Stage Mothers: Women, Work, and the Theater, 1660–1830 ed. by Laura Engel and Elaine McGirr (review)

This collection offers readers a fascinating study of English actresses during the long eighteenth century and the motherly roles they played on and off stage. The critical introduction and twelve chapters parse out a complex history concerning the symbiotic nature of actresses' personal and performed "maternal narratives" (1), thus showing how actresses' private relationships became fodder for their public personas, and how they used dramatic parts—especially those portraying mothers or motherly characters—to craft and re-craft their evolving celebrity images across their careers. The tension between celebrity actresses', such as Sarah Siddons's, roles as onstage and offstage mothers is at the forefront of this collection. As the volume's title presages, the women examined in the essays are for the most part actual mothers, and the stories of their real-life motherhood is as spectacular as—if not more than—those acted in the theater. A part of this "drama" comes from the premise that famous actresses seemed to favor their stage lives over their maternal duties. To be a stage mother in the eighteenth-century English theater, one could deduce, meant a woman privileging work over family and putting her career before the needs of her children. Of course, as the collection reveals, such a claim is too simplistic, for none of the essays in Stage Mothers situate celebrity actresses as "bad" or absentee mothers who cared little for the well-being of their children. On the contrary, the essays show that actresses had strong bonds with their daughters and sons and that the relationships between actress-mothers and their children must be viewed through a theatrical lens. In doing so, the essays trace the performative nature of women's lives, particularly actresses' strategic manipulations of their roles (on and off stage) as resourceful and ambitious mothers.

The collection begins with the editors' introduction, which recognizes both existing scholarship on motherhood and on actresses in the period, and as well as the dearth of in-depth examinations of working women in the theater who are also mothers. As Engel and McGirr explain, studies of motherhood have overlooked actresses' lives, and studies of actresses have not explored fully their offstage roles as mothers. The introduction does an excellent job of indicating the need for a volume that takes both into account. It also sets the stage, so to speak, for the ways the essays analyze "the reality and representations," as well as the "slippages and contradictions," inherent in actresses performing motherhood during a time period especially preoccupied with the concept of childbearing and maternal women's bodies (2, 5). As such, the editors argue that the idea of an actress-mother's body must be put into conversation with the fact that actresses are already overtly sexualized celebrity figures that now also embody the spectacle of motherhood.

The collection is divided into three parts: "actresses, motherhood, and the profession of the stage," "representations of mothers on the stage and on the page," and "actresses and their children." Part one begins with Helen E. M. Brook's excellent essay, which foregrounds a long eighteenth-century "cult of motherhood" in conduct literature and actresses' balancing of the demands of theater schedules alongside pregnancy and maternity. J. D. Phillipson's essay on one actress—Anne Oldfield—begins the collection's trend of actress-mother case studies. This essay, like most to follow, provides a history of the actress's pregnancies and her use of motherhood as a tool to "redeem her reputation" (56). Following suit, McGirr's essay on Susannah Cibber emphasizes the actress's use of a motherly role in the "rehabilitation" of her persona; as McGirr notes, Cibber "recast herself" in a role of "tragic maternity" (64). To finish the first part of the collection, Ellen Malenas Ledoux focuses on two of the later period's most famous actresses, Mary Robinson and Sarah Siddons...