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

Sos Eltis’s Acts ofDesire is a timely reminder of the scarcity of full-length studies on stage representations of female sexuality, particularly when it comes to the nineteenth century. This heavily researched work covers a wide range of material from over 130 years of theater. It traces the evolution of female figures on stage from the seduced heroine and her more outspoken double through to the New Woman and beyond into Noel Coward’s autonomous, overtly sexual beings. Ambitious in scope, this interdisciplinary study aims to show how the tension between individual desires and wider concerns for social cohesion become literally embodied in these narratives of illicit female desire. The image of female sexuality grounds the book, providing a fulcrum for an exploration of the shifting modes of representation during this period. For the Victorianist critic, the most notable genre appearing throughout is that of melodrama. Although the later chapters sit more comfortably within the framework of the long nineteenth century rather than the Victorian era, here Eltis identifies melodramatic tropes that continue to proliferate into the twentieth century and beyond. In examining what has been termed early melodrama, it becomes clear that the term itself is one imposed onto plays rather than a self-referential generic device. Arguably, tropes of seduction, morality, spectacle, and political power meted out through the body find their roots long before 1800. However, one of the persuasive arguments emerging from this work is that melodrama resists any form of containment in a manner similar to its female characters.

Before outlining how evasive the dramatic material is, Eltis begins by grounding the study in familiar territory. Drawing on Martin Meisel’s Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England (1983), Acts of Desire reestablishes the cross-cultural interplay between art and theater. The visual connections between William Hogarth’s The Harlot’s Progress (1732) and J. T. Haines’s play The Life of a Woman (1840) are outlined in detail and then developed to engage with how the drama disrupts those visual connections in order to create an affective response in its audience. This shifting mode of representation reappears and transforms throughout the period, proliferating into the discourse of social commentaries and contemporary journalism. For Eltis, the interplay between cultural forms indicates that the significance of the female figure lies in the ways in which the collective moral discipline needed for a cohesive society becomes transposed onto the individual female form. The connection between character in a moral sense and that of the performative, theatrical role is one that pervades the following chapters.

The relationship between theatrical character and accepted codes of public conduct is embedded within both the iconography of the female figure and the politics of censoring that body. Censorship is a key concern throughout, with the acknowledgement that the Lord Chamberlain’s office was more flexible in terms of censure during the early Victorian period. By using the Lord Chamberlain’s daybooks and an impressive array of other archival material, Eltis then shows the direct effects of censorship upon theatrical outputs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. There is a necessarily literary focus here, since censors only viewed the manuscript text while its performance counterpart was already in the rehearsal stages. This textual approach raises other questions concerning to what extent early melodrama was self-censoring in order to anticipate and appease the official process. Was the licensed script subsequently altered for the actual performance, further undermining any claim for a reliable text? As documented elsewhere, Jim Davis’s edition of The Britannia Diaries 1863–1875 (1992) shows the correspondence between the Britannia’s manager Samuel Lane and the Lord Chamberlain’s office, suggesting a common practice of adding songs and other elements after licensing. These lewd songs offered as amendments encouraged an alternative subtextual discourse on behavior and sexuality expressed through word and gesture. These multiple readings...