In:
Theatre Survey, Cambridge University Press (CUP), Vol. 40, No. 2 ( 1999-11), p. 27-42
Abstract:
The English actress Fanny Kemble, whose 1832–1834 tour left her unrivaled among female performers in this country and who has been touted by historians as a sterling example of antebellum womanhood, emerges as a far more equivocal figure than previous histories suggest. Indeed, for someone who disdained the spurious histrionics of public life, she routinely exposed her own paradoxical nature: she hated the stage, yet recovered her family's fortunes through a luminous albeit brief acting career; she yearned for the simple pleasures of domesticity, yet castigated American women as “drudges” in her published controversial journal of 1835; she made a fortune performing Juliet and yet was described as “unfemininely masculine” by Herman Melville who, in a letter to a friend in 1849, went on to exclaim, “had she not, on impeccable authority, borne children, I should be curious to learn the result of a surgical examination of her person in private.” Kemble was a woman whose identity was in constant flux throughout the 1830s and 40s, which makes her American career an excellent site for materialist investigations of gender.
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
0040-5574
,
1475-4533
DOI:
10.1017/S0040557400003549
Language:
English
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Publication Date:
1999
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2057848-9
SSG:
9,3
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