No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
Mrs. Pat's Two Bodies: Ghosting and the Landmark Performance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2016
Extract
In 1893, Mrs. Patrick (Stella) Campbell appeared as the title character in Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray at the St James's Theatre in London. The play told of a respectable widower, Aubrey Tanqueray, and his doomed second marriage to Paula, a younger woman with a past. Good wives did not have “pasts,” and Paula's is particularly scandalous for she has, since adolescence, “kept house” with a series of men. Aware that their marriage is unlikely to be accepted by their peers, Paula and Aubrey retreat to the country, where they are joined by Aubrey's adult daughter, Ellean. Ellean subsequently becomes engaged to a young soldier, Hugh Ardale. The crisis of the play occurs when Paula and Ardale come face to face and the audience learns that the pair had once lived together in London. With this revelation, Paula becomes convinced that she cannot outrun her past, and the play closes with her suicide. Despite the conventionality of its ending, the play was considered modern and daring and is remembered as one of the first attempts to represent the “fallen woman” sympathetically and to question the sexual double standard that operated in Victorian society. Campbell's clarity of expression and relatively unmannered delivery enhanced Pinero's uncommonly sympathetic portrait of a former courtesan. However, it was the actress's physical presence that particularly captured the audience's imagination. Campbell was tall, pale, and thin to the point of angularity—a representative example of the fashionable “neurasthenic” woman of the 1890s. Pinero's characterization joined with Campbell's playing style and (most important) her physicality to create the entity I dub “Paula Tanqueray circa 1893.” This entity haunted Campbell's entire career, acting as a ghostly double to her living body both onstage and off. Campbell continued to play the role of Paula Tanqueray into the 1920s, yet as the actress's body matured and changed, that of the ghost retained its svelte 1893 proportions and youthful charm, creating a corporeal dissonance that disrupted audience reception.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2016
References
Endnotes
1. Heather Anne Wozniak suggests that the play asks “what it means to be ‘modern’” by examining “how the individual attempts to assert autonomy and self-definition in the face of historicizing discourses, the rigidity of moral and social convention, and the devaluation of the feminine”; “The Play with a Past: Arthur Wing Pinero's New Drama,” Victorian Literature and Culture 37.2 (2009): 391–409, at 397Google Scholar. On the difference of this play's attitude toward its fallen woman, see also Sos Eltis, “The Fallen Woman on Stage: Maidens, Magdalens, and the Emancipated Female,” in The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, ed. Kerry Powell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 222–36.
2. Marvin Carlson, The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 7–9.
3. Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 188.
4. Arthur Wing Pinero, The Second Mrs Tanqueray, in “Trelawney of the ‘Wells’” and Other Plays, ed. J. S. Bratton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 187.
5. Mrs Patrick (Stella) Campbell, My Life and Some Letters (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1922), 71.
6. Kate Terry Gielgud, “The Second Mrs Tanqueray,” 29 May 1893, reprinted in Gielgud, A Victorian Playgoer: Kate Terry Gielgud, ed. Muriel St Clair Byrne (London: Heinemann, 1980), 11.
7. The Times (London), 29 May 1893, 9.
8. The Stage, 1 June 1893, 13.
9. William Archer, The Theatrical “World” for 1893 (1894; repr., New York: Benjamin Blom, 1969), 129.
10. On the history of the fallen woman on the London stage, see Eltis.
11. Margot Peters, Mrs Pat: The Life of Mrs Patrick Campbell (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1985), 66–8.
12. On this point, see Sally Ledger, “The New Woman and The Crisis of Victorianism,” in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 22–44, at 23–4; and Talia Schaffer, “‘Nothing But Foolscap and Ink’: Inventing the New Woman,” in The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms, ed. Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2001), 39–52.
13. Teresa Mangum, “Style Wars of the 1890s: The New Woman and the Decadent,” in Transforming Genres: New Approaches to British Fiction of the 1890s, ed. Nikki Lee Manos and Meri-Jane Rochelson (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994), 47–66, at 49.
14. Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco, “Introduction: Imagining and Embodying New Womanhood,” in The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s, ed. Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 1–18, at 1. Emphasis added.
15. Heather Anne Wozniak usefully describes Paula as a “proto–New Woman”; 393.
16. Elliott, Bridget, “New and Not So ‘New Women’ on the London Stage: Aubrey Beardsley's Yellow Book Images of Mrs Patrick Campbell and Réjane,” Victorian Studies 31.1 (1987): 33–57, at 50Google Scholar.
17. Joel H. Kaplan and Sheila Stowell, Theatre and Fashion: Oscar Wilde to the Suffragettes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 58. Also see Elliott for further commentary on Beardsley's portrait of Campbell.
18. Campbell, 121.
19. Winifred Black, “English Actress Gives Her Conception of Paula Tanqueray,” Chicago North-American, 3 January 1902, Robinson Locke Collection, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (hereafter Robinson Locke Collection).
20. In both instances it is pejorative: Campbell is “not even a good plain actress”; she is a “second rate actress.” Winifred Black, “In Magda She Does Not Act, but Wears Clothes with Much Grace,” Chicago North-American, 31 December 1901, Robinson Locke Collection.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid., and Black, “English Actress.”
23. Black, “In Magda She Does Not Act.”
24. Ibid. Decadence had been a subject of interest in the American media since the early 1890s; see R. K. R. Thornton, The Decadent Dilemma (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 62. It held increasingly negative connotations on both sides of the Atlantic following the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and was a distinctly pejorative term in writing about Campbell's American tour, especially among the more sensationalist writers.
25. Black, “In Magda She Does Not Act.”
26. “Mrs Campbell the Model: Said to Be the Original of a Burne-Jones Woman: Helped Set the Present Style: Fat Is Considered Fatal,” unidentified fragment, Mrs Patrick Campbell Letters to Bertha von Zastrow and Other Papers (MS Thr 662), Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library, Harvard University (hereafter Harvard Theatre Collection).
27. “On the London Stages: Mrs. Campbell at the Height of Her Popularity,” special correspondence dated 8 November 1901 to the New York Times, 17 November 1901, 15, Robinson Locke Collection.
28. The Times (London), 27 May 1895, 10; Arthur Warren, “Romeo and Juliet,” fragment dated 7 October 1895, Harvard Theatre Collection.
29. The Sketch, 25 September 1895, 464.
30. Janet Achurch to Robins, 10 December 1896, Elizabeth Robins Papers, The Fales Library & Special Collections, New York University.
31. Vanity Fair, 30 April 1914, 26.
32. The Stage, 17 May 1900, 15.
33. Ibid.; The Times (London), 14 May 1900, 13; The Era, 19 May 1900, 11.
34. Illustrated London News, 19 May 1900, 11.
35. The Era, 14 September 1901, 11; Illustrated London News, 14 September 1901, 368.
36. The Era, 18 July 1903, 10; The Stage, 16 July 1903, 12.
37. The Era, 18 July 1903, 10.
38. The Times (London), 9 September 1901, 11; The World, 11 September 1901, 29; Illustrated London News, 18 July 1903, 80.
39. The Stage, 16 July 1903, 12.
40. Pinero, 162.
41. Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 222.
42. Lois Banner, In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power and Sexuality (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 281.
43. Steele, 227.
44. The Stage, 5 June 1913, 29; The Sketch, 11 June 1913, N; The Sketch, 18 June 1913, 330.
45. The Sketch, 18 June 1913, 330.
46. The Stage, 5 June 1913, 29.
47. The Times, 5 June 1913, 10.
48. On the decline of the actor-management system, see Michael Woolf, “Theatre: Roots of the New,” in Literature and Culture in Modern Britain, vol. 1, 1900–1929, ed. Clive Bloom (1993; repr., New York: Routledge, 2014), 100–19, at 103–4.
49. Campbell to Harriet Carolan, postmarked 28 January 1905, Mrs. Patrick Campbell Letters, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library (hereafter Mrs. Patrick Campbell Letters).
50. Campbell to Harriet Carolan, January 1915, Mrs. Patrick Campbell Letters, emphasis in original.
51. Gerald Weales offers a vivid example of how the relationship between a performer and her past roles can foster nostalgia as celebration in his review of sixty-one-year-old Ruby Keeler's performance in a revival of No, No, Nanette on Broadway in 1971. Keeler, cast in a so-called age-appropriate role, “is the well-kept matron, now out of retirement, accepting what time does to all of us and tapping up a storm all the same. What we celebrate, then, is continuation, survival, and not survival in the barely breathing sense but in the way that allows us to glimpse the young woman in the older one and know, happily, that it is the latter who is alive, energetic, vital.” See “Nostalgia and Beyond,” North American Review 256.4 (1971): 78–80, at 79Google Scholar. On the aging actress onstage, see also Anne Davis Basting, “Dolly Descending a Staircase: Stardom, Age, and Gender in Times Square,” in Figuring Age: Women, Bodies, Generations, ed. Kathleen Woodward (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999): 248–63.
52. Cecil Beaton, The Wandering Years, Diaries: 1922–1939 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961), 45.
53. Ibid.
54. On the particular value of youth in this decade, see Hirshbein, Laura Davidow, “The Flapper and the Fogy: Representations of Gender and Age in the 1920s,” Journal of Family History 26.1 (2001): 112–37Google Scholar. On the increasing pathologization of the aging body in the early twentieth century and the attendant rise of the discourse of self-improvement, see Addison, Heather, “‘Must the Players Keep Young?’: Early Hollywood's Cult of Youth,” Cinema Journal 45.4 (2006): 3–25Google Scholar.
55. For more recent examples of older women and resistant performance, see Mock, Roberta, “Stand-Up Comedy and the Legacy of the Mature Vagina,” Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 22.1 (2012): 9–28Google Scholar.
56. Joseph Roach, It (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), 36.
57. John Gielgud, Distinguished Company (London: Heinemann, 1972), 31–2.
58. Roach, 39.
59. Beaton, 46.
60. Peters, 385.
61. An anecdote by Alan Brock offers a fascinating glimpse of Campbell's own confrontation with “wholeness” through the mirror. When he visited Campbell in her New York apartment in 1938, the actress showed Brock a portrait taken of her by the American photographer Napoleon Sarony in the 1890s. Brock writes: “she painfully whispered, ‘And to think that this beautiful creature was once me.’ I thought she would give way to tears. Rising, she stepped closer to a full-length mirror and placed the Sarony likeness alongside her own mature face, gazing wistfully at the reflection: ‘and look what has happened to her now.’” See Brock, , “This Very Old Fair Lady: The Last Years of Mrs Patrick Campbell,” New Theatre Quarterly 6.21 (1990): 57–63, at 58Google Scholar.
62. Illustrated London News, 17 June 1922, 1; The Observer, 4 June 1922, 12; The Era, 7 June 1922.
63. Illustrated London News, 17 June 1922, 1.
64. Cecil Beaton quoted in Sheridan Morley, Gladys Cooper: A Biography (New York: McGraw–Hill, 1979), 92.
65. Beaton, 45.
66. Ibid.
67. Ibid, 45–6.
68. For a detailed consideration of older women's bodies and issues of fashionability, see E. Ann Kaplan, “Un-Fashionable Age: Clothing and Unclothing the Older Woman's Body on Screen,” in Fashion in Film, ed. Adrienne Munich (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 322–44.
69. Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess and Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1994), 62–3.
70. Beaton, 46.
71. Nita Mary McKinley, “Ideal Weight/Ideal Women: Society Constructs the Female,” in Weighty Issues: Fatness and Thinness as Social Problems, ed. Jeffery Sobal and Donna Maurer (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1999), 97–115, at 107.
72. Ibid, 110.
73. Beaton, 46.
74. Russo, 62.
75. In addition to the obvious difference in status between Cooper's West End production and Campbell's Bournemouth production, the latter brings added suggestions of aging, nostalgia, and “pastness” because of its seaside resort locale, a site that was increasingly identified in the twentieth century with older bodies. Andrew Blaikie, for example, notes the “persistent emphasis on images associating age with pastness and community through the use of coastal milieux”; Ageing and Popular Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 150.
76. Pinero, 209.
77. Wozniak, 399.
78. Pinero, 209–10.
79. Roach, 91.