Go West, Young Women!

by Hilary Hallett

  As the nation’s capitalist expansion sent ever more people scuttling toward markets in cities and towns, leisure assumed more industrialized forms in which the star system and its celebrity culture played an increasingly central role. A theater manager in Philadelphia bemoaned how “a spirit of locomotiveness hitherto unexampled” erupted during “a commercial season of great excess,” making “the system of stars the order of 1835.”11 A set of emerging business practices tied to consumer capitalism’s growth, the star system offered the best means to fill the era’s larger and more numerous play houses. The theatrical entrepreneurs who sped the star system’s development jettisoned the elite man as the theater’s most important protagonist and patron. Instead, they publicized a more diverse set of players in different kinds of melodramatic plays that aimed to attract larger and more specific segments of the public.12 In this way, the star system encouraged the theater’s splintering along lines of class and gender.

  Inside and outside these more plentiful theaters, a commercial culture of print and performance resounding with melodramatic expression offered an aesthetic register to express the democratization of fame. Faith in the principle of poetic justice and the possibility of self-transformation for those long excluded from the heroic role distinguished melodrama’s form from the start. For this reason, some critics contend that melodrama’s roots share the same soil that produced fairy tales and ballads. Wherever its origins, the melodramatic form dominated the commercialized popular culture of the nineteenth century created by the spread of literacy, cheaper reproduction methods, and theatrical exchanges. Varying widely in setting and action, most melodramas relied on a plot structured around the protagonist’s triumph over villainy, dished out with strong emotion and leavened with comedic touches. By displacing the elite man as central patron and protagonist, according to writer Robertson Davies, melodrama appealed to the “poor working man and his female counterpart, or bourgeois citizen toiling to keep his place in a hurrying world,” encouraging their identification “with the Hero, the Heroine, or the Villain.”13 The variety of terms used to modify the melodramatic plays produced on the era’s soaring number of stages—including “apocalyptic,” “heroic,” “problem,” “nautical,” “sensational,” “immoral,” “domestic,” and “horse”—signaled not just the form’s ubiquity but the desire of producers to target and attract specific slices of an ever widening circle of fans. All variations enticed with skillful spectacles and shared an impassioned register that elevated the apparently average speaker and furthered his or her cause. Much like what the star system aimed to do with its production of intimate strangers, this heart-stopping aesthetic used strong emotions to bridge the chasm separating character from audience. Paradoxically, then, melodrama celebrated the individualism that mass society advanced and acted as an antidote to its isolating effects, making it peculiarly suited to popular culture fashioned in the American grain.14

  Stars who excelled in heroic or apocalyptic melodramas commanded the country’s expanding and increasingly democratic theatrical scene. Producers in cities like New York filled new theaters like the Bowery and the Chatham by encouraging young working-class men to shift the customary site of their all-male socializing, excluding prostitutes, from saloons. Cheaper tickets attracted these urban rowdies, but entrepreneurs discovered that magnetic actors performing in these melodramas drew them back. Privileging the roles and tastes of the city’s growing number of proletarian men, this mobile network of male stars disrupted the traditional balance of power between managers and players, and among men of different classes in the audience. Here arose the first American audience, lovingly chronicled by historian Lawrence Levine. The opinionated, passionate, and participatory style of this audience displayed how white men’s expanding political rights gave them the confidence to attempt sovereignty over performers and elites alike. Yet, rather than offering a truly democratic space, this theater presented a contained performance of the masculine conflicts and style animating the rise of the Democratic Party of Andrew Jackson.15

  The celebrity of Edwin Forrest, the first great American star, crystallized the type of man idealized by this political culture. Inside now largely class-segmented theaters, Forrest played the common man’s champion, a fearless destroyer of tyrants in plays like Metamora, or the Last of the Wampanoags (1829), the tale of a doomed “noble savage” who refuses to submit to the white man’s rule. To his legion of male fans, the public performer and the private man were indivisible. “It is no painted shadow you see in Mr. Forrest, no piece of costume,” boasted one reviewer, “but a man, there to do his four hours of work brawinly [sic], it may be, and sturdily, and with great outlay of muscular power but there’s a big heart thrown in.”16 Forrest was no effete English fop, but a vigorous American democrat and Democrat who actively supported the party of Jackson. On stage and off, he displayed what his friend and official biographer called the “one essential ideal” that distinguished him in this homosocial arena: his “fearless faithful manhood.”17 Thus Forrest’s fame grew from his performance of the qualities that his fans believed he possessed in private. However ersatz the display, Forrest inspired a devotion based on his seemingly authentic personification of the new social order’s dominant political culture in ways that drew on established modes of fame.18

  Women found little room in this theater as long as it aimed primarily to satisfy the “mechanics” whose wild and, at times, riotous behavior became part of the show. Such displays climaxed with the Astor Place Riots of 1849, a conflagration that pitted supporters of the aristocratic English star William Macready against Forrest’s “native” American fans and left twenty-two dead. By quickening the drive to segment theaters along class lines and to tame this audience’s participatory style, the event sped what cultural historians call the feminization of American culture and its resulting sacralization as Shakespeare moved out of the mechanics’ houses. The drive to clean up theaters—to make them spaces fit for the ladies of any class—dramatically diminished workingmen’s power in the pit by limiting their ability to use the theater as a space to strengthen solidarities of gender, class, and party.19

  Yet, from the perspective of the opposite sex, the move to reconfigure the gendered moral taxonomy of the theater opened up as much as it shut down. Not only did a theatrical culture aimed at men figure all women who joined its public as immoral, but its celebration of a fighting-style of masculinity also disadvantaged women performers. Shortly before she turned to film acting, Pickford recalled “the great difficulty” of performing before the remnants of this audience in the “ten-twenty-thirty” theaters, so called for their popularly priced tickets. Tellingly, Pickford played a small boy in a play in which the few parts for women continued to mirror the ideal of true womanhood that had pervaded popular conventions during the Victorian era. Originating among white middle-class urbanites, the ideal held that Woman should embody everything that Man—ever more consumed by the hurrying, competitive outside world of commerce—did not. Leading a pious, passive, and asexual existence, the true woman was a well-kept “angel in the home” who exercised spiritual power over loved ones from inside its walls. A rumor that a lady was not as pure as she appeared could foul her reputation, rendering the bawdy theater off-limits for respectable women regardless of class. Such attitudes explained why the actress’s economic independence and distance from patriarchal protection, as much her sexual conduct, made her commensurate with the prostitutes working the third tier.20

  Ironically, the popular image associated with the entrenched domesticity of the middle class—of the lady of the house with less and less to do—helped to produce its destruction by creating a lucrative target for theatrical entrepreneurs. Managers of the legitimate stage first moved to tap the rising purchasing power of middle-class women during a particularly steep financial free fall between 1837 and 1842. They brought the ladies out to the play house in droves by barring prostitutes, turning the third tier into a “family circle,” el
iminating the sale of alcohol, discouraging the frequent outbursts that led to riotous behavior, and instituting matinees. At midcentury, women’s patronage of what became known as the legitimate theater produced the sexual integration of “the first public den of male sociability,” according to historian Mary Ryan.21 In 1856, the first public space conceived especially for the ladies opened: A.T. Stewart, a marble palace department store located in New York City’s financial district. 1856 also marked the year in which the forty-year-old Cushman brought her London triumph home. Both events indicated how consumer culture could aid the ladies’ conquest of heretofore suspect territories, while creating new jobs for those who struggled to afford the fun. These developments also supported the celebrity culture that allowed Charlotte Cushman to achieve renown.

  “I was born a tomboy,” began the memoir Charlotte Cushman dictated to her longtime companion, Emma Stebbins, months before her death in 1876. “Tomboy” was “an ugly little phrase,” an “epithet in those days,” Stebbins later explained, that referred “to pioneers of women’s advancement.” “Applied to all little girls who showed the least tendency toward thinking and acting for themselves,” it kept “the dangerous feminine element within what was considered to be the due bounds of propriety and decorum.”22 The daughter of a schoolteacher, and the granddaughter of a single mother, Cushman credited her maternal line “for one element in my nature—ambition!”23 Born in 1816, Cushman was the eldest of four children and viewed the stage as a means to provide her family with the upward mobility blocked by her much older father’s business failures and desertion. After making her professional debut as a singer in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro in 1835, Cushman gradually re oriented her interest toward acting. By 1842, the young actress had made a small but considered reputation as Lady Macbeth, and she set about renovating Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theatre to attract the city’s “settled and domestic citizens.” There she acted as leading lady, publicist, and theater manager. The decision displayed her awareness that she needed a more ordered, if at times no less boisterous, space defined above all by the presence of women themselves. Moreover, the multiple roles she assumed at the Walnut, including her place at its helm, demonstrated how a theatrical work practice called “doubling in the brass” benefited actresses who sought unconventional types of public authority.24 A phrase that emerged from the contemporary all-male minstrel shows aimed at working-class men, “doubling in the brass” signaled the expectation that all members of a stock company perform roles that crossed conventional gender boundaries, including playing both sexes on-stage and performing tasks typically reserved for the opposite sex off of it. The practice helped to explain why the most successful thespians often excelled at more than just acting. But Cushman’s timing was unlucky. The Walnut Street Theatre was opened in the midst of a serious economic downturn, and financial problems forced her to resign in 1846. That same year, after performing alongside the great English tragedian William Macready, the twenty-eight-year-old Cushman set sail for London, touting the older actor’s advice (probably invented) that only in England would her “talents be appreciated for their true value.”25 The decision displayed Cushman’s belief in the still broadly shared assumption that the English possessed superior aesthetic sensibilities and powers.

  Cushman triumphed in her first London season, performing opposite her great American rival, Edwin Forrest, whose fame she eclipsed after midcentury. Like Forrest, Cushman played the same kind of roles, time and again, with a physical power and expressive emotionality that British critics considered characteristically American. But unlike Forrest, her theatrical type celebrated her ability to act like figures she was not and never could be: a powerful queen, whether Scottish, English, or gypsy, and Shakespeare’s most romantic male lead, Romeo, in the “breeches roles” that helped so much to earn her fame. The parts Cushman played to audiences’ greatest delight reveled in her manifestation of public virtues that confounded traditional femininity. “Her true forte is the character of a woman whose softer traits of womanhood are wanting . . . roused by passion or incited by some earnest and long cherished determination the woman, for the time being, assumes all the power and energy of manhood,” declared a review of Sir Walter Scott’s Guy Mannering.26 Guy Mannering featured her most famous role, next to her power-drunk Lady Macbeth: Meg Merriles, a gypsy queen who saves the hero and whom Cushman played as frightful-looking old crone, to Queen Victoria’s dismay. Credited with bringing breeches parts into vogue in America, her success as Romeo emphasized the role that acting a “manly” man played in her success.27 The tall, powerfully built, husky-voiced actress accentuated Romeo’s aggressive charms, depicting him as “a militant gallant, a pugnacious lover, who might resort to force should Juliet refuse to marry him.”28

  FIGURE 2. Charlotte and Susan Cushman in Romeo and Juliet, mid–nineteenth century. Courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library.

  Cushman’s roles also demonstrated how melodrama’s splintering licensed women’s access, as both performers and fans, to its democratizing, individualistic excesses. “Her style was strong, definite bold and free: for that reason observers described it as ‘melodramatic,’ ” recalled a theater historian in the Saturday Evening Post decades after her death. “She neither employed nor made pretense of employing, the soft allurements of her sex. She was incarnate power: she dominated by intrinsic authority.”29 Contemporaries marveled at the passion with which she fought duels and made love to other women on stage, notably with her sister Susan, who often starred opposite her as Juliet.30 In the end, theatrical lore stressed that her renown emerged from her exhibition of manly heroism. “When a fellow in the audience interrupted the performance” of Romeo and Juliet one night, “Miss Cushman in hose and doublet strode to the footlights and declared: ‘Someone must put this person out or I shall be obliged to do it myself’ ”; thereafter “all honors that a player might win were hers.”31

  Still, Cushman’s publicity also ensured that audiences understood how her private virtues justified her breaching feminine decorum. As with most early attempts to justify women’s display of privileges and opportunities reserved for men, the protection of loved ones initially posed the best defense. Much as with Pickford a half-century later, stories about Cushman’s personal life emphasized her role as family provider, explaining her Puritan pedigree, the collapse of her father’s business, her turn to the stage to support her family. Ever her own best publicist, Cushman initiated this presentation in a lightly fictionalized story she sent to Godey’s Lady’s Book in 1836, just weeks after landing her first real job on stage. Entitled “Excerpts from My Journal: The Actress,” the story prodded readers to recognize that acting offered many worthy women their best financial alternative when forced to fend for themselves. Cushman also publicized her tender feminine side by making much ado of a decision to forgo marriage after the end of a “tragic love-affair” with a never identified “young gentleman of a Presbyterian family.” Warned by his family of the “looseness of the lives of actresses,” the gentleman reportedly broke their engagement after finding her “being entertained by some of her theatrical friends and mates at a rather lively supper party.”32 Thereafter she reportedly devoted herself to “work, work, work! study, study, study!” her family, and philanthropy.33

  In this way, Cushman prefigured the path later taken by the first generation of highly educated, middle-class New Women. After 1900, such women’s success in the public sphere challenged assumptions about the female sex’s intellectual and physical incapacities while accepting that such pursuits often required forgoing marriage and traditional domesticity.34 Like many of the New Women to follow her, Cushman instead cultivated a circle of women for domestic partnership and intimacy. Indeed, one biographer speculates that her preference for intimate relationships with women made it easier for her to present an image of ladylike decorum in her private life by removing the threat of sexual scandals with men.35