Immorality, and Profaneness of the English Stage (1698), indicates that to allow women on the stage was “to make monsters of them, and throw them out of their kind” (Collier 185). In the eighteenth century, actress Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) challenged the negative stereotypes about the actress as a woman who expertly balanced her life off-stage as a wife and mother while also becoming the “beau idéal of acting,” as she was called by Lord Byron (qtd. in Manvell 299); however, she was the exception to the rule among her contemporaries, who included women such as Mary Robinson (1758–1800), who was known for her affair with the Prince of Wales, and Mary Wells (1781–1812), who was notorious for her transgressive performances and her alleged insanity.

By the nineteenth century, as Kerry Powell notes, the actress was still conceived of as a product and a symptom of a male-dominated discourse, which “reconstructed the performing woman as more than an actress— as a renegade female, one fundamentally different from normative wives and mothers marginally ‘feminine’ if feminine at all, quite possibly inhuman” (3–4). Although the stage and the audience became increasingly populated by women, “for a large section of society, the similarities between the actress’s life and a prostitute’s life . . . were unforgettable” (Davis 70): “as long as the drama was devoid of literary merit or social relevance, and as long as performers were of lower class of itinerant theatrical backgrounds, the public readily believed in actresses’ immorality and worthlessness” (73). Despite the longstanding negative associations with the theater and its performers, the quality of the plays and of theatrical locations gradually improved, thereby contributing to the improved reputation of the actress.

The Theatres Licensing Act of 1843 forbade the sale of alcohol, and managers worked to police the atmosphere so that theaters “became more like homes and less like houses of prostitution, the carriages of respectable families could once again be seen stopping outside” (Powell 48). London venues such as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Opera House (built in 1881), which was complete with private roads, electricity, and even smoking rooms, contributed to the respectability of theatrical entertainment for middle-class men and women alike. In addition, many of the actresses were no longer merely women on the stage, but paradigms of femininity. As Lindal Buchanan explains, “[Nineteenth-century] women were strongly associated with procreation, domesticity, virtue, sexual disinterest, and social retirement. These qualities—which were diametrically opposed to the actress’s presumed sexuality, amorality, and desire for public display—were appropriated by female performers in order to construct ethos and refute misconceptions of the theater and its women” (Buchanan 2).

In order to encourage the conflation of actress and domesticity, a female performer could find a respectable role as a middle-class woman in the increasingly popular “cup-and- saucer” dramas (plays such as Society [1865] or The Vicarage [1877]), which aimed for realism in the use of costumes, dialogue, and sets. Actresses not only constructed an ethos of...