Acts of Desire: Women and Sex on Stage, 1800–1930 by Sos Eltis (review)

This is a sparkling study of territory which we might think is familiar – the fallen woman, the courtesan, the woman with a past – but which Sos Eltis shows us is far more interesting than the clichés of seduction we take for granted in the theatre. Eltis sets out to trace the networks of “illicit female sexuality” (1) as they are represented on the stage across a very long nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. She does a stellar job in surveying and compressing an impressive range of material. As Eltis argues, the “sex-problem” play, and the fallen woman play have been amongst the most chewed-over plots and tropes for representing women on the English stage. In a dazzling display of historical research the author offers both familiar and new material in a fresh and nuanced general history of the Victorian stage, framed by feminist theory, and with a panoramic vision of the theatre as a whole.

In covering two centuries of plays and critical thinking about female desire and strategies of control over it, Acts of Desire works to match the theatrical with the social in each chapter, so this book is also a history of Victorian and Edwardian theories of femininity (and feminism) from the vantage point of stage representation. The analysis moves easily across a wide variety of types of evidence, from the play texts and reviews of performances, to the Lord Chamberlain’s office correspondence and reports, to memoirs, biographies, and (with extensive reference) to contemporary magazines and newspapers. Eltis cheerfully ignores debates – then and now – about the popular and the aesthetic, or ‘good’ and ‘bad’ drama, and makes no distinctions between them.

The book opens with a timely revision of standard critical views of melodrama. Although her chapter titles suggest a variation on the A. E. Wilson or W. J. McQueen Pope approach, being called “Seduced Maidens and Resourceful Maids” and “Bigamy and Sensation”, Eltis challenges more recent theorists (rather than chroniclers) of the nineteenth-century stage, and principally Peter Brooks (The Melodramatic Imagination, 1976). Unlike Brooks, Eltis stays with the stage, to show that the vogue for melodramas in the 1820s and ’30s focusing on imperilled heroines was not so much a shattering of the Sacred, as Brooks argues, as a sub-genre of much more familiar seduction plays which sought to “enact a transition and reconciliation between the traditional sacred institutions . . . and a rapidly emerging capitalist society” (15). This approach to recent theoretical understandings of melodrama typifies the way Eltis grounds her analyses in the material practices of the theatre, something more general theorists of melodrama tend to forget.

Eltis’ initial focus on melodrama is threaded throughout the book as a whole, as she discusses the obsessive repetitions of tropes of seduced heroines, bigamous wives, and criminal mothers, in a powerful account of the troubled side of nineteenth-century ideologies of gender. Even in the more temperate territory of the “well-made play” and in the respectable company of Henry Arthur Jones or Arthur Wing Pinero, Eltis shows how plays repeatedly return to the figure of the deviant woman. Although the book is sub-titled “Women and Sex on Stage”, much of its contents consider how men and masculinist ideologies represented women on stage. The evidence is sometimes not very pretty, and if I wanted to quibble about anything I might suggest that the argument could be rather tougher on the double standards of nineteenth-century morality. But the joy of this book is that its social critique is made lightly – perhaps seductively – while its achievement is that this lightness of touch invites us to reconsider our own “advanced” or liberal views of femininity and sexuality.