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Staging the Actress: Dramatic Character and the Performance of Female Identity

Lee, Melissa
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1397823196

Abstract Details

2014, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Theatre.
Since women first took to the professional stage, actresses have been objects of admiration and condemnation as well as desire and suspicion. Historically marginalized figures, actresses challenged notions of acceptable female behavior by, among other (more scandalous) things, earning their own income, cultivating celebrity, and being sexually autonomous. Performance entailed an economic transaction of money for services provided, inviting the double meanings of "entertainer" and "working" woman. Branding the actress a whore not only signaled her (perceived) sexual availability, but also that she was an unruly woman who lived beyond the pale. The history of the actress in the West is also complicated by the tradition of the all-male stage, which long prevented women from participating in their own dramatic representations and devalued their claim to artistry once they did. Theatrical representations of actresses necessarily engage with cultural perceptions of actresses, which, historically, have been paradoxical at best. In this dissertation I identify a sub-genre of drama that I call actress-plays, and using this bibliography of over 100 titles I chronicle and analyze the actress as a character type in the English-speaking theatre, arguing that dramatizations of the professional actress not only reflect (and fuel) a cultural fascination with actresses but also enact a counter-narrative to conventional constructions of femininity. Using the advent of the actress in the Restoration as a historical touchstone, this study weaves together theatre and women's history, literary criticism, and cultural studies to analyze the ways in which staging the actress highlights and interrogates the complex and layered nature of gendered prejudice that has historically marginalized actresses and thwarted female progress. This dissertation features detailed examinations of key actress-plays from different eras, including but not limited to J. Palgrave Simpson's World and Stage (1859), Christopher St. John's The First Actress (1911), Sophie Treadwell's O Nightingale (1925), and April De Angelis's Playhouse Creatures (1993). In this study I demonstrate how the actress character functions as a critical intervention, one that speaks from a necessarily marginalized position, performing and making visible female experience, while charting and questioning its own history or representation. The actress character represents a new and rich approach to history, women, and performance that underscores as well as enacts the importance of female self-expression and self-determination amid constantly evolving public images of women.
Lesley Ferris (Advisor)
276 p.
Gender Studies; Literature; Theater; Theater History; Womens Studies
Restoration; first English actresses; women in theatre; angel-whore trope; American stage; feminism; female performance; theatre history;

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Lee, M. (2014). Staging the Actress: Dramatic Character and the Performance of Female Identity [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1397823196

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Lee, Melissa. Staging the Actress: Dramatic Character and the Performance of Female Identity. 2014. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1397823196.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Lee, Melissa. "Staging the Actress: Dramatic Character and the Performance of Female Identity." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2014. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1397823196

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1397823196
11,186
© 2014, all rights reserved.
This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.