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“So Unfemininely Masculine”: Discourse, True/False Womanhood, and the American Career of Fanny Kemble

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2009

Elizabeth Reitz Mullenix
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Extract

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
Articles
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , November 1999 , pp. 27 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 1999

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References

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8. Under the rubric “Female Equestrianism,” one reporter stated, “Whether riding astride is an accomplishment which becomes a lady is a question which may bear debate, but it cannot be concealed that the opinion of this country is against it.” Spirit of the Times, 3 June 1832.

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12. Dudden, 44. It is interesting to note that in A. H. Everett's review of the journal in the North American Review (see note 16) democracy is distinctly tied to “natural” gender relations. Everett comments at length on Kemble's discussion of unmarried American women whose libertine behavior before marriage lay in contrast to their submissive, retiring manner as matrons; English women's conduct was just the opposite as aristocratic privileges allowed them certain social extravagances once wed, as opposed to the English mistress who single-mindedly and reservedly sought a mate. Everett argues that “artificial institutions” such as a monarchy violate the “order of nature” because married women are socially conditioned to abandon their families. “The introduction in this, or any country, of a privileged order, monopolizing, by hereditary right, a large proportion of the wealth and power of the community, and holding all useful labor a disgrace and a derogation, would give at once to the younger married ladies of that class, not merely the ascendancy in their own social circles, but the virtual control of the whole machinery of the government.” In other words, democracy breeds right gender ideology and aristocracies/monarchies breed anarchy or “petticoat government.”

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