Abstract
The binary opposition between money and art in the Victorian theatre is a troubling one, and in using it I am conscious of the danger of simply perpetuating the Victorian valorization of writing for art over writing for money. However, it was an aesthetic and discursive opposition which, although mutating over the century, remained fundamental to the structuring of the London theatre industry, and one which women had to negotiate. To see the ways in which women writers did this is to acknowledge — again — the work of class and gender in the Victorian theatre, and also to observe the ways that discursive constructions could have material effects. Furthermore, understanding these divisions in the nineteenth century are important as they form the foundation of a set of concepts which still dominate British thinking about theatre, art, and, money — concepts which do not match the basic facts of the theatre industry — but indicate much more interestingly the ‘cultural capital’ attached to specific playwriting and production practices. In this chapter, I will look in detail at two areas of women’s playwriting where money — success in the commercial or mainstream theatre — was not the principal motivation for embarking on dramatic writing. In the examples of the dramatic writing of George Eliot and Augusta Webster, we can see the enduring power of poetic drama, its lure for serious and ambitious women writers, and a tradition of women’s performance writing which, like the work of Hemans and Mitford, was grounded in sympathetic presentation of rebellion.
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Notes
Susan Brown, ‘Determined Heroes: George Eliot, Augusta Webster and Closet Drama,’ Victorian Poetry, 33: 1 (Spring 1995), 104.
Marjean Purinton, Romantic Ideology Unmasked: The Mentally Constructed Tyrannies in Dramas of William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and Joanna Baillie (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994), 21.
Christine Sutphin notes that Webster persuaded her husband to move to London so that she could mix in literary circles, ‘Introduction,’ Augusta Webster, Portraits and Other Poems, ed. Christine Sutphin (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2000), 11. Webster was also able to limit her family to one child, see Leighton, Victorian Women Poets, 165.
There is an extensive critical literature on Eliot’s use of artist and performer figures, most prominently in Daniel Deronda. For some starting points into this, see Gillian Beer, ‘“Coming Wonders”: Uses of Theatre in the Victorian Novel,’ Marie Axton and Raymond Williams (eds), English Drama: Forms and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977),
Alison Byerley, Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 126–33, and Marshall, Actresses on the Victorian Stage, Chapter 3, ‘George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, and the Sculptural Aesthetic.’
Rosemarie Bodenheimer, The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Her Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 174.
Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 370; Kathryn Hughes, George Eliot: The Last Victorian (London: Fourth Estate, 1999), writes of its ‘laborious gestation,’ 381.
Brown, ‘Determined Heroines,’ 91. Eliot records in her journal on 21 February 1865 ‘George has taken my drama away from me.’ Margaret Harris and Judith Johnston (eds), The Journals of George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 123,
and Rosemary Ashton, George Eliot: A Life (London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1996), 278, and Haight, George Eliot, 379.
Rebecca A. Pope, ‘The Diva Doesn’t Die: George Eliot’s Armgart,’ in Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (eds), Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 139–51, and Susan Brown, ‘Determined Heroines,’ 92.
Kathleen Blake, ‘Armgart — George Eliot on the Woman Artist,’ Victorian Poetry, 18: 3 (Autumn 1980), 80,
and Kathleen Hickok, Representations of Women: Nineteenth-Century British Women’s Poetry (Westport, Ct. and London: Greenwood Press, 1984), 140.
George Eliot, Armgart, in The Legend of Jubal and Other Poems (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1874; 2nd edition).
All further references are to this edition and will be given in the text. There is a modern edition of Eliot’s poems, L. Jenkins (ed. & intro.), Collected Poems (London: Skoob Books, 1989). See Pope for a discussion of the significance of Eliot’s knowledge of the European performance history of the Berlioz-Viardot production of Gluck’s Orpheus, ‘The Diva Doesn’t Die,’ 145.
Bodenheimer, ‘Ambition and Its Audiences: George Eliot’s Performing Figures,’ Victorian Studies, 34: 1 (Autumn 1990), 25.
Robert J. Nelson, Play Within a Play (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958), 90.
Dorothy Mermin, Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880 (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1993), 79–80.
See Patricia Rigg, ‘Augusta Webster and the Lyric Muse: The Athenaeum and Webster’s Poetics,’ Victorian Poetry, 42: 2 (Summer 2004), 135–64, and Christine Sutphin, ‘Introduction,’ in Webster, Portraits and Other Poems, for summaries of scholarship on Webster in the last decade.
See W. M. Rossetti’s comment that Webster’s play The Sentence should ‘be generally recognized — and this can scarcely fail to come — as one of the masterpieces of European drama,’ ‘Introductory Note’ to Augusta Webster, Mother and Daughter: An Uncompleted Sonnet Sequence (London: Macmillan, 1895), 13–14.
David Mayer, Playing Out the Empire: Ben Hur and Other Toga Plays and Films, 1883–1908. A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 2. According to Mayer, the term was first coined in 1895–1896, in response to the success of The Sign of the Cross.
Shou-Ren Wang, The Theatre of the Mind: A Study of the Unacted Drama in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Macmillan, 1990), xvii.
Virginia Woolf, ‘On Not Knowing Greek,’ Collected Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1980), Vol. I, 12 (from The Common Reader, Series 1, originally published 1925).
Augusta Webster, The Prometheus Bound of Æschylus, edited by Thomas Webster MA Late Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge (London and Cambridge: Macmillan & Co., 1866).
Augusta Webster, In a Day (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1882), 4. All references are to this edition.
See Viv Gardner and Susan Rutherford (eds), The New Woman and Her Sisters (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992),
Viv Gardner and Linda Fitzsimmons (eds), The New Woman (London: Methuen, 1991),
Jean Chothia (ed.), The New Woman (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 1998),
and Katherine Kelly (ed.), Modern Drama by Women, 1880s-1930s: An International Anthology (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
For the connections between New Woman drama and the suffrage movement, see Holledge, Innocent Flowers, and Sheila Stowell, A Stage of Their Own: Feminist Playwrights of the Suffrage Era (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).
Although Eleanor Marx informed her friends in 1884 that she and Edward Aveling were living together as if married, and requested she be known as Eleanor Marx-Aveling or Mrs Aveling, after her suicide and the revelation of Aveling’s dishonesty and infidelity towards her, a family friend, Wilhelm Liebknecht declared that she should now be known by her own name again; cited in Chushichi Tsuzuki, The Life of Eleanor Marx, 1855–1898: A Socialist Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 325.
Reprinted in Michael Egan (ed.), Ibsen: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 41–50.
Catherine Ray, ‘Introduction,’ to Henrik Ibsen, Emperor and Galilean, trans. by Catherine Ray, reprinted in Egan (ed.), Ibsen: The Critical Heritage (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 51. All further references are to this edition.
Henrietta F. Lord, ‘Preface,’ to Henrik Ibsen, The Doll’s House, trans. Henrietta F. Lord (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1907), 4. All further references are to this edition.
Sally Ledger, ‘Eleanor Marx and Henrik Ibsen,’ in John Stokes (ed.), Eleanor Marx (1855–1898): Life, Work, Contacts (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 54.
Henrietta Lord, The Academy, 13 January 1883, reprinted in Egan (ed.), Ibsen: The Critical Heritage, 63.
Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack, English Drama: A Cultural History (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996). See also Bratton, ‘Miss Scott and Miss Macauley,’ and New Readings in Theatre History for parallels with the 1820s and 1830s.
Lori Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,’ Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 13: 3 (Spring 1988), 458.
Cited in Michael Meyer, Ibsen (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974), 570.
Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, Vol. II, The Crowded Years: 1884–1898 (London: Virago, 1979), 105.
Christopher Kent, ‘Helen Taylor’s “Experimental Life” on the Stage: 1856–58,’ Nineteenth Century Theatre Research, 5: 1 (Spring 1977), 45–54.
Errol Durbach, ‘A Century of Ibsen Criticism,’ in James McFarlane (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 234. See also Ledger, ‘Eleanor Marx and Henrik Ibsen,’ 56.
Ronald Bush, ‘James Joyce, Eleanor Marx, and the Future of Modernism,’ in Hugh Witemeyer (ed.), The Future of Modernism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 63.
Lawrence Irving, Henry Irving: The Actor and His World (London: Columbus Books, 1989; 1951), 535.
Ledger, ‘Eleanor Marx and Henrik Ibsen,’ 54, and R. Brandon, The New Women and the Old Men: Love, Sex and the Woman Question (London: Papermac, 2000; 1990), 96.
Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 68.
John Stokes, Resistible Theatres: Enterprise and Experiment in the Late Nineteenth Century (London: Paul Elek Books, 1972), 3,
and see Ian Britain, Fabianism and Culture: A Study in British Socialism and the Arts, c.1884–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), for a broad study of the involvement of the Fabian Society in theatre.
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© 2005 Katherine Newey
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Newey, K. (2005). Art. In: Women’s Theatre Writing in Victorian Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554900_5
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