Title: "Irreproachable Women and Patient Workers": The Memoirs of Victorian Leading Ladies
Abstract: When Victoria ascended the throne, respectable society anathematized those men, women, and children for whom the theater was both a workplace and a way of life.1 The middle classes viewed the stage, in critic Mary Jean Corbett's words, as "the last refuge of the disgraced younger son or the 'fallen woman,' a sort of domestic foreign legion" (118). Actress, manager, and memoirist Marie Bancroft (1839-1921) acknowledges that acting was a profession that respectable society preferred to keep at a distance. Describing her childhood in a roving theatrical family, she writes in 1888, "to be an actor meant exile from home, family, friends, and general respectability" (2). A woman who went on stage was still further ostracized by polite society; she was regarded as fallen or soon to be fallen. Bancroft's use of the past tense implies that she would like her readers to view themselves as having shed the anti-theatrical prejudice of the past, although her memoir, like that of other leading ladies, is an attempt to establish her claim to approbation in the mind of respectable society. In her study of Victorian and Edwardian autobiographies, Corbett argues persuasively that Bancroft, together with actresses Fanny Kemble and Madge Kendal, "do not challenge the middle-class ideal of womanhood, but seek to perform it, onstage and off" (107). I contend that Victorian actresses portray themselves as ordinary, respectable women, but at the same time they are also concerned with establishing an image of themselves as skilled professionals who by their own efforts have earned the right to public acclaim and financial success. In short, these texts aim to create an image of a new type of respectable woman, the working professional.
Publication Year: 2003
Publication Date: 2003-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 5
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