Actress Images, Written and Painted, Famed and Defamed, British and German

The eighteenth century’s growing bourgeois impulse to define women as best limited to the private sphere was put under stress when women actors began bidding for social acceptability. Two new monographs and an exhibition book explore these tensions and add new materials to the study of eighteenth-century actresses. The richly illustrated catalog written and edited by Perry et al. concentrates on the portraits of actresses in England and on impressive visual records of their performances. Engel analyzes the self-fashioning autobiographical writings of three British actresses with very different public and private careers, and Dupree looks more broadly at “paratheatrical” texts produced by and about four German women, three of them actresses. Each book can stand well on its own, but read together they are especially interesting.

In 1775, when the much admired actor Charlotte Ackermann died at age eighteen in Hamburg, public mourning for her temporarily halted even that commercial city’s main business activities. Dupree’s account of this event, of the actress whose death precipitated it, and of the texts that resulted provides a fascinating introduction to The Mask and the Quill. Ackermann’s gifted performances, her particular roles as tragic heroines in powerful new plays, and her mother’s reputation for enforcing virtuous behavior in her troupe all contributed to admiration for the young woman and help explain the public sorrow when she suddenly died. Just as important, according to Dupree’s innovative analysis, Ackermann posthumously anchored the image of a new kind of actress, one whose performances were “natural” and (paradoxically) “authentic” because her feelings and standards of morality coincided with those of the virtuous heroines she performed. Such an actress Dupree calls a Gefühlsschauspielerin, which she translates as an “actress of emotion” (17). Her argument is that when a woman actor of the period succeeded in corresponding to the image of a Gefühlsschauspielerin, she could achieve respectability, ostensibly reconciling her public and private lives with society’s dominant expectations of femininity.

Dupree explores this thesis by looking at “paratheatrical” texts, those about the theater and about or addressed to actors. After examining Ackermann and the popular pseudomemoir about her, Dupree uses Freudian and Butlerian commentary on melancholy to address the distinctively emotional and gloomy lyric poetry of Sophie Albrecht. She follows with an analysis of Marianne Ehrmann’s partially autobiographical novel of a young woman who attempts to add reason to the emotions of the Gefühlsschauspielerin and who argues that performing passion on stage is a useful way of reducing the power of strong feelings off stage. Examining her fourth case, that of Elise Bürger, Dupree focuses on a work that is both theatrical and paratheatrical, a play Bürger published in 1814 addressing the tableau vivante performances popular at the time. With attention to texts by—or, in Ackermann’s case, purportedly by—these four women, Dupree argues that the image of the Gefühlsschauspielerin for a time enabled women to defend the respectability of their careers as actresses and opened new material to them as writers, though it lost effectiveness with changing social expectations. The Mask and the Quill is accessible to a range of scholars and students, with all quotations and titles both in German and (with one or two lapses) English, and with the literary context—Goethe, Schiller, and others—nicely included. Altogether, it is excellent to see literary-critical responses to the work of late eighteenth-century German women growing substantially with studies such as Dupree’s.

Laura Engel, looking at the same time period, examines the self-representations that three women actors in England managed through their theatrical careers...