Real work: the stage actress in the Bildungsromans of Geraldine Jewsbury and Louisa May Alcott

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Content REAL WORK: THE STAGE ACTRESS IN THE BILDUNGSROMANS OF GERALDINE JEWSBURY AND LOUISA MAY ALCOTT by Judith S. De Tar A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (ENGLISH) May 2011 Copyright 2011 Judith S. De Tar ii Epigraph The central issues of psychology and physiology, by whatever names they are known, are not remote abstractions to the performer, but literally matters of flesh and blood. … What is the nature of this extraordinary instrument—its memory, its imagination, its capacity for sensation and reflection—that it can accommodate the diversified and even contradictory demands imposed upon it by the art of acting? —Joseph Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting iii Dedication Michael, Phoebe, Justine, Helene, Jeanne iv Acknowledgments I give heartfelt thanks to my dissertation chair, Joseph Boone, for all his care, skill, insight, and patience. I am grateful to the other members of my committee, Jim Kincaid and Sharon Carnicke, for their thoughtful criticism and their belief. During several years of work as an assistant thesis editor, the thesis editing administration and staff at the USC Graduate School provided much more than a supportive academic home—they were true friends. Dr. Randa Issa, Dr. Annemarie Perez and Dr. Jonathan Liljeblad: thank you for laughing and for listening. Michelle Kim and Ayana McNair: you can do anything. Doctoral work and dissertation writing have been supported by a Graduate Assistantship with the USC Graduate School, Teaching Assistantships at the Thematic Option Program and the Writing Program, and a Dissertation Merit Fellowship from the English Department and the College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. I thank the USC faculty associated with these programs, as well as Dr. Julena Lind, for all their support. I am fortunate to have studied with many brilliant professors in the English Department, but here I thank several who were especially bracing and kind in addition to being brilliant: Hilary Schor, Susan McCabe, Alice Gambrell, Heather James. They are inspirational role models. v Table of Contents Epigraph ii Dedication iii Acknowledgments iv Abstract vi Preface viii Notes to Preface xxvi Chapter One Introduction: Why Nineteenth-Century Actors and Novels? 1 Notes to Chapter One 39 Chapter Two Artistic, Intellectual and Cultural Convergences: Charlotte Cushman, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Louisa May Alcott 48 Notes to Chapter Two 108 Chapter Three Sage Advice: Acting, Emotion and Science of Mind 122 Table: Carlyle’s “Characteristics” 136 Notes to Chapter Three 172 Chapter Four Hard Work: The Stage Actress in the Bildungsromans of Jewsbury and Alcott 181 Notes to Chapter Four 241 Conclusion: Future Work 243 Bibliography 246 vi Abstract Novelists Louisa May Alcott and Geraldine Jewsbury both crafted positive figures of the working actor in novels with social purpose: Jewbury’s The Half Sisters and Alcott’s Work: A Story of Experience. This study locates these novelists in shared transatlantic cultural movements and social networks, with particular focus on how, in an age of self-conscious hero worship, actress Charlotte Cushman influenced their positive narratives of an actress-heroine. Through correspondence, short fiction, journalism and novels, writers and performers in these discursive networks together reshaped stories of the female genius’s life and work. Influential intertexts include acting theories by Diderot and Lessing, bildungsromans by Goethe, de Staёl, and Sand, and essays by Emerson and Thomas Carlyle. The Half Sisters and Work highlight the actress-heroine’s skilled emotional knowledge; specifically, their heroines’ emotional knowledge helps them to resist gendered discourse on the debilitating effects of genius, while allowing them to explore the physical and mental benefits that women may reap from a modified Carlylean doctrine of action and work. This study uses a cognitive historical approach currently emerging in literary studies, and is also informed by theater research methods. The novels’ depictions of the neurobiology of mind, body and emotion were informed by contemporary science. They deliberately use a theatrical, popular melodramatic aesthetic; they express innovative views on physical and emotional health, with unique results for the Anglo-American hybrid form of the bildungsroman/kunstlerroman. The novels vii extend the young artist’s story into a midlife newly understood as the developmental impulse to social responsibility, subsuming the generic teleological tensions between the female artist’s artistic development and a romantic marriage. The female actor’s heightened sense of the dynamics of emotion in the embodied mind is necessary human equipment for individual growth and social progress, and the heroine both learns and teaches a positive example of emotional expression, building and sustaining a healthier community habitus with almost utopian potential. viii Preface The following dissertation attempts to weave together many methodological, theoretical and historical threads, drawing from several disciplines to investigate the overall question of what effects the figure of the professional stage actor has on variant forms or sub-genres of the nineteenth-century novel. The dissertation argues that actors had a unique effect on formal changes in stories of the artist, and that the novels and discourses about mind, body and acting that I examine in my chapters were an important part of this generic development. It is part of a planned larger project that will analyze additional novels, their aesthetics, and novel genres in light of changing cultural understandings of the meaning, origin, and expression of emotions as a scientific, aesthetic, spiritual, moral, and medical issue. As it does so, it touches upon a variety of scholarship about novels, actors, and the theater; this preface will explain the boundaries of the following study. This study focuses on how the figure of the professional actor might function in the novel. Although it at times briefly engages with topics associated in literary and theater studies with the figure of the actor, and the figure of theater itself, it does not attempt to explore in depth many intriguing areas of theory and literary textual analysis, such as, for example, the performance of social roles in everyday life. It does not examine the cultural construction of authenticity in acting, either in the theater, or in everyday life, or as a process of self construction that tries to compensate for a Victorian horror of unstable identity. It does place acting theories in relation to science of mind, aesthetics and other cultural currents, and offers an ix original way of understanding the energies shaping the period’s relationships among genres of sentiment, sensation, melodrama, romance, realism, and naturalism, but it does not attempt a unified narrative of the historical development of realism, the functions of representing art in the novel of realism, or developing varieties of science of mind in relation to theories of acting. Martin Meisel has referred to “the wild efflorescence of hybrids, mutations, and variants in the nineteenth century,” and after attempting to identify some works as primarily novels of education, or novels of self development, or novels of the artist, and similarly to identify nineteenth- century performance genres, I can only agree with Meisel wholeheartedly, and vow to read more primary material to rectify an ever-swelling sense of my own ignorance of even a small part of it all. The dissertation situates authors Louisa May Alcott and Geraldine Jewsbury in shared cultural movements and personal social networks, with particular focus on how the famous actor Charlotte Cushman affected their positive narratives of an actress-heroine in an age of self-conscious hero worship; gender performance and first wave feminisms are basic to the construction of a different kind of actress hero in these novels. I read the representations of the actor in two of their novels, Work: A Story of Experience and The Half Sisters, among a range of cultural texts and discourses that take the actor’s life, mind, and creative process as their subject— conversation circulating among writers and actors, critics, scientists, and the public in novels, letters, journals, dramatic heroine character studies, performance reviews, lecture essays, journalism, and autobiography. Actors, acting, and acting theory x significantly affect formation of theatrical and novelistic sub-genres, character archetypes and their sub-types. At this point it will be evident that I have taken an interdisciplinary and historicist approach to investigate why and how the figure of the actor is so resonant in the nineteenth-century novel and to probe acting’s relationships to novel form. In an effort to trace attitudes about actors and acting, body and mind that circulated among various discourses, I closely analyze correspondence and journalism as well as the novels. A thorough tracing and analysis of traveling metaphors is beyond the scope of this dissertation, but two outstanding examples propelled my interest in its early stages. Discourses immersed in questioning the control of emotions and the extent of the power of the will used the still-familiar figure of a horse and rider, across disparate discourses of science, medicine, moral philosophy, or religion, whether the horse represented emotion, and the rider reason, or other dichotomies such as body and mind. 1 Some metaphors persist for years, accumulating new shades of meaning and moving into new discourses as they perpetuated outmoded ones. William Benjamin Carpenter, writing, updating and developing his own Principles of Mental Physiology between 1852 and 1874, claimed that the will’s role in creative thinking—the original discoveries of Genius—was limited to selective attention (the examples are a great artist and a great poet). Selective attention would intensify the force of the impression “sensations” made upon the “Ego,” but no one can acquire creative genius “by practice.” 2 Similarly, questions of control over artistic expression often invoked the Aeolian harp which was played by the wind, xi whether the intent was to picture the surrender of control of the artist to divine inspiration or the reflexive nervous system receiving stimuli from the environment. The persistence of these metaphors could be partially explained since the new mass media had created accumulations of meaning on an entirely new scale. Likewise, technological advances in printing made high quality reproduction of images possible, and those visual aids assisted in the accumulation of massive cultural texts around nineteenth century performers (and some writers as well.) A star’s fame was now, to use Joseph Roach’s term, also a “constellation.” Part of this star formation is not only how star actors experienced and understood their own acting processes, but how acting theory and lore was communicated to their audiences, and how audiences related acting processes to the performances they experienced as spectators. Reading newspapers of the period, I was originally somewhat puzzled as to why ordinary audience members seemed so well informed about the different requirements of acting in different genres. To understand the novel as a form closely implicated with theater, I turned to theatre studies and methods as well as literary studies. Review of any of the playbills of the period shows that in one evening they usually were watching the same headlining actor perform in Shakespeare, a melodrama, or a farce. In a one or two week engagement they could attend several evenings and see the actor play a large variety of parts; if they happened to see a role performed twice, this would allow them to compare renditions. The signature roles of a performer’s career became identified as “iconic roles” through the awe, respect xii and affection that these often quite knowledgeable audiences had for the performance. Reviews and reminiscences can tell us how the actor was judged as a creative thinker and intelligent interpreter of human behavior. Also, the ways in which an actor is seen as a “natural” for the role, or miscast, reveals how she was read as a person—a “real life” character. All of this character reading among audiences, actors, and their “real life” and scripted roles—that is, interpretation of behavior, including observed and felt emotion—appears in the theater novel as well as in newspaper reviews and audience letters. I am far from the first, of course, to find that the tools of theater studies have a great deal to offer literary studies. Theater historian Jacky Bratton has written of her desire to formulate a theory and method she is labeling the intertheatrical, in a deliberate evocation of the literary intertextual methods upon which I am relying. Bratton explains that [a]n intertheatrical reading goes beyond the written. It seeks to articulate the mesh of connections between all kinds of theatre texts, and between texts and their users. It posits that all entertainments, including the dramas, that are performed within a single theatrical tradition are more or less interdependent. They are uttered in a language, shared by successive generations, which includes not only speech and the system of the stage—scenery, costume, lighting and so forth—but also genres, conventions and, very importantly, memory. The fabric of that memory, shared by audience and players, is made up of dances, spectacles, plays and songs, experienced as particular performances—a different selection, of course, for each individual— woven upon knowledge of the performers’ other current and previous roles, and their personae on and off the stage. … xiii The immediate problem of attempting to invoke such a perspective historically is, of course, how we may access more of the web than was written down by the dramatist and the critic. (37-8) Bratton reads playbills intertheatrically to build up a larger picture of performance culture. Another possible answer to Bratton’s problem is what I have attempted to do in writing this dissertation: add more intertextuality to her intertheatricality and include the theatrical novel in her “web,” since the novel was a medium that was in close dialogue with performance culture and aesthetic movements. The dense discourse in many media surrounding the theater, including the communal study and interpretation of the emotional semiotics of acting carried out in journalism, occurs not only because actors write and writers act, but because such exchanges constitute an important part of creating a middle class “habitus,” a concept that underpins this study as a whole. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus resembles holistic theories of acting that link mental imagery, emotion and bodily action. The theory ties the individual to the social in that an ideal emotion can be “read” in subtle physical actions or gestures at the same time as more emotional conduct is generated by bodily expression. This attempts to posit a process of how a “collective identity” could be formed— including national and local identities and structures of feeling. Gisele Stedman argues “texts allow the invention of new or different emotion concepts which can later even transcend their textual origin and move out into ‘reality,’ as may have been the case during the Romantic period” (2). Actors should be understood as a key “text” in the nineteenth century. xiv My interest in cognitive historicism, and my understanding of the importance of the shift in understanding the embodied mind in the early to mid nineteenth century has been enormously strengthened by the current analogous research in cognitive neuroscience of emotion. 3 Indeed, my main lines of argument for how these new approaches to rendering a cognitive process of embodied emotion in the novel—through a certain “kind” of artist in a network with others like them—is supported by current findings on people who in laboratory tests have been found to have an acute internal sense of their own bodily state (interoception), measured by their awareness of their heartbeat (biofeedback) despite deliberately added interference to the accuracy of the external signal of the biofeedback mechanism. Most suggestively, those subjects who were the most interoceptively aware “are also more emotionally aware and expressive” (Dolan 84). 4 Thus, neuronal systems may then represent our own bodily and emotional states along a spectrum. Human altruism and compassion, or one’s capacity for empathy, may be associated with both the degree of one’s awareness of one’s own bodily states, and with the degree of the awareness of the bodily states of others. Dolan observed that the same brain areas were activated when the subject experienced pain as when the subjects observed loved ones undergoing the same pain (85). Here the vast topic of “sympathy” in the eighteenth century and its treatment in literature meets contemporary neuroscience and acting theory (see note 7 below). xv In Western culture there is a long and pervasive history of mistrust of emotions. Different philosophical stances place differing emphases on the obvious fact that feelings may be enabling as well as dramatically disruptive. The Epicureans and Stoics took a more positive view of emotion based in the belief that reason can control emotional desires: appetites for wealth, fame, and power can be redirected toward more substantial goals to shape a life well-lived. Certainly Christians did not trust reason’s restraint, instead labeling the “problematic emotions” as deadly sins to be restrained by fear of eternal damnation. 5 Dabbling in sinful emotions, even to dramatize moral lessons, was corrupt and corrupting as a process. Constantly forced to defend the moral worth and cultural value of their work, actors have tried in many different ways to explain that emotion is, essentially, a kind of feeling/thinking. Recently, in contrast to the longstanding common assumption that “emotions undermine wisdom,” contemporary evolutionary theory and emotion theory based on objective experiments have added functional teeth to the actors’ argument that emotion is a form of intelligent thinking. In Arne Ohman’s 2006 account, current evolutionary thinking posits that because emotions are ubiquitous in both man and other mammals, emotions—and our ability to read them in ourselves and others— must have positive adaptive value. Evolutionists assume that complex human society pressured humans to be able to identify individuals in their group and to read the emotions of others accurately. In emotion theory, a “broader perspective […] views emotions as helping establish priorities for action;” specifically, “emotions guide action by highlighting important goals” (Ohman 37-8). xvi In particular, Antonio Demasio has built a strong case that emotions are crucial to human cognition. Individuals with damage to the brain regions responsible for coordinating emotions with decision making cognition showed no measurable deficits in cognition such as perception, attention, memory and language, but nonetheless “their lives fell apart” because of “ill-advised economic and social decisions” (Ohman 37). Seemingly, emotions guide our decision-making through associating choices with positive or negative biases, making choices appealing or ruling them out. Because these individuals lacked the “‘somatic markers’ that convey information about emotion-related bodily changes,” this bodily/emotional information could not be integrated by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex with the cognitive brain processes. Not only consciously, but unconsciously, emotions signal “approach” or “avoid” in normally functioning persons. Demasio proposes that the people he tested with this damage syndrome face too many choices with no valences, and as a result they end up choosing badly. Memories may be encoded in the brain via chemical markers that are part of the physiology of emotion, with the intensity of the emotion guiding where the memory is stored (long or short term, for example). Hence Demasio theorizes that “feedback representations of visceral and somatomotor activity give emotional color to ongoing experience but also support a bedrock representation of ‘the self’” (Dolan 82-3). Emotions may occur on several levels or stages. Ohman explains that Stoics were disposed to give more weight to our cognitive capacity to assume responsibility and control because they distinguished between first and second “movements” of an xvii emotion, the first being reflexive and the second a conscious handling of the reflexive response. In fact, contemporary research (by Zajonac and LeDoux for example) tends to support this division of emotion. A cognitive “high road” may follow an earlier unconscious emotion; conscious awareness emerges as the cortex receives enough signals from the body to identify a developing “feeling” as a particular emotion. Current science of emotion defines emotions as neither “unified” nor reduced to their “feeling,” but considers them as “fuzzy concepts, best defined in terms of the degree of overlap with a prototype of a full-blown emotion, which includes an emotional stimulus, a reported feeling, a facial expression, psycho- physiological activation, and emotional behavior” (Ohman 39). Various experimental techniques have established a subcortical “low road” of reflex emotion that is routed quickly and directly to the amydala. Researchers measured emotional responses without the subjects being consciously aware of their fleeting exposure to a target image of something greatly feared by them, such as a spider. The subject then consciously perceives an additional (non-reactive) “masking” image. Without full processing in the sensory cortices, experimental subjects had no conscious awareness of seeing the target image or having an emotion of fear, but when they were subsequently shown the masking image, subjects manifested physiological changes consonant with emotion. It is important in framing my overall inquiry in this dissertation that although the “low road” of a rapid, reflexive emotional response can be termed “automatic,” it does not follow that this “automatic” system is activated only under limited xviii conditions of stimulus; in fact, the stimulus can be quite complex (Ohman). There is additional evidence of similarly “automatic” emotional response systems that is particularly germane to this paper’s inquiry into the uses of actor-characters in nineteenth-century novels. For example, experimenters using masked stimuli (happy/sad faces) evoked non-conscious facial mimicry responses in the subjects, measuring the muscular movements electrophysiologically. In other words, humans reflexively imitate emotional facial expressions even when they are not aware of seeing those faces, or their own mimicry. This “gap” between sensation and perception was theorized by Cabanis as early as, and taken up by other scientists in the early nineteenth century. Novelist Geraldine Jewsbury studied Cabanis, among others, and other direct evidence of the interest she and Alcott took in the science of mind is discussed in Chapter 3. To sum up the implications of the available contemporary objective data, as Ohman puts it, “emotions are in the body before they are in the mind.” As noted above, contemporary evidence of the speed of involuntary and unconscious emotion strongly suggests its crucial function in decision making. However, while “approach-avoidance” signals “pervade” our neural organization, which controls goals and their emotional valence, emotions are not merely positive or negative and our responses to them are varied. Notably, individual responses even to “negative” emotions such as fear occur along a varied spectrum. For example, some post- traumatic stress syndrome patients are forced to re-experience physically traumatic fear in involuntary flashbacks, while some individuals voluntarily (even xix compulsively) seek out dangerous situations (such as extreme sports enthusiasts, Peace Corps workers and war journalists). Others can’t control passionate love or other appetites; the brain’s reward system relies on dopamine levels, and because there are many other chemicals involved in neurotransmission, too much or too little of a single one in the body upsets the proportional levels needed for optimal cognition (Ohman 33). Other examples of emotive imbalances of this kind are postpartum depression, which usually dissipates over time as hormone levels readjust (but may not and can be very severe to the point of fatality). The depression that accompanies Parkinson’s Disease, fibromyalgia, and the complex of illnesses now known as chronic fatigue immunodeficiency disorders seems to be different since there is underlying disease: these neurotransmitter imbalances usually do not return to normative levels and functions such as memory can be affected. Anti-depressants that mimic neurotransmitters must be used long term to mitigate impaired cognitive skills and restore important aspects of emotional function such as motivation. As will be developed, part of my argument is that the artists examined in this study may have had in common lives that were lived with autoimmune disorders. Newly available objective “internal evidence” that contributes to our understanding of the brain mechanisms of emotion includes dynamic pictures of the brain at work through functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). However, this is not really the only “objective” evidence available. Ohman also notes that while the inner feelings are mainly accessible only in “the mind’s eye of the emoter,” xx language can communicate these feelings. Apparently, most adults are reasonably good at describing feelings, “sometimes to the point of providing meaningful quantitative estimates of its intensity” (Ohman 35). (Hence the linear charts of different facial expressions used in hospitals that represents a scale of pain intensity.) At this point we can begin to see our way back to possible cultural functions of actors in representing emotive action in front of a communal audience in an anthropological sense. Contemporary evolutionary theory contends that we necessarily developed the capacity to sense the emotions of others under the pressure of a complex society: “[s]uccessful social navigation demanded not only that individuals could recognize many group members but also accurately decode their emotional states, in order to understand, predict, and exploit their actions. One could even claim that we have a special organ that allows (and sometimes impedes) emotion recognition: the face. Darwin himself provided a compelling argument that a primary function of the face is to communicate emotion. Indeed, a substantial body of research attests to the fact that humans from diverse cultures are quite adept at distinguishing a set of apparently universal emotions from facial expressions” (Ohman 35). 6 Psychophysiologists can record and interpret peripheral body changes in relation to psychoemotional stimuli, one objective technique for studying internal emotion, but much “external evidence” allowing the scientific study of emotion flows from our abilities to sense and interpret the emotions of others, with cues originating from the face in particular, but also body language, situational context, xxi and action. Examples of readily observable events are blushing (particularly linked to embarrassment, but I would dispute this narrowing). In a less obvious example of multiple emotions being linked to the same physical index, the pupils of the eyes widen in fear, but they also change as response to seduction. Hence this index to emotion is nonspecific. We also infer emotion from action, particularly approach- avoidance behavior (direction of gazes (averted/sustained) and body posture (tensed to escape, moving away). Further, because situation provides contextual cues, our awareness of the “stimuli” guides our interpretations to the likely emotions and behavioral reactions of others (Ohman 35). As with the research on how our brains react the same way to our own pain as to that of a loved one (mentioned above on page xiv), contemporary cognitive scientific research on emotion overlaps the vast body of writing, in various disciplines, on the role of sympathy in culture (for example, I am thinking here of the eighteenth century writings of Shaftesbury and Adam Smith, which build similar interpersonal structures by theorizing from subjective data analysis—what David Marshall calls the “theater of sympathy.” 7 Marshall’s treatment of Smith’s complex mirroring of the sufferer and the spectator made it clear to me that Smith and acting theorists such as Diderot meet on the ground of a “double consciousness” in the actor/audience and sufferer/spectator. Smith assumes the separateness of other minds and limitations on our ability to share other people’s feelings. For Smith our greatest desire is for the relief of others’ sympathy. Since we avoid pain, we are not likely to get sympathy by xxii showing feelings, so we modify them in the hope that the spectator will extend sympathy and not recoil. The “double consciousness” is in watching ourselves suffer to modify our expression of it to get the relief of sympathy while gauging the spectator’s reaction. The eighteenth century interest in the complexities of interpersonal perception and communication as a means of discerning the moral and ethical nature of man grew even more pointed in the nineteenth. In a general cultural framework of religious doubt and competing theories of the mind-body relationship (monist, dualist, vitalist, organic), Victorians were intensely preoccupied with drawing and redrawing the various possible limits on conscious volition and the power of human will, endlessly parsing the resulting implications for moral responsibility. This nineteenth-century preoccupation with the limits of the “will” and the implications for jurisprudence arose from the pressure felt from new Victorian maps of human neurological anatomy. The same preoccupation is recurring in this century under pressure from new findings about the cognitive abilities in the immature or damaged brain. Contemporary debates on criminal responsibility and capital punishment for the young, those of low IQ, or those who have brain damage from various kinds of abuse are difficult, given that case law is decided on demonstrated (i.e. “conscious”) knowledge of wrongdoing. 8 Indeed, the complexities of a neurophysiological body whose very structure changes in response to both nature and nurture in overlapping feedback loops poses a new challenge to jurisprudence. Trying to locate defensible limits of assigning moral responsibility for impulse control, or lack of it, is formidable. A crucial problem is xxiii that social science and lab science disciplines face a historical methodological gap between “objective” scientific evidence and “subjective” approaches. Connolly assumes that an important mutual object of study for cultural theorists and social science is “cultural creativity.” Connolly points out that methodological approaches differ between the practitioners of a science of society (who stress predictive science and thus tend to bypass creativity) and cultural interpreters (who minimize biology to avoid determinism and preserve a space for creativity— even those theorists who study bodily representation). Yet in daily human experience biology and culture intertwine closely. In Connolly’s view, the social sciences end up minimizing the role of cultural creativity in adhering to a natural science methodological approach that is predictive, while cultural analysts prefer to curb the role of biology to avoid genetic determinism. Further, even those “who study bodily representations seldom examine the body as a site of biocultural dispositions and relay point for political mobilization.” To the extent that they minimize “the layered character of the body/brain/culture network,” they lose sight of “some aspects of that network implicated in cultural creativity” (67). The gap between a science of society and one of cultural interpretation could be lessened if the contemporary revolution in neuroscience and its ability to study body-brain processes is linked to a phenomenology that analyzes “implicit structures of experience that infuse perception, desire, and culture.” This linking between a neuroscientific revolution and Connolly’s complex phenomenology, is an excellent description of what I believe Alcott and Jewsbury were trying to represent in their xxiv novels through the figure of the actor. Like Connolly, they sought to cultivate a mind/body philosophy that reduces neither biology nor culture. Of particular interest to me is Connolly’s location of the biocultural body “as a relay point for political mobilization,” because a prominent feature of Alcott’s and Jewsbury’s bildungsroman novels are the mentors, educators who wish to pass on their feminism and their social vision, and the process of “apprentices” who become mentors in their turn. My own thinking about the validity of my multidisciplinary approach to “evidence,” drawing from literary, theatrical, and cultural studies while mixing in neuroscience, was helpfully clarified by Connolly’s essay, which supports a mingling of evidentiary methods. Closer attention to the development of the subgenre of the “theatrical” novel allows us to glimpse how nineteenth-century writers understood and helped to structure the personal and cultural value of the novel and the theater as artistic practice, communal metropolitan activity, and also as a window into the developing nineteenth-century science of mind. In joining the critical conversation about the theatrical novel as novel, while tempted, I have resisted as much as possible repeating a familiar critical gesture that takes two terms that have been put in opposition and argues that they are held in tension with each other to produce a dialectic (though I am both attracted and persuaded by this move and the readings produced are complex and insightful). Terms often put in suspension with each other in these novels include theatricality and authenticity (‘natural acting’); realism and romance; gothicism and realism; xxv individualism and social consensus; rational man or woman of virtue and middle class mores; and novel endings in marriage and in death. My assumption is that this dynamic view of the novel, which Shires terms “ideologically dialectical,” has proved itself and perhaps should be taken as a given. Similarly, I have tried to push familiar critical formulations about the cultural contests the nineteenth-century “domestic” novel stages around the construction of middle-class identity, the naturalization of female subjectivity, and the maintenance of the domestic sphere into new territory by focusing on the actor onstage, offstage, and in the novel, tracing an influential figure that represents an alternative emotional habitus based on an embodied mind: a different female actor-hero. xxvi Notes to Preface 1 For two examples of the horse and rider trope, see Shuttleworth, Frances Power Cobbe “On Unconscious Cerebration”) and William Benjamin Carpenter (“The Power of the Will Over Mental Action”). Cobbe draws a line between the automatic activities of the brain and its consciously willed ones: If the brain can work by itself, have we any reason to believe it ever works also under the guidance of something external to itself, which we may describe as the Conscious Self? It seems to me that this is precisely what the preceding facts likewise have gone to prove— namely, that there are two kinds of action of the brain, the one Automatic, and the other subject to the Will of the conscious Self; just as the actions of a horse are some of them spontaneous and some done under the compulsion of his rider. The first order of actions tend to indicate that the brain “secretes thought;” the second order (strongly contrasting with the first) show that, besides that automatically working brain, there is another agency in the field under whose control the brain performs a wholly different class of labours. …We have seen, in a word, that we are not Centaurs, steed and rider in one, but horsemen, astride on roadsters which obey us when we guide them, and when we drop the reins, trot a little way of their own accord or canter off without our permission” (95). 2 Carpenter wrote: The Relation between the Automatic activity of the body, and the Volitional direction by which it is utilized and directed, may be compared to the independent locomotive power of a horse under the guidance and control of a skilful rider. It is not the rider’s whip nor spur that furnishes the power, but the nerves and muscles of the horse; and when these have been exhausted, no further action can be got out of them by the sharpest stimulation. But the rate and direction of the movement are determined by the Will of the rider… . It may be stated as a fundamental principle, that the Will can never originate any form of Mental activity. Thus, no one has ever acquired the creative power of genius, or made himself a great Artist or a great Poet, or gained by practice that peculiar insight which characterizes the original Discoverer; for these gifts are Mental Instincts or Intuitions which, though capable of being developed and strengthened by due cultivation, can never be generated de novo. But the power of the Will is exerted in the purposive selection, from among those objects of consciousness which Sensations from without and the xxvii working of the internal ‘Mechanism of Thought and Feeling’ being before the Ego (whether simultaneously or successively), of that which shall be determinately followed up; and in the intensification of the force of its impression, which seems to be the direct consequence of such limitation. This state is what is termed Attention… (Shuttleworth 96-97). 3 This project had been underway for a long period of time before I became aware of cognitive historicism, first by encountering Alan Richardson’s British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind. Although Richardson does not look at the figure of the actor, he discusses Louisa Musgrave’s brain injury and personality change in Persuasion. I was delighted to discover his conviction that Austen’s new understanding of the physiology of the mind was evident not only in Louisa, but in her representations of an embodied nervous sensibility in many of her characters. Much of the neuroscience revolution in the early nineteenth century came a few years after Austen. 4 Ray Dolan, “The Body in the Brain.” Dolan reviews experiments tracing the brain structures and feedback systems that create the layer of our consciousness that we experience as the sense of our bodies in our minds, or “embodiedness.” To introduce the article, Dolan turns to literary renderings that make an imaginative case for the fundamental importance of embodiedness in our multi-layered consciousness, citing two modernist novels, William Golding in The Inheritors and J.M. Coetzee’s novel Elizabeth Costello. As Golding depicts the mental lives of Neanderthals, “thought and felt experience, engendered by perturbed bodily states, are indistinguishable” (78). For these novelists embodiedness is a bridge between our consciousness and that of early humans as well as that of contemporary animals. As the various citations of Arne Ohman in the text that follows indicate, the following summary is largely indebted to his article “Making Sense of Emotion: Evolution, Reason and the Brain” and the other articles in the Summer 2006 issue of Daedalus 135.3 on the embodied mind by the Damasios, Dolan, Fodor, Gilligan, Johnson, d’Amboise, and Edelman. 5 Arne Ohman, “Making Sense of Emotion: Evolution, Reason and the Brain,” 33. Ohman cites Keith Oatley’s Emotions: A Brief History (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishing, 2005). 6 Ohman’s reference here is to Eckman, Emotions Revealed, 2004. 7 I was inspired by the treatment of Shaftesbury and Smith in David Marshall’s The Figure of Theater at the beginning of my thinking about this project, as well as by his reading of Daniel Deronda. For Marshall, Eliot and Smith are both “concerned xxviii with the theater of sympathy,” and in Deronda Eliot “realizes” Smith’s dynamics of sympathy. In Marshall’s account of Smith, “we desire and depend on spectators but we can tolerate them only if we can believe in the fiction that they can transport themselves from their distant position and become us. Our greatest fear is that they will remain spectators” (191). To “remain a spectator” is to deny sympathy to the actor, to remain apart emotionally. 8 Another initial inspiration for this project was the article “Revelations on Pages and Stages” by Nina Auerbach, whose important body of work linking the novel and theater is well known. Auerbach put her finger on George Eliot’s use of an actress in Middlemarch to raise the question of what “rehearsal” of an action might do to impulse control. The actress murders her husband onstage in actuality as they enact a murder scene in a melodrama. When Lydgate, a young doctor, talks about the incident with Laure, he is eager to absolve her of intention, but Laure repeats apparently reconcilable true statements of her experience: “my foot really slipped” and “I did not plan: it came to me in the play—I meant to do it.” Eliot is raising the question of evidence to convict when “intent” is troubled by what we don’t know about the mind/body connection, as seen through the eyes of a medical researcher involved in testing the structure and operation of the autonomic nervous systems of frogs and rabbits using electricity, i.e., galvanic experiments (Eliot Middlemarch 97- 98). Laure’s apparently contradictory statements can be explained by unconscious perception; that is, automatic functions of the mind may perceive and react before we are conscious of an emotion or thought. 1 Chapter One Introduction: Why Nineteenth-Century Actors and Novels? I. During most of the nineteenth century, the novel and the theatre occupied similar positions in transatlantic culture: they were the premier forms of entertainment, highly sought after by all classes and even a daily indulgence for those who had means and leisure, but they did not yet carry the status of cultural forms such as music, the essay, or poetry. 9 Too, they were art forms of which women were noticeable cultural producers. Authors and actors had to market their creative talent and product actively. Authors had to persuade newspapers, journals, and lending libraries to accept their work, or publish by direct subscription. Actors had to call on their supporters, sometimes in person, and solicit them to come to their benefit performances—a social undertaking that Dickens treated comically in his novels, and laden with dubious gendered freight in the nineteenth century. With tremendous demand for “entertainment product,” plots of plays and novels were traded among England, France, Germany and America and constantly scrutinized for adaptation into one form or the other. 10 So while it might seem more logical to turn to plays and playwrights when looking for an actor’s influence on literature, market economics of the time favored the novel and journalism, and very few producers, actor-managers or writers ventured to produce original dramatic works. 11 The turbulent economic cycles of the early nineteenth century drove many American and British actors across the 2 Atlantic, with an accompanying traffic in novelists and other writers. Since the business models of publishing and stage production often did not provide sufficient financial returns for their work (Dickens being one notable exception), or because of the travel and financial opportunities, many famous writers and actors directed their talents to the performance genre of platform readings. They targeted the middle class reader by offering dramatic readings from popular poetry, novels, and plays, touring the same platform reading circuits. Considered together as leisure entertainment, both novels and theater were valuable business commodities; successful writers and actors became “stars” of the lecture hall. The most notable British performers were Charles Dickens and actress-author Fanny Kemble. Thackeray also held readings in America, later followed by Oscar Wilde, whose performance as a unique literary genius found favor with silver miners in Colorado. Mark Twain was the leading American novelist to take to the lecture stage. Impressed by the dramatic readings of Dickens, Twain was committed to fully performing his public readings; he memorized his text in order to become “absorbed” in the characters he portrayed. Philosopher-sages Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson supported themselves and their families primarily with their lectures and not their published works. Even the more retiring Boston transcendentalists Bronson Alcott and Margaret Fuller held public “conversations.” However, Fuller disliked platform or salon performance, feeling like a female curiosity on display. 3 Like Margaret Fuller, the British actress Fanny Kemble famously disliked appearing on the commercial stage. She would have preferred developing her skills as a writer. Bereft of funds, eventually she published her journals and she held acclaimed and profitable platform readings of Shakespeare’s plays. She carefully edited down the plays and interpreted all the parts to realize her own vision of the entire work, and found herself able to enjoy acting in a performance medium where she could exercise her range of skills as a writer (or director/dramaturg), and as actor of all the parts, not only the women’s roles. Like the British Kemble, Anna Cora Mowatt (author of “Fashion,” often called the “first American play”) and Charlotte Cushman were major American actress/writers who performed one-woman platform readings. 12 This turn to a hybrid form of entertainment specific to writers and actors deepens the mutual implication of theater and novelists, actors and the novel, and raises questions about working process and creative form. In what ways did writers act and actors write? When we consider those who craft fictional characters with voice and body, and those who craft them in writing, there are significant affinities in the creative process of writers and actors which, perhaps, come into focus most clearly around the idea of “character.” We do not often think of actors’ work as “writing”—creating a scripted text—especially if they did not author it in written form. Still, in the second half of the eighteenth century—a time pertinent to the development of the novel— prominent writers of German Romanticism such as Lessing and Goethe were 4 actively experimenting with theater production and acting methods in particular. They theorized about the relationships between the arts, analyzed the process of creating theatrical texts and performances, and pointed out the unrecognized ways in which actors were co-makers of matter and meaning with writers. Lessing was a proponent of English theatrical traditions. With British acting in mind, Lessing’s work expanded the image of the actor from that of a primarily instinctive creature with a gift for mimicry to that of a thinker/creator. He distinguished between the dramatist’s authorship of the written text of a play, and the collective authors of what is now known as the “performance text:” actors and all others who collaborate in authoring all theatrical elements that are unique to each production and to each performance as well. Lessing’s work and that of Goethe and Diderot in the late eighteenth century newly grounded German and French national theaters in Anglo-European aesthetic theory and practice through comparative analysis of the actor and acting. They not only sparked long lasting nineteenth-century debates about acting theory and process, but in doing so, raised the visibility of the actor and his work over the course of the coming century. Increasingly, the actor is seen not merely as a clever mimic, aping the ideas of others, but as an original creator of art. Diderot’s staging of an artistic debate between two actresses contributed to the debate on the “woman question,” and vice versa. English translations and repackaging of this material in the early decades of the nineteenth century increased circulation of these writings. Different forms of theater mushroomed when theater licensing restrictions were 5 loosened in England, and with the advent of mass market journalism and novels, social classes and genres mingled in the cultural field as never before. Skilled actors of all kinds increasingly gained artistic and cultural capital, becoming a source of national pride and corresponding international competition. The art forms of theater and the novel competed as well, defining themselves in relation to each other in a complicated process of audience construction. 13 As one aspect of these exchanges, or more competitively, mutual “colonizations,” how might an “acting process” shape a written creative “product” within the nonspecific formal conventions of the (loose, baggy) novel? From his daughter’s account, we know that Dickens made faces in front of a mirror and spoke aloud in character voices while composing. We know that a novelist might “act” characters as regular practice, even if the use of an “acting process” as a composition tool is not physically manifested, but remains a mental visualization which is then conveyed in written modes of narration, dialogue and description, rather than through an immediately communicated live performance (although arguably the secretaries to whom Thackeray and Henry James dictated their books were auditors/audience for their live compositional performances). Likewise, George Eliot always read her work aloud to G.H. Lewes; Nina Auerbach calls “these dramatic exchanges between performer and manager/audience … the foundation of George Eliot’s literary career” (Romantic Imprisonment 258). Twain felt he had to enter into his characters completely to write. Writers’ work then, may include acting work. 6 Literary critics have discussed for some time the nineteenth-century novel’s “theatricality” as a potent source of its energy. That theatricality has also sparked a rich and creative vein of criticism. Theatricality and the novel’s related stake in “performance” has been comprehensively read to include formal and stylistic features shared with contemporary dramatic forms, such as melodrama; parlor performances and private domestic entertainment such as dances, singing, playing instruments, charades, tableaux, impersonations (both playful ones and those less innocent); writing, sketching, reading aloud, and private theatricals; larger and more public assemblies such as balls, fairs, charity functions, teaching, lecturing, preaching, athletic events and school productions; and finally, interwoven with these other Victorian cultural productions, we read, with a sense of oddity, of the actual theatre: that is, theatrical performance with professional actors. 14 It has been established that theatricality “infects” the nineteenth-century novel across a wide spectrum, appearing closely intertwined with anti-theatrical prejudice, which in turn has misogynist and anti-feminist currents. Novelists created myriad uses for both the everyday and the more particular performances of a range of theatricalized fictional characters. While it is also clear that novelists deployed this spectrum of performances precisely in order to proliferate telling relationships among characters in a novel—as Joseph Litvak and others have shown in Bronte and Austen, for example—does this diagetic proliferation of performances and relationships operate primarily to distinguish between characters’ characters, or erase distinctions between them? More narrowly, do the characters in novels who are 7 actors by profession, and who perform in many a nineteenth-century fictional context infected with opposing, parallel, tangential or oblique theatricalities, have a significantly different function or functions from other characters? Why, exactly, are they there, as they so often are? 15 One point of entry into these questions lies in the forces of genre: characters who are actors often appear as part of a bildungsroman, a novel of self culture, or variant subgenres: novels of a “season of youth,” novels of education or pedagogy (stemming from Rousseau’s Emile) or novels of the development of the artist (kunstlerroman). As in the tradition of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, often cited by critics as a widely influential root of the bildungsroman, such actor characters may intersect with the arc of the protagonist’s development, indicative of an immature (irresponsible but often joyous) life phase. 16 As Susanne Howe, a literary historian of the English bildungsroman puts it, heroes in the British novel in the Wilhelm mold in the first half of the nineteenth century “feel the spell of the theater for a while” while they seek their field of activity” (133). As a part of such plots of self-culture, the actor character tells a cautionary tale of the addictive dangers of selfish egotism and self-display—an addiction which the main character must break or risk arrested development (not to mention poverty and a variety of other mortal sins). As part of a kunstlerroman, or stories of the developing artist-hero, however, the actor has been thought of as rare; critics have frequently noted that most often the artist seems to be a writer or poet, or a writer thinly disguised as a painter or sculptor. 8 Decades ago Ellen Moers in Literary Women considered this substitution of one art for others, pointing out that as a protagonist, the novelist-as-character posed difficult problems for the writer, not only in locating a source for dramatic action, but also achieving a characteristic voice for the writer-character. Moers also suggested that the “high minded level” of “intellectual talk” maintained by de Staёl’s actress Corinne set a pattern for the living room “performances” of novelists such as George Eliot (“in her sibylline mood”) and Kate Chopin. Margaret Fuller was dubbed the “Yankee Corinna” by Emerson and others, and called herself a “paid Corinne” for holding her public “conversations.” 17 Everyone read Corinne. De Staёl’s 1807 novel has the structure of classical tragedy, the dominant stage form in 18 th century France. Corinne as the “hero” is literally crowned as a supreme artist-citizen. After this apotheosis the hero must fall, and the novel’s arc moves inexorably to her death. As a celebrated artist, Corinne is a multi-talented genius—her abilities include musical and poetic composition as well as mesmerizing performance of those compositions—but as Moers emphasized, Corinne is not primarily a writer or salon performer, but a great tragic actress (184). Why did woman writers so identify with this figure that they adopted Corinne’s “diva act” in their own orchestrated salon settings? Partly, de Staёl modeled Corinne on the late eighteenth-century “Tragic Muse” Sarah Siddons, who appears as herself in the novel. Siddons’s acting intensity combined with her virtuous reputation to redefine fame itself over her long career, but she was solely an actress/interpreter of roles even if she was hailed as a unique phenomenon of female 9 tragic genius. In contrast, Corinne’s genius seamlessly combined abilities in acting, writing and music, and in this de Staёl creates her as a fictionalized prototype of the eighteenth-century actress-playwright-novelists—women of acknowledged intellect but “tainted” reputation. De Staёl gives their protean, improvisatory talent the fame of Siddons and more—her hybrid actress-artist is publicly celebrated as a national hero and a genius in the center of the capital, not merely onstage. Independent and nationally recognized, Corinne has no need to be humble about her skills—and she isn’t. Her matter-of-fact assumption of her own high worth continually jars her English suitor’s culturally formed expectations of deprecatory female behavior, and de Staёl draws out this delicious situation for all the entertainment possible. It is Corinne’s incredible operating attitude that women writers crave to own, because it has the force of prolepsis: the stance creates the validating and supporting environment that it assumes is already present. That successful writers would style their performances as serenely dignified and confident Corinnes underlines that the cultural continuum of writing and acting, the novel and the theater that this introduction has been establishing was quite powerful. Yet the power of this formation has become obscured. Presumably influential nineteenth-century critics were more alert to the influence of the prestigious, more respectable, male writers and theorists of the theater such as Goethe. It is likely that eagerness to reference such figures was reinforced by reluctance to remember and cite the influence of the solidly successful, but socially tainted actress-writers such as Eliza Heywood, Charlotte Lennox, Elizabeth Inchbald 10 and Charlotte Charke. Perhaps this is one reason literary scholars writing on the bildungsroman/kunstlerroman have largely overlooked the cross-influences between writers and actors, and also the actor-figure in the novel as an important tributary in the shaping of narrative form. However, recent scholarship has been tracing and theorizing a kunstlerroman tradition (to date, predominantly a female genealogy) that begins to give the actress a place among influential woman artist-heroines featured in the genre of the novel. 18 Corrine is an important strand of this genealogy of literary inheritances and affiliations of female writers, actors and artists. In her Records of a Girlhood, Kemble notes Corinne and Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyee both inspired her with a “wild desire” for an independent artist’s life in Italy. 19 Corinne’s successor was George Sand’s eponymous heroine in Consuelo (1842). As an opera singer , Consuelo is a hybrid singer/actress who as a musician, the highest artistic calling, escapes the immoral taint of the theater actress while continuing the trend of performing female genius. 20 Linda Lewis characterizes Consuelo as an intensified Romantic form of divinely inspired actress: In Corrine they found an artist whose source of genius is ‘l’enthousiasme’ (creativity plus vivacity) welling up from inside herself, and in Consuelo a divine goddess visited by sacred fire, ‘la flamme sacree.’ Staёl and Sand are important because they begin to define the woman-as-artist at the very point in literary history when Romanticism was defining the hero-as-artist and when the woman writer, rapidly becoming a presence in the English publishing world, were looking for foremothers (8-9). A mere seven years later, when Geraldine Jewsbury wrote her second novel The Half Sisters (1849)—a novel which this project will be looking at in detail—young female 11 hero worship of the mythical actress figure was an established cultural trend. Jewsbury’s idealistic character Alice is not only enthralled by Corinne, but the narrator remarks that reading the novel is “an epoch encounter in a woman’s life.” The play on epoch/epic lends the narrator a humorous tone of female sage “knowingness” about the female genius artist figure and its charismatic effect on young women. Yet Corinne becomes unable to practice her many arts and dies from unrequited love. As critics have debated the “positive” and “negative” political and cultural values that might be ascribed to the variations in woman artist stories, they of course have emphasized how the story ends: death, marriage, lonely success, or some combination. Much feminist criticism of nineteenth-century bildungsroman/ kunstlerroman finds the plot’s resolution in marriage to be a retrograde movement by definition. Given the diminished legal rights that marriage imposed on women in the nineteenth century, and the reigning “domestic ideology” that increasingly restricted women’s public scope, this reaction is understandable. However, the ideology of separate spheres for men and women was not monolithically split into separate complementary spheres. Particularly in America, an important strain of domestic ideology perpetuated in novels (Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the prime example) was that the values of the domestic sphere should take over the public sphere. For some, women’s sphere “naturally” included advocating in public for women’s issues of concern. In a sermon titled “The Public Function of Woman,” Louisa May Alcott’s friend and mentor the Reverend Theodore Parker preached that women’s role 12 “begins at home, then, like charity, goes everywhere” (Elbert xxv). Along with novelist Stowe, journalists cited actresses such as Fanny Kemble and Charlotte Cushman as positive examples of women in public life—exhibits in an ongoing culture war about the permeability of separate spheres. Moreover, then as now, popular journalism serves to create a public forum about actors’ supposedly private lives by creating a set of common references in which to ground ongoing debates about marriage relations. 21 Actors’ performances in popular pieces that took marriage as their subject created additional common reference points. For example, Charlotte Cushman’s readings in Chicago of Will M. Carleton’s 1871 poem “Betsey and I Are Out” has divorce as its subject, and a fee- hungry lawyer in the cast. A second dramatized poem supplies a happy ending, “How Betsey and I Made Up.” A conservative doctor of divinity pronounced Cushman’s rendition “better than a sermon” on matrimonial quarrels. 22 Of course novels about an artist should be considered as part of this complex social discourse carried on in print and on stage—particularly those that encompass a social vision— and we should read strongly those currents that run against the conservative or commercial forces of genre even if the narrative finds a traditional closure in marriage. Such a marriage may be offered as an exemplary partnership (see note 15) that provides a base from which to contribute to society, together reaching not inward, but outward, often working toward social equality. 23 As part of the century’s consideration of marriage reform, some novelists dissected bad marriages (Eliot did so famously); it should not be surprising that some 13 writers imagined ideal, co-equal marriage relations as well. The dominant popular American novel genre from 1820 to 1870 that Nina Baym has called the “woman’s novel” has a range of domestic women: Most of the novels assume, however, that women will perform most of their life activities in the household and strive to give women traits that would make them emotionally content with comparatively limited space and mobility. But none of them insist that all women are equally formed for domestic content, and although in virtually all woman’s novels the heroine’s trajectory ends with a happy marriage, there are many examples of contented single women of all ages. Moreover, the marriage form advocated is egalitarian rather than hierarchical” (Baym xxvi). For all of these reasons, though it may be rare, it is perfectly possible for a nineteenth-century woman artist’s quest story of self-expression, individuation, and independence to end in marriage—even a fairy tale, wish fulfillment alliance with a rich aristocrat—without negating or diminishing the purpose of the preceding quest. The quest’s aim may not have been marriage; the marriage may even bring the artist’s current practice to an end, but it does not mean the end of the artist, or her skills, or her practice of them. The question often being asked is “why does the artist’s story end in marriage?” It seems a more fruitful approach to ask, “what kind of marriage is it?” or “what kind of marriage does it aspire to be and is that likely to happen?” By the time Jewsbury writes of reading Corinne as an “epoch” encounter, the novel’s female genius was an established figure of admiration. As we shall see, converting awkward feelings of inadequacy and paralyzing worship of the established artist to an energetic focus on training and practice—perhaps finding a 14 mentor—become important elements in the kunstlerroman. While of course other novels had treated life episodes as stages in a journey, I read Alcott’s and Jewsbury’s novels as showing an increased understanding of human lives as having developmental patterns in common: hence “epochs.” In this dissertation, I examine in detail how and why Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters and Louisa May Alcott’s Work and Jo’s Boys draw on the important cultural figure of the actress as artist, and in particular how these professional novelists were able to study Charlotte Cushman as a working actress and fellow feminist—a real life successor to the Romantic women geniuses of fiction. Linda Lewis’s study of the genre she calls the “coming-of-age fictions of creative women” (5) is a thorough analysis of the mythic and cultural sources of the genius female artist—first the “secular sibyl” as de Staёl created Corinne, then the “divine Sophia” of Sand’s Consuelo as a response to de Staёl. Lewis then undertakes an intertextual analysis of how these French Romantic era women artist figures, who are divinely inspired goddesses, were revised by four “serious” British women authors: Geraldine Jewsbury, E.B. Browning, Eliot, and Mrs. Humphrey Ward. Lewis takes a nuanced approach that it is primarily in the latter part of the nineteenth century that the tragic female artist manqué comes to predominate, whereas earlier stories, including the models set by de Staёl and Sand, can be termed stories of “success,” though that success may take various and complex forms. 24 Lewis insists that Corinne and Consuelo, “as well as many of their successors, do ‘make it’—at least in the sense of artists who are brilliant and ambitious, fascinating 15 and famous” (6). Indeed, differing readings of how the novels structure “success,” whether in terms of material, moral, spiritual or other values, underlie many of these critical debates. But even Lewis finds the ending of The Half Sisters inadequate: “Having first insisted that Bianca’s gift compels her to perform on the stage, Jewsbury does not persuade the reader that being a wife and an educator will do just as well. …She answers the question of what to do with a creative, gifted woman, but not the question of female genius” (97). Similarly, Clarke complains that when Bianca agrees to the request of her future sister-in-law—her long time friend—to give up acting upon her marriage into the aristocracy is “perhaps realistic” but a circular argument about gendered genius. Though Bianca has rejected becoming a “nun” in the service of art, becoming the wife of Lord Melton (a feminist) amounts to the same thing—a political dead end removed from the “sphere of necessity” in a philosophical “morality of self-realization” that does not “change anything” but is merely a “power of resistance” directed toward retaining “personal authenticity” (196). Still, Clarke concedes that it was essential for middle-class women to resist the “warping and crippling” of middle-class mores and that that this resistance “moved in the opposite direction from the womanly ideal” (197). I argue that Bianca largely embodies that resistance to the womanly ideal in her professional and personal life, and that she also actively undermines its ideology. Bianca strikes at the warping and crippling process itself through her behavior, which is admired and 16 imitated by others, including women of other classes and men. Lewis’s critique of the unconvincing substitution of educator for actress in The Half Sisters turns on her distinction between “female genius” and “gifted woman,” which itself relies upon a Romantic idealism about artistic creative process. Jewsbury’s sense of “genius” does not fall into this aesthetic. She is interested in the real choices working artists must make in sustaining an entire career, not just arriving at one. It is hard to say, for example, what a divinely inspired dancer should do or will do when his aging body begins to limit his youthful technique on which his art depends; he may change his practice, or leave his art altogether, for example. It is equally difficult to say what Jewsbury’s hard-working middle-class actress should have done when she realizes that her telos—to uplift theatrical art as a cultural medium—no longer meets her needs as she has developed over time. Other readings have argued that Jewsbury is extending the domestic into the stage as a “natural” move, relying upon the many conduct books that argue a true woman’s role is to “act” the part of the angel at the same time as they argue that women’s nature is angelic. Other readings show that the stage moves into the domestic. These novelistic crossings between the two “worlds” rely upon the same figure, the womanly angel or angelic woman. In this critical paradigm, as in Clarke’s thinking, home and the desire for it is inescapable. Jewsbury is domesticating the stage for women but undermining its liberatory force, no more so than by allowing her female artist hero to marry an aristocrat. 25 Seemingly no choice is possible for Bianca that would meet the requirements of critics of 17 domesticity for this female kunstlerroman, in either Romantic/melodramatic aesthetics, those of realism, or Jewsbury’s mixture of both. Yet post-Romantic novels about the woman artist do not wholly subscribe to the Romantic aesthetic or ideology of the artist as godlike creator (whose self-sacrifice bears more than a passing resemblance to the self-renouncing woman), but write in tension with that figure. In fact, it is possible to read Bianca’s decision to give up the strenuous life of acting as a rejection of the role of idealistic superhuman, and of Romantic sacrifice and suffering to keep art pure—a rejection, not an embrace, of Carlylean “self- affirmation through self-renunciation” (Clarke 120). Part of the difficulty is the tendency to read any attempts by the artist to make or find a “home” in opposition to her art-making. This can be amended by more careful attention to where and how art-making takes place. Another more intractable difficulty is that the Anglo- American bildungsroman is a mixed form made even more complex by a female protagonist; Kessler finds The Story of Avis (1853), the story of a gifted woman painter, a mixture of the bildungsroman, kunstlerroman, and the sentimental women’s novel (see note 30). There is little question that “the" female bildungsroman has a complex structure. Susan Fraiman’s study of the female bildungsroman not only notes that generic elements and genre theory are historically read and constructed, her analyses are most compelling. Fraiman argues that the elements of the Goethean “apprenticeship” model have been read as male: mentors, choice, travel, and sexual encounters, all of which are problematic for women; thus, in the female 18 bildungsromans that engage with this tradition, she finds a clash of competing stories or a series of crossroads rather than a linear path (2-5). Her readings of iconic predecessor novels such as Evelina and Pride and Prejudice present for me the most convincing evidence possible of a fractured female bildungsroman form that radically breaks up or undermines the inevitability of the heroine’s arrival at marriage. In Pride and Prejudice an alternate plot (Lydia’s seduction) speaks to the loss of power marriage represents to Elizabeth’s autonomy; in Evelina, a nightmare plot repetition of entrapment-escape-entrapment is added to a displacement similar to that in Pride and Prejudice, where the violence the heroine avoids (beating, rape, suicide) happens instead to characters strongly linked to the heroine, decentering and demystifying the major narrative (10). At its most general, the argument is that in the process of canon formation, critics privileged the “alienated genius” of Romanticism, “at odds with the prosaic community,” “against the infiltration of the social and political novel,” whereas the female bildungsroman was necessarily a story of “the protagonist’s construction by social and economic factors” (136-7). With the above in mind, based on my study of the novels of Alcott and Jewsbury, novels concerned with social problems written primarily for women, my own sense of what constitutes a “successful ending” for the female artist’s bildung focuses on the artist’s work, which is that they learn and understand development and process as a process. This work encompasses the effort and attention needed to learn and practice the skills needed for the art, but even more importantly, the task is to learn that both art-making and making the life of an artist are always a continuing 19 practice. Like a performance, the pages of a novel must come to an end, but the story—which is that of the dynamics of character—does not. Or so we should feel. In other words, the artist may choose to turn her skills to different projects at different life stages; what matters is that she is “successful” enough to choose freely, and that she chooses to live life wholly. But how did this decentered “ending,” if it is one, become possible to imagine? A major factor seems to have been the ability of the figure of the performing woman to appropriate the shifting semantics of the category of “genius.” Norma Clarke persuasively establishes that a shift to a more positive arc from the plots of Germaine de Staёl, Felicia Hemans, and Anna Jameson (Diary of an Ennuyee) comes initially from writer Maria Jane Jewsbury (Three Histories). Maria Jane was Geraldine Jewsbury’s older sister, her teacher and role model. Clarke traces the borrowings and displacements of woman artist plots by the Jewsbury sisters as they may have taken them from the lives and writing of their close friends Jane Welsh Carlyle and Felicia Hemans (particularly her Records of Woman). Maria Jane Jewsbury’s heroine Julia in ‘The History of an Enthusiast’ breaks the tradition because she neither dies nor becomes ill when she finds she cannot have both an artist’s life and romantic love, but resigns herself to a lonely existence and goes abroad (Clarke 76-86). It is this loneliness that Geraldine Jewsbury’s actress Bianca rejects after her brilliant career can go no higher. 26 Geraldine Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters is only partially a critical gloss on de Staёl. Alice’s vague idealism may have had artistic potential, but it has been stunted 20 by her narrowly domestic upbringing. Lacking self-love from the beginning to the end, Alice actually is like Corrine only in that she dies from excessive need of love. Fatefully interrupted in her “epoch encounter” with de Staёl by a marriage proposal from an older man, Alice errs in thinking that it is his task, not hers, to release her inner potential abilities. Alice is the victim of Mrs. Ellis-style domesticity, living by and through the man. Doomed by her marital disappointment and passivity, Alice’s “nervous organisation” turns neurotic and finally hysteric. The other half-sister, Bianca Piazzi, is a fulfilled genius actress—the novel’s undeniable, full fledged actress-heroine—but Bianca is emphatically not a divinely inspired Romantic actress. As Linda Lewis notes, “in Geraldine Jewsbury’s hands the myth is modified into a more pedestrian heroine who must toil for her success and for her bread and in so doing becomes an exemplar of Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Gospel of Work’” (10-11). Jewsbury examines Bianca, a “woman of genius,” as a case study of a sensitive “nervous organization” as it becomes modified by the professional body/mind training of a dedicated actress. Her half-sister Alice is a contrasting study in the effects of domestic training, with the sisters’ similar genetic inheritance of highly impressionable nervous and emotional responses as the controlled variable in a test of nurture’s effect on nature. The novel juxtaposes Bianca’s personal growth and hard-won success with Alice’s smothered potential, inactivity, lack of emotional knowledge and experience, and eventual nervous collapse and sudden death. 21 Fifteen years later Louisa M. Alcott began writing the second text that this dissertation engages at length: Work: A Story of Experience. Published in 1873, Work extends this inquiry into character, talent, and the female kunstlerroman. The American heroine, Christie, leaves her prosaic farming community in search of work, independence, and “self-cultur,” as her uncle calls it, labeling “the wants of her higher nater” as “ridic’lous notions.” Like Bianca, Christie has a Carlylean faith in work, and eventually becomes an actress, but although she is an excellent comic actress, her dramatic talents are less defined. Additionally, the theatre of her time and place is more commercial. 27 Crucially, however, the skills Christie acquires as a professional actress are not wasted, even as she voluntarily leaves the profession and continues seeking the work and place in the world that will allow her continued personal growth and social service. Alcott’s choice to soften the uniqueness of the “woman of genius” in Work, to consider various possible outlets for the inherent emotional resources and acquired skills of an actress character, has the effect of making the artist’s journey more universally accessible—more “democratic.” As with The Half Sisters, many critics have been dissatisfied with Alcott’s plot turns in the novel. Christie’s story begins entertainingly with an independent series of jobs, but when she experiences loss of a close friend and extended unemployment, the novel relocates her into a variety of domestic settings which enable her recuperation from suicidal depression and illness. She marries during the second year of the Civil War in the last quarter of the novel. Criticism of Work often mirrors that of The Half Sisters, especially criticism of the heroine’s marriage 22 and the abandonment of her successful acting career. Like Jewsbury’s novel, Work has been seen as awkwardly constructed, flawed with “structural and stylistic breaks.” To modify this view of Work’s structure at least partially, Elaine Showalter argues “the novel can be read as coherent once we substitute feminist definitions of “work” for conventional definitions of waged labor. If work is reproduction as well as production, and domestic as well as commercial, then marriage is as much a stage in Christie’s working life as anything else” (xxxiv). This is certainly how Alcott “staged” Christie’s plot. Alcott’s writing vehemently presents women’s “domestic work” as strenuous and difficult labor, both physical and emotional; there is no “if” about it for her. Christie’s “actress episode” takes place early in the novel and she holds the job for several years, longer than any other, and the details of Christie’s emotional and physical work in repertory theater serves to materialize an ephemeral, repetitious, “invisible” labor. Christie works her way up in the company and is highly paid, but this only strengthens the recognition that her work resembles the unpaid, “invisible” work women undertake in the family, and the low wages they command when performing outside domestic work. When she leaves acting, her decline is rapid when work cannot be found. Alcott’s Work clearly draws from the American “woman’s novel” previously mentioned, a genre that flourished from about 1820-1870 and which Nina Baym surveyed in her well-known study of 130 novels by forty-eight women. They were often written by women at the request of publishers who aimed at the specific market of women who were either striving to reach the middle class or trying to stabilize 23 their class position in uncertain times. The authors of woman’s fiction expertly met their cultural clients’ needs and wants while providing them with singular role models of professional womanhood (Baym Woman’s xvi). Because the theater or actress novels explored in this study serve the needs and desires of a (young) female market similar to the one targeted by the woman’s novel, providing models of exemplary behavior, they share formal features as well. Baym’s description of an overt “teaching” formula for the sub-genre of woman’s fiction could almost be a plot summary of both Work and The Half Sisters: a young woman who has lost the emotional and financial support of her legal guardians—indeed who is often subject to their abuse and neglect—but who nevertheless goes on to win her own way in the world. Her “own way” is nothing like a success story of today, since it seldom involves more than domestic comfort, a social network, and a companionable husband; what makes the success is her overcoming of obstacles through a hard-won, much tested “self-independence” (ix). Individualism and a right to personhood was new for women, and hence feminist for the time (xxi). The crux of woman’s fiction stories is that women must develop a self if they are to survive a turbulent and difficult world. Critics have often noted that domestic ideology sought to extend the domestic sphere of women’s influence to the larger world; Baym points out that there was “no pre-existing American domestic scene into which a woman’s fiction protagonist could comfortably fit; she had to create the domestic scene that represented her” (Baym xxvii). Work and The Half Sisters differ from the woman’s novel in similar ways: they are overtly feminist, employ a traveling, acting female hero, and though they reference God and Providence, they explicitly resist organized Christianity, while the 24 woman’s novel is affiliated to varieties of Protestantism. But apart from being aimed at a similar audience as woman’s fiction, The Half Sisters and Work resemble both that sub-genre and each other because they all are written against the late eighteenth- century heroine of sensibility. The heroine of woman’s fiction was written against two types, the ballroom belle “who lived for excitement,” who is crippled by her “woman’s education” into the marketplace as a voracious consumer of wealth; and the passive woman: incompetent, ignorant, cowed, emotionally and intellectually undeveloped—whom they considered an anachronism from an earlier time. …She sinks quickly under life’s demands to an early death or a life of apathy, debility, and obscurity” (28). Proto-feminist women who wrote against these two types of “sensibility” (which Baym rightly calls “trivializing and contemptuous” of women), wrote in common with a body of British women’s “novels of education.” In Baym’s view, the antecedents of the American exemplary mode of fiction are the “mixed” heroine of the novel of manners as practiced by Burney, and even more influentially, English women moralist writers such as Mrs. Opie, Mrs. Barbauld, and especially Maria Edgeworth, with her combination of educational intention, moral fabulating, and description of manners and customs. . . .The writings of these earlier women can be understood, in literary terms, as an attempt to carry over into more complex experience and into the American scene the clarity of Edgeworth’s exemplary fiction blended with the accuracy of her regional novels. Drawn from these English sources, woman’s fiction then developed indigenously in America, and showed itself relatively impermeable to the influence of the major women writers in England during the Victorian age. . . . Signs of George Eliot and of Charlotte Bronte can be discerned in writing of the 1860s, but not before.” (Woman’s Fiction 26) 25 Writing after 1820, the purpose of the women who wrote against these “victim heroines” who lived entirely in their feelings was to “show their readers how to live” (Baym 26). Seemingly, the generic crossover between American woman’s novels and English exemplary novels is fueled by a teaching or mentoring desire on the part of the authors, and partially explains why the actress novels of Jewsbury and Alcott share many common features, even though Alcott is writing in the next generation. There are versions of the “theatrical novel” that seemingly are part of this tradition, though some are written by men. In “Actresses at Home and on Stage: Spectacular Domesticity And the Victorian Theatrical Novel,” Lauren Chattman lists “essentially domestic” novels with actress heroines and calls these novels “enough for a respectable sub-genre” (72). In Chattman’s overall reading of this sub-genre, the most talented actresses are “good” in that they wish only for “a home in which [they] can more properly exercise and display [their] virtue,” while the “stereotyped” actresses are “corrupt, selfish, and vulgar exhibitionists.” Chattman reads The Half Sisters as a typical theatrical novel that “reveal[s] the performance of domesticity that domestic novels tend to naturalize,” (75) and characterizes Jewsbury as “attempt[ing] to salvage the actress’s reputation by demonstrating that professional acting is perfect training for marriage” (76). The essay describes clearly the productive friction produced by the domestic novel’s formation of this particular theatrical sub-genre. In theatrical novels about selfless, unselfconscious actress heroines, both stage and home rely on female spectacularity and display while equally relying on fictions of privacy, exposing all 26 women’s gender performance as culturally imposed. However, to produce such a reading, Chattman’s analysis of The Half Sisters does not track closely the complexities of many key terms as they are used in Jewsbury’s novel; the essay itself does not examine kinds of acting, of marriage, of training. Chattman’s discussion of character dialogues about acting and actresses bypasses the distinctions the characters themselves are trying to make between kinds, or the distinctions Jewsbury is making between a range of cultural attitudes. Still, in other theatrical novels that Chattman mentions (for example, Justin McCarthy’s My Enemy’s Daughter; Henry Chorley’s Pomfret: or, Public Opinion and Private Judgment, and Annie Edwards’s The Morals of Mayfair), it seems likely that the contemptuous attitudes towards women Baym identifies in the late eighteenth-century heroines of sensibility—the attitudes the women moral novelists were writing against—has reentered the mid nineteenth-century theatrical novel as prejudice both anti-theatrical and anti-emotive. Hence, the actress-heroines of The Half Sisters and Work: A Story of Experience draw upon a complicated heritage of literary models of the performer, male as well as female ones, such that constellations of polarized values surround terms such as “home” and “feeling” in ways that can confound both authorial intentions, and critics’ readings of texts and generic relationships. Despite these challenges, it is reasonable to focus on Alcott’s Christie and Jewsbury’s Bianca as working women who are orphans. As such, they are driven to seek and create “homes” on every level available: in work, a working method, a mentor, a circle of friends, a best friend, a lover, boarding houses, the theater, a genre, a typical role, the 27 circus, a church, a factory, their own bodies and minds. Like the authors of woman’s fiction, they must theorize not only the kind of home “base” from which a heroine can move to remake (or “domesticate”) the world, but the kind of woman who can create such a powerful home. In the first part of this introductory chapter, I have been tracing various elements of women’s artist stories that made the actress a novelistic figure available to both Jewsbury and Alcott: literary actress heroines and exemplary heroines, the kunstlerroman, the novel of education, and the bildungsroman, all of which have been linked to autobiographical impulses and forms. These literary elements come into contact with the exemplary heroines of the novels of manners, morals and American woman’s fiction through many avenues of transatlantic transmission, paths that will be specifically discussed in the following chapters. Here, I now turn from tracing the influence of novelistic heroine figures on authors and genre to introduce the influence of historical ones—actors and other mentor figures, but also the authors’ understanding of themselves—all key elements in Alcott’s and Jewsbury’s unusual ability to create complex actress heroes. 28 II. I shall never forget how aggravated I felt one day when I was in the blackest despair. One of the commonplace sensible women said to me, ‘Ah, Miss Jewsbury, you have a charming flow of spirits, you have not learned what sorrow is yet.’ It is just because one is becalmed in despair that one has one’s wits about one, and can be very amusing for the benefit of such fools! I am never witty except when I am ready to cut my throat. —Geraldine Jewsbury 28 Saw Miss Rebecca Harding, author of ‘Margret Howth,’ which has made a stir, and is very good. A handsome, fresh, quiet woman, who says she never had any troubles, though she writes about woes. I told her I had lots of troubles, so I write jolly tales; and we each wondered why we did so. —Louisa May Alcott 29 Although some novels represented theater and acting’s cultural importance in stories of the artist’s development, nineteenth-century novelists widely avoided integrating the specifics of artistic training and practice in their work. 30 This may be understood for reasons beyond the barriers raised by anti-theatrical or misogynistic energies. Not only is the work product of the actor ephemeral, like that of the dancer, but it is also notoriously difficult to separate the artist from the art. A similar blurring surrounds the subject of the actor’s (or dancer’s) training. Because the artist’s body and mind is the instrument, and because exercises and technique are largely acquired from practice and observation, much tacit knowledge may be passed down from experienced professional to apprentice. This information may never become directly articulated, even in the context of published reviews and debates on acting methods. 29 For a novelist searching to portray the artistic growth and life of an actor, research gleaned from finished performances and books would be of limited use: inside information is required. The following chapters of this study focus on Alcott and Jewsbury, two novelists who chose to explore the life of the actor in kunstlerroman novels, writers who were uniquely constituted by temperament, education, and location to receive and transmit such “inside” information. For evidence abounds of the great influence that the age’s foremost American actress, Charlotte Cushman (1816-1876), had on these writers’ choice of the actress as subject matter and also their positive depiction of the craft and its skills as a conduit to personal physical and spiritual wealth, cultural asset and social capital. Chapter Two discusses the many cultural ties, social, intellectual, ideological, feminist, and creative, shared between the Carlyles, Geraldine Jewsbury, the Alcotts, Charlotte Cushman, and Fanny Kemble as a necessary framework for understanding the cultural roots and innovative functions of the actress heroine in Alcott’s and Jewsbury’s novels. Chapter Three uses close analysis of key writings to focus specifically on how Alcott, Jewsbury and members of their circles managed to question the beliefs of influential “sage writers” and close mentors Thomas Carlyle and R.W. Emerson— beliefs suspicious about acting, performance, emotion, and their effects on the individual and social body. The stance taken in their writing is at odds with the sages’ own performances and compositional methods. In contrast, an essay by Margaret Fuller on current artistic performances in Boston imagines a key role for 30 performance in culture, one that is therapeutic for the individual and society. Chapter Four closely analyzes the novels to show how acting, emotion and the body figure in these artist novels, forming unique hybrids of realist and melodramatic aesthetics and mixed variants of the bildungsroman. As I have suggested above, in the nineteenth century the analytical and synthetic work of the actor in developing a character can, and did, closely align to the work of the writer. Given this creative affinity, I propose that, in bildungsroman novels where the artist character is an actor, that actor often “stands in” for the author-writer with intents and results that differ from authors’ depictions of painter, sculptor, prose writer or poet characters. Because the actor-character concretely embodies an important, unseen part of the writer’s work, the study of human mind and behavior that underlies both acting and the novel is brought to the fore and made visible. The authors have a “scientific” approach to the actor character, that is, one that is informed by a materialist scientific understanding of the mind as embodied, that is a unique aspect of the theater novels explored in this study. Jewsbury and Alcott were aware that emotion and character are closely tied to genre and voice. In addition, the new scientific explorations of the links between emotions and the body—part of any actor’s learned craft—were integrally related to the life stories of Jewsbury and Alcott as seen in their own bodies’ histories, and in Alcott’s case, also seen in her long acting experience. The leading performers and writers I examine— Charlotte Cushman, Fanny Kemble, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Louisa May Alcott—shared an unusual degree of physical vitality and enjoyed their 31 bodies’ capabilities. They were not perturbed by labels such as “tomboy;” they firmly believed that exercise (and the clothing appropriate to it) was crucial for their overall health and happiness. As educated nineteenth-century women who needed to earn a living and support family members, they needed to resist a middle class gender ideology that encouraged them to think of themselves as frail and prone to break down under hard professional work. Carlyle’s doctrine of work was attractive because its moral and spiritual arguments supported the sustained efforts they had to make. These four women responded to Carlyle’s passionate writing voice as well; they all were noted for their emotional expressiveness, which contemporary neurological experiments have shown are linked to an ability to perceive one’s internal bodily states accurately (see Preface xiv and note 4). Their creative lives fostered thinking about the relationships between mind, body, and emotion, and correspondence and interviews show that they analyzed their experiences and participated in the current philosophical discourses and scientific research on these subjects. But unexpectedly, their correspondence also contains almost identical metaphors of emotional states as they struggled to live with debilitating health problems, and also shows parallel insights into mind and body causes and effects. Finding their way to physical, emotional and mental health again and again made them highly aware of current scientific investigations into the nervous system. Deidre David’s biography of Kemble documents Kemble’s compulsive adherence to constructed routines. Calling them her “monotonous habits,” Kemble knew she had 32 constructed these behaviors to control her neuroses and depression, and, as David puts it, “to forge a managed life” in spite of her inherited nervous ‘organisation’ (47). Despite the legendary energy and vitality that she shared with Alcott, Jewsbury suffered from deep depression, exhaustion and serious vision problems, and Jane Carlyle was famously and mysteriously ill with an ever-changing roster of debilitating symptoms including insomnia, bodily pain, migraines, exhaustion, and depression which now sound remarkably like an immune system disorder such as fibromyalgia (she died suddenly and unexpectedly). Likewise, Cushman, who was famous for her vitality, muscular strength, and stamina, nonetheless experienced recurrent nervous and physical collapses for which she sought treatment, frequently undergoing the water cure at Malvern in Worcestershire. 31 She eventually died of cancer, as did Jewsbury. Alcott’s health problems manifested themselves after treatment for typhoid late in the Civil War, and she died of a sudden stroke at 55. Recent medical analysis has revised the theory that she was poisoned by mercury contained in medication. Norbert Hirschorn and Ian Greaves studied the skin tones in Alcott’s oil portrait, and reviewed the long term symptoms Alcott tracked in journals and correspondence: “headaches and vertigo, rheumatism, musculo-skeletal pain, and skin rashes; in her final years she recorded severe dyspepsia with symptoms of obstruction, and headaches compatible with severe hypertension.” Their 2007 article published in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine concludes that Alcott very likely had a multi- 33 system disorder of the immune system, systemic lupus erythematosus. Her immune system may have been affected by the mercury. Significantly, the epigraph to Alcott’s Work, taken from Carlyle, preaches work as an antidote to depression: “An endless significance lies in work; in idleness alone is there perpetual despair.” Depression is now known to be caused by a variety of neurotransmitter deficits and malfunctions and may be related to autoimmune disorders such as chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia, in which deep depression and physical exhaustion are primary symptoms, along with sleeping disorders including both insomnia and narcolepsy. An affected person may become ill because of a genetic predisposition of sensitivity to environmental toxins, combined with exposure to those toxins, which may be both triggered and exacerbated by traumas and stress. (Parkinson’s disease has recently been shown to be caused by environmental chemicals altering brain chemistry in sensitive individuals.) Given what we now know about the numerous environmental poisons present in the industrial north of England and in urban London, where Jewsbury and the Carlyles lived, it seems appropriate to look afresh and lend more weight to their own speculations on vulnerable types of “nervous organizations,” including “women of genius” who knew themselves to be energetic and strong since their “tomboy” childhoods. Searching for possible causes and therapies, these intelligent women artists took each other’s symptoms seriously, and mutually supported each other as they shared ideas about mind and body interaction in their correspondence and in 34 their fiction. In their novels Jewsbury and Alcott tested the physical, emotional and mental attributes of their actress characters, and suggested causes and effects might lie in the structural relationship between body and mind, as that relationship was being theorized and tested by contemporary psychological science and philosophy. 32 While it has been shown many times that various Victorian typologies— including the “lines of business” in the theater—characteristic roles for which actors were hired in repertory companies—that tried to categorize human beings according to characteristic traits and behaviors consisted of pseudoscientific cultural biases and prejudices, we now know that genes expressing unrelated or random traits can group together in populations through their locations on the same chromosomes, and further, that certain genes are turned on or off as a result of exposure to environmental toxins (the fast growing field of epigenetics). In other words, for example, it is possible for certain physical traits or even typical behaviors to be common to persons with similar chemical vulnerabilities. Materialist Victorian hypotheses and modern neuroscience alike place emphasis on the body as well as the mind, indeed locating the “problem” not in the cultural and mental environment alone, but precisely in the interface between body and mind: what we now know to be complex chemical interactions among many different neurotransmitters. The mind affects the body, but the body also affects the mind. Elusive, changing symptoms that defy a solid diagnosis create a vacuum of knowledge that is too frequently filled by attributing the primary cause of illness to the repression of strong feelings—in life, in literature and in criticism—with analysis 35 of Jane Carlyle being one persistent example. The analysis of gender politics between Carlyle’s gospel of silence and Jane Carlyle’s submission to it insists that Jane’s somatic symptoms are rooted in obvious repression. This evocative rendering is but one example: “The fear of going mad was in part a fear of saying what she had learned was unsayable. Sooner than speak out her thoughts, Jane bodied them forth in tumultuous illnesses. The fight that she agreed not to wage outside the doll’s house took place inside her skin” (Clarke 130). Likewise, Elaine Showalter remarks on Alcott’s “psychosomatic illnesses”: “Despite her complaints about overwork and fatigue, this schedule helped her evade confrontations with explosive feelings and impeded desires” (xxxii). 33 It is past time to rethink the reproduction of this critical trope, since illness can precede both situational stress and the emotions that become endemic to a chronic illness and a stressful environment. Instead, I would read Jane Carlyle as using intermittent physical work and long walks as therapy for her unknown illness, with some success at stabilizing a body that possibly was under autoimmune attack. 34 This is not to say that stress and repression does not exacerbate the illness; obviously it does—but so can stress and emotional expression. The early decades of the nineteenth century saw remarkable growth in physiological knowledge, including the nature of the nervous system and the distinguishing of voluntary, involuntary and conditioned reflexes, resulting in a controversial new view of the material basis of the mind/body relationship, or a new science of mind. In any era, arguments about the mind/body relationship attempt to solve perennial problems, such as defining and distinguishing among mixed mental, 36 physical, emotional, and behavioral phenomena such as desire, will, reason, emotion, instinct, impulse, and reflex. Not only must these “faculties” be located in the mind and/or body, but also in the conscious or unconscious mind, however these relationships are constructed. Further accounting for these phenomena includes the relative importance of nature or nurture in terms of both the causes and the development of these human attributes. Still, physiological discoveries in the 1830s and 1840s, particularly the nervous system, created a new variety of sites in which the discussions took place and a difference in the evidence relied upon by participants. In a time when Chartism had failed to enfranchise (male) workers, and the last revolutions in Europe were being parsed for meaning, the political and social upheaval combined with the new physical basis of mind to remodel social responsibility and behavior. As Anderson explains, “Physiological models of sensibility, which outlined the sphere of reflexive behavior, and the influence of will and reason over that sphere provided a means of conceptualizing proper social behavior and defining individual responsibility” (156). During the nineteenth century psychology was moving from the domain of a philosophical discipline to that of an empirical science, so that past, present, and emergent discourses overlap with daunting complexity. Rick Rylance has usefully discriminated between four types of Victorian psychological theoretical discourse: the “soul,” “philosophy,” “physiology in general biology,” and “medicine.” The study of moral philosophy was becoming the study of the dynamic mind. But study of the body’s nervous structure could not include viewing the living brain at work, a 37 tool that has only recently become possible late in the last century. Nineteenth- century psychological inquiry had to rely on subjective reporting by the study subject. Following the lead of Garrick in the eighteenth century, who corresponded with Diderot, intellectually curious actors corresponded with scientists, assisting them to develop subjective analyses of mind-body interaction. The eighteenth- century pursuit of the “science of acting” permeated the writings of major theorists of theater and other arts that lasted throughout the nineteenth century and into the next: [T]he overriding interest in the relation of mind and body, as it appears in the work of such contemporaries of Garrick’s as Aaron Hill and G.E. Lessing, reveals itself as a necessary and inevitable concern for anyone interested in the expression of emotion—and that at least is one interest that would continue to animate discussions of acting theory throughout the next two centuries (Roach 59). Actors’ specialized practice of physical manifestation of feeling and thought offered a rich field of exploration on such issues as how repetition of mental and physical actions could result in voluntary control of usually involuntary reactions such as tears. Thinking about the nervous system through metaphors such as one that likened its operations to the sympathetic vibrations of stringed instruments, producing music without the conscious control of the musician, materialist-minded Victorians examined creative “genius”—often seen as the distinguishing trait of the truly inspired actor—as the effect of an unusually intricate or specialized nervous organization. This embodied view of actorly genius intrigued the novelists examined in this project. In Rylance’s taxonomy, they primarily engaged with the materialist 38 discourses of medicine and physiology in general biology. They turned to actors and the work of acting to explore, in fictional character and in narrative form, a changing (and contested) cultural understanding of the mind-body relationship in light of general scientific development, most specifically neurophysiology. Generally speaking, my study differs from many previous ones on nineteenth-century medical discourse and ideologies of illness in that it focuses on use of the embodied mind as a means of recovery and prevention of illness, a kind of health education. Specifically, certain actors, novelists and thinkers were attracted to these lines of inquiry, and developed a new phenomenological view of emotion as not necessarily an enemy of rational thought, but as a form of thinking that involved the body—even if their discourse sometimes employs the vocabulary of “spirit” inherited and not yet discarded from the language of moral philosophy and Romantic constructs of creativity (see Chapter 3). Still, their writing evinces an unmistakable new attitude toward acting theory, actors’ working process, the social standing of actors and the cultural and moral place of theater. At stake for the nineteenth-century Anglo- American novel are definitions and epistemologies of “character” as well as “genius” that shape narrative form. 39 Notes to Chapter One 9 Of course the cultural roles and values of nineteenth-century theater and novels is a huge topic in itself. Alison Byerly, in Realism, Representation and the Arts found that in general the nineteenth-century novel created a world where authenticity was the criterion that ranked the moral value assigned to forms of art: theater was at the bottom, followed by painting, with music at the apex (5-6). In the context of this dissertation’s inquiry into nineteenth-century theories of emotion, it is interesting to speculate if it is the abstraction of music that lends its highest moral value. In other words, if music is valorized because of its capacity to evoke wordless emotion in the audience—who may watch or not as the musicians “play” the musical text, thus controlling the whether they choose to heighten the communal sharing of response to the sounds by seeing others’ responses—then actors, who “play” many of the dramatic text’s emotions by manifesting them through their bodies, can be seen as interposing a extra layer of mediation in terms of the emotional journey of the audience. Some audience members may feel this mediation to be coercive and resent the multiple, secondary identifications with, or alienation from, the represented characters and/or the actors themselves, and the confusion between the two. In other words, it is a kind of anti-theatricality based on a desire to retain control of the emotional response— that advantages music as the most moral art. On the other hand, in the United States, as in England, mimicry of manners was an important strategy of self invention, and numerous speech and conduct books taught the convincing social performance of sincere emotion as the key to (middle class) social acceptance. In the U.S. in particular, democratic ideals created pressure for maintaining a path to upward social mobility through self improvement. This pressure clashed with moral disapproval of pretending to feel what you did not (and to be what you are not). This tension increased as immigration accelerated an “emerging culture of self-inventing strangers” who might not be worthy of trust. Graceful participation in the gestures of sentimentalism became a passport to class membership. This passport was an “unconscious strategy” to police class boundaries while still maintaining the narrative of a classless, unprejudiced society (Roach, Emergence 195, citing Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women). 10 Martin Meisel’s well known text Realizations is a deep well of connections between the arts in both the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; it discusses the longstanding practice of taking French melodramas and adapting them for the British stage. Another rich discussion of connections between novelists and actors of the nineteenth century is in the Introduction to When They Weren’t Doing Shakespeare, (xiv-xxii). For example: 40 Both [Scott and Dickens] built readily identifiable visual or verbal traits into their characters which gave an actor or actress a foundation from which to build an impersonation. Moreover, the Dramatic Copyright Act of 1833 encouraged hack dramatists to become literary pirates because only printed plays were protected. Oliver Twist, for example, was on the stage before Dickens had completed its serial publication in Bentley’s Miscellany in 1838” (xv). 11 In 1842 Charlotte Cushman articulated the reasons for this in an address to the audience soon after the opening of the Walnut Street Theatre in Philadelphia under her management. She wished to bring families “back” to the theatre boxes, and promised to “offer this community those good old plays that have secured the approval of the public, and which may be seen with advantage and pleasure as they excite a healthy tone of feeling by their morality and generous sentiments” (qtd. in Merrill, 52). Though only 26 at the time, Cushman knew that to keep the theatre solvent she had to attract the respectable middle class, women as well as men, who were continuing to embrace the novel as the repository and expression of their moral and emotional values, by elevating the reputation of both the theatre-going experience and of actors, including herself. Cushman had learned that other managers worked constantly to build this audience and spent capital to do so. To this end, Cushman pointed out that “the theatre I now have under my charge has been thoroughly repaired and decorated. . . [and] those who have visited the house since it has been under my management can bear witness to the order and quiet with which it is conducted” (Merrill 52-3). Cushman was a critical success as both manager and lead actress, and a social success in Philadelphia, but the theater could not pay for itself due to tough times. Cushman found her multiple functions at the Walnut Street Theatre too demanding for the financial rewards and risks. She decided she must sail the Atlantic and hazard a London debut. 12 Kemble probably received a higher percentage of critical admiration for her solo readings than she did for her ensemble acting. Louisa Alcott saw her read The Merchant of Venice on January 15, 1868 and wrote in her journal, “she was a whole stock company in herself” (Cheney 194). Another fan remarked on how much better he could enjoy the performance without the distractions of lesser players. Star touring primarily involved performing after little rehearsal with town repertory company members, who might be familiar with a different version of the play, or not at all. The same was said of Cushman: It was well said by a friend, on one occasion, “I much prefer hearing Miss Cushman read to seeing her act, because in the readings she is so well supported.” All the minor parts are given their full value and significance, and one receives a strong impression of what the drama might be if this completeness were more persistently aimed at. Often these small parts in able hands assume an unexpected importance, are, 41 indeed, like certain shifting tints or fitful lights in a picture, important adjuncts to the general effect, and meant to be such by the artist or dramatist; connecting links, as it were, whereby the passion or emotion is subdued or heightened; points of repose upon which the mind can rest for a moment, contrasting or enhancing the situation (Stebbins 214). Stebbins’ example is the drunken porter’s suspension of plot’s forward movement, suspending the discovery of the king’s murder in Macbeth, which was seldom included in contemporary productions, but which Cushman included. Recognizing the importance of small but crucial parts such as the porter, it is no wonder that Fanny Kemble and Charlotte Cushman enjoyed the broader exercise of their talents in their one-woman readings. Critics have long commented that this scene is evidence of Shakespeare’s genius for plot structure and his ability to appeal to all classes. 13 See Emily Allen, Theater Figures: The Production of the Nineteenth-Century Novel (2003) for a recent “psychological” theorization of the relations between the novel and the theater as parallel to the mutual “push-pull” dynamics of the unheimlich (uncanny) and the Heimlich (domestic), where theater operates as a “third, and generally though not necessarily degraded, term, against which warring novelistic categories can negotiate their position vis-à-vis one another” in the market by making “claims for and about literary value.” Both forms were contending with their questionable history as art forms in a moral sense, and so the two main art forms seek to distinguish themselves from each other by “abjecting” the other as well as warring with their sub-genres. The novel in particular has “generic hysteria” aimed against the theater (3-10). This is a fascinating way of viewing genre relationships, but its emphasis on competition diminishes the friendly exchanges between the art forms, their practitioners, their audiences, and their sub-generic blending and borrowings. 14 In compiling the following list of novels with professional actors as protagonists or key characters, I have consulted Davis, Rosen and Chattman among others. I have excluded many novels with actors or stage performers as minor characters (Thackeray, Dickens and other works by Eliot for example). Anon., The Actress of the Present Day (1817); Henry Chorley, Conti, the Discarded (1835) and Pomfret; or, Public Opinion and Private Judgment (1845); William Thackeray, Pendennis (1848-50); Mrs. E.J. Burbury, Florence Sackville, or Self- Dependence (1851); Annie Edwards, The Morals of May Fair (1858); Wilkie Collins, No Name (1862); Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret (1862); Joseph Hatton, Christopher Kenrick (1869); Mrs. Edwin James, Social Fetters (1867); Justin McCarthy, My Enemy’s Daughter (1869); William Black, In Silk Attire (1869); Mrs. Riddell, Home, Sweet Home (1873); George Eliot, Daniel 42 Deronda (1876); B.H. Buxton, Jennie of “The Prince’s”(1876), Nell—On Stage and Off (1879), and From the Wings (1880); Florence Marryat, My Sister the Actress (1881) and Facing the Footlights (1883); George Moore, A Mummer’s Wife (1882); Mabel Collins, In the Flower of Her Youth (1883); Harriet Jay, Through the Stage Door (1883); Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Miss Bretherton (1884); Henry James, The Tragic Muse (1890); Somerset Maugham, Theatre; Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie; Mary Austin A Woman of Genius (1912). Linda Lewis offers a more general list of nineteenth-century female-authored works about the woman artist that is not limited to actress novels. She includes Maria Jane Jewsbury, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Landon, Dinah Craik, Fanny Fern, Anne Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, August Evans, Louisa Alcott, E.D.E.N. Southworth, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Mona Caird, Mary Hallock Foote, Sarah Grand, George Paston, Mary Cholmondeley, Edith Johnstone, Mrs. Everard Cotes, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Marie Corelli, and Kate Chopin (7). 15 In her important book Actresses as Working Women, Tracy Davis identifies a close connection between the work advice given to financially ruined middle class women (increasingly common in the returning cycles of economic depression), and the advent of novels with actress characters. She cites the heroine’s “cold consideration of her options” in one 1851 novel in particular, Florence Sackville, or Self-Dependence. The consensus in both media offering work advice and the novels is that acting is probably no worse that the alternatives (governessing or prostitution) and in any case sinking in class is unavoidable. “This message was disseminated through guides to the stage, actresses’ advice to newcomers, and employment manuals specifically addressed to women. The successful communication of these ideas to employable women is indicated by their reiteration in three-volume novels about the stage” (Davis 17). 16 See Susanne Howe, Wilhelm Meister and His English Kinsmen, for a clear delineation of thematic and formal traits of each subgenre, and British novels’ mixed incorporation of them. Among the first followers of Wilhelm (and Carlyle) Howe discusses Sterling’s Arthur Coningsby (1830); Bulwer’s Percy Godolphin (1833), which employs several actress characters (152-159); and Ernest Maltravers; and G.H. Lewes’s Ranthorpe (1842) (224). For a recapitulation of the critical history of the Wilhelm Meister genealogy and a feminist ideological critique, see Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women. 17 “By the early 1840s Margaret Fuller was being called the ‘Yankee Corinna’ by Emerson and everyone else—and the Victorian apotheosis of the Corinne myth was underway” (177); for salon performances of Corinne, see Moers 184. Fuller is quoted in Faye Dudden, Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences 1790-1870, 38. 43 18 For an overview of feminist criticism on the female artist bildung and various arguments regarding its structures, as well as a list of female-authored artist novels, see Linda M. Lewis, Germaine de Staёl, George Sand, and the Victorian Woman Artist, 4-7. For a review of criticism on the bildungsroman with an emphasis on genre/gender lacunae, see Fraiman, Unbecoming Women, in particular pp. 125-127 and 135-141. 19 Kemble, Record of a Girlhood 1:202-03. Both Dudden and Moers cite Kemble in their literary/theatrical heroine genealogies (Dudden 37-38; Moers 188). 20 “In the novels women wrote after Mme de Staël, the actress did not become the principal descendant of her performing heroine, and for the reasons one need not turn to Zola’s Nana, but to Fanny Kemble’s Records of a Girlhood or to a woman’s novel like Villette” (Moers 189). In Villette Bronte’s Vashti is a “low, immoral” spectacle to Lucy Snowe. Kemble’s story of her debut, “Opening Night as Juliet,” concludes with her dislike of the acting life and her sense that acting in public was not a healthy occupation for women—or men: And so my life was determined, and I devoted myself to an avocation which I never liked or honored, and about the very nature of which I have never been able to come to any decided opinion. It is in vain that the undoubted specific gifts of great actors and actresses suggest that all gifts are given for rightful exercise, and not suppression; in vain that Shakespeare’s plays urge their imperative claim to the most perfect illustration they can receive from histrionic interpretation; a business which is incessant excitement and factitious emotion seems to me unworthy of a man; a business which is public exhibition, unworthy of a woman. Although one might object to Kemble’s gender divisions, given the negative public perceptions of actresses, the generally low pay and the dangers and rigors of continuous travel, it is not difficult to see why Kemble had her doubts about endorsing the profession for women. Moreover, Kemble believes the acting life inflicts injuries to both men and women, though in her opinion there are gender- specific moral differences. 21 As, for example, in a front page article titled “Married Life of Actresses” in the Brooklyn Eagle of December 20, 1855, which points out that the marriages of actors and actresses who continue pursuing their profession are generally attended with greater happiness” because of “the community of feelings and pursuits, and the constant companionship… . There is never a want of that something to do which leads to weariness, or the leizure [sic] for crossness, which is the greatest destroyer of connubial life. … Few lives are more replete 44 with pleasure to the world, and happiness to themselves than that of Mr. And Mrs. Charles Kean, so well known and well loved among us. Nothing can be more graceful and refined than their home and life, or more sweetly hallowed by sincere affection. 22 One clear example can be found in the column "Our Chicago Letter" from The Independent, Feb 29 1872 p 6, signed “Duncan.” This column item appears between detailed commentary about temperance and prohibition law and statistics on fallen women, their children and social agencies. Charlotte Cushman's readings have been the great feature of the lecture season here this winter. Apparently it never occurred to the vast audience that filled the somewhat ornate and amphitheatrical auditorium of the Union Park church, that, sitting beside a table of that platform, and reading what Will Shakespeare and Will Carleton had written, she was "out of her sphere." Curious that there should be the difference of—of a sphere between that and standing behind a desk on the same platform and reading what she herself had written! Indeed, coming out of the house, I overheard a D.D. of the straitest sect of the Paulists, who allows not a woman to teach, declaring, as he rubbed his hands with satisfaction, that the rendering of "Betsey and I Are Out" was "better than a sermon" on matrimonial quarrels. He rejoices in the instruction that Mrs. Prentiss and Mrs. Stowe have given with their pens; and so does not really object to woman's teaching, per se. He delights in listening to Parepa's singing or Miss Cushman's reading; and so concedes that women may appear on the public platform. But somehow he ciphers it out that it is not proper or biblical that woman should ever preach or speak in prayer-meeting! 23 The 1855 Brooklyn Eagle article (see note 13 above) specifically links its exemplary couple the Keans, actor-managers of the Princess’ Theatre in London, to Fourier: [T]hey constantly gather round them the members of their company, interspersed with literary guests, like Foster of the Examiner; Charles Dickens, Harriet Ainsworth, Mark Lemon, and Charles Reade; and perhaps, in the Princess’ Theatre is alone to be found that socialistic perfection for which Fourier has so long sighed.” The Keans are being admired for providing a private /public space (their home and theater) in which those of different socioeconomic classes, genders, and professions, including the famous and the obscure, can mingle on an equal footing. The article goes on to praise the training that talented actors receive under their management; teaching is another exemplary social virtue. 45 24 “From Staёl’s improvisatrice Corinne onward, most succeed in their careers, but as I note in the concluding chapter, fictional women artists of the 1890 decade tend to fail” (Lewis 7, fn 15). 25 Tillotson notes as a genre feature the “compromise between romance and sociology,” the “persistent motif” of the “inter-class marriage or love-affair.” I will argue that they also comment on these traditions [Reference the biographical origins of the actress marries a peer rags to riches, upwardly mobile novels as well as the following.] As Howe points out, H.F. Chorley, who reviewed The Half Sisters anonymously in the Athenaeum of March 18, 1848, “modestly” named his own novels Conti and Pomfret in pointing out that The Half Sisters plot (actress marries peer) was not original (although I argue this is may be the plot but it is not the ending or resolution). Chorley also named Harriet Martineau, Consuelo or “from some German tales a la Corinne.” Chorley’s review chastises Jewsbury for a lack of form and order that “a woman of genius” in particular needs to cultivate, and for making Bianca too conventional (like some contemporary critics, discussed later in this chapter). Chorley evidently believes that Bianca’s respectability contradicts Jewsbury’s actual anti-conventional “philosophy” and this weakens the book with an Edgeworthian moral righteousness. We would have Miss Jewsbury—as a gifted woman—with a career of activity, literary distinction, and social usefulness opening before her, examine herself closely. We would have her calmly distinguish between random exhibitions of passion and invective such as befit the insane Prophet, and those no less earnest utterances of feeling and sympathy which . . . bespeak a poet of the highest order. It rests with herself to do good service to the world of workers and dreamers (Howe 109-110). 26 I agree with Clarke that in The Half Sisters Geraldine rewrites the “irreconcilable lifestyles” ending that her sister wrote for her writer heroine Julia—it is undeniable that Geraldine’s actress hero Bianca chooses marriage over loneliness—but I will argue that for Bianca, the terms of the choice are significantly different because Geraldine situates Bianca and her career at a different life stage, i.e. maturity instead of youth. Julia’s success has been sudden; she is only 22. 27 Alcott’s portrayal of the theatre that Christie encounters is accurate. In Women in the American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences 1790-1870, Faye Dudden states “Women’s bodies became products in the entertainment marketplace of nineteenth- century America long before there were “mass media” (4). Dudden establishes that the development of the commercial theatre began in the economic forces unleashed as Thomas Hamblin, owner outright of the Bowery Theatre in New York, pioneered a bill of fare in the 1830s that expanded the hitherto small upper-class theatre audience to the vast working and middle classes. His spectacles offered more 46 relaxation because they relied on attractive young actresses for visual appeal, rather than verbal action that required a taxing level of attention at the end of a long day. By the 1860s, when Alcott began writing her novel, theatre was well on the way to becoming a capitalized business rather than a craft controlled by actor-managers, and was financially dependent upon burlesques and other “leg show” extravaganzas that used any pretext to display women’s bodies (155). 28 Geraldine Jewsbury to Jane Carlyle, July 13 1851; see Ireland 410-411. 29 Journal of Louisa May Alcott, May 1862; see Cheney 130-131. 30 Kessler writes in the introduction to Phelps’ “The Story of Avis (1877) that Phelps focuses on “the absence of emotional supports [that] prevents creative work from emerging,” not on lack of talent or material resources, but the “constraints to creative self expression women typically must confront. To this end she omits the arduous training that might lead to artistic success; for this we must wait for The Song of the Lark [1915] by Willa Cather” (xiii-xiv). Phelps wrote The Story of Avis inspired by E.B. Browning’s Aurora Leigh, and specifically in response to the thwarting of Dorothea’s potential in George Eliot’s Middlemarch. She asked Eliot to treat the subject of the permanent effects marriage could have on a gifted woman’s life and work in a great novel of “the Coming Woman.” Finally Phelps herself took on the task: in contrast to Middlemarch, Avis alters the focus and duration of the marriage plot (xviii). Wishing to present a different view of the married artist, in response to Avis, Louisa May Alcott began to write Diana and Persis, thinking of herself and her sister May, but when May died in childbirth Alcott was unable to finish the novel. 31 The treatment was beneficial to some probably because it involved a healthy diet, a regular schedule including plenty of rest and early rising, and much walking and bathing, with some evening entertainment. For Dr. John Harcup’s description of this health regimen, and how its wide popularity was spurred by famous patients such as Dickens, see the Malvern Spa Association website, http://www.malvern-hills.co.uk/malvernspa/medicinal/medicinal1.html. 32 The principles they drew from their own experience in coping with health problems were correct. Recent studies have shown that exercise lends a temporary boost to the immune system, as well as releasing mood elevating endorphins. Thus, a regular program of exercise stabilizes both body and mind, allowing a higher plateau of daily functioning, if not a cure for the underlying impairment of the immune system. 33 “Psychosomatic illnesses” appears on xvii. Showalter doesn’t deny Alcott is physically ill and relates it to mercury poisoning, but emotions are causal: “ill health 47 made it difficult for her to be patient and playful, and severe attacks of vertigo, headaches, dyspepsia, rheumatism, insomnia, and nervous prostration made it impossible for her to write. She unsuccessfully sought help from a variety of quacks, homeopathic physicians, and mind-cure specialists, but never could confront the emotional conflicts that expressed themselves in these physical forms” (xxv). Showalter’s introduction was written in 1988, and our understanding of various illnesses has changed, autoimmune disorders in particular, but many patients are still told by doctors and others that “it’s in your mind.” After trying “Mind Cure” séances with the guidance of two different mediums, Alcott herself wrote in a March 1855 journal entry: “After 30 trials I give it up. No miracle for me. My ills are not imaginary, so are hard to cure.” The previous entry in February notes “Dr. Munroe with good plain massage does me more good than Mrs. [N]ewman & ‘letting divine strength flow in’” (An Intimate Anthology 184). 34 Jane Carlyle to Thomas Carlyle 8/23/46: “The amount of exercise of body and mind I have gone thro’ has astonished myself, and proves, I think, clearly enough, that I have no “liver-complaint,” whatever other deviltries I may have. . . . Geraldine has kept to her purpose of not leaving me a single vacant hour up to the last minute. And her treatment, I believe, has been the most judicious that was possible. It has brought back something like colour into my face, and something like calm into my heart.” (New Letters and Memorials of JWC I, 208-211). 48 Chapter Two Artistic, Intellectual and Cultural Convergences: Charlotte Cushman, Geraldine Jewsbury, and Louisa May Alcott Ah me, these are sorry times, these of ours, for a young woman of genius! —Thomas Carlyle to Jane Welsh Carlyle, July 1841 She comes nearer to my notion of a woman of genius that any other I have yet seen. She has a fine creative faculty, which is my idea of genius, and she is strong, can live without either the affection or sympathy of others— live on her own resources in a way I cannot understand; but when she does care for anyone it is an affection that is as strong and enduring as a rock. She is wild after your husband’s books, and I have been saving up my eyes to read the lectures (Ireland 32-33). —Geraldine Jewsbury to Jane Welsh Carlyle (Aug 1841) 35 I do think you would find Seaforth “very exciting,” especially with Geraldine there to weep on your hands and show you how a woman of genius demeans herself!—having some notion of setting up for the part yourself, you cannot begin to study it too soon!—Helen, too, I want to go. (Huxley 75; italics in original). —Jane Welsh Carlyle to her cousin Jeannie Welsh (Jan 1843) We have had Whipple on Genius,—too weighty a subject for him, with his antithetical definitions new-vamped,—what it is, what it is not, but altogether what it is not; cuffing it this way and cuffing it that, as if it were an India-rubber ball. Really, it is a subject which should expand, expand, accumulate itself before the speaker’s eyes as he goes on, like the snowballs which the boys roll in the street; and when it stops, it should be so large that he cannot start it, but must leave it there.” —letter from Thoreau to Emerson in England (Dec 1847) The playful irony in the personal correspondence above reveals how self- conscious the era’s hero worship was from the outset, and how it was often accompanied by the elastic trope of the Genius. Competitive commentators in many print media batted around both concepts. The Carlyles themselves “shared a scorn for the fashionable worship of genius such as Thomas Carlyle was deemed to embody.” A “woman of genius” was much used as an epithet that signaled the 49 speaker’s familiarity with a constellation of cultural discourses on the definitions, functions, and positions of women of talent. De Staёl’s and Sand’s open enjoyment of their success and fame as gifted women flew in the face of gender conventions for modesty and, this convention being under threat, it became even more a social imperative that gifted women remain diffident and submissive in order to retain any claim to genius. Women who did not weren’t geniuses, or if this couldn’t be plausibly denied, as with de Staёl and Sand, their genius “unsexed” them. Thus, “‘woman of genius’ was well established by the 1840s as a pejorative term indicating a woman who demanded more attention than was good for her” (Clarke 146-8). Thomas Carlyle most often did employ it ironically (such as impatiently applying it to his mother-in-law), although he occasionally used the epithet as an accolade as well, and certainly Jane often did. 36 I maintain that the creative work and public images of Cushman, Jewsbury and Alcott challenged the threadbare assumptions that underpinned much of this semantic play. While satire or irony were frequently used modes for questioning “genius” and the “woman of genius” in contemporary discourse, nonetheless being referred to as a candidate for the genius epithet, in any mode, operates to put the artist into a category of difference. Nina Baym characterizes literary “genius” in the nineteenth-century United States as a general term employed roughly as we use “artist”: “in American antebellum discourse, being an ‘artist’ did not mean what it meant in 1890, say, when one could claim the appellation by producing work conformable to recognized norms for art fiction. In the mid-nineteenth century, there 50 were no art novels or art stories, and the literary artist was simply a genius—i.e., somebody who transcended norms altogether. Unquestionably, and for many reasons, antebellum women were far more hesitant to label themselves geniuses than turn-of-the-century women novelists would be to label themselves artists” (xvi). It seems helpful to me to consider how the word was applied to actresses as well. Aside from acting, writing was the only “profession” open to women (and the more respectable one by far). A competent working actress or published writer was referred to as a professional as a term of respect, and “genius” begins to appear when the critic wants to convey sustained excellence. Both Jewsbury and Alcott looked to Charlotte Cushman as a unique actress figure, yet their novels about the actress-hero inspired by Cushman were written in different countries and two decades apart. Even so, to a remarkable extent Alcott and Jewsbury shared artistic, intellectual, personal and cultural contexts and interests. This chapter establishes these connections, closely following them with the additional purpose of tracing why, and how, these three artists considered acting and mind/body science in their lives and work. Chapter Four builds on this one to analyze how their thinking manifests itself in the novels. There are various reasons for actress Charlotte Cushman’s large impact and success: her uniquely androgynous gender presentation, transatlantic cultural currents, compelling personal history, exemplary roles, carefully built and maintained social networks and media management, and the growth of a female audience attracted to the action heroines of melodrama and courted by theater 51 managers. 37 Many of these factors, as well as the curious obscuring of her historical fame (a remarkable phenomenon in itself), have been usefully explored in carefully researched biographies and scholarly studies by Joseph Leach, Lisa Merrill, Norma Clarke, Faye Dudden and Joseph Roach. Although theater historians and literary critics have mentioned Charlotte Cushman as the prototype for literary actress characters examined in this study (Jewsbury’s Bianca in The Half Sisters, and Alcott’s Christie in Work, Cushman’s personal, intellectual and philosophical connections with writers and novelists have only been touched upon. 38 Moreover, the influence of this massively popular transatlantic actress on the genre of the novel remains a subject for closer analysis. How did the cultural formation that was Cushman’s stardom (Roach’s “constellation”) participate in genre conventions? As a unique cultural and personal phenomenon over several decades on both sides of the Atlantic, to what extent did Charlotte Cushman have a catalytic effect on established narrative patterns for depicting the female artist’s education in the novel? In what specific ways might her carefully shaped success story have provided a template for overturning the pre-existing pattern of thwarted artist heroines of the 1830s (descendants of de Staёl’s Corinne and Sand’s Consuelo)? 39 This chapter explores in more depth how, over the course of the middle decades of the nineteenth century, including the post Civil War period of the 1870s, Cushman’s influence helped to propel the figure of the successful woman artist in the kunstlerroman from Romantic mythic models into those of literary realism, moving 52 from tragic sybilline figures or artists manqué to an emphasis on more positive and specific figures of “the woman of genius.” As we have seen, “Genius” functions as a key term; it links the large body of discourse on gifted women to the body of critical thought that defines genius in the actor (both past and present). Genius is also a term common in debates about actors’ abilities of mind and body and the role such abilities assumed in theories of acting process and its creation of “character.” As genius comes into proximity with hypotheses of character across multiple discourses in literature, science, the arts, and journalism, it influences the subgenre of the kunstlerroman, helping to shape a body of texts specifically about the actress’s education—her “development” into a new kind of female hero. As with many heroes, an actress could win admiration by embarking on heroic journeys and successful feats of arms. Charlotte Cushman dared to compete for cosmopolitan fame and fortune at a time when Americans were disrespected as uncouth, and traveling abroad was difficult and uncommon. When she crossed the Atlantic, Cushman had to negotiate both Anglo- American cultural competition and different concepts of acceptable performances of female gentility. Like Fanny Kemble’s parents, who had lost virtually all their money managing the large and expensive patent theater of Covent Garden, Charlotte Cushman risked her savings while trying to fill the Walnut Theater in Philadelphia in the hard times of the early 1840s. When Cushman decided that acting by itself— provided she attained high visibility and status by making a success in London— would be the better course to support herself and her dependent birth family, and 53 went to England, it took only a few months before she was well on her way to becoming the most revered English-speaking actress of the mid-nineteenth century. She was the only actress whose intensity, impact, and acting “genius” were widely compared to the legendary English actress Sarah Siddons of the previous generation, the “Tragic Muse.” Indeed Siddons’ niece Fanny Kemble, a not inconsiderable actress in her own right, said, “You saw in Charlotte Cushman the greatest tragic actress of the world” (Pickett 62). At a time when competition between British and American male actors was cutthroat, even violent, Charlotte Cushman managed her iconic status as the strong American woman without setting off dangerous explosions of national pride in either Britain or America. This was no small feat: with memories of the Revolution and the War of 1812 still in circulation, rivalry between Britain and the United States was bitter and mutual knowledge shallow. Humorous literary travel narratives pointing out American social oddities, technological deficiencies, and physical discomforts by Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens created real anger in many Americans. So did the obvious disdain and snobbery emanating from the round of British stars who regularly came to the United States, stars who earned high salaries, demanded box office percentages, and amassed fortunes on tour while supported by the casts of low-paid American stock company actors. Each nation carefully monitored the reception of its own artists in the other country: American actors who were too well received by the British had their attitudes scrutinized for aristocratic contamination on returning home; British actors who returned wealthy from years-long American 54 tours were suspected of losing their artistic edge due to playing alongside incompetent actors before boorish audiences. In this thick atmosphere of mutual distrust, in 1821 when British star Edmund Kean refused to play before a Boston house which he considered to be too small to be worth his while, his disdain was a major cause celebre. Returning four years later, he was pelted on stage and the theatre vandalized by a rampaging, hooting crowd. American national pride found an object in the muscular, manly Edwin Forrest, who became the first major American theatrical star through playing a barechested, noble Indian king in the eponymous play Metamora. 40 In 1836 Forrest toured Britain in Shakespearean roles, continuing a direct rivalry with the reigning British star, Charles Macready, that began gracefully and rapidly deteriorated. Their national identification and personal competition reached a violent apex in New York in 1849, when Forrest twice arranged to put on the same play on the identical nights, deliberately fostering attacks on Macready at the Astor Place Opera House, and finally ending in the theatre’s destruction by a howling mob of 20,000. While Macready escaped (in disguise) without injury, some twenty lives were lost when cavalry fired to disperse the crowd. The worst riot in New York history was sparked by rival Macbeths. Carefully negotiating her professional life and affiliations on both sides of the Atlantic, Charlotte Cushman was able to act with both Macready and Forrest and all the leading British and American actors of her day without becoming overly identified by her audiences with either nation or as the protégé of any particular 55 actor-manager. 41 She also established herself as the headline attraction—unlike other leading English-speaking actresses, such as Fanny Kemble, who acted with her father, or Helen Faucit, who played second fiddle to Charles Macready. Ultimately, Cushman’s power to draw large audiences superseded and lasted longer than any of the other stars of her era, whether male or female. Once she reached success, the only performers who caused her concern that they might draw away her audience when they performed in the same city were Jenny Lind (promoted by P.T. Barnum), and Charles Dickens. Dickens argued persuasively for the mutual benefits of copyright to American and British authors, but in the end his financial success depended on his wildly popular dramatic readings. The biggest hit was his sensational portrayal of Nancy Sykes’s death. Cushman originally set the pattern for acting Nancy in realistic detail, including a gruesomely physical enactment of her death onstage. Her horrifying performance made a success of a small part, and in doing so she created the vogue for dramatized Dickens in America (the adaptation had been brought out as soon as the first copy of Oliver Twist reached the New York dock. 42 Warned by her friend Junius Brutus Booth, (father of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth) that its physical realism would cast her beyond the social pale in England as too coarse and undignified—too unladylike even for an actress—Cushman never performed this role abroad. 43 These limitations of acceptable gender performance, even when representing a character on stage, was a difficulty Dickens didn’t face when performing Nancy’s death rattle a la Cushman. Instead it was the highlight of his 56 readings. But the idea that such a representation of emotion is debilitating, and discomfort with Dickens’s inhabiting the role of Nancy (a crossover of gender and class as well as from author to actor), appears in several contemporary accounts that attribute Dickens’s own death to the strain of his repeated, intense performances of Nancy’s murder—or so his actor story goes. Cushman herself claimed to dislike reading in public, but later in her career when her health had become fragile due to cancer and the demands of acting dangerous, she capitulated, and like Fanny Kemble, Thackeray, Twain, and Dickens, she traveled the platform circuit to great acclaim. Long ago, her career had begun as a teenager in Boston as a trained classical singer when her family was destitute. Singer, then actress, Cushman also published poems and short fiction in newspapers and journals. For many people, she must have seemed a modern embodiment of de Staёl’s Corinne. Cushman actively sought to create this image of giftedness in print. From the outset of her career in the United States Cushman was careful to cultivate connections with critics, writers, and editors, including Sarah Hale, the editor of the age’s mainstream conduit of domestic ideology and the cult of true womanhood, Godey’s Ladies’ Book. 44 Hale published Cushman’s early short story “‘The Actress’: Leaves from My Notebook,” which Cushman cannily tailored to her readers’ expectations. The stakes were high that she do so. According to Bruce McConachie, Cushman’s early career coincided with the beginning of a new interest in the actor’s psyche. The public’s attention was drawn in this direction because a new idea of the 57 mind was circulating, a “depth psychology that takes as its premise the importance of unconscious motivations in the creation of spontaneity, variety, and believability in characterization.” Roach calls this the “privatization of the actor’s unconscious” and locates it in multiple discourses, a concentration resulting in a fetishism of the star’s soul that ran from the characters they portrayed to their private lives: The public craving for information about celebrities was apparently insatiable. A flourishing genre of nineteenth-century theatricana was the star biography or autobiography. Another less august genre was the newspaper scandal predicated on the private lapses of actor or actress (one of the most unsavory of these, Edwin Forrest’s divorce, was predicated on both). In such a formation, the stage and the backstage collaborate to encourage a particularly complicated kind of fetishism, one focused not on a particular bodily part but on the whole soul of the performer. The larger-than-life emotions of the characters portrayed are traced to their source in the larger-than-life personality that portrays them. (“Emergence” 362-3) Godey’s Ladies’ Book under Sarah Hale’s editorship was a leading journalistic force in maintaining the cult of true womanhood. “‘The Actress’: Leaves from My Notebook” is not what one expects to find in its pages. It is not Cushman’s own story, even fictionalized, but a standard starving actress melodrama. (Leoline must act to feed her birth family, is tempted, resists, is betrayed, works and dies.) At first the title leads the reader to expect glimpses backstage through Cushman’s eyes, transparently acting as a lure to pull in fans. It takes some thought before a reader eventually identifies the genre (not a journal entry? Not reminiscence? Not autobiographical fiction? Oh, woman’s fiction!) Even while reading the story, the subtitle’s meaning remains somewhat puzzling, until we realize that the “notebook” in the title contains the creative fiction writings of the actress Charlotte Cushman. 58 The misdirection of the title evidences the journal’s participation in the fetishism of the “whole soul of the performer” that Roach raises in the above quotation. The story’s subtitle “Leaves from My Notebook” implies a backstage scene that can be glimpsed by the privileged Ladies Book reader. Cushman creates theater fiction in her notebook during a break from rehearsal (or performance! maybe even in makeup and costume!) as she imaginatively projects herself into an actress character (perhaps inspired by the actual sight of a poor young actress backstage!), and constructs a plot using her actress-mind’s double powers of unconscious sympathy and conscious artistic skill. The sentimentalism of the familiar story signals a gender and class readership constructed by the genre, uniting Cushman the star with other readers in an implied equality of taste and feeling. Most crucially, the title creates a mirror in which the fiction reflects Cushman’s feeling soul and mind—her nobility. In turn the fiction, as the product of physical words written with the noble one’s pen on pages torn from her personal notebook, guarantees the fictional actress’s moral worth (at least enough so that the reader is not tainted by her story—Leoline must die to complete the moral stain-free guarantee). Cushman did not write full length novels, either alone or in collaboration, but she did write other pieces for the press—sentimental potboilers and commemorative poetry to earn cash quickly in hard times, to keep her name before the public, and to foster the public acceptance of actresses as well as her own moral reputation. She 59 also authored occasional verses that she spoke in tribute at benefit or charity performances, and Ladies Book published sheet music of her songs. For all her efforts to connect with her audience in print, keep theater critics friendly, promote a spotless reputation, keep her name before the public and make money, Cushman couldn’t achieve financial security. To attain the financial clout of male stars such as Macready and Forrest, Cushman had long realized that first, she had to win acclaim in London, and second, she had to court the British media age to broadcast that acclaim. After she played Lady Macbeth with Macready in New York, he himself advised her to go to England. Arriving in Liverpool in late 1844 with seventy letters of introduction, Cushman’s first champion was Mary Howitt, who penned a long article on Cushman for her husband’s radical Quaker journal the People’s Journal. Lisa Merrill notes Howitt’s article “helped construct the image by which Charlotte would be known in England,” one of “self-denial and purity of life.” Critics often use the word “noble” in discussing Cushman’s presence and performances (see endnote 21), and it is by far the most easily legible attribute of the public persona constructed by articles and pictures in the popular press. Howitt was the first of many women writers who became part of Cushman’s circle. These included, most notably, Geraldine Jewsbury, who saw some of her first performances in England, and whose relationship to Cushman, we will now see, was all-inspiring. A focus on the mutual courtship of Cushman and the various media of her time must be matched by recognition of her tremendous personal appeal. Cushman thoroughly understood the power of social networks, and seemingly spent all of her 60 spare time boldly cultivating social connections and then maintaining them with visits in Europe, England and the United States, tirelessly entertaining in her own homes and the hotels she stayed in while traveling. She constantly wrote letters to stay in contact over long distances, and her written presence brought her many devoted lovers and long lasting friendships. But most remarkably, in a move that seems more modern Hollywood mogul than Victorian actress, she erased the boundaries among professional, public, and private to make these networks dynamic, so that they created a synergy that was more than the sum of their parts. As Merrill explains: Women who started out as fans or friends in one period of her life became lovers. Some lovers became ‘family.’ Writer friends created and publicized images of her, framing what she would come to mean to the larger community of their readers, and Charlotte Cushman herself constructed narratives about her life that were in dialogue with these images (13). In addition to the People’s Journal article, Mary Howitt wrote Cushman letters of introduction, which she used during her first provincial tour in September 1845 to meet Geraldine Jewsbury in Manchester, who instantly became one of the smitten adoring fans. Jewsbury’s attraction to actors lasted her whole life; she was later the friend of Helen Faucit. Susanne Howe, Jewsbury’s biographer as well as author of an important study of the bildungsroman in the 1930s, attributes this involvement to her own expressiveness: Geraldine’s dramatic temperament naturally drew her to the theatrical folk, Macready, Westland Marston, Sheridan Knowles—who visited Manchester and mingled with the other oddly assorted elements in the 61 Jewsbury drawing-room. Charlotte Cushman and George Henry Lewes were the nearest to her heart. Much to Mrs. Carlyle’s annoyance she “swore eternal friendship” with the American actress, who was playing in the north in 1846 at the beginning of her long and successful career in England (70). Although Jane Welsh Carlyle was bitterly jealous of Jewsbury’s friendship with Cushman at the beginning, when she met her Carlyle gave in completely to Cushman’s attraction in later years. One of her many letters to Cushman acknowledged her power as a role model for women: “without seeing you … without interchanging words with you, it is a pleasure to know of you in the same world with me. The influence of a strong, brave, loving, true woman may be felt at any distance” (qtd. in Merrill, 155). This triangulated relationship—bringing together the worlds of professional actress, novelist, and hostess/muse to the London intelligentsia—shaped Jewsbury’s popular second novel, The Half Sisters (1848). As mentioned above, the plot contrasts two sisters—one smothered by prosperous domesticity, the other nobly negotiating an impoverished road to acting stardom. The novel’s paired character structure may have functioned as Jewsbury’s means of exploring the pull she felt between her two passionate female friends, her own role models and genius “half sisters:” the brilliant, domestically restrained Jane Carlyle, and the acclaimed genius actress and unabashed businesswoman Charlotte Cushman. 45 Both Cushman and Jewsbury worked particularly hard to cultivate dynamic social networks that included both professionals and amateurs in literary, artistic and scientific disciplines. Like their friend Carlyle, even in a letter-writing era they were 62 especially noted for their prolific, wide-ranging correspondence, and hosted long standing salons. More than ten years before she moved to London in 1854, Jewsbury’s home in Manchester, like Cushman’s in Rome, attracted the leading artists and thinkers of the day, European, British and American, figures political and scientific as well as literary. 46 Jewsbury traveled to France in 1848 with R.W. Emerson and others; Jewsbury’s Manchester friend Matilda Hayes, the first translator of George Sand, was Charlotte Cushman’s romantic partner for ten years. Cushman and Jewsbury frequently traveled on personal visits to foster professional and intellectual friendships; a proud Boston native, Cushman had already met Emerson in England, and while on a trip to the U.S. in 1860, went to pay visits in Concord. There she met Louisa Alcott, who seen the famous Cushman perform two years earlier in Boston. Alcott had been acting in barns, parlor performances, and quasi-professional community theater her entire life, but due to family opposition had been trying to reconcile herself to earning money by writing short stories for periodicals. But when she saw Cushman, Alcott felt compelled to act in a professional theater in the hope that this was the proper “vent” for her “Nature,” and a better means to ease her family’s poverty. When first Kemble and then Cushman became transatlantic stars, acting seemed for many women an increasingly possible way to make money. 47 Eighteen- year old Louisa Alcott’s diary entry for August 1850 reads: “Anna wants to be an actress, and so do I. We could make plenty of money perhaps, and it is a very gay life.” Alcott’s vision of making “plenty of money” as an actress in tandem with her 63 sister owes much to the groundbreaking example of her fellow Bostonian Cushman. Like Alcott, from a young age Cushman was under intense financial pressure. As soon as she began working as an actress Cushman quickly coached her sister Susan and brought her into the profession, but even with two working actresses in the family they barely made a living as the rapidly changing economy cycled in and out of serious depressions. However, once Cushman achieved fame in London, she demanded unprecedented sums for her performances and achieved record-breaking financial success, adding impetus to the development of the star system and commercial theater as a business. Fanny Kemble offered a contrasting financial cautionary tale: pressured by her actor father, who was desperate for a means to support their famous but bankrupt acting family, in her teens she reluctantly left London to tour with him in America. During years of nonstop touring in America her large earnings were appropriated by her father; upon her marriage her father transferred the money to her husband Pierce Butler; and finally the resources she earned by her writing were exhausted by the Butlers’ famous divorce and custody battle—which Kemble decisively lost. Given the variety of risks Kemble and Cushman negotiated to reach the pinnacle of their profession, it is no wonder that Louisa Alcott quickly qualifies her eager “make plenty of money” with an honest “perhaps.” Her parents read her journal; Alcott may have added “perhaps” to show that she knew that winning theatrical fame is uncertain and that the wages of the regular players are modest. Probably her purpose was to disavow naïve wishful thinking, just as similar 64 comments signal a “serious” young aspirant today. Still, while Alcott’s written desire to pursue acting success acknowledged a risk of earning little, it was undeniable that Cushman had acted her way out of poverty and made “plenty of money.” 48 In the mid-nineteenth century Cushman’s personal story of stepping into the role of family breadwinner as a young teenager resonated strongly with a melodramatic formula that carried primal popular attraction—the story of the daughter who saves the imperiled father. The same dynamic operates in the popular attraction of Louisa May Alcott’s and Fanny Kemble’s personal legends of heroic striving. Alcott’s philosopher father Bronson’s improvidence and Louisa’s shouldering of the primary financial responsibility for the family, from a young age until her death, is the crux of her own legendary narrative in American literary history. In effect, public gender anxieties raised by the spectacle of female genius and ambition are mitigated because the daughter may be seen as inheriting her gifts from the father and because her genius and heroism is called forth by “exceptional” circumstances. The figure of the “unlucky” or victimized father usefully deflects the specter of a more “selfish,” immodest and unladylike female ambition to develop her gifts fully and to hazard her fortune. 49 This is not to say that Louisa May Alcott herself felt this brand of gender anxiety and took refuge in this story, or that her attraction to Cushman primarily stemmed from her own situation’s resemblance to Cushman’s biographical legend. By all accounts, Cushman’s powerful stage performances alone could explain why 65 she was the prototype for a compelling new kind of character on stage and in a novel—and why she might also electrify a similarly stage-inclined budding novelist. When she was 26, Louisa May Alcott saw Charlotte Cushman perform the two signature Shakespearean roles of her maturity, Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine, in a “farewell” run in Boston. Alcott’s long-simmering desire to be an actress boiled over, and she finally actively pursued a professional debut. Her diary entry for June 1858 documents the effect on her of the forty-two year old Cushman’s acting: Saw Charlotte Cushman, and had a stage-struck fit. Dr. W[indship]. asked Barry to let me act at his theatre, and he agreed. I was to do Widow Pottle, as the dress was a good disguise and I knew the part well. It was all a secret, and I had hopes of trying a new life; the old one being so changed now, 50 I felt as if I must find interest in something absorbing. But Mr. B. [Boston Theater actor-manager Barry] broke his leg, so I had to give it up; and when it was known, the dear, respectable relations were horrified at the idea. I’ll try again by-and-by, and see if I have the gift. Perhaps it is acting, not writing, that I’m meant for. Nature must have a vent somehow. (Cheney 99) Two years later, Alcott’s artistic ambitions and anxieties—for both herself and her artist sister May—were rekindled when Cushman (with her current domestic partner Emma Stebbins, a sculptor) were guests at the Alcott’s home in Concord in September, 1860, a visit which provided her with a vision of mutually supportive women artists who worked their way up from obscurity and poverty. Alcott’s journal entry reads: Saturday we had J.G. Whittier, Charlotte Cushman, Miss Stebbins the sculptress, and Mr. Stuart, conductor of the underground railroad of this charming free country. So you see our humble place of abode is perking up; and when the ‘great authoress and artist’ are fairly out of the shell, we shall be an honor to the country and terror to the foe,— 66 provided good fortune don’t addle or bad fortune smash us. (qtd. in Cheney 113) 51 Shortly after Cushman visited the Alcotts, in 1861 Alcott began an adult novel, calling it Success. In fact, Alcott’s journal entries in the year of Cushman’s visit show a concentrated convergence of the various writerly influences analyzed in this chapter and the first: Cushman, acting, poverty, fame, the turn in Alcott’s sister’s “bildungsroman” to marriage, Carlyle and subversive comic style. 52 Alcott managed to write several more chapters of Success in 1864. Nearly ten years later, at the end of 1872, when Henry Ward Beecher offered her $3000 for a serialized story in the Christian Union, she returned to it, re-named it “Work” and was “possessed” until it was finished. 53 The change of title from Success to Work is a fascinating change of emphasis from the end result (success) to the beginning and middle of the heroine’s journey (work), a change that has parallel echoes of her journal entry of 1850 about becoming an actress (“make plenty of money perhaps…a gay life”). A similar movement away from narrative endings to the ongoing processes of the middle in Alcott’s juvenile novel Jo’s Boys will be discussed later in this chapter. Alcott’s journal entry on the excitement and inspiration of Cushman’s and Stebbins’s visit (quoted above) also evidences feelings of humility and inadequacy, feelings which may even have contributed to the suspended composition of Success. Cushman herself had similar mixed feelings about female artists she admired, E.B. Browning and George Sand, who had dared to write stories of fulfilled female 67 artistic genius (Aurora Leigh and Consuelo). In a letter to Elizabeth Peabody, who was a longtime friend of the Alcotts and who visited Cushman and her circle in Rome, Cushman wrote: This used to be my feeling even with Mrs. Browning. I never felt that I could bring anything worthy to exchange with her, and I became conscious, which spoiled my ability and her appreciation of me. Unless I can utterly forget myself, I am as nothing; and this is why you care for me, why my own friends love me and judge me kindly; because, when I can talk freely upon the subjects which interest and occupy me, without a thought of myself or the impression I am making, all is well enough, and my life, my character through my life, makes itself felt. To George Sand I should bring nothing but my reverence and my admiration. She would produce in me the same feeling and the same silence she did in Mrs. Browning. Therefore I have hesitated to know her. But one of these days we will go together to see her and thank her for all that she has been to both of us; for to me she revealed my religion, and she has ever been able to produce nothing but good in me. (Stebbins 170) 54 As already suggested, Cushman protected her precarious position in society as an unmarried actress by energetic social networking, and in her letter to Peabody, a Boston Brahmin, she is careful to convey that she is a suitably humble worshipper at the literary shrines of Browning’s Aurora Leigh and Sand’s Consuelo. But she is also careful to assert her own value, openly claiming “religious” kinship to their character portraits of dedicated, genius artist-heroines. Her narrative regrets that her actress-character is too self-conscious of making an impression offstage to “talk freely” enough to make herself authentically known to Browning, but her tongue-tied self-consciousness and feelings of unworthiness while with Browning are now in the past. What matters more is that she figures herself as an artist on a continuing journey, seeking wisdom from her peers. The story ends with the assertion that she 68 already has found significant enlightenment and is not hesitant to proclaim her knowledge. The coda to Cushman’s letter encourages Peabody to join her in a future pilgrimage that would bear not only homage, but open witness to their belief in the beneficial effects of their “Sandism.” 55 Most importantly, as she casually refers to the poems that express Browning’s silenced awe of Sand, and her own “hesitant” feelings to approach Sand in person, these feelings not only join Cushman to Browning, but are revealed as natural and appropriate responses to heroine-worship of a great sister artist. The assumption that Peabody is intimately acquainted both with the text of the Browning poems and with Cushman’s feelings about them lend a distinct tone of insider “knowingness.” These awkward feelings of silent worship are an emblem of sensitivity and of potential eligibility for membership in an insiders’ genealogy of heroic female artists, both fictional and real. As theater historians have argued, the new phenomenon of transatlantic stardom was linked to a fast-changing, financially unstable era’s self-conscious need for heroes. For Cushman, Jewsbury and Alcott, this general trend became reinforced by personal contact with their real life heroines. An impoverished teenaged Louisa Alcott was thrilled to encounter Kemble one summer when the older actress was visiting Walpole, New Hampshire and Alcott was acting in local amateur theater. 56 An impoverished young Cushman avidly studied Kemble’s first performances in America and haunted the street in front of her hotel. She later cited seeing Kemble 69 act as the “foundation for whatever style I may be said to have in acting” (Dudden 37). If Anglo-American competitive nationalism and preoccupation with hero worship helped the cultural formation of the star, Dudden also calls attention to the degree to which the rise of stars such as Kemble and Cushman “offered a trope for rethinking the plot and the action of women’s lives” that dovetailed with the age’s feminist movement. Indeed, Kemble’s unprecedented “fearless” public life positively influenced at least two appreciative members of her audience, feminists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Margaret Fuller. Fuller wrote of Kemble’s “genius” after twice seeing her perform in Boston at just the moment Fuller was trying to imagine a career for herself. In Fuller’s 1844 Summer on the Lakes cultural prejudice against actors and social policing appear. It tells a tale of Mariana, a “high-spirited girl with a taste for costume and an eccentric flash of genius in all she does.” Her restlessness finds an outlet in performing in school plays, and she becomes popular, but suffers a nervous breakdown when she is ostracized and mocked for continuing to wear a bit of rouge (Dudden 38). As we have seen, Fuller rejected a career as an actress for herself, although many thought she would make a good one. But Kemble’s example of a successful and eloquent woman in the public sphere remained for Fuller to draw on and apply to women as a class. Dudden reasons that “A woman of the theatre like Fanny Kemble might provide practical examples of new female behavior, since the theatre was a public realm in which 70 woman already spoke and worked alongside men as their acknowledged peers” (39), and in fact the language in both Woman in the Nineteenth Century and the “Declaration of Sentiments” produced at the 1848 Seneca Falls conference attempt to extend the privileged stature of the gifted actress to other female public speakers. The precursor to Charlotte Cushman, Fanny Kemble began the cultural trend of the nineteenth-century genius actress, which was an important source for a new fictional female hero. As the niece of the legendary actress Sarah Siddons as well as her own actress figure’s contradictory personality, shrinking and daring, feminine and athletic, Fanny Kemble’s fame was unique. Her star formation added private personality to existing public knowledge of her famous acting family. Kemble truly disliked their way of life, and actually her openness about her doubts made it easier for both British and American readers to ascribe reality to a positive actress figure, and to accept it. 57 Soon after, Charlotte Cushman’s even larger success in the late 1830’s and early 1840s stretched “genius” further to include an “eccentric character” of the star personality. Though many other actors had risked crossing the Atlantic to earn a secure living, Kemble and Cushman became the first transatlantic female stars. Since the mainstream female gender performance of the time was domestic, the gender performance of the nineteenth-century genius actress was never seen to be ordinary. According to nineteenth-century as well as current cultural understandings of gender performance, Kemble would be considered more “feminine” and Cushman more “masculine,” but at the time both actresses were considered to be odd; they 71 described themselves as “tomboys.” At the turn of the nineteenth century in the United States, the tomboy figure developed in the theater as a typological statement of the essential American character of independence: Because British imports and French and German translations were the most popular plays of the period, Americans fretted about their cultural provincialism, and American dramatists strove to create distinctively American themes and characters. Eventually they invented a number of stock characters that were supposed to stand for quintessential American qualities; one of the earliest of these was the American Girl. Versions of the witty, coquettish, and enthusiastically tomboyish heroine repeatedly romp through early American drama— from Louisa Campdon in James Nelson Barker’s Tears and Smiles (1806) to Diana Headstring in Robert Montgomery Bird’s The City Looking Glass (1828). “The passive sentimental heroine,” writes one critic, “was simply an inadequate type for native dramatists, largely because she could not personify the essence of American independence.” (Dudden 20) Today “tomboy” is still a usefully elastic term, but replacing it with today’s word “queer,” though of course it is not equivalent, might better convey what Kemble and Cushman were risking in acting as tomboys long after they had left their romping girlhoods. An important shift occurs between the star formation of the British Kemble and that of the American Cushman which could be seen as a shift to a different collection of types known in American theater as “eccentric business.” “Business” refers to the “lines of business” for which actors were hired, and “eccentric business” evokes a corpus of specialized roles and talents that is somewhat equivalent to what we mean by a “character actor” today. 58 The emergence of the American actor was marked by a huge expansion in the types represented by the eccentric line of 72 business—generally, American regional types were far different in their class performance from those in the British tradition. 59 As Joseph Roach puts it, the cultural formation of the star changed to accommodate gifted American actors. These American stars (Roach’s examples are Cushman, comedian Fox, and Edwin Booth) conflated the “lead” actor (hero/heroine) with that of the character actor. Once in America, Fanny Kemble toured for several years until she married the American Southerner Pierce Butler, a conservative on gender roles who believed that his opinions should now be hers. As she rebelled against her husband and his family, Fanny Kemble’s public profile increasingly shifted away from the feminine ingénues and leading ladies she had performed onstage. A “fanatic about fitness and fresh air who thought her health ‘one of God’s best gifts’” (Clinton 56), she was one of the first to elect Bloomer dress. She was a favorite subject for cartoonists who poked fun at her clothing, her healthy appetite, and her athletic horseback riding. 60 Her in-laws disliked her: “they regarded Fanny’s flamboyant ways as an embarrassment people of their position could ill afford, and they demanded from her a seamless transition from belle to matron. For her part, Fanny was unwilling to abandon her distinctive appearance and social flair. When she insisted in dressing for horseback riding in Turkish trousers and on decorating her rooms with garish fabrics, her new family ridiculed her mercilessly” (Clinton 77). As Deidre David remarks in her recent biography of Kemble, “She had already appropriated and begun to revise the role of American wife as prescribed by sexual and gender politics” (125-6). 73 In contrast to Cushman, Kemble stirred up Anglo-American nationalistic prejudices. When her first book, Fanny Kemble’s American Journal, was published in June 1835, it created “transatlantic outrage,” even from her own family. “English newspapers accused her of impertinent ingratitude, and American readers thought her tone supercilious, her abolitionism naïve” (David 129). American Journal was elaborately parodied in print (My Conscience! Fanny Thimble Cutler’s Journal of a Residence in America. Whilst Performing a Profitable Theatrical Engagement, Beating the Nonsensical Fanny Kemble Journal All Hollow); a comedian even performed a spoof of the journal on the New York summer stage (Clinton 85). Her opinionated, breezy style was not only parodied, but harshly criticized for unfeminine vulgarity. Her written voice was attributed to her ineradicable, low theatrical background, which was characterized as a hothouse that forced open tender flowers too soon: a competitive, crowded, traveling business that aged and hardened women, even if they were not literally “strolling” players. Still, Kemble retained her reputation as an acting genius. Faye Dudden characterizes Kemble’s public image as avoiding the cult of true womanhood “and stood for something almost entirely different—neither domestic nor sexual, escaping the limitations of public and private through triumphant, undeniable genius” (34-35). For Dudden, Kemble’s “genius” converts sexual suggestion: she carried the inevitable sexual charge of any “public woman” (even if not a prostitute by profession) but her talent converted it into a differently charged energy. 74 In a slightly different view of the genius actress, Elizabeth Mullenix’s essay “Acting Between the Spheres: Charlotte Cushman as Androgyne” also treats her widespread reception as a genius as founded in her unique sexual charge. Women writers including Jewsbury, Alcott, Mary Howitt, and Kate Field admired Cushman for qualities and accomplishments previously thought of as male, “regarded her as sort of a feminist icon” and “idealized” her androgyny and wished to join the “alternate sphere” she had created, one neither private/domestic nor public/commercial (48). Mullenix reads Cushman as presenting not a blended gender performance, but that of a protean androgyne, someone who convincingly performs both male and female gender roles intermittently, sometimes to the point of “passing.” She analyzes Cushman’s Shakespearean performances of Rosalind/Ganymede, and especially Romeo (a role which Mullenix reads was written by Shakespeare as a protean androgyne, i.e. an alternating male/female gender performance). In this view, Cushman’s alternating gender performances so exceeded the given limitations that they opened up an alternate “third sphere” that was in between male/public or female/private sphere ideologies. She could exceed the male/public, female/private spheres without incurring the woman’s penalty of crossing the moral/immoral divide. For a moment I would like to consider Roach’s view of Cushman’s American star formation (a conflation of “eccentric business” with “leading actor”) as working in conjunction with different British and American national types of “tomboys.” As we have seen, Kemble’s image shifted toward the “eccentric lead” after her marriage 75 to an American imposed different social standards on her behavior, while at the same time her travel book American Journal branded her as a hostile British outsider. In contrast, Cushman can be understood as corresponding to Jacksonian America’s national “masculinity” in roles such as Lady Macbeth or Meg Merrilies (and her masculine roles such as Romeo and Richelieu). These “eccentric lead” roles alternated with roles which were traditional leading lady parts such as Queen Katherine. Cushman’s range in her parts, with the addition of her insistent dignity off the stage, joined the alternating gender performances in the composite “genius actress.” In considering all of these related critical views, with Mullenix’s argument on Cushman particularly in mind, I would add that the power to open or enter a third or alternate sphere for women artists may be found in a mixed constellation of charged meanings that might accrue around them—tomboy/androgyne/genius/heroine—but that if this alternate sphere did evade outright immorality, it could not however evade the sexual, at least in the specific case of female performers. Certainly Cushman did generate “sparks” onstage and off by repeatedly crossing highly charged boundaries. But Tracy Davis’ Actresses as Working Women has forcefully shown that . . . the frequent appearance of actresses (real and fictitious) in popular pornography demonstrates that the theatrical conventions that defied social norms were capable of receiving explicit sexual readings by spectators who were fully literate in the conventions of pornography. . . . As long as female performers were unwitting parties to this ‘invisible’ semiosis, they were subject to social ostracism and treated like sexual anathemas. . . .No matter how scrupulous their conduct was as private citizens, actresses had no authority or control over their public sign- 76 making of bodily covering, gestures, and spatial relationships lodged in a separate but symbiotically dependent source. (xv, 108) Hence, Cushman’s alternating gender performance (in various roles), might have minimized the sexual semiotics for some audience members, and it might have multiplied those associations for others—or both—in a complicated way difficult to analyze. Joseph Roach’s observation that “As with Edwin Forrest, critics frequently used metaphors of electricity to describe the effects of [Cushman’s] acting on her audience and herself” (Emergence 364) underscores the general shock that she administered. Certainly, “genius” operates as a convenient shorthand term that obscures more specific meanings such the sexual, but it moves between discourses and creates overlaps between them as well as operating euphemistically. Some male critics tried to undermine the power of the androgyne, located in both male and female. Using terms such as “epicene,” “amphibious,” or declaring it was hard to tell Cushman and Charles Macready apart, they suggested Cushman’s performance of gender was monstrous, denying women the male power of the androgyne. While threatening to a minority of male critics, most of the audience, however, like Jewsbury, Alcott, and Mary Howitt, responded enthusiastically to Cushman as androgyne. As Joseph Roach observes, In most accounts of gendered sexuality on stage in the nineteenth century, not a great deal of room is usually provided to accommodate a personality as far outside the norm as Charlotte Cushman’s. But not only was it accommodated by her audiences, it was embraced and celebrated. In such a career, the efficacy of the process of the formation of stars out of the nebulae of eccentric business is revealed. (“Emergence” 364) 77 Here, I reemphasize that it was Cushman’s force and amplitude in portraying any character—regardless of the role’s original size, gender and function in the dramatic text—that gave the primary impetus to the shift from Kemble’s British style of stardom to Cushman’s idiosyncratic American model. Cushman’s conflation of leading hero/heroine and eccentric lines of business meant that if she appeared in a play, her lead/character might change the plot, music and songs might be added or subtracted, and scenes might be relocated, amplified or cut, as happened with the character of Meg Merrilies in the stage the adaptation of Scott’s Guy Mannering. These shifts in dramatic text to accommodate a “character heroine” are mirrored in a corresponding shift in elements of the actress kunstlerroman of the younger Alcott in particular. Alcott’s writing and her fame as an author/character carried the new cultural formation that had collected around Kemble and Cushman—the genius actress/writer/heroine—through the Civil War into the later decades of the nineteenth century and into the realm of the novel. For fellow New Englanders Cushman and Alcott, two gendered American nineteenth-century currents enabled this admiring recognition. First, as American producers of culture they could bolster national self assertion against European artistic domination. Second, the tremendous tides of the civil war meant that enthusiasm for heroism of all stripes—a social call to arms— created recognition of their value as role models of heroism. Alcott’s first success as a writer/heroine came with the publication of her nursing experiences in the war 78 (which included her performances of eccentric Dickens characters for the soldiers). Hospital Sketches was based on her letters home and the incidents she acted out for her circle in Concord. Both Cushman and Alcott raised significant sums of money for the war effort in charity performances; Cushman sailed from Europe to do so. Their efforts evoked the classic amazon as well as the descendant of the Puritan foremothers: the archetype of the independent New England girl, which is a subtype of the established “Yankee” character of stage tradition: an extension of the blend of lead actor/eccentric character into a female hero (not “heroine”). A verbally witty version appeared in melodrama in the low comedy scenes known as the “lively girl.” Often paired with a young Yankee male, the couple parodies the serious plot elements of the melodrama, directly exposing melodramatic conventions. 61 The daring and impudent “lively girl” closely resembles Alcott’s Jo and aspiring actress Josie in the March family novels, as well as Alcott’s original comic characters, who parody both feminist and anti-feminist rhetoric and Transcendentalist lectures (see Chapter 3). In reading close contemporaries’ impressions of Alcott, it is apparent that like Charlotte Cushman, Alcott fully embodied her internal sense of gender from an early age (the “tomboy” epithet is applied by others and adopted by Cushman and Alcott). Again like Cushman, Alcott honed her talent for bodily expression, and was able to communicate her gender character so strongly that, over time, transatlantic social groups accepted, and celebrated them both as unique women who were simply 79 unable to be anyone else, or to embody and express a more typical gender type— they were forces of nature born to play strong characters. It has not been fully recognized that for Alcott, being a “tomboy” meant a feeling of gender rebellion and discomfort that did not lessen over time. In a magazine article, “Recollections of My Childhood,” written for the Youth’s Companion shortly before she died, Alcott confessed to her competitive drive: “No boy could be my friend until I had beaten him in a race, and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences and be a tomboy” (Shealy 34). In Alcott’s terms, “tomboy” is a minimum standard for girls, while Alcott had to challenge the boys. Apparently Alcott bested them all. Clara Gowing, a close Concord friend of the same age as Louisa, recalled that at thirteen Louisa was “the fleetest runner in school, and could walk, run and climb like a boy” (Shealy 135). Frederick Willis boarded with the Alcotts in Concord for several years and became Mrs. Alcott’s confidante and “son.” He remembers that Louisa “could run like a gazelle. She was the most beautiful girl runner I ever saw. She could leap a fence or climb a tree as well as any boy and dearly loved a good romp. We have many times clambered together into the topmost branches of the tall trees at Hillside” (Shealy 177). There are many references to Alcott’s physical restlessness and impulsivity; seemingly she was an unusually gifted athlete who was addicted to daring physical feats. Risk taking and impulsivity are behaviors more common to young males. Those that knew Alcott well and wrote about their memories of her do not use the word “tomboy” but recall instead that she strongly felt she should have been 80 born a boy. As they try to convey their memories of Alcott’s gender expression as innate, the term most of them use is “boy nature.” One of her two nephews explained “She always wanted to be a boy, you know, and somehow she felt that she understood boy-nature better. I don’t think the fact that we two youngsters were boys had anything to do with it” (160). Gowing and Willis, the companions of her Concord adolescence, use much more suggestive language. Gowing states “That she was not a boy was one of her great afflictions,” and Willis recalls “Louisa always lamented she was not born a boy” (178). The strong word choices and blunt style of these declarations conveys Alcott’s experience of gender difference was not merely frustrating or restrictive, but painful to her. Alfred Whitman was ten years younger than Louisa, but they became close as fellow actors in the Concord Dramatic Union and corresponded for years. His description in a 1901Ladies’ Home Journal article of the gap between Alcott’s literary persona and his memory of her in her twenties is telling: [J]ustice has never been done to the sweetest and most attractive side of her nature—her real love for boys, which sprang from the boy nature that was hers in so marked a degree; and how our hearts go out to her as she makes her appeals for a proper recognition of this quality. She always said she ought to have been a boy, and that she could not be was one of the many crosses she had to bear . . . (102). Whitman clearly experienced Louisa’s “boy nature” as authentic as well as the larger part of her nature overall (“marked degree”). He also characterizes it as her “sweetest and most attractive” side. The guarantee for her boy nature, then, is that it is also (oddly) feminine. There is a distinct echo of nineteenth-century liberation 81 rhetoric in Whitman’s call for “justice,” and his prompting of Alcott’s readers to take seriously the appeals in her writing for recognition of “this quality.” Whitman’s “crosses to bear,” like Gowing’s “afflictions” and Willis’s “lament,” draws from Christian narrative tradition to dramatize that for Louisa, it was a lifelong tragedy that she could not be a boy. In a way that was unusual for her, Alcott cooperated with Louise Chandler Moulton’s interview article for the compendium Our Famous Women, published in 1884. Moulton’s account evidences that even as an older woman Alcott was still reflecting on aspects of her experience of gender, including sexuality. In this period Alcott had been chronically ill for years; she died only three years later in 1888. In the heart of the interview, Moulton marvels that Louisa actually was the author of the “lurid” novel A Modern Mephistopheles, which initially was published as part of a “No Name” anonymous author series. Moulton is unable to fathom how Alcott could have so departed from her nature, that is, a flow of wholesome goodness, to write of drug dens and the like. Although Alcott does not reveal that she wrote many sensation stories for the penny dreadfuls, she assures Moulton that she has an innate taste for the sensational and exotic and enjoyed writing it. Moulton reframes Alcott’s unexpected response as an example of Alcott’s playfulness and lively imagination: How well I remember the humorous twinkle in her eyes, which half belied the grave earnestness of her manner, when she told me once that she was inclined to believe in the transmigration of souls. “I have often thought,” she said, “that I may have been a horse before I was Louisa Alcott. As a long-limbed child I had all a horse’s delight 82 in racing through the fields, and tossing my head to sniff the morning air. Now, I am more than half-persuaded that I am a man’s soul, put by some freak of nature into a woman’s body.” “Why do you think that?” I asked, in the spirit of Boswell addressing Dr. Johnson. “Well, for one thing,” and the blue-gray eyes sparkled with laughter, “because I have fallen in love in my life with so many pretty girls, and never once the least bit with any man.” (Moulton 39) Moulton notes that the twinkle seems to “half belie” the grave earnestness, but stays in line with the genre of intimate authorial chats by setting up Alcott’s declaration of same sex desire as a punch line to a women’s joke (“a good man is hard to find).” Since Alcott guarded her privacy, limited her interviews, and destroyed journals and correspondence, 62 it is striking that she deliberately emphasized this self characterization in this important conversation, knowing that what she said to Moulton would appear in Our Famous Women. It is possible to read this exchange as Alcott as mischievously using Moulton’s innocence to signal through her to a “knowing” audience; it is also possible to see Moulton as participating in the signaling. Nevertheless, Alcott seems to take this opportunity to reflect openly on the persistence and strength of her long term experience of gender difference and to pass on that experience. Without unduly imposing our own formulations of gender, it still should be possible to listen to Alcott and her chroniclers with new ears. While it would be anachronistic to label Alcott’s gender discontent with a current term such as gender dysphoria, the contemporary connotations of “tomboy” imply a developmental phase 83 of active physicality that primarily takes place in childhood and adolescence, one that sometimes includes a sense of androgynous gender. I have been arguing that the “tomboy as developmental phase” was not Alcott’s experience. She sought to expand the material conditions that hampered girls and women from adult citizenship as an active feminist, particularly obtaining the vote and equal pay. 63 Though Alcott often said she understood boys better than women, girls, or men, clearly Alcott both identified with women and loved them. Although Alcott had created “Aunt Jo” as her main authorial persona—a storytelling, tomboy spinster aunt—and maintained that figure in print until the end, in the Moulton interview Alcott reaches back to the beloved “lively girl” character type of earlier nineteenth-century melodrama. As Alcott invokes this figure, she defamiliarizes its heteronormative gendering. The casting freedom afforded by the local amateur stock companies gave Alcott other ways to push against gender. Following a long stage tradition of women playing certain male roles (Cushman was a recent, and the most famously successful example), Alcott too performed in male parts on stage. Off stage, on one occasion she completely fooled Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son Julian into thinking she was an Alcott family male cousin visiting from England, which had been mentioned to Julian as imminent for some time. In Hawthorne’s account, Alcott played the cousin as a slender effeminate complete with drawling accent, mustache, and a monocle which “he” popped out of his eye. This arrogant pompinjay’s manner finally completely enraged Julian when the disguised Alcott took the awful liberty of putting “his” arm around the waist of his “cousin,” Louisa’s youngest sister May, at 84 whose blond-ringletted altar Julian then worshipped. Shockingly, May appeared to enjoy the presumptuous gesture, leaning her head on his shoulder. At the point Julian was stepping forward to administer the manly American correction of English rudeness clearly called for, the Twit snatched off his hat, Louisa’s long hair came down, and the two sisters whooped with laughter at their victory and capered into the house. Offstage, Alcott pushed the limits of female decorum expected of a woman in her late twenties. Hawthorne speculated the hasty retreat was because of her immodest male trousers, but like many other contemporaries, he admired her as a creator of original comedy, and he gives Alcott sartorial license as “the life of Concord” and a “born actress.” Such impudent “bonhomie” can be one of the signs of “genius” (see endnote 26). Here too Cushman had been a public example. Not only did Cushman play many role roles onstage, but offstage she often dressed as a man from the waist upwards, and Cushman’s overcoat and boots apparently were also “men’s.” 64 This was duly noted in the press. It is possible Cushman had shown Geraldine Jewsbury the benefits of an unusual public performance of gender. Jewsbury did not perform onstage, but loved to shock people by smoking cigars, indulged in free emotional expression, and let it be known that she had proposed marriage to several men. 65 Geraldine Jewsbury’s eccentric performances were apparently more easily accepted by the mixed society (class, occupation and nationality) in industrial Manchester than the society of literary London. All these “performances,” many tinged with 85 comedy, parody or satire, were motivated by the feminist liberation politics of the performers. The appropriation of masculine props by these women is related to their overall gender presentation, but I would like to emphasize what I think was their own “actor’s” understanding and use of alternating gender performances. Their street and stage costumes allowed them to assume, to draw from and deploy the assertive inner resources that they needed. Their costumes provided a physically comfortable liberation, but also one that expanded their always gender-inflected character range into “eccentric” lines of business. This trend in theater worked well for them in overlapping with the already ironized “woman of genius” formation, because the “eccentric character” combined with “woman of genius” even further complicated its problematic dynamics of exclusion—that is, that the more of a public genius you might be, the less “womanly” you probably were—to the point that it helped them to negotiate that exclusion by making its overdetermination of meaning even more obvious. Still, additional problems are posed by the invisibility of labor, always a difficulty for women and actors alike. Lack of visible labor goes some way in explaining the efforts in the novels to actualize all kinds of labor, particularly emotional labor, and to argue its crucial role in both art and society. Gustavus Stadler’s recent study of the American cultural politics of the figure of the nineteenth-century genius also identifies a category of “queer genius,” one that includes race and ethnicity as well as gender in a “fantasy” of unalienated labor: 86 Ultimately, genius is a useful term for examining cultural politics, rather than simply a mystificatory one, because of the insight the category provides into the politics of deciding what counts as labor, especially in the cultural area. The association between genius and Jewishness, and genius and sexuality, may well have originated as a quasi-racial alibi in relation to labor, connecting artistic production by people of color, women and queers to a fantasy of labor so unalienated that one need not even exert one’s will to do it: the energy is merely in the “blood.” (Stadler 168) Although Stadler includes Alcott in his category of queer geniuses and their “free labor,” he does not analyze Alcott as a performer. Indeed, Alcott was extremely conscious that her acting made a great deal of money for charity while she herself went unpaid. In a primary example of the invisible unalienated labor of the queer genius, even before she became famous as a bestselling author, Alcott was locally famous for her improvised “Mrs. Jarley” performance, which she performed many times for charity. Newspapers reported how she convulsed her audience by making local in- jokes as she guided them around her “waxworks.” After her national fame, her improvisatory ability in comedy became more widely known. A Chicago Tribune article of February 2, 1879, (Work was published in 1873), reported on the elaborate Boston “Author’s Carnival” held in the large Music Hall. It was “the most successful amateur entertainment ever given in Boston” even though it charged “opera” ticket prices ranging from one dollar to two, and after its run (extending over several weekends), there was discussion of making it a professional production. The subtitle heading of the Tribune article was “A New Discovery About Louisa Alcott”: 87 Louisa Alcott as Mrs. Jarley was a fine success. Miss Alcott is tall, and naturally determined-looking,—a sort of go-ahead expression on her face and in her carriage,—and her dress of smart green woolen stuff, with its narrow ruffle, pink stockings, showing above laced slippers, the wide white collar, red shawl, and enormous bonnet of green silk lined with pink, with a feather standing on the defensive, was something to be seen and not described. The costume was copied as exactly as possible from the Cruikshank illustrations. Her remarks as a show-woman were copied from nobody. Take all the fun that can be found in all the stories she has written altogether, and a fair idea couldn’t be given of the wit and humor that she managed to put into her Mrs. Jarley. Somebody remarked apropos, ‘Louisa Alcott has written some very nice, successful books for children but I’d no idea she had genius until tonight.’ Alcott’s status as a successful author works to cement her ownership of her original material as a “show-woman,” which otherwise may have been in doubt, but it also works against her to disguise the wit and humor in her books for children as merely “fun.” Her recognition as a “genius” depends on the surprise of seeing her “spontaneously” composing in character as an actress, while the years of labor that went into her Mrs. Jarley performance remains invisible along with her adult novels. We have come some way in understanding the personal networks and cultural crosscurrents that in combination, beginning in the 1840s, helped to create the conditions for positive actress heroines to emerge with a new story. But how did the longstanding contemptuous attitude “only an actor” (which signaled among other messages that actors are deficient or lazy in higher intelligence, and essentially instinctive mimetics) give way to celebrations of the genius performing artist, who was understood to be a creator of character and co-creator of the performance text— even praised for redistributing its genre affiliations? What were some of the ways 88 that public intellectuals and the general public understood acting and the social function of theater? The cult of Shakespeare that built up over the nineteenth century is a common thread in the general belief in actors’ social, cultural and artistic value as experts in human character and their rise in status from “imitators” to “creators.” Actresses in particular were able to leverage their gender to join the female scribbling masses as thinking artists. Their efforts to carve out a place as experts on character and respectable purveyors of high culture took two main forms: they imagined complete life histories of the Shakespearean heroines they played, and analyzed character, motive and feeling. Their readings were based on both Shakespeare’s written text and the performance text they “co-authored” with Shakespeare and the other players. Geraldine Jewsbury often urged her friend Helen Faucit (Cushman’s acting rival) to write down her interpretations. Faucit finally did so when Jewsbury was mortally ill with cancer in 1880, beginning with a series of articles in Blackwood’s Magazine which Blackwood collected in 1885 and published in book form, On Some of Shakespeare’s Female Characters (Carlisle 245). Faucit was among only one in a line of women who authored nineteenth- century Shakespearean character articles or books earlier in the century. Her predecessors were Sarah Siddons, Anna Jameson (an influential proponent of women’s rights, art critic, friend of Fanny Kemble and later Cushman), and Fanny Kemble. 66 The subject of this character writing was often the nobility of queens and bears some generic resemblance to conduct books. In one example, a controversial 89 issue for decades was the interpretation of Lady Macbeth’s character and motives, which often turned on how to play her as a gender performance: how “masculine,” how “feminine?” Did she control her husband, or he control her? Did she desire power for herself, or did she do it all for love of him? The actress novel sub-genre develops with and from these actress-authored character studies, as does the theater’s development of the “star system” which relied on the audience’s desire to see star actresses playing iconic characters in single, key scenes. In these touchstone star turns, audiences could see a concentrated burst of acting power, and join in the constant conversation that evaluated actresses’ relative suitability for the roles and their interpretations. Lady Macbeth and Queen Katherine in Henry VIII were the two sides most often stamped on the sides of this particular cultural coin, that of the “tragic muse.” 67 The dramatic heroine character studies, the novels, and the theater all ride the same currents, including the discourses on marriage, the woman question, moral development, and epistemologies and definitions of character. These popular cultural productions were being retailed to (and produced by) seekers of the middle class respectability to be found in knowledge of the arts and culture. As a result, actresses were instrumental in creating the positive public image that actors could be experts and original creators of art. Judith Rosen follows Nancy Armstrong in asserting that “Shakespeare’s heroines were gaining tremendous importance as figures of interiority and as instruments of national culture” (Armstrong’s argument is that women gained 90 cultural influence as the crucial interpreters and disseminators of the moral truths art contained). Because Shakespeare’s heroines were seen as the embodiment of the moral in Shakespeare, they moved into the center of Shakespearean criticism, and also conferred “creator” status on the female moral interpreters, in print and on stage. In fact, several glowing reviews of Helen Faucit’s endow her with the power of the poet. Her interpretation of Lady Macbeth stressed her “womanly” devotion to her husband rather than her own ambition, making Lady Macbeth a less monstrously inhuman figure and Faucit a genius for certain Victorian critics. The Glasgow Herald review of 1848 goes so far as to say “her versatility of power and variety of conception not only keep pace with Shakespeare’s imagination, but outstrip it” (42- 57). Actresses’ production of critical literature and fiction that was closely tied to their artistic process helped to “authorize” the rise in acting’s respectability and value as an art as well as an occupation, even if it had not yet attained the respectability of a “profession.” 68 But how did a turn to the actor’s experience of playing a role as a reliable source of knowledge on character affect general public discourse on the cultural and moral value of actors and the theater? If actors increased their cultural capital and authority by sharing their work process, how did they understand it and study it themselves? What acting theories did they develop from and test against their own practice? What written texts did they feel most accurately represented their experience and explained their own thinking? How did these conversations filter into the kunstlerroman? To explore these questions, I turn 91 to the working methods and theories of Cushman, Jewsbury and Alcott, examining them through the cross-discourse prisms of “character” and “genius.” In the early 1840s Cushman and her Philadelphia friend Anne Brewster studied acting texts as well as Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Chaucer. According to Brewster, they spent many mornings reading books and plays and talking them over together before Cushman went to the Walnut Street Theater for her rehearsals and management duties: She always asked me to read aloud her part for the evening; sometimes it was uninteresting and passed without comment; sometimes it was from a famous play, and led us to a long and pleasant reading of the whole work. We plunged into the clear wells of old English poesy with all the enthusiasm of youth. Without thinking of, or meaning to go through, a thorough and instructive course of poetical dramatic literature and criticism, we did so. Up to that time Miss Cushman had studied her parts simply as a professional, without sufficient leisure to enjoy the literature of her calling. While we were reading together she would often exclaim, “It is a new world!” If it was an unknown realm to her, to me her readings and conceptions opened up a vast kingdom. … It was at that time that Lessing’s ‘Dramaturgie’ first fell into my hands. His long, tedious, but highly useful criticisms on acting, on foreign plays, the many quotations from classic ancient writers and learned comments, were read by us with the simple faith a child gives to a gospel. (Brewster 171) Lessing’s ambitions included weaning the dramatic literature away from lowbrow stock entertainment and stale French classic drama, with Shakespeare as his ideal author. A master original playwright given an aristocratic mandate to reform the theater, Lessing was anxious to test theory and practice against each other systematically, to experiment and analyze results together with his actors, and to 92 record the result in essays that would advance the art and cultural value of theater: as such he originates the role of dramaturg and drama theorist in one. 69 Essay 25 in the Hamburg Dramaturgy (which is a series of articles) takes an oblique approach to the question of whether the actor was a poet (in its larger sense of “maker”). Lessing wondered how it was that great actors often gave their best performances in inferior material. He decided that a good actor often adds ideas (embodies a character, expresses emotions) that were completely absent from the mediocre playscript and that a great actor could create deep thought content in the performance text (66). Lessing wrote of the actor’s abilities, “Valuable gifts of nature are very necessary to his calling, but they by no means suffice for it. He must everywhere think with the poet; he must even think for him in places where the poet has shown himself human” (qtd. in Cole and Chinoy, 262). In later essays Lessing finds that the actor’s co-creation of the performance text can be both a positive and a negative force. The production analyzed in essays 54-56, “The Earl of Essex” by John Banks, had as its subject the struggle between Elizabeth I and Essex. Lessing’s opinion was that the play was very poorly written, but that fortunately it did have an inherently dramatic premise that disguised the bad writing. He speculates that because mediocre plays rely on one or two major characters, good performances by the lead actors will make a shoddy play successful, and the odds of success are much better than when a company produces a masterpiece. In a well wrought play, all the characters matter, so poor acting even in subordinate roles ruins the production (160). 93 The idea of the thinking actor as co-creator also appears in an earlier treatise on acting, Le Comedien (1747) by Pierre Remond de Sainte-Albine, a French journalist. This enormously significant text bounced around many countries and authors. Lessing had translated portions of Le Comedien. It also was translated into English with some additions by John Hill and published in 1750 as The Actor: A Treatise on the Art of Playing: Follow author strictly and faithfully but also assist and support him, even become a sort of author, adding new expression to the poet’s every finesse; not only execute, but creates graces: a start, a gesture, a mere attention, a peculiar vocal cadence, or bare pause can produce applause for a sentence it might not otherwise draw. (Cole and Chinoy 123) Hill’s widely used Treatise matters because its focus is on the qualities that the actor must cultivate in his/her own mind and body. Cole and Chinoy point out its liberating effect for actors, because this focus on the actor’s qualities loosens the constraints of following a series of prescribed classical gestures. This shift in acting theory led to a performance style that was seen as more “natural.” In this case Hill’s language clearly “authorizes” the actor to “create graces” and lists as tools a variety of physical and vocal gestures and active listening. The traditional actor’s training in the classical vocabulary of gestures, once considered the comprehensive encyclopedia of natural expression of emotion, is now opened up to the actor’s choices, making a greater individuation in character expression more likely. More “natural” means an increased range within a character type is possible. 94 The consequences for theater—and literature—are significant if the idea of “character” enlarges, particularly for tragedy. Tragedy’s structure requires kings and queens, and as a type they generally are more abstract than characters in comedy, which often is based on anomaly or peculiarity. In his analysis of the mediocre play Elizabeth in Essay 25 (quoted above), Lessing points out that the actress playing Queen Elizabeth can manifest her royal dignity less because she is in power and does not need to assert that dignity as consistently as the weaker Essex absolutely must. As Brewster and Cushman’s study sessions evidence, Lessing’s text was still in circulation a century later, and his character-based interpretive methods became part of the public discourse on acting ability and interpretive choices. Lessing’s observation that the genius actor could effectively transform the genre of a mediocre play was applied to Charlotte Cushman by an audience member in a Boston newspaper in 1863. He retrospectively reviewed her 1840’s performances in New York at the Park Theatre with Macready before her trip to England. This spectator frequently saw her perform and read reviews of her subsequent London performances. He stressed that her “genius” and “physical and mental energy” gave her performances “independence” and “thorough individuality” that eclipsed the “cultivated” and experienced artist Macready’s “magnificent” acting: Sometimes the intensity with which her acting affected me also vexed me. ‘The Stranger’ and ‘Fazio’ are both plays that I could never see for their own sakes; but I have been so moved by Miss Cushman’s Mrs. Haller and Bianca, that I have gone home ill from the effect of the acting. I was unutterably ashamed of myself, to be so prostrated by compositions of such spasmodic melodrama and such maudlin sentimentalism; but the artist created the tragedy in her own person, 95 and that which was frigid in the book became pathetic in the woman. The same was the case with Mrs. Siddons; some of her most overpowering acting was in very inferior plays. (quoted in Stebbins 32; my emphasis) Geraldine Jewsbury wrote similarly of Cushman’s “character effect” years later after her death: I remember her Mrs. Haller [The Stranger] well. She seemed to absorb and consume all the false sentiment of the play, and to elicit only the real suffering of the character, and the tragical truth that nothing can undo ill deeds once done. It was, I think, the character in which she most impressed me. (Stebbins 78) In these recollections, Cushman’s performances of popular plays consistently pushed melodrama and sentiment into the territory of highbrow tragedy by creating “the tragedy in her own person.” The genius actress is indeed acknowledged as a “poet.” Cushman displays her capacity for creative invention in a letter to Elizabeth Peabody. In a paragraph, Cushman describes character types she has identified as recurring every year in the expatriate society of Rome, showing how Cushman observed and sorted out human behavior into casts of character types with deep roots in classical satire. Without altering Cushman’s words, I have added line endings to break up her paragraph format, so that each character type begins on a new line: Here you are without a foundation, but your own house and home and its inmates, and every year you are a prey to the adventurer who comes to speculate, the needy annuitant who comes to live cheap, or the ambitious parents who come to marry their daughters; the callow parson, who comes to find a wife with a little money; the small, very small heiress, who comes to fish for a husband; the ignorant and rich American jobber, who comes to play the patron to art, and buy bad copies and still worse originals; 96 and the vulgar and pretentious wives and daughters of such, who fall victims to hungry Italians in search of dances, suppers, and champagne. And such is this Roman mosaic, which is made up winter after winter in the same design, only differing each year in the value of the material out of which it is made. (Stebbins 175-176) The subject character types are all predicated in terms of their financial position and motives; the mosaic tiles form an image of a circle of predators stalking the author. 70 We can see in Cushman’s letter how actors carry character types and genre forward in time and space. The elaborate dance between actors, culture and memory also of course takes place in performance. As Roach puts it: “Acting is an art of collective recollection, involving both the performer and the public. …nightly they transfer their version of the accumulating stock of invented social identities from the past into the future.” (“Emergence” 338-9) 71 Cushman’s Roman mosaic also provides a glimpse of how repeated immersion into the theater environment of the spoken word—a highly oral/aural culture and training—deeply shapes mind and memory. 72 These habits of mind and memory are implicated in the creative process of invention as well. That is, words are committed to memory, to be recalled, contemplated and reworked at any convenient time. Stebbins explains what she knew of Cushman’s study methods: A speech would be read over aloud to her, quite slowly and distinctly; then she would repeat what she could of it. Then another reading and another repetition. The third time was generally enough. Then he next speech would be taken up in the same way, and so on. There was apparently no labor, and passages so acquired remained stored up as it were in her mind, ready, when called for, at a moment's notice. Beyond the due expression and feeling given to the words, which she 97 could never wholly omit even in study or at rehearsal, the acting was left to the inspiration of the time and place.” (Stebbins 23-24) “The acting” may have appeared to Stebbins from the outside to have been “left to the inspiration of the time and place,” but other accounts of Cushman’s careful preparation cast doubt on such a method. Cushman apparently strove to omit expression and feeling as much as possible “even in study or in rehearsal.” This holding back circumvents as much as possible the carving forces of repetition of patterns of emotion and expression, vocal and physical. Resisting an early settled interpretive pattern is not the same as “leaving it to inspiration.” Cushman’s interpretative thinking and decisions were accomplished as an ongoing mental process in rehearsal, memorization sessions, textual study (with Brewster, for example), and other reading, writing and thinking wherever she happened to be. Performing with different actors in a different theater every few days, in different parts, provides enough unexpected variables with which to employ improvisatory energies during performance. Stebbins no doubt knew all this; Stebbins tends to use a loose romantic vocabulary and concepts, such as her invocation of Cushman’s reliance on “inspiration” above. Alcott’s writing methods seem to have been influenced by her acting experience. They were also portable, also based in memory, with invention taking place in the mind; she essentially memorized the results, recursively repeating plots and even formulating the wording: I never had a study. Any pen and paper do, and an old atlas on my knee is all I want. Carry a dozen plots in my head, and think them 98 over when in the mood. Sometimes keep one for years, and suddenly find it all ready to write. Often lie awake and plan whole chapters word for word, then merely scribble them down as if copying. Used to sit fourteen hours a day at one time, eating little, and unable to stir until a certain amount was done. Very few stories written in Concord; no inspiration in that dull place. Go to Boston, hire a quiet room and shut myself up in it. (Cheney 399) Alcott used Concord in spring and summer as a place of physical activity to rest her mind, a place of caring for others, and Boston in autumn and winter as her place of mental work where she was free to create and please herself in her own way. In Boston she went to the theater constantly, and also lectures, as Jewsbury did in Manchester and London. Alcott’s working method of ruminative invention and mental retention of her unwritten stories encompassed skills developed in part by acting and in part by long hours of sewing when she occupied her mind with thinking of stories. Her method allowed her to write during years of ill health, and despite severe disability, enabled her to write her final novel in short intervals in the peace of her Boston hotel room. 73 The quality of the prose has a pared-down efficiency more than is usual for Alcott. The final materialization of Alcott’s always simmering mental storytelling “engine,” Jo’s Boys features a character specifically based on Charlotte Cushman, a famous actress-mentor named “Miss Cameron.” While I will not undertake a full analysis of Alcott’s juvenile novel, I will trace a dense concentration of mentorship substitutions both real and literary, a subject that will be examined further in the next chapter. As 99 we will see, in one “cast of characters” Emerson plays Goethe as mentor to the young Alcott’s Bettina. Another cast appears in Alcott’s novel, where Cushman is played by the Miss Cameron character, who mentors the tomboy actress character Josie (the young Alcott as aspiring actress. (As well, both Josie and Alcott could be said to play Goethe’s Wilhelm.) I examine this series of substitutions of mentors and apprentices because it illuminates the central importance of mentoring under consideration in this project and in the kunstlerroman genre as a whole. Mentoring forms a thematic trope where social cohesion is built along with the transmission of important knowledge. Bianca in The Half Sisters attracts the notice of an experienced older actor, as does Christie in Work. Though the apprentice is being “tested,” both mentor and apprentice must build a relationship of mutual respect and trust. Jo’s Boys is the last installment in the juvenile series that begins with Little Women. The series itself, and Little Women in particular, is usually read as Alcott’s semi-autobiographical bildungsroman (or kunstlerroman) of the writer Jo March and her sisters. The Marches (like the Alcotts) are passionate performers of semi-private theatricals that are a mixture of original material and nineteenth-century stage staples. In Jo’s Boys the March family bildungsroman extends into the next generation, interpolating the kunstlerroman of Meg March’s daughter, a hyperactive tomboy named “Josie” who is devotedly stagestruck. While summering at her aunt’s beach house, Josie bashfully pursues the notice of the famous actress Miss Cameron (Cushman) with anonymous bouquets of flowers left on her villa’s doorstep. Josie is 100 serious about acting and aches to meet her hero and study acting with her. As the summer days pass, Josie becomes so “desperate” that she plans to “climb that pine tree and tumble off on her piazza roof or get Sheltie to throw me just at her gate and be taken in fainting;” or better still, be the hero and not the victim: “Oh, if only she would drown a little and let me save her!” (125). It is the “wet” version of this dream that comes true. In a scene of physical comedy typical of Alcott’s burlesque-tinged sentimentality, the famous “tragedy queen” finds a “weedy throne” on a rock at her private beach (128). Then Miss Cameron loses her bracelet in the sea while swimming. She waves a towel for help, and Josie finally meets her idol when the latter asks in “that wonderful voice of hers:” “Will the little boy find me a long stick?” (126). Josie “heroically” dives to retrieve it. The heroism lies in her sheer persistence until, half-drowned, she succeeds, though Miss Cameron has given it up as a bad job. (Alcott gives Miss Cameron a distinct lack of majesty but abundant good judgment.) Josie is a young fifteen, and her bashful floral tributes are gestures taken from a period when Louisa May Alcott was a young girl of fifteen who was filled with romantic hero worship of Emerson. Like Josie, her behavior involved anonymous bouquets, as well as scaling a tall cherry tree outside Emerson’s window at midnight and serenading him and the moon with Mignon’s song from Wilhelm Meister “in very bad German” (Cheney 57). In her journal entry written in April, 1882, just after Emerson had suddenly died, Alcott recalled how she “wrote letters a la Bettine to him, my Goethe, at fifteen, up through my hard years, when his essays on Self- 101 Reliance, Character, Compensation, Love, and Friendship helped me to understand myself and life, and God and Nature” (Cheney 345). Alcott has a very strong sense of “seasons” of life as stages of cognitive development and awareness that corresponds with her sense of literary movements. In another written recollection of her adolescence Alcott opens with the words “My romantic period began at fifteen, when I fell to writing poetry” and ends it with the thought, “The trials of life began about this time, and happy childhood ended.” The “trials” were hunger and poverty that Louisa newly faced following a family council on “a certain gloomy November afternoon,” a sudden awakening to responsibility that Alcott never forgot. She responded by sitting in a special refuge outdoors and fiercely swore an oath that she would find success and security (Cheney 57-58). Perhaps responding to the heavy responsibilities of his young neighbor, as well as to her developing, curious mind, Emerson allowed Alcott to browse the books in his library, where is where she found Goethe’s Correspondence With a Child; it was about this time that Emerson gave her Goethe’s works. It took courage for Alcott to invade Emerson’s library and ask to borrow books. In Jo’s Boys Josie must summon the courage to directly ask for what she wants when Miss Cameron asks “How shall I thank you?” Josie reveals her hero worship and her “abandon, pluck, will” when she clasps her hands with a “wet splat” and pleads “Let me come and see you once—only once! I want you to tell me if I can act; you will know” (128). Josie’s persistence and physical courage are among the signs that she has the toughness she will need. Miss Cameron, already slightly 102 acquainted with her aunt and uncle, has appreciated the tact of Josie’s family in respecting for her privacy in the past month while Miss Cameron recuperated from an exhausting season. Miss Cameron invites Josie to audition the next morning in her imposing villa’s living room, though “usually I avoid stage-struck girls as I do reporters” (127). The summer resort setting for this scene of testing and mentorship suggests to me that during the summer of 1855, while she was in Walpole, New Hampshire, Fanny Kemble may have witnessed the twenty-three year old Alcott perform in summer stock (see note 48). Certainly Alcott must have strenuously wished for Kemble to attend and hoped for the famous actress to be at least impressed enough for a friendship to take root. For Kemble to become a mentor would have been a fairy tale come true. In her last novel Alcott writes this fairy tale for Josie, substituting acting for writing and Cushman a fantasy mentor such as Kemble and Emerson had been in earlier periods of her life. Within its wish fulfillment frame this episode outlines the attributes an aspiring young actress must cultivate and why, and the specific steps she should take. But at the same time Alcott deliberately casts doubt on the odds of this fairy tale coming true for just any young girl. The text reiterates, for example, that in Miss Cameron’s thinking Josie’s artistically gifted, socially prominent, well-to-do and polite relatives increase the probability that she might have the talent and background to carry her through an acting career; it is not Josie’s personal qualities alone that magically carry the day. 103 Josie’s audition scene, which follows a standard pattern of gloomy failure with gleams of potential shining through, is one of the few detailed descriptions of such a scene in nineteenth-century fiction (another occurs in Henry James’s novel The Tragic Muse; his friend Fanny Kemble was one of James’s models for his aspiring actress character Miriam Rooth). In her concern for the production mechanics of expression, Miss Cameron shows she is a thorough, practical professional as she raps out telegraphic judgments and advice without a word wasted: “The Portia was good declamation. Go on with that sort of thing; it trains the voice—teaches shades of expression” (131-2). Overall Josie is physically capable of acting (mobile expression, good enunciation, good voice and natural grace). Artistically she is incompetent (“leave tragedy alone until you are ready for it”), but her comedic acting in a farcical piece had potential: “There you showed real talent. It was both comic and pathetic. That’s art. Don’t lose it.” Her Ophelia is “very pretty,” but “any clever girl can do it effectively.” Her most ambitious attempt (Juliet of course) fails miserably. Instead of the expected applause she expected, for Josie had been told that she “did it very well,” Miss Cameron’s “ringing laugh made her tingle with indignation and disappointment.” Josie is not only developmentally and experientially too young to scale the heights of genius (“My dear, it is very bad. How can it help being so? What can a child like you know of love and fear and death?”) but she is also not yet analytically skilled enough (“the real meaning of Shakespeare is far above you yet, child”) (131- 2). Miss Cameron is frank: 104 I told you that you would not like what I would say to you; yet I must be honest, if I would really help you. …instead of telling you to come and study with me, or go and act in some second-rate theater at once, I advise you to go back to school and finish your education. That is the first step, for all accomplishments are needed, and a single talent makes a very imperfect character. Cultivate mind and body, heart and soul, and make yourself an intelligent, graceful, beautiful, and healthy girl. Then at eighteen or twenty… can you wait as well as work? (132-4) This advice is the opposite of what Cushman wrote her protégée Sarah Anderton, who was old enough to weather the loneliness and disappointments of practical training in regional theater. Miss Cameron contrasts “Geniuses, who are very rare, and even at fifteen seldom give much promise of future power” to a current apprentice of hers she believes will succeed because of her qualities of “talent, indomitable patience, and mind as well as beauty.” She warns Josie that whatever “we” [actresses] are (and Josie disavows thinking she is a genius), “We have to climb slowly, with many slips and falls.” 74 But when Josie explains that despite her shallow understanding of Shakespeare, she is irresistibly attracted to his work, Miss Cameron confides that she would like to “leave behind a well-trained, faithful, gifted comrade to more than fill my place, and carry on what I have much at heart—the purification of the stage.” Both Josie and Miss Cameron are tested in building a meaningful mentor/apprentice dyad; both must keep faith with the other. Miss Cameron faithfully attends the March family Christmas theatricals at Plumfield College, and much sooner than Josie could have ever hoped, starts to teach her the next summer, becoming Josie’s mentor. Despite Miss Cameron’s stern warnings about the long, 105 sacrificial road to a meaningful stage career, near the end of Jo’s Boys Alcott tells us that “little Jo’s instinct’s were right; and the dramatic talent of the Marches was to blossom by and by into an actress famous, virtuous and beloved” (271). Although the only glimpses we get of Josie’s interpolated kunstlerroman are this concentrated audition scene, and a quick description of the Plumfield Christmas theatricals, Josie’s story does cover a lot of acting ground, from the training of the bodily instrument to the mind that must be open to the sublime music and meaning of Shakespeare’s poetry. As will be seen in the next chapter, Margaret Fuller wrote of public performance as social glue and a site of transmission of valuable knowledge. In Alcott’s story an awestruck youth and a guarded adult mentor must seek one another out and deal honestly and faithfully with one another to tap the positive potential of the theater. The Half Sisters also interpolates an episode (to be examined in the last chapter) where a young apprentice and her mentor build a working relationship that transmits the treasure of artistic knowledge, preserves it for the next generation, circulates artistic excellence, and meets the needs of both apprentice and mentor. Much like the compression of Josie’s audition scene, the final page of Jo’s Boys is a telescopic sweep as the characters quickly march across the stage for their final bow. But first Alcott stages a rhetorical explosion in an outburst that prospectively buries the entire March family series along with all its fairy tale endings beyond the reach of the most intrepid archaeologist’s shovel. Below a row of asterisks, the author-narrator suddenly bursts out: “It is a strong temptation to the weary narrator to close the present tale with an earthquake which should engulf 106 Plumfield and its environs so deeply that no youthful Schliemann could ever find a vestige of it. But as that somewhat melodramatic ending might shock my gentle readers, I will refrain, and forestall the usual question, ‘How did they end?’ by briefly stating that all the marriages turned out well” (303). The narrator then brusquely matches up her characters with too-neat endings and douses the lights, evoking the roughly-sketched narrative closures we find in the final paragraphs of the “theatrical” novels of Thackeray or Austen. For example, we learn that the other tomboy character in Jo’s “Boys”, the medical student Nan, who has never wanted to marry, “remained a busy, cheerful, independent spinster, and dedicated her life to her suffering sisters and their children, in which true woman’s work she found abiding happiness.” We learn that the two young March artists, Josie and her cousin Bess, “won honors in their artistic careers, and in the course of time found worthy mates” (unlike the spinster actress Miss Cameron). The final half-sentence recalls the end of Vanity Fair as the box lid shuts on the folded puppets, but it has an even darker knell: “let the music stop, the lights die out, and the curtain fall forever on the March family.” This final goodbye is dark and silent, so bereft of any sense of continuing life, that by contrast the earthquake alternative seems full of light, warmth and excitement, providing a field of action for youthful explorers even if the March family’s future would remain forever buried. Alcott’s narrative energy pulls us back away from the well-known happy endings back to the middle of the more melodramatic story, to the excitement of its subterranean rumblings and spectacular eruptions. Alcott, who loved Carlyle’s 107 “earthquaky” style, beckons to readers’ imaginations with the unseen and unfinished and casts them as a fellow actor/explorer in the play. Like the actor she was, Alcott finds ways to “move” the audience with the spontaneity that comes from an unselfconscious flow of action that takes its energy from a heightened awareness of the singular, unrepeatable present moment. This chapter has examined the many personal and artistic connections between Alcott and Jewsbury, finding that in spite of their generational and national distance, both authors participated in large sociocultural debates that are closely related to their fascination and admiration for Cushman as an artist-hero. These common cultural discourses include many narratives growing out of questions about work, acting and society: the place of the theatre, women, genius, actors, character types and national character. As well, their individual gender performances expressed and shaped their thoughts and feelings about these debates. Both novelists were earnest and irreverent; attracted to melodrama both as form and content; and sought out mentors for themselves and supplied them to their fictional heroines. As the next chapter will develop, these novelists also share other specific circles of mentoring and influences, influences that their novels are shaped by, praise, undermine, and reject. 108 Notes to Chapter Two 35 Huxley 32. Since the letter was written from Seaforth House in Liverpool, the friend referred to is probably Mrs. Paulet, who in the beginning was co-writer of Zoe. 36 In an example of the epithet “man of genius” sincerely applied, in 1849 Jane Carlyle wrote of G.H. Lewes “he is the most amusing little fellow in the whole world—if you only look over his unparalleled impudence which is not impudence at all but man-of-genius-bonhomie” (Huxley 321). 37 Cushman appealed to women of all classes. Dudden quotes a letter to Cushman from a working woman: “I have watched your career for many years, and being an unmarried lady have felt proud to direct other ladies who were struggling for bread, to take example from your noble career, and work out for themselves an independent and individual life…. I feel as a working woman I am under obligation to you for the footprints you leave on the sands of time.” Julia Ward Howe told Cushman that because of her triumph, “I feel much better about womankind” (77). These remarks about Cushman’s reach across time and distance were echoed by Jane Carlyle in a letter to Cushman mentioned later in this chapter. Dudden explains that Cushman “played women’s suffering not as triviality, but as the stuff of greatness” (78). Dudden argues that Cushman’s stardom, as well as her own warnings to women of the difficulty of an acting career, built up the legend of her uniqueness to the point that it had a discouraging effect on women and “served to obscure the more ordinary process of commodification” of the actress. I would argue that Jewsbury’s novel, and even more so Alcott’s (Christie is not a star) counter such an effect by focusing on the specific steps Bianca and Christie take to learn the business—the work of becoming an actress. 38 “Miss Cameron” in Alcott’s last novel, Jo’s Boys, was also inspired by Cushman. 39 As mentioned in Chapter 1, several critics have argued that the figure of the female artist changed from positive and strong women to a Romantic era figure who was debilitated by her own emotions, and often died from loss of love—a pattern that gradually changed in the 1840s 40 Forrest’s performance of Metamora as a “national” representation has been analyzed by Bruce A. McConachie in his essay “The Theatre of Edwin Forrest and Jacksonian Hero Worship” (anthologized in When They Weren’t Doing Shakespeare). Rosemarie K. Bank, in “Meditations Upon Opening and Crossing Over: Transgressing the Boundaries of Historiography and Tracking the History of 109 Nineteenth-Century American Theatre,” traces centuries of a trans-Atlantic performance culture that included Indians from the United States. One result was that “by the 1840s (at least) the “timeworn and conflicting tropes” about the “‘Indian’ had become the ‘American’ and the ‘American’ the ‘Indian,’” such that “rough but savvy, primitive but clever” were “touted” by American exhibitors at the Crystal Palace exhibition in England as “characteristically ‘American’ traits (and successful ones)” (60). 41 This is not to say that Cushman could avoid all national prejudice. For example: Miss Cushman opened her second engagement in London at the Haymarket Theatre, December 30, 1845, when the sisters made their first appearance together in Shakespeare’s tragedy of ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ There were many difficulties and vexations behind the scenes in consequence of their determination to act the play according to the original version of Shakespeare instead of the ordinary acting play with which the company were familiar. It may be supposed that they resented what they considered an assumption of superiority on the part of these ‘American Indians,’ as they called the Misses Cushman, and they made themselves disagreeable accordingly; so much so that Mr. Webster, the manager of the theatre, was obliged to put up a notice on the green-room that any lady or gentleman who made any difficulty or objection to carrying out the wishes of the Misses Cushman was welcome to leave the theatre. This tone, however, was very soon changed when the seal of success was stamped upon their effort, and soon the unanimous verdict of the whole community brought the malcontents to better and wiser conclusions. They were destined to become sufficiently familiar with the Shakespearian version, for the tragedy was acted upwards of eighty nights in London alone, and afterwards pursued the same career of almost unexampled success in the provinces,—an unprecedented fact in those times. (Stebbins 58-59) 42 For an account of the arrival of Oliver Twist in New York, see Anne Brewster. For excerpts from the script and quotations from Lawrence Barrett’s recollection of Cushman’s performance, see Waters, Chapter VI, and note 43 below. The manager of the Park Theater in New York was trying to keep Cushman humble by giving her a tiny role, as Nancy was a minor character in the adaptation—and an immoral woman. Joseph Leach’s biography of Cushman reports “In spite of her fears about the repulsive part, wholly against Stephen Price’s intentions, Charlotte’s Nancy became an immediate hit. Walt Whitman labeled the reality of her acting 110 ‘appalling,’ the ‘most intense acting ever felt on the Park boards.’ … Charlotte’s Nancy established an American theatre vogue for Dickens” (91). 43 Leach 130. Cushman’s biographer and domestic partner, sculptor Emma Stebbins, insisted that if Dickens is not declassed by writing Nancy, then Cushman shouldn’t be for performing the part: [T]he idea that any impersonation which she could feel strongly herself and through which she could influence the feelings of others, could possibly lower her dignity or her position as an artist, she could not accept for a moment. As well say that a great writer lowers himself by producing such types of character. It was sufficient for her that she found in the part of Nancy Sykes a great opportunity, to which she was fully equal; and it was characteristic of her, that she shrank from nothing in it, and was able to descend into the depths of its abasement as thoroughly and potently as she ascended into the highest range, and touched the noblest notes of the varied symphony of human nature. There is a nobility in these struggling souls, which Dickens knew how to recognize and Miss Cushman to feel and interpret. (Stebbins 154) Perhaps the best account of Cushman’s acting of Nancy, because it is the most descriptive, is that given by Anne Brewster in a Blackwood’s article. Brewster was a close friend in 1941-42 at the time Cushman was managing the Walnut in Philadelphia, after her first performance of Nancy: She went down into the city slums; into Five Points, and studied the horrible life that surrounded such a wretched existence as “Nancy Sikes.” In the first scene “Nancy” only crossed the stage, gave a sign to Oliver, who was in the hands of the officers, and then went off. It was an entrance and exit hardly noticed, a small accessory incident in the terribly realistic drama. But after Miss Cushman created the character, this silent scene was always tremendously applauded. It was curious to see how quickly the audience seized on her clever meaning. Instead of crossing the stage once, she made three passages. Before the second the whole house came down with thundering applause. Her make-up was a marvel. There was not the sign of feminine vanity about Miss Cushman. She was always ready to sacrifice her appearance at any time to the dresses required by her parts. And surely that horrible perfection of a Five Points feminine costume was a sacrifice. An old dirty bonnet and dirt-colored shawl; a shabby gown and shabbier shoes; a worn-out basket with some rags in it, and a key in her hand! She entered swinging the key on her finger, walked stealthily to on the outside of the crowd, doubling her 111 steps; looked with sharp cunning at the boy; attracted his attention, winked one eye and thrust her tongue into her cheek. […] “Nancy Sikes,” as Miss Cushman made the character, stood out with rough but solemn tragic power. It was like a revolting sacrifice in some rude work of early art, when there was the strength of genius without culture and refinement. “Nancy” has little to say in the play. Miss Cushman had to gain her effects by careful and powerful acting. It was Sardou’s rule, “Each sentence contained pages; each word comprised many sentences.” The scene with Bill Sikes and old Fagin the Jew, when she was trying to creep out unnoticed to the bridge rendezvous, is an example. The talk is between the two men. But who ever listened to them when Miss Cushman acted “Nancy?” All sympathy was with her; every eye rested on that poor creature, who was blindly groping to perform an act of justice. After ineffectual attempts to steal off, and Bill’s brutal oaths showed her it was useless, she put pages of despair in the acts of battering her ragged old hat on a nail in the wall, sitting down, rocking to and fro, and biting a bit off a stick! Then the scene on the bridge! The old Jew leaning over the parapet, listening, then moving off like some demoniac power to hasten the tragic fate of the doomed woman. Poor “Nancy!” Her vague notions of right and wrong—the dull, stunning sense of degradation in the presence if simple purity,—Miss Cushman delineated these emotions with wonderful skill. Only a few bold strokes; but they disclosed the sad awakening if the gutter-born wretch. When the young girl treats “Nancy” with kindness, and showed that she trusted in her, Miss Cushman’s exaltation was fierce, and the handkerchief was snatched with hungry eagerness; and when she bowed humbly down before the memory of her foul life it was heart-breaking. The murder scene was always revolting. But how she acted it! Hunted to death, the poor wounded woman crawled in on the stage, writhing with agony, on her lips almost the odor of sanctity. “Pardon!—Bill!—kiss me—I forgive!” 44 Hale had an expansive concept of “true womanhood,” however, that included numerous, detailed scientific articles—including technical drawings—on subjects such as the steam engine, plumbing, modern privies, and pumps. Like Catherine Beecher (or Florence Nightingale in regard to nursing and hospital administration) her notion of “domestic science” was science, and provided a way for women to colonize a developing profession. See Baym, American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences: Styles of Affiliation, 36-53. 112 45 This is Norma Clarke’s psycho-biographical reading in Ambitious Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love : The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle. 46 For a strongly argued but still somewhat sympathetic view of Cushman as a opportunistic “social climber,” see Merrill. Cushman’s long term relationship with Matilda Hayes, which followed her affair with Eliza Cook (Jewsbury wrote Cushman that she at first felt jealous of Cook), is discussed in Merrill at length (154- 180). Jewsbury’s prior friendship with Matilda Hayes and her translations of Sand are mentioned in Howe, 23-24 and Merrill 154. Geraldine Jewsbury was less socially exposed than Cushman and her networking activities are less open to similar judgments, though she was seen as “pursuing” the Carlyles by some. Jewsbury’s biographer Susanne Howe mildly defends her against this reading of Jewsbury’s social activities: During the first years of her intimacy with the Carlyles and her frequent trips to London to visit them, her own house was a centre for such notable visitors to Manchester as the Carlyles, Emerson, Lewes, and Charlotte Cushman. She entertained groups of her Manchester friends connected with the press, the theatre, workers’ education, science, and the growing power in the north of foreign commercial interests, German and Greek especially. On a trip to the Continent in 1848 with W.E. Forster, Emerson, and her friends Mr. and Mrs. Paulet, she had an opportunity to see the working of some of the revolutionary political clubs in the Paris of those stirring days, and to renew her friendship with Lambert Beys, a St Simonian Frenchman, who had served his cause in Egypt and with whom she was, for a time, deeply in love. (viii; see also 65-66) Espinasse also provides detailed information on the Jewsburys’ Manchester circle (134-144). Jewsbury praised G.H. Lewes’s early Sandian novels, and in the spring of 1848 Jewsbury enthusiastically reviewed G.H. Lewes’s Manchester performances with Dickens’s troupe, and again in April 1849 when he performed in his own play (Ashton 79). Jewsbury’s biographer Howe relates their friendship: With Lewes she felt completely at home at once; ‘I took to him like a relation.’ He had lectured in Manchester before, ‘Making a prodigious sensation,’ but on March 10, 1849, he appeared at the Theatre Royal as Shylock. Geraldine wrote a more glowing criticism for the Manchester Examiner and Times of his ‘intense and thoughtful performance’ and of his prowess in his own play, The Noble Heart, on April 16 th of the same year, than most critics vouchsafed the versatile little man’s serious but too sanguine attempts at dramatic art. (Howe 70) 113 47 Like the deep reluctance felt even by the unconventional Alcotts, radical J.S. Mill was unhappy about his stepdaughter Helen Taylor’s attraction to an acting career as an escape route to further education and independence, although supportive (Davis 73). Later in the 1880s, Karl Marx opposed his daughter Eleanor’s career. Helen Taylor preferred to work in the provinces so she would not be seen by London society (Davis 21). For detailed discussion of the opportunities could offer to (British) middle class women, see Tracy Davis’s indispensable study, Actresses as Working Women. Davis lists at least eight advantages it offered over other available work: it was an established job since women had acted since 1660; an actress competed only against other women; she was immune from pressures to give up job for men; education was an asset; the pay was low but generally equal with possible advancement into the manager class; she had more freedom in a co-sexual workplace; she could marry, with some marriages offering upward mobility in class, and/or the profession with possible increased financial stability; and she was relieved from some social hypocrisy about true womanhood myths (18; also see Chapter 3). It is reasonable to extend this to American actresses. 48 The rapid movement in this journal entry—the tone moving in one word from ebullient vision to practicality, and then on to the hope of “a very gay life”—is deeply characteristic of Alcott. Later, as an experienced writer, Alcott deliberately employed this characteristic movement in several genres to add deflationary humor, pathos, and melodramatic reversals. Alcott relied on the figure of a scheming actress several times to structure the plots of her short fiction thrillers (such as “Behind a Mask)” and as I will show, investigations of acting are also a key element in her “respectable” works, if less obviously the central engine of the “scheme.” 49 Geraldine Jewsbury doesn’t share this precise narrative, but she was a rare professional female working writer. As a young woman, after her elder sister’s marriage and departure for India she kept house for her father and brothers as well as earning with her pen. After her father’s death and her brother’s marriage she moved to London and supported herself as a writer. To make ends meet, Jewsbury wrote incessantly, producing an astonishing number of reader’s reports for a circulating library and articles for the Aetheneum. 50 Alcott’s younger sister Elizabeth had died and her elder sister Anna had become engaged to John Pratt. Anna was Alcott’s best friend and acting companion. There is general agreement in a range of primary sources that Anna was an excellent dramatic actress who could move an audience to tears. In the Walpole summer theater company and the Concord Dramatic Union, Anna generally took ingénue roles while Alcott did heavy comedy, sometimes old ladies (character parts). Louisa was devastated at the death of her younger sister and the departure of her mainstay Anna from the family home. 114 51 The Alcott sisters mentored each other as well as looking outside the family for role models of poor women who had built careers as artists. Louisa funded May Alcott’s art classes whenever she could and eventually was able to send her to Europe. For her part, May Alcott was later to write a guide for women artists on how to study art abroad on a strict budget. Louisa continued to help struggling artists on an individual basis. 52 On the convergence with thinking about marriage, see footnote above. In 1861 Alcott read Carlyle’s French Revolution, started Success and the farce she had written five years before (for William Warren, lead comedian at the Boston Theater) was finally performed. Nat Batchelor’s Journey was used as an end piece. Alcott’s journal reads: May.—Meg’s wedding. My farce was acted, and I went to see it. Not very well done; but I sat in a box, and the good Doctor [Windship, who promoted Louisa May Alcott’s theater aspirations] handed up a bouquet to the author, and made as much as he could of a small affair” (Cheney 121). …January, 1861.—… Wrote on a new book—“Success” [“Work”]— till Mother fell ill, when I corked up my inkstand and turned nurse” (Cheney 124). … June.—Read a good deal; grubbed in my garden, and made the old house pretty for May. Enjoyed Carlyle’s French Revolution very much. His earthquaky style suits me. (Cheney 128) 53 “Fired up the engine, and plunged into a vortex, with many doubts about getting out. Can’t work slowly; the thing possesses me, and I must obey until it’s done. One thousand dollars was sent as a seal on the bargain, so I was bound, and sat at the oar like a galley-slave” (Cheney 267). The problem with Alcott’s working method for the novels (plunging into a “vortex”) was that she almost ate nothing and did not sleep. It is no wonder that as her health became fragile her doctors advised her not to write. Alcott wrote Jo’s Boys shortly before her death in 1888. She had it all in her head and was equally “possessed” to write it down, pleading with her doctor that she was so restless mentally that it would be healthier if she were allowed to write. He agreed that she should write for a half hour per day (she did feel better). 54 Barrett Browning wrote to Miss Mitford after The Half Sisters was published that “There’s a french sort of daring, half audacious power in [Jewsbury’s] novels (quoted in Lewis, 97). 115 55 Thomas Carlyle famously used this term to express his disapproval of the enthusiasm of his wife and other women for Sand and her work (as did others). 56 It is not clear whether Kemble saw Alcott act, but it seems likely that she did. Alcott’s journal entry of July 1855 reads Busy and happy times as we settle in the little house in the lane by my dear ravine,—plays, picnics, pleasant people, and good neighbors. Fanny Kemble came up, Mrs. Kirkland and others, and Dr. Bellows is the gayest of the gay. We acted the “Jacobite,” and “Bonnycastles,” to an audience of a hundred, and were noticed in the Boston papers. …I did “Mrs. Malaprop,” “Widow Pottle,” and the old ladies. (Cheney 82) 57 In one interview, Kemble explains that the profession of acting infected the Kembles’ entire lives even if the art encouraged personal growth: Quiet life does not come to any of us. We never had any real life. I think if we could trace our family back to the Garden of Eden we should find the original Kemble in a mocking-bird that spent his life imitating the sounds he heard and pretending to be any kind of bird that he was not. We have been somebody else so long that we never find ourselves. […] It is beautiful to be able to be any kind of bird at will. It expands the sympathetic nature and makes life varied and interesting. […] If one could feel, with my aunt Sarah Siddons, that there is nothing worth living for but upturned faces in the pit it would be the ideal life. She was the goddess of my childhood. I was not a good child. (quoted in Pickett 64-65) 58 “Leading business generally, though not necessarily, meant dramatic roles […]. The progression from leading lady to heavy business (Emilia, Gertrude, Lady Audley, etc.) was an honorable concession to maturity and experience. As financial circumstances and personal following allowed, leading or heavy business could be coupled with management. […] Character actresses […] played the low comedy, dialects, some adventuresses, and eccentrics.” Tracy Davis, Actresses 22. For a full- length study, see James C. Burge, Lines of Business, Casting Practice and Policy in the American Theatre 1752-1899 (1986). 59 The traditional “lines of business” which guided casting according to type actually grew from the varying functions and responsibilities of the actors’ roles in the play’s structure. The lead lady and gentleman were responsible for carrying any emotion, while eccentric business normalized the leads. The lines of business had been transported to America from 18 th century English theater. (Roach, “The Emergence of the American Actor,” Cambridge History of American Theatre II: 362-4). 116 60 John Quincy Adams complained that when he asked her about her “poetic productions,” Kemble preferred to talk about her “feats of horsemanship and told him she had ridden that morning about thirty miles, and “leaped over many fences and stone walls” (David 121). 61 Grimstead, Melodrama Unveiled, 183-86. 62 Alcott wrote to Moulton in 1883 “I have not the least objection to the writing of a sketch of L.M.A. by any one, & should feel quite comfortable in your hands.” But she also told her “I have very little material to offer for my journals were all burnt long ago in terror of gossip when I depart & on unwise use of my very frank records of people & events” (quoted in Shealy, 32). 63 Maria S. Porter wrote of Alcott “She was an earnest advocate of woman suffrage and college education for girls, because she devoutly believed that woman should do whatever she could do well, in church or school or State. When I was elected a member of the school committee of Melrose in 1983, she wrote: I rejoice greatly thereat, and hope that the first thing that you and Mrs. Sewall propose in your first meeting will be to reduce the salary of the head master of the High School, and increase the salary of the first woman assistant, whose work is quite as good as his, and even harder; to make the pay equal. I believe in the same pay for the same good work. Don’t you? In future let woman do whatever she can do; let men place no more impediments in the way; above all things let’s have fair play,—let simple justice be done, say I. Let us hear no more of ‘woman’s sphere’ either from our wise (?) legislators beneath the gilded dome, or from our clergymen in their pulpits. I am tired, year after year, of hearing such twaddle about sturdy oaks and clinging vines and man’s chivalric protection of woman. Let woman find out her own limitations, and if, as is so confidently asserted, nature has defined her sphere, she will be guided accordingly—but in heaven’s name give her a chance! Let the professions be open to her; let fifty years of college education be hers, and then we shall see what we shall see. Then, and not until then, shall we be able to say what woman can and what she cannot do, and coming generations will know and be able to define more clearly what is a ‘woman’s sphere’ than these benighted men who try to do it. (Porter 69) The cadences of “sage writing” are strong in this quotation, with echoes of Margaret Fuller, Thomas Carlyle, and Mary Wollstonecraft—but by mixing in “say I,” “in heaven’s name,” and “then we shall see what we shall see” Alcott invokes Yankee working class female in a fascinating blend of voices. 117 Sarah Elbert’s introduction to Work makes the important point that Alcott does not assign gender to either domesticity or selflessness: While self-sacrifice remained an important principle in all of Alcott’s work and one that was repeatedly praised in contemporary reviews, one must be careful not to accuse Alcott of claiming that domesticity was ‘natural’ to women. On the contrary she thought it a skill that must be taught and practiced like any other. Her devotion to the women’s movement was a major commitment in her life and work; she signed the Seneca Falls Principles in a public call to the first meeting of the New England Women’s Suffrage Association. […] She had lived for others and yet had managed to create in her writings a vision of self-sacrifice that did not preclude the realization of women’s human potential. (xxii) 64 Lucy Snowe in Bronte’s Villette insisted on the same suggestive “halfway” costume to be able to act the male lover to Ginevra Fanshawe onstage, with the result that she felt a new creative intoxication and emotional freedom. She felt the daring necessary to act as an aggressive and sincere lover. Lucy’s improvisational artistic choices changed her part from a stock fool to an honest man of feeling signaling his love by and through flirtatious word play; the genre and meaning of the play from comedy to romantic (melo?)drama. Cushman and her first lover in England, Eliza Cook (a well-known poet who published her own journal, including many poems about Cushman), dressed exactly alike in the same hybrid costume. This signaling of a special relationship puzzled Barrett Browning until the concept of a “female” or “Boston” marriage was explained to her. 65 For a description of Jewsbury’s dinner party performances directed toward shocking Mrs. Grundy, which used her more conventional brother as a straight man, see Ireland (xiv). Jewsbury deflected censure by assuming an attitude of innocent ignorance after her shocking remarks. See also Howe 65-66 for her storytelling ability. 66 Anna Jameson, Shakespeare's heroines: characteristics of women, moral, poetical, and historical (1832), describes “acting as a noble profession for women and argued that classic female characters and their embodiment onstage could serve as suitable models of women’s ‘moral’ characteristics” (Merrill 140). Sarah Siddons, “Remarks on the Character of Lady Macbeth” (“On Playing Lady Macbeth” appears in Krich and Chinoy, Actors on Acting, 142-45); Fanny Kemble, Notes on some of Shakespeare’s Plays (1883). Judith Rosen notes that Jameson’s book went through “ten editions before Jameson’s death in 1860 and ten more by 1920 (Desmet 54n1), and numerous writers followed Jameson’s lead,” among them Mary Cowden Clarke’s Girlhoods of Shakespeare’s Heroines (1851). “Popular 118 giftbooks, printed in both costly editions and inexpensive monthly parts, featured illustrations and moral analyses of each character (Melchiori 121)” (Rosen 42). 67 The trope of the “tragic muse” has a very long history. Often in 19 th century use it references a famous 18 th -century portrait of Sarah Siddons, a cultural icon much analyzed by critics. Two pertinent examples for this study both use the trope to imply the depths of long term depression. Jewsbury’s biographer Ireland applies it to Jane Carlyle and Jewsbury, while Alcott uses it to describe her own author photographs. Ireland figures Jane Carlyle as a prisoner of her habitual decorum: There is a certain armour which proud natures are apt to rivet on themselves from some motive or other, and which, once assumed, becomes difficult, almost impossible, to lay down, though under it a human heart may all the while be panting for relief. The struggle may or may not be apparent, but it is a desperate matter when there is felt to be no possibility of laying aside the iron links. The longed-for relaxation Mrs. Carlyle found in Miss Jewsbury, in whose intimate presence she could be herself. It was, in some sense, as though the Tragic Muse rested her head on the fairy-like bosom of an ‘Ariel,’ but this ‘Ariel’ had also depths of her own. And the two were comforted!” (xvi) As many readers have remarked, Ireland’s introduction is a remarkable sample of female sentiment mixed with intelligence and emotional insight. In an interview, Alcott explained why she never liked her portraits: “When I don’t look like the tragic muse,” she told Maria S. Porter, “I look like a smoky relic of the Boston fire”—and in even the best of the bad photographs, as she wryly explained to an editor, one glimpsed but “the pensive invalid” (quoted in “About Louisa May Alcott,” New York Public Library website). Alcott appears to dislike seeing her own dark sadness, illness and depression. Ireland seems to be using the tragic muse with a similar meaning, since she refers to “depths.” In Jo’s Boys when Josie arrives to audition for Miss Cameron, she imitates a copy of the Siddons “Tragic Muse” portrait, and is overawed when Miss Cameron sweeps into the room and declaims the associated monologue in deeply moving tones of voice. The incident serves to create a line between the larger experience of the older woman, which authorizes her to enter the realm of tragedy, and to preserve the short-lived lack of tragic knowledge of the young girl for as long as possible to protect her capacity for happiness. Alcott vividly remembered the sudden ending of her own childhood, discussed earlier in this chapter (102). 119 68 Despite the common use of the idea of the “rise of the actor” in cultural histories, with the exception of a few stars, most working actors’ salaries remained stagnant for many decades in the nineteenth century. Their general reputation improved but prejudice was easily aroused. See Davis, Actresses as Working Women. 69 His published essays pressured his company of professional, formerly commercial actors to realize their potential as co-creators of the text in performance, but some resisted the involved critical analysis this required, some resented Lessing’s appraisals of their work in public, and most objected to the vast amount of time Lessing’s project required. 70 The regular rhythm of Cushman’s prose, and its longer sentences at beginning and end, strongly suggest blank verse meant to be spoken aloud: a prologue to a comedy to set the scene, perhaps delivered by the clever servant character (working for the “ignorant and rich” American). This classic satiric mode has affinities with characters in Restoration comedy, or Austen, Thackeray, or Dickens, or (more roundly) James, but Cushman includes in her cast of characters distinctly American comic roles, characters from the American farces (such as the character suggested by the title of Alcott’s one professionally produced comic afterpiece, “Nat Bachelor’s Journey”). Alcott also gave a similar American twist to this tradition. Inverting the satiric and generalizing form of the archetypal “spinster” character, she wrote an article “Happy Women” that specifically spoke to young women. It describes her single women friends, the Physician, the Artist, the Philanthropist, the Actress, and the Lawyer, offering their lives as additional paths open to women to counter the intense pressure girls faced to become wives under almost any circumstances. Character types (often comic or satiric) recur in Cushman’s and Alcott’s writing as a habitual mode or style that I argue comes from their experience as American actors, which instilled a habit of seeing casts of character types often in their onstage lives, which would make them keen observers of type offstage, including characters with traits in common who are attracted to a particular profession by recognizing that they have the needed abilities, and in turn are shaped by practicing that profession, so that the process perpetuates a recognizable professional “type.” In this sense, writing women into male-dominated professional types, creating an alternately gendered version, is a culturally revolutionary act masked by its familiar classical form. 72 In the audition scene in Jo’s Boys Josie has memorized Ophelia’s mad scene from thorough study with the professor of elocution at Plumfield College (131). Dudden briefly discusses the premium placed on the speaking voice and the popular love of elocution in both theater and politics, 11-16. For this study, the importance of elocution’s history in America is not only that it fostered a cultural cognitive environment based on memory and trained habits of physical expression, but its shifting of oratorical technique from argumentation to a “doctrine of passionate 120 expression, founded in natural sentiment but cultivated by assiduous attention to what later came to be called ‘vocal culture’” (Fliegelman, qtd. in “Emergence,” 350). For a history of the “elocution revolution” of the late 18 th century and influence of schools of oratory and teachers of elocution on American performance culture, including a list of primary texts, see Watermeier and Roach,“Emergence of the American Actor,” in Cambridge History of the American Theatre (Vol II) and McTeague’s Before Stanislavsky. Dudden explains that audiences’ respect for beautiful speaking worked to the advantage of plain women like Cushman as well as aging actresses, but the value of the aural component of theater was gradually undermined by the financial success of theaters aimed at male audiences, which spread the commodification of the actress’s body. Smaller theaters and the turn to visual spectacle were also factors in the decline of a theater based on voice. 73 Alcott’s journal entries in 1883 show how ill she was and also her interest in writing in novel form her thoughts about the concept of genius: February.—To B. for a week of rest, having got Mrs. H. settled with Father, and all comfortable for November. Began a book called “Genius.” Shall never finish it, I dare say, but must keep a vent for my fancies to escape at. This double life is trying, and my head will work as well as my hands. (Cheney 352- 353). December.—Began again on “Jo’s Boys,” as T.N. wants a new book very much, and I am tired of being idle. Wrote two hours for three days, then had a violent attack of vertigo, and was ill for a week. Head won’t bear work yet. Put away papers, and tried to dawdle and go about as other people do […]” (Cheney 356). 1886 March 27 th .—Another attack of vertigo,—ill for a week; sleepless nights. Head worked like a steam-engine; would not stop. Planned Jo’s Boys” to the end, and longed to get up and write it. Told Dr. W. that he had better let me get the ideas out, then I could rest. He very wisely agreed, and said, “As soon as you can, write half an hour a day, and see if it does you good. Rebellious brains want to be attended to, or trouble comes.” So I began as soon as I was able, and was satisfied that we were right; for my head felt better very soon, and with much care about not overdoing, I had some pleasant hours when I forgot my body and lived in my mind. (Cheney 358) 121 74 Alcott wrote to James Redpath “I’ll try not to be “spoilt, & think ten or fifteen years of snubbing rather good training for an ambitious body; but people mustn’t talk about “genius”—for I drove that idea away years ago & don’t want it back again. The inspiration of necessity is all I’ve had, & it is a safer help than any other” (qtd. in Stern’s biography of Alcott, 139). The original letter is held by the New York Historical Society and is not dated. 122 Chapter Three Sage Advice: Acting, Emotion and Science of Mind I. If notably “unusual” women for their time, one of the most marked aspects of Charlotte Cushman’s, Geraldine Jewsbury’s and Louisa May Alcott’s difference from others—and the most durable basis of their attraction, recognition and respect—was their professional, practical work ethic: an ongoing behavior that others, as well as themselves, often read as “masculine,” and often attributed to a “tomboy” childhood as its source. 75 As we have seen, Alcott and Jewsbury’s actress novels make reference to patterns and variations established by and among Goethe, Germaine de Staёl, Anna Jameson, Maria Jane Jewsbury, and George Sand. 76 Yet in addition, both Alcott and Jewsbury were in the daily presence of famous thinkers who spoke in a literary prose voice that scholars since have come to call “sage” writing, one that supported their work ethic. Alcott and Jewsbury actively sought out contact with male mentors as well with female role models. As a book-starved teenager Louisa May Alcott visited Emerson in his study, where he began to guide her reading. She famously grew up in the Boston/Concord network of thinkers, artists, and novelists, and her entire life she was surrounded, supported and stymied by the rigorous classical education and clouds of transcendentalist philosophical speculation generated by her father Bronson Alcott, R.W. Emerson, Hawthorne, Theodore Parker, and the other sages 123 and artists of Concord and Boston. Theodore Parker ministered to Louisa May Alcott at a low point when she was desperately seeking work in Boston (this is reproduced in Work); Parker and Cushman knew each other in Rome in 1859 during his last illness. Bronson Alcott visited Carlyle in 1842, who found him “a man who has got into the Highest intellectual region,” but who also found Alcott to have “more than prophetic egoism" in his intention of founding a sect (Fruitlands). Jewsbury boldly wrote Carlyle a letter regarding her religious doubt and existential despair that began a lifetime friendship with both Carlyles, but especially Jane (in the oft-used code phrase of the women’s epistolary coterie, Jane and Geraldine swore an “eternal friendship”). Thomas Carlyle and Emerson maintained a close correspondence; Emerson first visited the Carlyles in Scotland in August 1833, just as Sartor Resartus was being published, before their move to London and Carlyle’s rise to prominence. Emerson visited Jewsbury in Manchester several times over a period of years, and they traveled to France together with others. 77 According to Jewsbury’s recollection, Cushman brought letters of introduction to her in Manchester soon after she arrived in England for the first time, shortly after her London debut in Fazio (Stebbins 77). Both Cushman and her sister Susan, who acted with her until her marriage (most famously as Juliet to Cushman’s Romeo), became “very intimate” friends with Jewsbury, and Jewsbury and Charlotte also swore an “eternal friendship.” When Cushman eventually met Jane Carlyle, she enjoyed her personality immensely, admiring her intellect and talent as a raconteur. 78 124 While there is no evidence that the younger Louisa Alcott’s contact with Cushman reached this level, we have seen that Alcott found Cushman’s personal presence on stage and off irresistibly charismatic. 79 Part of Cushman’s attraction for both novelists was her family-centered narrative of artistic and economic struggle. Jewsbury’s and Alcott’s lives as writers were dominated by pressing necessity and a desire for independence, and their experiences were strongly reinforced by tales of Cushman’s courage in the face of poverty and that of her contemporary “actress- hero” Kemble. Their stories of shouldering responsibility as young teenagers were factual even if they provided conveniently press-worthy excuses for leaving woman’s private sphere for a masculine public life. 80 Alcott and Jewsbury felt keenly and thought much about the affinities, tensions, abrasions, and gaps that opened between their mentors’ theories (Romantic, male) and what came to be their own practice (female, realist). In their work, they synthesized this cross-fertilization of ideas in a unique approach to novels of the life of the artist so that new analytical and materialist threads entered the fabric of such fiction. Key features common to the bildungsromans of Alcott and Jewsbury include the exploring of poverty and class; moving beyond epiphanies to mid-life crises; and most significantly, linking the heroine’s development and survival to the performer’s training in emotion as it traverses both mind and body. 81 Alcott’s and Jewsbury’s focus on the material body’s effect on the creative mind partially tames their Romantic precursors’ larger-than-life Romantic era female artist heroines. Their novels also evidence their desire to make artistry (and its 125 “genius”) less mysterious and more accessible to women: not only the education and mentoring of women in the performing arts, but also their education in general, form integral patterns in the fiction. In addition, their novels reemphasize the “body” side of the mind-body connection, deflating the philosophical flights of their early male mentors, Carlyle and Emerson; in doing so, these novels reflect Jewsbury’s and Alcott’s knowledge of developments in biological science. Still, the dash and drama in the prose style of both Jewsbury and Alcott retains the Romantic bravado of Carlyle—as we have seen, Alcott called it his “earthquaky style”—while weaving in threads of analytical thoughtfulness all their own. A confident voice of advice, intelligence and energy appears in the authorial narration of their fictions, as well as the individual voices of the performing heroines, one that is characteristic of Carlyle’s “sage” speech as well, but unlike his, directed to the “condition of women.” An example occurs in the comments of Jewsbury’s actress character Bianca. A successful actress Bianca has lived with women of all classes, and is concerned about those who have no need to work: They want an object, they want a strong purpose, they want an adequate employment,—in exchange for a precious life. Days, months, years of perfect leisure run by, and leave nothing but a sediment of ennui: and at length they have all vitality choked out of them. This is the true evil of the condition of women. The need of some sort of a stimulant becomes, at last, an imperative necessity—it is the cry of their expiring souls, an impulse of self-preservation; they possess unsatisfied, unemployed powers of mind—a strong vitality of nature, that must consume them, unless an adequate, legitimate employment be provided for them. They must find something that is worth being done; voluntary employment will not stave off the evil. The very possession of existence inspires a desire for activity, and it is melancholy to see the blind vague efforts women make to be useful; 126 they do their various things, not as an imperative duty, but because they have ‘plenty of time,’ and play at being Lady Bountifuls and lady patronesses to poor people, to get rid of their own weariness. (249) One of the most famous lines in Sartor Resartus is “Do the Duty which lies nearest thee.” A strong echo of Carlyle’s emphasis on vitality and action, and his call to work at the task presently at hand can be heard even in Cushman’s epistolary advice to a younger novice actress, Sarah Anderton: I should advise you to get to work; all ideal study of acting, without a trial or opportunity of trying our efforts and conceivings upon others, is, in my mind, lost time. Study while you act. Your conception of character can be formed while you read your part, and only practice can tell you whether you are right. You would, after a year of study in your own room, come out unbenefited, save in as far as self- communion ever must make us better and stronger; but this is not what you want just now. Action is needed. Your vitality must in some measure work itself off. You must suffer labor, and wait, before you will be able to grasp the true and the beautiful. You dream of it now; the intensity of life that is in you, the spirit of poetry which makes itself heard by you in indistinct language, needs work to relieve itself and be made clear. I feel diffident about giving advice to you, for you know your own nature better than anyone else can, but I should say to you, get to work in the best way you can. All your country work will be wretched; you will faint by the way; but you must rouse your great strength and struggle on, bearing patiently your cross on the way to your crown! God bless you and prosper your undertakings. I know the country theatres well enough to know how utterly alone you will be in such companies; but keep up a good heart; we have only to do well what is given us to do, to find heaven. (Stebbins 81) In “The Everlasting No” chapter of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, the idealistic young hero Diogenes is at a low point much like that of Cushman’s self-doubting, aspiring actress: Meanwhile, under all these tribulations, and temporal and spiritual destitutions, what must the Wanderer, in his silent soul, have endured! 127 "The painfullest feeling," writes he, "is that of your own Feebleness (Unkraft); ever, as the English Milton says, to be weak is the true misery. And yet of your Strength there is and can be no clear feeling, save by what you have prospered in, by what you have done. Between vague wavering Capability and fixed indubitable Performance, what a difference! A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimly in us; which only our Works can render articulate and decisively discernible. Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible Precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, Know what thou canst work at. (126) Doubt saturates the emotional life of Diogenes Tuefelsdröckh and saps his strength precisely because he has not yet actualized any result from his “Workings.” In both texts, the “indistinct language” and “inarticulate Self-consciousness” of the ideal tempts the artist to introspective dreaming, but the ideal can only be accessed through a lonely, hard, laborious process of realizing a “Work.” Actualizing the ideal creates a mirror whereby the artist-worker can see the form (“natural lineaments”) of his or her own “spirit,” of poetry and “intensity of life.” In a dialectic of theory and practice, ideal and real, practice must be the focus. This is the bildungsroman as Goethe shaped it in Wilhelm Meister, a story where experience is the primary means of learning for a protagonist, although for Tuefelsdröckh, self cultivation leads away from others to a solitary life of philosophical study. Still, despite differences between the two heroes, as in the passage quoted from Sartor, both Wilhelm Meister and Sartor center around the themes of “action and development according to natural gifts” (Howe 119). Alcott’s Work and Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters combine elements of Carlyle’s Goethean bildungsroman with the female artist subgenre discussed in 128 Chapter One, and with the novel of education or pedagogy. This blend will be taken up more fully in the next chapter. Emma Stebbins’ posthumous biography of Cushman shows Carlyle’s influence in their circle was pervasive. As Stebbins puts the final laurel crown on a verbal portrait of Cushman, she casts Cushman as a specifically Carlylean hero, in effect adding an actress to Carlyle’s series of characters in Heroes and Hero Worship. Both his rhetorical drumbeat for idealism and his style are prominent in her prose: So there is no higher joy than the heartfelt appreciation and love which Carlyle has immortalized under the name of ‘hero-worship,’ and no lower plane than a systematic and cynical depreciation of its God-given truth and beauty. Miss Cushman lived and wrought through this power, preserving a marvelous equilibrium of the real and ideal in herself, and always able through emotion to establish that higher relation with the hearts and souls of others which is the highest gift of human consciousness. Whatever may seem extreme or exaggerated in this volume is due to the writer’s high appreciation of this great gift, and her belief that it is the keynote to a character which could not be fully illustrated without it. (Stebbins 188-189) Stebbins’s clarion style at this “keynote” peak of emotion has a distinct ring of Carlyle’s absolute assurance and headlong speed. Indeed, the supremely confident headlong style, like Carlyle’s, backs up the author’s declaration of truth and inoculates the text against accusations of exaggeration. For Stebbins, both actress Cushman and the Carlylean writer-hero speak in idiosyncratic passionate character voice, embodying the real and urging toward the ideal. 82 From the exalted tone of Stebbins’ prose, one would never imagine how much Alcott’s, Cushman’s, and Jewsbury’s genuine reverence and respect for 129 Carlyle and Emerson was tempered by their insiders’ perspective. Alcott and Jewsbury clearly saw how their male mentors’ theatricality of expression in their writing and their public personae as lecturers helped to mythologize them as cultural sages. Stebbins writes of Thomas and Jane Carlyle’s remarkable domestic “performance” as a brilliant literary couple—an experience much remarked upon by many of their visitors, and a power struggle much analyzed by critics. Cushman would imitate not just Thomas Carlyle’s manner of delivering his monologues, but his typical hobby horses as well: It was at this house she first met Mrs. Carlyle, that wonderful woman, who was able to live in the full light of Carlyle’s genius and celebrity without being overshadowed by it. …When in the right mood, and to the right listeners, Carlyle was greater than his books; for then manner was added to matter, and even more characteristic and individual. He had a method of talking on and on with a curious rising and falling inflection of voice, catching his breath now and then in the lower key, and then going on again in the higher, in the broadest Scotch accent, and ever and anon giving out peals of the heartiest laughter over his own extraordinary pictures. This peculiar manner of speech—the broad accent, the tremendous, breathless earnestness which he would infuse into the smallest topic if it were one which anywhere touched his instincts of reformer—Miss Cushman imitated to perfection. Meanwhile his wife, quiet and silent, assiduously renewed his cup of tea, or by an occasional word, or judicious note, struck just at the right moment, kept him going, as if she wielded the mighty imagination at her pleasure, and evoked the thunder and sunshine at her will. (Stebbins 84-85) The delight the women felt in finding others who refused an undue reverence for a fellow human being, however brilliant and male, comes through clearly, along with the suggestion that Jane Carlyle played “director” to Thomas Carlyle’s “actor.” 130 Jewsbury’s intense identification with Carlyle’s work faded as she grew older: “the chapters [of Sartor] that had seemed full of inspired insight…read now quite cold and strange. One recollects but one feels it no longer” (Howe 90). The younger Alcott also felt Carlyle’s style “suited” her, but Work comments on Carlyle by framing a too-idealized hero worship as a handicap to young women. The heroine Christie is advised by her minister Mr. Power (based on Theodore Parker) to rethink how her habit sets up others for an inevitable fall and herself for perpetual disappointment: “You are a hero-worshipper my dear; and if people don’t come up to the mark you are so disappointed that you don’t see the fine reality which remains when the pretty romance ends. Saints walk about the world today as much as ever, but instead of haircloth and halos they now wear”— “Broadcloth and wide-brimmed hats,” added Christie, looking up as if she had already found a better St. Thomas than any the church ever canonized. (253-254) For her birthday shortly thereafter, Mr. Power gives Christie Heroes and Hero Worship, “empowering” her to read for herself. It is striking that immediately after Mr. Power gives her the book, Christie is begged by the domestic circle at the party to do some “play-actin,” and Christie performs both comic and dramatic characters, delivering an extended entertainment for the birthday guests. Like Alcott, Christie’s special talent is for “low comedy” eccentrics from Dickens: Tilly Slowboy, Miss Miggs, and Mrs. Gummage. The adults cry with laughter, and the children roll on the grass “in ecstasies.” Mr. Power then calls “Now a touch of tragedy!” Christie replies “You insatiable people! Do you expect me to give you comedy and heavy 131 tragedy all alone? I’m equal to melodrama I think, and I’ll give you Miss St. Clair as Juliet, if you wait a moment.” She reappears draped in a tablecloth with a vinegar cruet, intending to “burlesque the poison scene,” but the melodrama segues into tragedy, and she “did it as she often longed to do it, with all the power and passion she possessed.” Though “very faulty was her rendering” the “earnestness she put into it made it most effective to her uncritical audience, who ‘brought down the house,’ when she fell upon the grass with her best stage drop, and lay there getting her breath after the mouthful of vinegar she had taken in the excitement of the moment” (271). She then performs Lady Macbeth not as parody, but as an imitation of a serious dramatic actress, using her performance as a guide. The actress is not named, but called “a fine model,” and Alcott probably had Cushman in mind. But Christie is not done yet: again at Mr. Power’s request, she finishes by acting a reverent speech of Portia’s in her own character; that is, as a tribute to him from herself, and he is both surprised and moved. Christie’s performances begin in Dickens but move into a representative group of Shakespearean heroines, referencing Cushman’s readings but also the published studies of Shakespeare’s women discussed in the previous chapter. With Mr. Power’s birthday gift of Heroes to Christie, and his additional gift of encouraging her not only to return to her abandoned acting, but to experiment with her acting range, Alcott suggests that women, and the actress figure, had been left out of Carlyle’s Heroes. As we have seen, Stebbins had annexed Cushman to Heroes in her biography by referencing her “marvelous equilibrium of the real and 132 ideal in herself,” thus establishing Cushman as a universal hero figure in the Carlylean vein. Likewise, Mr. Power has not only advised Christie to find the heroic ideal in the everyday real, but he prompts Christie to stretch her acting range through a spectrum of dramatic genres until she arrives at Portia, a female hero who speaks in an androgynous legal realm of (male) justice and (female) mercy. For her part, Christie carries her audience along with her, showing that she is capable, as Stebbins would have it, “through emotion to establish that higher relation with the hearts and souls of others which is the highest gift of human consciousness.” This tone of high seriousness is emphatically not Alcott’s, but she too strongly values feeling with others through theatrical performance of character. That Carlyle cannot see the problematic aspects of hero worship for women or the positive social aspects of theater is pointed out as a weakness, one that other “wise” men such as “Mr. Power” do not share. Just as Cushman would exercise her gift for mimicry on Carlyle’s prophetic manner, Alcott also parodied or demystified sage figures with her own comic performances (in semi-private parlor settings). One of her characters was a woman’s rights advocate in bloomer dress who harangued on the ‘Rights of Woman.’ This female (perhaps a parody of Margaret Fuller) read aloud writings she was editing of “Rolf Walden Emerboy” as well as parodies of Bronson Alcott’s writing. She also performed a male counterpart, a stuffed shirt named Oronothy Bluggage, who lectured on the “Position of Women.” She gave other comic performances at the club for women she founded in Concord as well as in private homes. 83 133 Likewise, Alcott’s denial of a natural ability for morally wholesome tales in a late interview with La Salle Corbell Pickett is also meant to draw a firm distinction between her writing and that of the Concord sages: I think my natural ambition is for the lurid style. I indulge in gorgeous fancies and wish that I dared inscribe them upon my pages and set them before the public. . . .And my favorite characters! Suppose they went to cavorting at their own sweet will, to the infinite horror of dear Mr. Emerson, who never imagined a Concord person as walking off a plumb line stretched between two pearly clouds in the empyrean. To have had Mr. Emerson for an intellectual god all one’s life is to be invested with a chain armor of propriety. (Pickett 108) The phrase “intellectual god” is telling, and the “chain armor” recalls the caution Mr. Power gives Christie in Work about the dangers of hero worship. Alcott reminds us that while male philosopher sages such as Emerson propounded an abstracted humanity in their writing, her work grapples with passionate emotion as she embodied it in individual characters. When Alcott compared her intellectual bent to her elder mentor-sages, she said she was “never a student, but a great reader.” 84 We should remember the level of scholarship was high, and Alcott was intellectually ambitious. Elsewhere in her journal (December 1860) Alcott reports Emerson’s invitation to his class to “talk on Genius” as “a great honor, as all the learned ladies go” (Cheney 124). Many members of her circle, and Jewsbury’s, were broadly educated and eagerly embraced many fields of knowledge, able to do so because the professionalization of disciplines, and their degree of specialization, had not yet advanced so far as to create impassable boundaries between them. Many worked as 134 editors and contributing writers, fostering the flourishing journalistic culture that published the essays of Carlyle and Emerson, and polymaths such as G.H. Lewes (actor, novelist, literary critic, and scientist, as well as the intellectual companion, literary manager and common law spouse of George Eliot). Both print and oral exchange, journals and social circles, facilitated theories and ideas on the type and role of heroes, education, philosophy, and science. As I will show, one intellectual nexus in particular—theories of the mind-body connection—created a flashpoint between art and science, actors and literary figures. As a young woman Geraldine Jewsbury’s enthusiasm for Carlyle’s early work specifically included Sartor, the Heroes and Hero Worship lectures and his 1831 Edinburgh Review essay “Characteristics.” 85 Previously I have discussed hero worship and Jewsbury’s many connections to the literary development of a female hero. Clearly the widely popular Heroes, with its taxonomy of heroic types, including the “hero of letters” as the modern day remnant of the declining heroic, exerted a general pressure on the development of the novel. 86 Jewsbury’s attraction to “Characteristics” is less obvious, but as we shall see, the essay divides human faculties into opposing camps, traits and abilities that are part of parallel debates in acting theory of the later eighteenth century, and also theories representing the relationship of mind to body in light of nineteenth-century scientific discoveries. In subtle but powerful ways Jewsbury’s thinking on acting and mind/body theory alike inform her revision of the kunstlerroman in The Half Sisters, and a longer look at 135 Carlyle’s rejection of such analysis reveals what is at stake in perpetuating a mystified relationship of mind and body. In the forementioned “Characteristics” essay, Carlyle holds forth on the “unknowable” dynamics of the mind. An initial aphorism structures the entire essay: “The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick.” That is, Carlyle insists that the greater part of the body and mind are unconscious, and that this mystery is what Nature intended; the more conscious an intellectual or moral operation is, the less inspired it is, and the less useful it is. For Carlyle the relative awareness of the human mind and body is evidence of a deep epistemological structure: that is, in general we can know systems on the mechanical level, but we cannot know the most valuable and larger part of complex systems, its invisible dynamic processes. With graven-tablet certitude, his biblical diction and syntax emphasize that all forms of vital or dynamic action are inherently healthy, and necessarily occult as a general principle: We may say, it holds no less in moral, intellectual, political, poetical, than in merely corporal therapeutics; that wherever, or in what shape soever, powers of the sort which can be named vital are at work, herein lies the test of their working right or working wrong. To an extent perhaps exceeding the idealism of earlier Romantics, Carlyle entertains a vision of childhood as the blessed state of oneness of body and mind, “the whole man like an incorporated Will” (3). Relative states of “incorporation” of mental faculties are ruling metaphor, theory, method and practice for Carlyle. In addition to his Mosaic style of address, his style of persuasion sets up well-known distinctions, 136 points to their metaphorical longevity as evidence of their facticity, and finally asserts their relative value in rhetoric that relies more on violent pathos than scientific logos. For some twentieth-century critics, Carlyle’s appeal endures primarily in masterful verbal portraits, his sketches of character. 87 This ability can be seen clearly in the following passage from “Characteristics,” in which Carlyle personifies the mental faculties of “logic” and “insight” as “quite separate characters”: [O]ne fact . . . has long been familiar: that the man of logic and the man of insight; the Reasoner and the Discoverer, or even Knower, are quite separable,—indeed, for most part, quite separate characters. . . . Often by some winged word, winged as the thunderbolt is, of a Luther, a Napoleon, a Goethe, shall see the difficulty split asunder, and its secret laid bare; while the Irrefragable, with all his logical tools, hews at it, and hovers round it, and finds it on all hands too hard for him. (5) The “Irrefragable” man hacks incompetently at tough mental logs while the whiz kids throw their winged verbal thunderbolts: “Characteristics” as a whole sets up a stunning array of characters and oppositions. To be able to grasp the essay’s groupings and methods of character construction, I have reduced Carlyle’s creative verbal wealth of oppositions to a table. 137 Table: Carlyle’s “Characteristics” Natural/Healthy/Unconscious Artificial/Sick/Conscious Intuition, insight/divine inspiration Logic/system Depth/dark/roots Surface/light/leaves and flowers Unity Dualism INTELLECTUAL Meditation Articulate thoughts Dynamic, vital Mechanical, small Genius/immeasurable value Faculty/measurable value Creation Manufacture Great, mysterious Trivial, intelligible Artist (doesn’t know ‘how’; divine gift) Debater/demonstrator (knows ‘what’ and ‘how’) Shakespeare Milton Walter Shandy College Tutor Luther, Napoleon, Goethe Schoolmen, spinning dervishes, Irrefragable Doctor (of astrology) Discoverer/Knower Reasoner Orator Rhetorician Business person Systematic theoriser Word-monger MORAL Right Wrong Continuous welldoing Self-contemplation Alms-giving Preaching virtue Spontaneous habitual all-pervading spirit of Chivalrous valour Shrivelled Points of Honour Humane Courtesy/Nobleness of mind Punctilious Politeness Goodness/Freewill/self-impulse Precept/Sanctions/rewards/punishments/ necessity Generous Affections Sentimentality/magnanimity preached and pressed Active work Fragile impotent conscious virtue/inaction Wholly lives in goodness without wonder Makes love/courts goodness/abandons in contempt Involuntary/unconscious Voluntary/conscious 138 Viewed schematically, “Characteristics” evidences how Carlyle’s work puts into tension terms that are part of parallel debates in acting theory of the later eighteenth century, and also the period’s mind/body theory. For example, we can see above two opposing constellations, “involuntary-unconscious-vital-genius-artist” and “voluntary-conscious-mechanical-systematic-demonstrator,” such that Carlyle perpetuates elements of Cartesian dualism and vitalism in both England and America into the nineteenth century. 88 That none of Carlyle’s exhaustive studies of Goethe and Lessing mention Lessing’s Hamburg Dramaturgy has been noted as curious, given that its influence is pervasive in Carlyle’s writing. 89 Lessing and other theorists sought to know dynamic, shifting causes and effects of character in the embodied person. Still, even while insisting on not tampering with the mind’s dynamic mystery because it is the source of its vitality, Carlyle acknowledges that questions of the relationship of the mind and body are still under scientific investigation in his own era, even as he sweepingly excludes these questions from his own inquiry: These curious relations of the Voluntary and conscious to the Involuntary and Unconscious, and the small proportion which, in all departments of our life, the former bears the latter,- might lead us into deep questions of Psychology and Physiology; such, however, belong not to our present object. (7) Given the chronic illness of his wife Jane, and the ill health of Jewsbury and Alcott, it is interesting and perhaps inevitable that they would look askance at Carlyle’s claim to a deep structural law that healthy vitality was a silent, mysterious dynamic process, and ill health was the noisy proof of the process’s decay into stasis. In 139 contrast to Carlyle’s dismissal of the mind/body question, Jewsbury and Alcott knew that actresses such as Cushman investigated these “curious relations” between the “conscious” voluntary and “unconscious” involuntary in the daily practice of their work. These relations were also part of Cushman’s study of acting theory in her reading of Lessing. In a letter to Jane Carlyle dated January 25, 1842, Jewsbury’s comments on the “Yankee Puritan” Emerson that she thought she saw behind his essays were scathingly protective of Thomas Carlyle as the senior sage: By the way, I had Emerson’s ‘Essays’ lent me on Saturday, and I have read nearly half through them. I like the one on ‘Spiritual Laws,’ much, but I don’t take to the man— he is a dry, cold, sententious Yankee; he spiritualises profit and loss, and strikes a very fair balance, and says many true and many sensible things, but he owes himself to your husband, I think, and has not a grain of his passionate eloquence, which makes one’s heart burn within one. I can profit by him now, but I might have read him till doomsday before I knew your husband, and been neither better nor worse. I don’t take to the man at all; he is sober, honest, and so forth, because he clearly sees he gets more by it. It is the most profitable and safe investment he can make of his faculties. (Ireland 52-3) Five years later, when Jewsbury had come to know Emerson personally, her judgment became less harsh; indeed, her home in Manchester was his base of operations in the north. They traveled in France early in 1848 in company with her friends the Paulets, W.E. Forster and Arthur Clough, and later in June Emerson delivered a series of three lectures in London on the “Natural History of the Intellect.” She writes to Jane: 140 July 13, 1848: I fancy there will be what ___ calls a “metaphysical prayer meeting” to-morrow. Emerson is to spend the day at Seaforth [home of the Paulets], according to a long-standing promise that he would not leave England without going there again. I have a great affection for Emerson, in spite of the provokingly serene ether he always seems to breathe. He has such a fine spirit in him, and so much humanity, too. (Ireland 248) Though Jewsbury refuses hero worship and finds Emerson’s “serene ether” “provoking” (much like Louisa Alcott’s “plumb line stretched between two pearly clouds in the empyrean” noted earlier on page 132), her critical feeling about the philosopher has changed markedly, as the character sketch she delivers in her letter reveals. Like Jewsbury, other critics think that Emerson’s writing developed a more relaxed and effective voice when he began giving live lectures, in effect, when he became a professional performer who used his live audiences’ responses to rework his lectures. 90 He was a proponent of the democratic Lyceum lecture halls, where anyone might go for inspired instruction. Emerson also found its lecture format to be a “test of the best” of the speaker’s thinking: Emerson assumes the aggregate audience response is a reliable guide to their judgment. At the same time, he maintains a bias against performance, or “lust of freer demonstration of those gifts we have” that overeager scholars with an eye for fame might exploit, wasting their neglected bodies and genius in unthinking competition just as merchants who work themselves to death for riches: The distinction between speculative and practical … [is] in perpetual balance and strife. . . .We are ever tempted to sacrifice genius to 141 talent; the hope and promise of insight through the sole avenue of better being, to the lust of freer demonstration of those gifts we have. We seek that pleasurable excitement which unbinds our faculties, and gives us every advantage for the display of that skill we possess, and we buy this freedom to glitter by the loss of general health. (Emerson 145) As in Carlyle’s “Characteristics,” genius is grouped with character, health, and work, but it is defined in opposition to lesser talents. Someone of mere talent is addicted to the pleasurable excitement and freed abilities that accompany demonstration of skill, but genius comprises the “true work” for which Emerson reserves his choicest language. To explain the difference between talent and genius, Emerson offers as an example Mesmer’s dream of access to the hidden wisdom of the mind. Under detached scientific analysis, Emerson claims, mesmerism finally was revealed as the old corrupt dream of instant wisdom: This was the expedient of mesmerism,—by way of suction-pump to draw the most unwilling and valuable mass of experience from every extraordinary individual at pleasure. [Mesmer’s penetrating eyes] put him in possession of men. He was the man-diver. He was the thought-vampyre. . . .No man can be intellectually apprehended,—as long as you see only with your eyes, you do not see him. Alas! The whole must come by his own proper growth, and not by addition; by education, not by inducation. If it could be pumped into him, what prices would not be paid! . . .But no,—the art of arts, the power of thought, Genius, cannot be taught. (Emerson 165) Like Carlyle’s recoil away from investigating the interface of mind and body in “Characteristics,” Emerson seems squeamish to the point of nightmare at the thought of tampering with the virgin wholeness of mind and body as a singular entity, and firmly ties such investigations to shirking the “work” of education that leads to self growth. As for “Genius,” it not only cannot be taught, it must not be touched. As 142 we have seen in William Carpenter’s long-lived work Principles of Mental Physiology, Genius is an innate capacity (noted in this Preface, page x and note 2); this belief gives breathing room to male intellectuals in particular, who otherwise might have to compete for cultural capital with hardworking, ambitious thinkers of any kind—even women. Carlyle as well as Emerson found that the transcription of his Heroes lectures did not capture his full meaning (or the audience understanding) because of the weight of emotional and intellectual content that his performance text had communicated, or that he hoped it had. He rewrote extensively for the published book collection to add the semantic meaning that had been carried by his acting, to restore the dramatic values that had been lost. Clearly, in the 1840s Emerson and Carlyle exhibit a confused ambivalence about their own lecture performances as they found them to be a valuable element in their working process, an interactive two-way communication with their audience that sharpened the communicative skill of their prose. In Carlyle in particular, as Michael K. Goldberg has pointed out, the received effect is that of “enthusiastic” speech, but in fact this effect has little relationship to any “spontaneous” working method—or one that actually would carry out his theories of inspired genius and distrust of acting. 91 The discrepancy between Carlyle’s theories and his practice were apparent to many. His provocative and entertaining verbal pyrotechnics, especially performed in person, supplied their own excuse and those who noticed the discrepancy deferred to him. 143 Carlyle’s and Emerson’s attitudes toward inspiration and genius, with their emphasis on the “mind” side of the mind/body connection, are related to the novel genre’s gradual increase in retrospection and interior currents. Kathleen Tillotson locates the source of this current back to the influence of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus and the subsequent body of novels that took up Carlyle’s psychodrama of religious doubt. She observes that “the heroes and heroines of the religious novels think in a special way—they analyse their own states of mind.” Contemporary critics of these essentially autobiographical novels of anguished religious questioning noted that the novels featured “dialogue[s] of the mind with itself” as a common formal mode, and their comments ranged from labeling these dialogues “ingenious” modes of accessing consciousness to finding them to be “diseased habit[s] of analysis.” 92 The tendency to self-exposure in the new “autobiographical” novel sparked diverse reactions that mirror a strikingly similar range of cultural attitudes about actors: on the one hand, actors’ use of introspective analysis as a means of character study is a narcissistic “diseased habit,” while on the other hand, their “ingenious invention” is fascinating, and lofty values are insistently attached to “the dialogue of the mind with itself.” Despite Sartor’s influence in preparing the ground for novels of religious doubt, including Jewsbury’s first novel Zoe, Carlyle himself rejected introspective analysis; an important part of his “doctrine” was repression of questioning and an exhortation to silence. His heroes were men of action and will. But important cultural currents were against Carlyle: analysis of all kinds was expanding as science turned to formal induction and deduction, while at the same 144 time politics was democratizing. By 1873 Herbert Spencer singled out On Heroes and its “great man” view as an example of writing that essentially indulges the public mind in mythological thinking, retarding the development of a widespread scientific approach to the study of man as a social being. 93 As the discussion of ”Characteristics” and Emerson on mesmerism has shown, the dominant category containing work, health, character, education and genius are tied to not knowing “what” and “how,” to the instinctive and spontaneous. Like Spencer, Jewsbury and Alcott raise similar kinds of objections to Emerson’s and Carlyle’s limits on analysis and insistence on mystifying the embodiment of mind, in that their novels take a more materialist view of the linked body and mind, a view that remains dynamically “holistic,” while simultaneously unsettling the male sages’ equation of health with a necessary and fragile mystery. If Jewsbury and Alcott felt ambivalent about Carlyle and Emerson’s deprecating attitudes about acting and their reluctance to investigate the physiology of emotion and thought, so too did a third intellectual mentor, Margaret Fuller, who offered an alternative valuation of acting (and as a writer of fiction, of the novel’s positive value as well). Fuller was widely read by feminists in Europe such as Jewsbury, and like Emerson she visited the Carlyles and their circle. It is likely that Alcott’s enthusiasm for Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century not only sprang from its feminism, but the fact that it was not as suspicious of theater and dramatic values as were many intellectuals of the day. Indeed, it argues that “those who had seen the great actresses,” and heard the Quaker preachers of modern times, 145 would not doubt that Woman can express publicly the fullness of thought and creation.” 94 Significantly, Fuller’s references to “genius” lack Emerson and Carlyle’s insistence on the danger of addiction to excited, fevered feelings that will cause mental and physical disease. In “Entertainments of the Past Winter,” a long critical review of Boston culture in The Dial of July 1842, Fuller even argued that the New England regional character needed exposure to more drama to balance the culture’s unevenly developed mental faculties. Fuller’s article uses the phrase the “genius of the time” in the sense of a aggregate cultural mind: the predominant spirit in a hierarchy of cultural values that in turn affects cultural expression. Revisiting the Puritans’ legacy of anti- theatricality in New England, Fuller labels it a “reaction” against human beings’ natural need for amusement, noting that while the desire for amusement was over starved, the natural human desire for instruction was overfed. The mind’s corollary to the desire for instruction is the faculty of “understanding.” New Englanders’ faculty of “understanding”—the “genius of the time”—was currently being overdeveloped by the predominance of one cultural form, the lecture (“a business person’s way of finding out what there is to know”) and she argues “it is an entertainment which leaves the hearer too passive. One that appealed to the emotions would enter far more deeply and pervasively into the life.” For individual and community health, the aesthetic and emotive side of New England nature should no longer be denied. 95 146 Importantly, Fuller takes on the question of the morality of looking at the body on stage, linking rejection of the body in the visual and performing arts to contemporary disdain for, and neglect of, the human body in a broad cultural sense, “as an object of care and the vehicle of expression.” Her review of Fanny Ellsler’s “opera dancing” (ballet) labels disdain for the body to be contrary to the current of progressive civilization (64). In particular, she believes that “the perfect discipline of limb and motion, till they are so pliant to the will that the body seems but thickened soul” is “the true state of man.” Lacking this “transparent,” fully expressive body, one where “the subtlest emotion is seen at the fingers’ ends,” the body is no better than a “rude hut” or “case” in which his soul is trapped. The “rapidity and fullness in the motions of the ballet” lend the same communicative advantage to arts of bodily movement (“pantomime”) as poetic rhythm and text improve the drama (65). The tensions in Emerson’s and Carlyle’s analyses of character and genius contrast with Fuller’s integration of acting into both character and genius, and her broad inclusion of acting and the body as a vital part of the public sphere, highlight the ways in which Alcott’s and Jewsbury’s fiction integrated discourses of national and class character types, romance, heroism and theatrical character. Jewsbury and Alcott were able to listen with less anxiety than their older male sages to Fuller’s characterization of the “spirit of the time,” and as novelists found their form—one that was concerned with the artist’s healthy body as both “an object of care” and the “vehicle of expression”—in a similar nexus of a disciplined, known body both fully 147 expressive of the “spirit” and fully responsive to the will. Both Jewsbury and Alcott mixed a realist aesthetic with the expressionistic values of melodrama to evoke a Fuller-like “transparent” human in their novels. However, despite the numerous shared Anglo-American cultural connections we have traced, as fellow Americans and New England women, Alcott and Fuller drew on a national history of revolution and its rhetoric of rights and liberation that Jewsbury did not. This rhetoric had helped to form the stereotype of the capable, independent New England female of which Work’s Christie is one example, as well as the “lively girl” of American melodrama. The appeal to a national rhetoric of revolutionary liberation appeared strongly in “Entertainments” when Fuller termed the contemporary American body “defrauded,” and called for a “reinstatement” of its “rights;” similarly, in Work Alcott rescues the Transcendentalist “spirit” from the ether by figuring it as a product of her young working heroine’s active, feeling American body. Here, Alcott’s accumulation of meanings around “spirit” at the outset of Work merits closer examination, apart from the textual analysis of the novels that follows in the next chapter. Alcott links “spirit” to her key terms “success” and “work,” evading religious connotations of disembodied soul and appropriating it as national character with habitual emotional values. The idea of a national emotional “character” is a persistently interesting one, and New England actress Charlotte Cushman also invokes it when she refers to international differences in acting approaches that align to national histories of acting theory. 148 In the first sentence of Work, Alcott’s heroine Christie “declares independence” and announces plans to leave the home that her aunt and uncle have provided, after she reaches her 18 th birthday in a few days. After thrashing it through with them, Christie sits by the fire alone late into the night thinking of her past, present and future. The narrator interrupts the reverie in mid-paragraph to list for the reader Christie’s various past “inheritances,” including personal, class, and cultural legacies. The intervention ends by telling us the result of those multiple inheritances, which is Christie’s—and the novel’s narrative—desire: [T]he strongest [young working women] struggle on, and, after danger and defeat, earn at last the best success this world can give us, the possession of a brave and cheerful spirit, rich in self-knowledge, self-control, self-help. This was the real desire of Christie’s heart; this was to be her lesson and reward, and to this happy end she was slowly but surely brought by the long discipline of life and labor. (11) Alcott’s journal notation of being “possessed” by writing Work (see page 57) echoes in this passage, for the narrator tells us that Christie will be “possessed” by the “long discipline of life and labor” which brings her “slowly but surely” to the “happy end,” when her protagonist will “possess” the rich spirit that is “the best success the world can give us.” Despite the central place in the quotation of the noun “spirit,” the narrator does not define “success” as being a “spiritual” one in the lofty sense that tends to minimize embodied, worldly experience. Rather, “spirit” here is a more personal attribute, as the triple repetition of the prefix “self” in the list of descriptors emphasizes. Success is a spirit that is “rich” (a quick poke at Americans’ focus on 149 material success) in “self-knowledge, self-control, and self-help.” These accumulated qualities describe a self that can diagnose, correct and rely on itself; in other words, it is independent and self-reliant in the sense that American Transcendentalist thinking so often emphasizes. The spirit is “brave and cheerful,” but it is unclear whether this is a habitual inward stance, or whether this spirit includes characteristic brave and cheerful outward behavior that affects others. However, if we read the narrator’s definition of success alongside the earlier passage where Christie defines her desired life as incarnating a radiant, memorable source of warmth, light and sound, it is clear that in this case, the narrator’s “brave and cheerful spirit” is meant to be expressed and also felt by others, layering inner and outer manifestation of this spirit. We cannot easily identify the source of the spirit: whether the brave and cheerful spirit generates the independent self, or the reverse—where the qualities of the self enrich and enable the spirit to be brave and cheerful—or both, where spirit and self form a mutually reinforcing feedback loop. Still, the final statement is clear in its declaration that the spirit and its self is a “reward” that is “possessed” as the result of “the long discipline of life and labor.” Since “self-knowledge, self-control and self-help” evoke active and highly specific qualities of strong character, they seem more likely to be adaptive skills shaped by “life and labor”; thus, these qualities of the self are more likely to generate the “brave and cheerful spirit” than the overall spirit as the source of the self. The causal logic structuring the passage lends emphasis to this “spirit’s” source in the active, embodied, laboring self. The 150 narrator’s definition of success thus hinges on “disciplined” patterns of work and emotional behavior. The narrator unequivocally identifies this successful emotional work as Christie’s “real (narrative) desire” and the “happy end” of the novel. The narrator gives away the ending by naming Christie’s ultimate desire and that it is requited, but it is clear that along the way, Christie (and the novel) will have desires and endings that differ from the eventual “real” ones. With this early narratorial intervention, then, Alcott announces a bildungsroman of education by experience and self-culture, and establishes a complex relationship between her two key terms, “success” and “work,” that will shape the novel’s narrative form. “Work” accumulates particularly evocative connotations of both inner and outer labor, and of passive and active leadings to success. In addition to citing Christie’s individual character and her environment as factors in her success (causality is mixed), the narrator tells us that some of Christie’s “inheritances” are more widely shared. Her class character (“that of most New England girls”) includes “much romance and enthusiasm” that is “hidden under the reserve that soon melts in a genial atmosphere.” Significantly, this hidden quality also includes “the spirit which can rise to heroism when the great moment comes.” This typological argument—which creates a class easily extended to other U.S. regions—is part of the soldier rhetoric of the Civil War, but it also has echoes of the shift in the theater’s lines of business discussed earlier. The leading hero now includes aspects of the regional American character “eccentric” lines of business—in 151 this case, the stoic Yankee whose emotions are as mobile as those of any other human. Yankee actress Charlotte Cushman loosely correlated emotional type not only to national, regional or ethnic types, but also matched them to the most suitable technique for acting a character. In her experience, some roles could tolerate a high degree of self-consciousness in performance, that is, the actor could afford to be less absorbed in the emotions of the character and remain largely detached as her mind and body performed the actions of the character and “assumed” the emotions without necessarily “feeling” them. In her own case, she had found that she had to allow herself to become absorbed so that she had a lesser degree of conscious outward control of her mind and body. Nervous at the prospect of acting Lady Macbeth with the great Macready, Cushman decided that to prepare, she would use his method of practicing in front of a mirror. Anne Brewster recalled the results: She bounded in like a gay romp of a girl, tossed her book up to the ceiling, and gave a hearty wholesome laugh. . . .“I have never acted so fiendishly bad in all my life,” she said. “If I act that way when Macready comes, I’ll kill myself instead of Duncan. Mirror-pointing may do for Macready, but it plays the mischief with me. I don’t mean to think of Lady Macbeth until I go on the stage to act it with him. Let us read any and every thing else. I must do something to get back my unconsciousness. I hate pointing and rules; they make me trip and tumble as if I were in a long gown, and feel horribly nervous.” (Brewster 172) When this general account is compared to a published interview that queried Cushman on conscious control in acting, her reply is strikingly pragmatic. In effect, the technique she uses depends on the impression she wants to make on the audience, 152 a choice which itself depends on the role and its guiding genre. These factors set the terms of the mental and emotional concentration needed to be unselfconscious (being “absorbed” or “in the moment”) for longer periods. Apparently her need to be “unconscious” to retain flexibility and freedom of expression did not apply to all characters, but to “great roles,” and in these parts (presumably Shakespearean tragedy or roles approaching that standard) she needed to feel “the passion she assumed.” This is only indirectly a preference for an experience of a particular aesthetic, creative or even moral value, indeed if it is a preference at all. It is a pragmatic focus on what works to affect the audience, put their minds and bodies into an interactive state with the performance text, to “move” them. Specifically, Cushman explains that “the Anglo-Saxon has too much self-consciousness to be able to impress an audience otherwise, although a Frenchman or Italian may put on and off a character and act it well with perhaps an entire lack of self-consciousness” (Goddard 206). At first, Cushman’s brief remarks may strike us as facile, overly broad stereotyping both by race/ethnicity and nation, as if styles of personal expression such as extroversion or introversion were dependent upon inheritance of a certain geographically reinforced gene pool. It is hard to say what Cushman is referring to in her report of a subjective experience of being inhibited from a free and flexible expression in a “great role” unless she is “feeling the emotions she assumes.” However, it is clear that she is referring specifically to trained actors, whose language and acting style are shaped by the theatrical and literary history of their 153 geographical nation. Actors are products of national theater traditions that are shaped by different kinds of government control of theaters, plays, and genres. In addition to these specific learned sets of expressive vocabularies dependent upon nation and geography, these patterns may overlap with those on broader levels of culture (such as gender) but also those shaped by environment. Moreover, there are nonverbal utterances and gestures that are not entirely involuntary, but are much less available to conscious control (Darwin’s Expression sought evidence of a common vocabulary of physical expression of emotions across species). The huge ambiguity of which vocabulary of expression Cushman feels inhibited from is further complicated since the aim of training based on repetition (that is, conditioning) is to make the mimetic (imitation) feel the same as “natural” impulse. Actors are aware of this, and indeed, neurologically speaking, there isn’t any difference. Macready, for example, was known to take a shortcut in the wings just before he entered so that he would strongly feel the sensations of anger. The action of violently shaking a ladder would prime his body to feel anger. Once this was done, he could more easily think the thoughts the dramatic situation provoked in his character and become absorbed in the resolutions and actions he would take to pursue his given objectives. Macready’s copious diaries show that he was never satisfied with his acting unless he “felt the part.” If we keep Cushman’s knowledge of well known techniques of actors in mind, a more likely reading of Cushman’s explanation of national difference in the inhibiting power of self consciousness is that she is referring to national differences 154 in training and conditioning of actors, not neurobiological differences, or even regional cultural conditioning, such as Alcott’s New England reserve that “melts” in a genial atmosphere to reveal “romance and enthusiasm.” In other words, Cushman is not actually attributing different capacities for absorption to a genetic inheritance; the cause is not primarily that the “races” have inherited variant neurological systems. For example, Cushman does not become “horribly nervous” when she is conscious of the multiple acts of mimesis she must coordinate because the neurological wiring of Anglo-Saxons makes fear more easily felt, nor does the nerve capacity of the French and Italians lend itself to “abandon” so that French and Italian actors are free from being conscious of a gap between mimetic feeling and “spontaneity.” The distinction that Cushman makes between “great roles” that require absorption, and roles that do not, reveals that it is the scale of emotion that exacerbates the self consciousness of performing learned acts, and it is that scale that renders a self-conscious performance of a great role “unimpressive” to the audience. Essentially, the actor must not become distracted by the unusual sound of his own voice or unfamiliarly large movements (in modern parlance, “commit” to the actions). As an overall group, then, French and Italian actors are trained so thoroughly so that they “may” be less distracted by the sensations of their bodies, since those sensations are not unusual to them. Indeed, Cushman may be reminding us that the French and the Italians may not need to extend themselves vocally and physically as much as “Anglo-Saxon” actors must in Shakespeare. 155 From an actor’s point of view, it is important to recognize that the differing demands of genre involve differences in language that complicate the complex neurophysiological relationships between thought, feeling, and spoken word (action). Krich and Chinoy attribute the split in acting theory between the “emotionalists” and the “anti-emotionalists” (or the head vs. heart camps), famously debated early and often in France and in England, to French actors’ different approaches to handling the spoken challenges of their inherited theatrical tradition, i.e., to language: The classical quality of the spoken word in French dramatic art has undoubtedly sharpened the actors’ consciousness of the problem of nature and artifice in acting. The dichotomy between natural emotional expression and controlled artistry have probably been expressed best in the words of the great French actors. It is noteworthy that France is the home of the extreme emotionalist attitude, stated in Saine-Albine’s Le Comedien, and of the most absolute statement of the antiemotionalist position, voiced by Denis Diderot in Le Paradoxe sur le comedien. (153) As the decades-old interview with Cushman in The Theatre Magazine shows (it was not published until 1906, thirty years after her death), the fascination with the issue of whether a performance can be effective without the necessity to “feel” the emotions portrayed (or to what degree) is perennial, and even a brief hint of what Charlotte Cushman thought about the issue after a long career was valuable to the modern theater community. Diderot’s Paradoxe was not translated into English until 1830, but it became widely known as Cushman began her acting career around the 1840s, and her working actress’s pragmatic answer that different roles and audiences require different degrees of absorption, and also elicit different awareness in the actor of what they are feeling at a given moment, encompasses both a 156 phenomenological account and a theoretically nimble hybrid of Diderot’s deliberately extremist positions in Le Paradoxe. No one has analyzed more thoroughly than Joseph Roach (in his massive study The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting), exactly why it is difficult to pin down what is being debated in arguments about “genuine” or “felt” emotion in acting without a detailed understanding of the state of contemporary knowledge of physiology and mind/body relationships. The slippage in the well- worn key terms being debated is large and so are their epistemologies (what the semantic content of the word “emotion” might be is just one problem). Many actors as well as critics have agreed, however (and I do too), that Diderot’s staging of a debate between two rival actresses in the Paradoxe (actual 18 th century Comedie Francais master actresses Clairon and Dumesnil) remains one of the most clear in framing the issues while exposing the debate itself as something of a red herring for actors and theatrical performance in a practical sense. The competing claims that art consists of perfect absorption and emotional freedom, or that art consists of perfect detachment and emotional control are specious; the debate turns on defining what is meant by “spontaneity.” Since spontaneity is rooted in a phenomenological awareness of the origins of a physical feeling of emotion, it becomes obvious that a historical understanding of mind/body relationships always underpins our understanding of acting processes. 96 In terms of this project as a whole, as well as this chapter, looking at how actors attempt to tap into the links between mind and body in order to create a 157 character helps us to become aware of related methods employed by novelists. There are correlations between the representational techniques (such as iconic gesture) that actors and novelists chose as they joined and helped to create the variety of melodramatic modes and genres of the mid-nineteenth century. Meisel identifies “situation” as a common structure between nineteenth-century painting, drama and the novel. 97 In this chapter we have been tracing the tensions around concepts of “genius,” “spirit” and “emotion” in the rhetoric of significant mentoring figures (Emerson, Carlyle, Fuller, Cushman), tensions that are generated by a growing scientific and cultural recognition that these intangibles might have material embodiment, and that it might be fruitful to consider them as a physiological process. As we have seen, Emerson and Carlyle held the view that a mind that was not conscious of its links to the body was a healthy one; to be aware of the mind and body affecting each other while they were “at work” was by definition to be in a state of disability. This attitude has its correlate in the extreme “emotionalist” side of the debate on self consciousness and “genuine” emotion in the work of acting. I am now going to examine more closely the shared knowledge of these writers and actors. The approaches to the mind-body connection that I am now going to develop include not only the nervously susceptible state of genius and female genius, but a mental-somatic condition shared by all three women; that is, their tendencies to depression, tied to issues of gender and professional work, which inspires them to learn more about how mind affects the body and vice versa, with the 158 result that their kunstlerromans develop a different way of representing relationships between emotion and thought. II. I have read the [draft of Zoe] and [the characters’] indecency looks so purely scientific and so essential for the full development of the story that one cannot, at least I cannot get up a feeling of outraged modesty about it—nay I should feel as if I were the indecent person should I find anything to blush at in what they [Jewsbury and her writing partner] seem to have written just for fact’s sake without a consciousness of wrong— —Jane Welsh Carlyle to her cousin Jeannie Welsh (12/25/42) The “indecency” that Jane Carlyle calls both “scientific” and “essential for the full development of the story” is Jewsbury’s first attempt to put her reading on the physiology of the nervous system and the emotions into a novel. As a result, the characters’ motivations for their actions, or lack of them, seem so strange to Jane Carlyle that she (rightly) identifies it as indecent, at least in comparison to older ways of representing character in terms of a coherent moral or religious code. The Half Sisters is Jewsbury’s second attempt at representing character and action in this way in a novel, and like Diderot, she found acting and actors a good means of focusing the implications of her new knowledge. The science of mind was still largely subjective territory in which actors had a substantial claim to expertise since they acquired unusual control over physical behaviors that were involuntary for others, which made them attractive research subjects. Later in the century William James would follow Diderot in looking at actors as an entry into an embodied psychology. For nineteenth-century actors, toiling to elevate their status and that of 159 their profession, “scientific” psychological expertise provided a useful component in arguing for the social worth of theatrical representation. Cushman herself knew she was “studying mind.” In a letter to Elizabeth Peabody, Cushman is keenly aware of relative cultural values, and cannily annexes the claim to psychological insight spoken by a proud actress in one of Victor Hugo’s melodramas: Your letter has done me good, dear friend, and not the least part of it that which speaks approvingly of my beloved art, and all that it takes to make an exponent of it. It has been my fate to find in some of my most intimate relations my art ‘tabooed,’ and held in light esteem. This has always hurt me; but my love for my friends has ever been stronger than my pride in anything else, and so my art has been ‘snubbed.’ But no one knows better than myself, after all my association with artists of sculpture or painting, how truly my art comprehends all the others and surpasses them, in so far as the study of mind is more than matter! Victor Hugo makes one of his heroines, an actress, say, ‘My art endows me with a searching eye, a knowledge of the soul and the soul’s workings, and, in spite of all your skill, I read you to the depths!’ This is a truth more or less powerful as one is more or less truly gifted by the good God. (Stebbins 142) This letter reveals once more Cushman’s skill at self-fashioning narratives, which includes and synthesizes the rhetoric employed by both sides in the tug of war between the materialist science of mind (which gradually had been emerging from the grip of its parent discipline, moral philosophy), and religious tradition. Her phrases “the study of mind is more than matter” and “a truth more or less powerful as one is more or less truly gifted by the good God” stakes out property rights for the actor in a new psychological science—not only perception of the “soul’s workings,” 160 but also the talent to “read” normally “invisible” traits such as motive and intent in others—while retaining the mysteries of God’s intents and prerogatives. Cushman’s rhetorical and narrative adroitness surely adds much to her fascination for a novelist. According to Mary Poovey, in mid-Victorian England there were two main narrative tropes by which women were “excused” for entering into the public sphere: a “domestic,” self-sacrificing necessity, such as struggling to support family (oneself would not suffice); and a “military” individualistic heroism, a “natural” eruption of the force of will. As Merrill points out in theorizing the sources of Cushman’s wide appeal, Cushman (like other actresses and female authors) embodied a stunning convergence of these two narratives (Merrill 277, fn 12). A well-accepted general critical explanation of nineteenth-century separate sphere ideology considers these attitudes to be a result of powerful new economic forces and a way for the middle class to differentiate itself. Many advocates considered it dangerous for women to work because her system just was not strong enough—at least women of a certain class, which at least partially includes the class of women possessed of an especially sensitive “nervous organization.” To date, much of the critical analysis of Jewsbury’s and Alcott’s novels has focused on the various ways in which the texts simultaneously challenged and reinforced nineteenth-century separate spheres gender ideology. This study builds on and extends these sociocultural gender analyses, taking a new turn by examining the textual evidence of Cushman’s, Alcott’s and Jewsbury’s interest in a variety of possible sources and effective treatments for depression, from which all of them 161 suffered. They were women who needed to earn money on a daily basis. They were all highly aware of their untenable position as talented female professionals, necessarily “public women” who were pressured by the era’s gender ideology mandating separate male (public) and female (private) spheres; they knew their position had corrosive effects on their mental, emotional, and physical health. Literary historical or biographical approaches to their lives and works have been similar; the critical tendency has been to focus on causes of illness as they relate to cultural and family pressures, personal psychology and emotional patterns, emphasizing the location of the “problem” in the cultural and mental “environment.” As their twentieth-century critics have done, they themselves sought to assign possible causes for their similar somatic complaints, speculating on and analyzing the personal psychological and cultural pressures on themselves, their friends and other nineteenth-century artists, both in their correspondence and their creative work. Indeed, one of the enduring tropes in the female kunstlerroman is the physical and emotional toll taken when the indigent artist must resist cultural pressures and undergo social marginalization for exhibiting her art in order to earn a living. Actors of course exhibit themselves, making them the extreme case. 98 These actress narratives certainly reflect this overall structure and are passionately didactic in criticizing women’s socialization and limited opportunities in contemporary Anglo- American culture. Still, the Jewsbury-Cushman-Alcott artistic and discursive communities did not look solely to cultural constraints and emotional and psychological stress for the 162 causes of their chronic symptoms. Given their personal experiences, they acknowledged work might be a strain on women, but they knew that it tested men’s stamina in equal measure, 99 and argued that overall, women, even those vulnerable to illness, were stronger and better for leading active lives—provided they could avoid the practical necessity of working past the point of exhaustion. They took a scientifically informed, open-minded view of their situation, and this attitude, combined with a female support network, enabled them to keep on working in spite of poor health. As it developed over many years, Geraldine Jewsbury and Jane Carlyle’s long friendship often took the form of Jewsbury commiserating and suggesting remedies to Jane to improve her mental and physical health, and it is clear that for Jewsbury, the two intertwine inextricably. In July, 1851 (a year after publishing The Half Sisters), Jewsbury wrote to Jane Carlyle powerfully describing the sensations of deep depression and its possible causes: But it seems that it is only in novels that people live with those they most care for. I can better understand the mood you have so long been suffering from than perhaps you think, for some years ago I was in something very like it for a long while, but I did not understand it. I had no one to speak to, and I could not believe in it, and so tried to force myself out of it, which did me a great deal of harm. It was like living in one of those dreary, calm November days when there is but one cloud—but that one covers the whole heaven, and there is no believing in sun while it lasts. I can only give you the sympathy of fellow-feeling! I hope and believe that it will clear off, but no effort of our own, nor any wisdom or maxim from without, can drive it away. . . .It was the frightful absence of all feeling or energy, as if I were dead and yet alive under it all, that made it as horrible to me as being bricked up alive in a prison. . . .If I had given in to my wretchedness, and not tried to get up a feeling of some sort, it would 163 have been better for me. . . .But I think, too, that physical causes had a great deal to do with it! (Ireland 410-11) Jewsbury believed that fighting depression was useless, either with inner effort or “wisdom or maxim from without,” or by forcing herself into energetic activity or getting “up a feeling.” Such hopeless advice seems odd until the final assertion that “physical causes had a great deal to do with it!” In her experience, until there was a physical change toward bodily health, it was not possible to will a faith in the existence of the sun behind the all-encompassing cloud, and Jane would do herself harm by trivializing her “mood” as taking place only in her mind—and presumably blaming herself for not being able to function. Jewsbury held these views well prior to the 1850s. Jewsbury wrote sternly and supportively to Cushman in the years 1846-1848, the period Cushman worked feverishly to build and maintain her career both artistically and financially following her sudden tremendous success in London: As to what you say of not having been ‘up to the mark.’ You are not a machine, but a woman of genius. Nothing is certain and constant in its action but mechanism, and yet the best thing done by mechanism is not so valuable as the uncertain, varying, sometimes imperfect result of human efforts. What you effect comes from within, and if you were always ‘up to the mark,’ it would be a great presumption that it was mechanical, and came from without. So do not disturb yourself for nothing. I have no need to say ‘Go on,’ for you are one of those who cannot help it. Tell me how you go on, for indeed and indeed I feel for your success more than I ever could do for my own. (Stebbins 74) You must contrive not to do so much another year. Your ‘passionate work’ will kill you else; for though nature is very elastic, she won’t stand to [sic] much. Remember what I am saying is not fancy, for I have suffered myself, and I have studied the philosophy of the thing, 164 and so I consider I am qualified to speak, and you are to believe what I tell you. Do you hear?’ (Stebbins 76) Jewsbury here lectures on the physical toll that “emotional work” takes on the creative artist. Read in conjunction with her letter to Jane Carlyle, her thinking on the mutual effect the body and the mind have on each other becomes clear. According to Jewsbury’s longtime Manchester neighbor Mrs. Everett Green, Jewsbury had similar physical reactions after writing her novels due to the emotional work involved: She had an illness after almost every novel and her doctor told her that she must give it up or she would be a confirmed invalid. This was owing to the strong faculty she had of throwing herself into her characters. “You know, my dear, I’ve got to live it all,” I remember her saying to me when she was at work upon one . (Howe 126) Jewsbury had indeed studied “the philosophy of the thing.” In a dramatic example of how mind-body philosophy early became woven into her work (in language that echoes Alcott’s “stage-struck fit”), Jewsbury wrote to Jane Carlyle on February 12, 1844, regarding a work in progress, her first novel Zoe: So my store of philosophy surprises you? . . .As to “that scene,” my dear—I came to the requisite knowledge very honestly, if you will but believe it—indeed I could not help it. I took a fit of studying metaphysics before I was 16, and would not have given a straw to read any book whose meaning did not lay at an unfathomable depth; and when I had gone through a course of those, I was fired with a glorious ambition to say my say on the much-vexed question of ‘matter and spirit,’ and, save the mark! the nature of life, and I accordingly set to work on physiology, and for nearly two years I read nothing else. There is at this moment a box upstairs full of extracts, and abstracts, and conclusions. I have a more than feminine ignorance of anatomy—I don’t feel too sure on which side the heart lies—but, en revanche, I have physical philosophy enough now to stock the College of Surgeons. I have forgotten a great deal of it, and 165 the taste for that sort of reading has gone by me—but out of such a decoction of Blumenbach-Magendie-Tiedemann-Cabanis, and ever so many more, it would be hard indeed if I had not gathered a few theories. Apparently a family friend, a physician, had shared French and German medical research with the young Jewsbury. It was an exciting time for neurophysiology, which was working on the idea of nervous energy. Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis, one of the founders of modern psychophysiology, accepted the conclusions of Luigi Galvani (of galvanism, the effects produced by electrical flow on muscles and nerves, i.e., degrees of contractility), and proposed that this electricity was stored in the brain. Just after the turn of the century he published “new ideas on brain function, on the brain’s own sensibility, on the concept of will, and on the chemical basis of nervous activity.” Cabanis was not an experimental scientist, but “his way of discussing the concept of nervous energy invited scientists to pursue experimental research in this field of study.” The spread of his ideas was facilitated by his travel abroad during the Terror; he acquired German and even translated works of Goethe. His concepts of a specialized nervous system and sub- systems prefigured many modern knowledges, among them “genetic, hormonal and neurological factors,” an astonishingly complex view that goes some way to explaining the mixed causalities Jewsbury attributes to the differences between the half-sisters Bianca and Alice. Another concept that probably intrigued Jewsbury was that Cabanis located perception in the brain, and sensation in the nerves. Cabanis found evidence that the 166 brain did not register all sensations or events, thus showing automatic processes that are not conscious for the individual, providing “one of the early nineteenth-century models for what conventionally came to be called the conscious and the unconscious.” Hence he is “a major transition figure between philosophical speculations on brain function at the end of the eighteenth century and experimental lesion studies in the early nineteenth century,” (Turgeon and Whitaker 412-16), which provided enormous impetus to new theories of mind because it could correlate missing areas of the brain with associated loss of function. Blumenbach was a comparative anatomist who categorized humans into five races based on assumptions, similar to those of phrenologists and physiognomists, that physical characteristics like skin color and cranial profile were correlated with group character and aptitude. These general pseudoscientific assumptions can provide a basis for some correlations between national/ethnic/geographical groups with mental and emotional capacities and character traits that Jewsbury, Alcott and Cushman all make, such as Cushman’s assertion of varying degrees of self consciousness among different European actors, desire for education, or nervous and physical stamina under stress. Then as now, however, labeling sub-groups with typical observed behaviors can be as much an acknowledgment of learned cultural patterns as an evaluation of permanently wired innate capacities or abilities. The rigidity of the system is crucial; Blumenbach did initially rank the races according to degrees of aptitude or capacity, a ranking which unfortunately became better known 167 than his later significant modification of those judgments promoted by additional observations as he came to know more about his human subjects. Though obviously they are not immune from picking up aspects and unexamined assumptions underlying widely held prejudices of their time, my assessment of the categorizing remarks of Jewsbury, Alcott and Cushman is that the stereotypical labels they employ are a kind of shorthand that depends less on genetic explanations for rigidly defined capacities and more on a learned emotional habitus (as we have seen in the quotation from Cushman about national acting styles in page 151). In The Half Sisters, Alice’s future husband Bryant escorts her around the assembly rooms at a public gathering that honored visiting great thinkers. As a businessman who is often abroad, Bryant is not particularly impressed by the crowd. Just as Cushman has remarked, in his view they are too self conscious: It is when you see a great gathering like this that you perceive the uncultivated state of social habits amongst the English; there are, no doubt, exceptions, but social talent is not indigenous amongst them; they are all encumbered with themselves, and consequently, don’t move well; there is all the dead material for enjoyment, but no life to set it going. (55) The idea that “social habits” and “social talent” can be lacking on a national level, and the added population of thinkers suggests a development of a particular habitus underlies Jewsbury’s notions of collective behavior. More precisely, Jewsbury and Alcott invest their belief in a dynamic “nervous organization” that is not only shaped by developmental processes, but the health and structure of which is continuously reshaped by habit and other environmental factors. Their actorly understanding of 168 the embodied mind encompasses the universal human capacity to learn from the behavior of others, sometimes with sensations so quickly registered, triggering reflexive mimicry so quickly, it is a process that escapes our conscious knowledge, like the gaps in continuous motion created by film frames that we do not attend to— the distinction between perception and sensation made by Cabanis. In Jewsbury’s case, her citation of the physiologist Friedrich Tiedemann bears out an emphasis on giving human potential a wide scope for development, not a rigidly limited innate capacity. Tiedemann’s interest in whether there was a unified developmental principle led him to his research into embryology and comparative anatomy, and his 1816 treatise announced that ontogeny did indeed recapitulate phylogeny (that is, embryonic developmental stages did resemble the developmental stages of other animals): “the formation of his organ in the [human] fetus, followed from month to month during its development, passes through the major stages of organization reached by the [vertebrate] animals in their complexity. We therefore cannot doubt that nature follows a uniform plan in the creation and development of the brain in both the human fetus and the sequence of vertebrate animals” (Gould 8). 100 His later cranial studies led him to the opposite conclusion from Blumenbach: first, that there were no differences in brain capacity between the sexes, and second, between the races. Tiedemann published a paper in English with the Royal Society in 1833 to support and celebrate the full manumission of slavery in England, which concluded: 169 The principal result of my researches on the brain of the Negro is, that neither anatomy nor physiology can justify our placing them beneath the Europeans in a moral or intellectual point of view. How is it possible, then, to deny that the Ethiopian race is capable of civilisation? This is just as false as it would have been in the time of Julius Caesar to have considered the Germans, Britons, Helvetians, and Batavians incapable of civilisation. The slave trade was the proximate and remote reason of the innumerable evils which retarded the civilisation of the African tribes. Great Britain has achieved a noble and splendid act of national justice in abolishing the slave trade. The chain which bound Africa to the dust, and prevented the success of every effort that was made to raise her, is broken. (Gould 11-12) It is possible, even likely, that the Alcott family’s close involvement with abolition may have led to Louisa May Alcott’s reading of this very article, or hearing about it at a lecture. Certainly she would have heard many similar scientific arguments about racial equality. The overall tendency of the research cited by Jewsbury, regardless, shows that she was interested in an inquiry into physiology that tended towards egalitarianism and an expansive view of human abilities based on reasoned conclusions from reliable data. Vivisection was producing a revolution of sorts in locating specific location for bodily feelings, including both sensation and emotions. Charles Bell and Francois Magendie identified sensory and motor pathways (automatic reflexes and voluntary movement). Late eighteenth-century physiologists had thought every part of the body could feel, with emotions felt in the visceral organs, and the brain the locus of ideas. But during the period 1805-1825, Francois Magendie and some of his French colleagues located feeling in the brain, as the center of the nervous system: a change in the associations made between structures and their function that limited 170 sensibility to the neuromuscular system. The result was that feelings and emotions “came now to be primarily mental and even intellectual events situated in the brain: emotions became a species of ideas” (Gross 270). If emotions are given the status of ideas, women with strong feelings become thinkers. Jewsbury’s later feminism suggests that, among other things, she may have been looking for scientific evidence of male/female equality. Her exhaustive thinking about the woman question is flamboyantly staged in the Half Sister, where she puts eloquent feminist arguments on the woman question into the mouth of her fantasy aristocrat, Lord Melton, who finally manages to marry the acting genius Bianca. In just one example, Melton refers to “physiology of their minds:” If all women were not brought up in such unnatural traditions of what is ‘feminine’ and ‘maiden like’, and ‘sensitively delicate’, they would not feel it a bounden obligation to tell lies, and deny an honest lawful affection for a lover. But they are crushed down under so many generations of arbitrary rules for the regulation of their manners and conversation; they are from their cradle embedded in such a composite of fictitiously-tinted virtues, and artificial qualities, that even the best and strongest amongst them are not conscious that the physiology of their minds is as warped by the traditions of feminine decorum, as that of their persons is by the stiff corsets which, until very recently, were de rigueur for preventing them growing ‘out of shape.’ (159-160) It is not solely the actor protagonists in The Half Sisters and Work who testify to their creators’ belief in a dynamic “nervous organization,” one that is not only shaped by developmental processes, but the health and structure of which is continuously reshaped by habit and other environmental factors. 171 To represent such varied, “invisible” modes of perception in the novel is a difficult task, and part of my argument is that the figure of the actor lends itself to such a task, as does the aesthetics of melodrama. Another part of my argument is that on a personal level, these women writers and actors had a highly attuned awareness of their own processes (or in the current scientific terms discussed in the Preface on page xiv, “interoceptive awareness”). Because of that awareness (correlated with emotional awareness and expressiveness) they were attracted to the scientific/medical discourse that helped to crystallize and support their own sense of embodied cognition. They analyzed their chronic illness and disabilities using these new paradigms in their search for how to live stronger, healthier and happier lives, and part of their project in the novels is to share their knowledge with others. However, the “abjected” class status of the acting profession, melodrama, and the body were all against a positive reception for such work. What they share in common is “spectacular” emotion, and behind the unease of Carlyle and Emerson in connecting emotion and thinking there is a long cultural history of abjecting emotion, as has been touched upon in the Preface. The next chapter looks closely at the novels to try to answer the questions of how acting and its theory understood emotion, and how the novels represent embodied emotional cognition and make their case for the value of acting. 172 Notes to Chapter Three 75 Cushman’s autobiographical fragment forthrightly begins: “I was born a tomboy. My earliest recollections are of dolls’ heads ruthlessly cracked open to see what they were thinking about; I was possessed by the idea that dolls could and did think.” (One wonders if George Eliot had read or heard this from Cushman herself and applied it to Maggie in her bildungsroman Mill on the Floss). This beginning purposefully throws down a feminist political gauntlet, according to Emma Stebbins: In those days this epithet, ‘tomboy,’ was applied to all little girls who showed the least tendency toward thinking and acting for themselves. It was the advance-guard of that army of opprobrious epithets which has since been lavished so freely upon the pioneers of women’s advancement and for a long time the ugly little phrase had power to keep the dangerous feminine element within what was considered to be due bounds of propriety and decorum. (Stebbins 12-13) “Play” remains a key word for Cushman as a mature adult: “I cannot let people be conventional where I am, for I don’t know how, and when I go to play with people, they must play my way; is it not so? And this is the only thing I will admit I am dogmatic in” (Stebbins 251; Aug 11 1873). 76 Louisa Alcott’s familiarity with Consuelo was documented by Frederick L.H. Willis, who boarded with the Alcotts for several summers starting in 1844 when he was 14. He reported: “One of our number, usually myself, would read aloud while the mother and the two elder daughters engaged in the family sewing. Thus we read Scott, Dickens, Cooper, Hawthorne, Shakespeare and the British poets, and George Sand’s “Consuelo.’” (Frederick L.H. Willis, Alcott Memoirs (1915), in Shealy, Alcott in Her Own Time,172) An 1854 book list of Louisa May Alcott’s reads: “List of books I like:— Carlyle’s French Revolution and Miscellanies. Hero and Hero Worship. Goethe’s poems, plays, and novels Plutarch’s Lives Madame Guion Paradise Lost and Comus Schiller’s Plays Madame de Staёl Bettine [von Arnim, friend of Goethe] Louis XIV Jane Eyre 173 Hypatia [Kingsley novel 1853] Philothea [Lydia Maria Child 1845] Uncle Tom’s Cabin Emerson’s Poems” (Cheney 68). 77 George Eliot was also considered to be a “sage” in company with the other male figures I mention (her wise sayings were even collected and published by a fan later in her career), but her influence on Jewsbury is indeterminate, despite Jewsbury’s friendship with G.H. Lewes (which flourished before he and Eliot began their personal and professional partnership and before Jewsbury moved to London). Cushman met Lewes as part of a circle that met regularly on Sundays at the Bayswater home of the portrait painter Samuel Lawrence (Merrill 154). Alcott, however, noted that she did not care for Eliot’s novels in her journal (see endnote 54). 78 “During my first sojourn in Manchester I saw something of Miss Jewsbury’s very intimate friends the two Cushmans, American actresses, the elder of whom had astonished the Londoners by playing Romeo to her sister’s Juliet. In due time she was introduced to Mrs. Carlyle, of whom in one at least of her social phases—and Mrs. Carlyle had several—Miss Cushman has given a brief but lifelike word-portrait in a letter printed by one of her American biographers: On Sunday who should come self-invited to meet me but Mrs. Carlyle? She came at one o’clock and stayed until eight. And such a day I have not known. Clever, witty, calm, cool, unsmiling, unsparing, a raconteur unparalleled, a manner inimitable, a behaviour scrupulous, and a power invincible—a combination rare and strange exists in that plain, keen, unattractive, yet unescapable woman! Oh, I must tell you of that day for I cannot write it! After she left, of course we talked her until the small hours of the morning. (Espinasse 143, fn 1) 79 It is possible that Louisa May Alcott and Cushman had further contact in Boston. One possibility is the Radical Club, which met from 1867 to 1880, and included many members of their overlapping circles, including Alcott’s father Bronson, R.W. Emerson, Elizabeth Peabody, Julia Ward Howe, and Ednah Cheney, who authored the first biography of Louisa May Alcott. Alcott’s journal entries mention her attendance at various Radical Club meetings. Correspondence from Cushman to various members of the Club appears at the end of Sketches and reminiscences of the Radical club of Chestnut street, Boston; these letters evidence dinner party invitations and other events such as “Poetry Picnics” to which Cushman was invited, and some of which she was able to attend. Much of the time Cushman lived abroad. Certainly Cushman and Alcott would frequently hear of one another’s activities both 174 in the press and through mutual friends. In her foreword, Mary Elizabeth Fiske Sargent, the editor of the volume, which consists of essays read aloud and responses from those in attendance, notes the atmosphere of the club contributed to its longevity: “Rare thoughtfulness, deep human tenderness, and profound earnestness marked these reunions” (n.p.). In terms of this project, this represents an instance of a community that has a shared habitus. Cushman refers to one evening when women’s suffrage was discussed, and on another occasion one of the topics was the brain. She regretted not being able to attend: “The account of the “Brain Party” was most interesting, as was also that of Mr. Emerson’s Brook-Farm lecture. How I wish I could have heard him!” (395). 80 As mentioned earlier, Cushman’s struggle to support her family, beginning as a young teenager, was widely admired. Jewsbury wrote to Cushman of how her struggle to support her family had won over an older Englishman: Although he had not been to see you act, he felt a sympathy with you for what you had done for your family; he said he had heard of that, and it happens that all his family had been thrown on him, and he behaved in a most worthy way. He was intended for the church, and had a most decided inclination for it; but whilst he was at college his father died in embarrassed circumstances, and this man was obliged to leave college, and go behind a counter and drudge for years to retrieve his affairs and bring up the rest of the family, hating it all the time; but he did it, and adopted two of his sister’s children beside; finally made his fortune and retired, and is extremely respected, as he deserves to be; and there was your point of interest to him. He knew what it was you had done, and could appreciate it. (Stebbins 73). Being driven into show business as the sole family breadwinner is a standard opening trope in actress stories to excuse entering and exhibiting oneself in the public sphere. 81 Lewis argues that Barrett Browning’s and George Sand’s kunstlerromans (Aurora Leigh and La Comtesse de Rudolstadt, sequel to Consuelo) critique the split between “body and soul,” which she traces back to the Psyche and Eros myth (11). This analysis, and the work of other scholars on the prevalence of the Psyche/Eros myth underlying many nineteenth-century works, lends an ancient genealogy for the distinctly more scientific version of this thematic structure in Alcott and Jewsbury’s artist novels. 82 Stebbins’s writing style also resembles Cushman’s, as may be seen in the letter Cushman wrote on Sand and Barrett Browning discussed in the previous chapter. By observing that both Cushman and Stebbins exhibit attributes of sage writing, I do not mean to say that Stebbins’s biographical efforts in any way match either Carlyle’s 175 reckless agility of style or his masterful character portraits. 82 I am directing attention to the “authorizing process” Carlyle’s sage discourse provides—in this case, Stebbins claims rhetorical authority as the fortunate product of Carlyle’s and Cushman’s living example of the artist as hero; she has been witness to the “great gift” of inspiring others through (represented) emotion and, in her view, is following in the footsteps of the genius actress and the sage biographer as master delineators of character. 83 Alcott’s 1855 journal entry notes: “I delivered my burlesque lecture on “Woman, and Her Position; by Oronthy Bluggage,” last evening at Deacon G’s. Had a merry time, and was asked by Mr. W. to do it at H. for money. Read “Hamlet” at our club—my favorite play.” (Cheney 81). This performance was still remembered many years later: “Louisa’s original monologue, “Oronthy Bluggage,” was not given in public, but was given occasionally at home, to the intense enjoyment of the fortunate few who were permitted to hear her…” (Alfred Whitman, “Miss Alcott’s Letters to Her ‘Laurie,’” (1901); in Shealy, Alcott in Her Own Time, 102). Edward Emerson tells of Alcott’s turn as a bluestocking in a parlor performance that took place in 1857 when Alcott was 25. It is the most detailed account of an Alcott character satire. She apparently honed these performances at home with her mother and sisters acting as critical audience: Before we left, Louisa was persuaded by her mother to do something for our amusement. She disappeared and soon came in transformed. Her hair, which girls in those days wore brushed low and braided, was twisted up into a little knob on her head so tight that she could hardly wink. The broad collar, white undersleeves and hoopskirt of the day were gone, and she appeared in an ugly, scant, brown calico dress, with bloomer trousers to match, blue stockings and coarse shoes. She had a manuscript in one hand, and a pen in the other, which she thrust behind her ear and began a harangue on the ‘Rights of Woman,’ and offered and at once proceeded to read in strident tones a gem of thought which she had just turned out, called ‘Hoots of a Distracted Soul in the Wilderness.’ She then passed on to other confirmatory manuscripts that she professed to be editing—travesties on her father’s writings, I think—certainly those of my father under the name of Rolf Walden Emerboy. Mr. Alcott came in from his study to hear, and however little he could understand such manifestations of the spirit of prophesy, he seemed to feel the pride of a parent in his daughter’s wit. (Edward W. Emerson, “When Louisa Alcott Was a Girl” (1898)in Shealy, Alcott in Her Own Time, 95-6) 84 The entry reads “Never a student, but a great reader. R.W.E. [Emerson] gave me Goethe’s works at fifteen, and they have been my delight ever since. My library 176 consists of Goethe, Emerson, Shakespeare, Carlyle, Margaret Fuller, and George Sand. George Eliot I don’t care for, nor any of the modern poets but Whittier; the old ones—Herbert, Crashaw, Keats, Coleridge, Dante, and a few others—I like” (Cheney 398). Edna Cheney’s biography of L.M. Alcott follows her journals very closely, reprints long sections but also seems to report personal interviews. Cheney was a family friend. 85 Jewsbury wrote Carlyle for the first time as an admirer of his work and asked for advice on accessing the “yea” stance toward life. “So it was with her reading of Carlyle’s earlier writings, Sartor, the essays about German literature, and especially the essay called Characteristics. This great man had done her an inestimable, regenerating service. The thing to do was to let him know it at once. Her decorous but glowing letter he answered with kind, brotherly exhortations to “courage” and “silence” (Howe 41-42). 86 For a summary of criticism on Carlyle’s and Heroes’ influence on (mostly male) novelists, see Michael K. Goldberg: “Carlyle’s general effect on nineteenth-century fiction, not only on its subject matter but on its form, began to be most strongly felt in the decade of his lectures on heroes.” Goldberg cites Tillotson’s assertion that the novels of the forties owe a noticeable change to Carlyle’s influence; her examples are Dickens, Thackeray, and Kingsley. Goldberg adds: “to the three novelists cited one should add Disraeli, GE, Hardy, Meredith, who claimed the introductory chapter of the Egoist was “in the vein of Carlyle” (Meredith Letters 3:1295], Charles Reade, Butler, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Melville, and Twain, all of whose connections with Carlyle have been the subject of recent scholarship” (Goldberg lxxix, fn 370). 87 Goldberg cites Rene Wellek and Charles Frederick Harrold, summarizing their views and concluding “Given his focus on individual heroes, the strong visual character of his imagination, his abiding interest in physiognomy, and his constant reference to these subjects throughout the lectures, it seems not only apt, but a view sanctioned by his own practice, to see him as a painter of historical portraits” (xxxvi). 88 See Roach, The Player’s Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting for a complex account of changing models of the mind/body connection and the persistence of old concepts alongside new ones. 89 Luckhurst, Dramaturgy: A Revolution in Theatre, 57 fn 46. 90 The following quotations are from two of Emerson’s lectures in a series Mind and Manners of the Nineteenth Century first given in London in 1848, which Jewsbury may have attended around the time she was writing The Half Sisters. The lectures 177 are titled “The Powers and Laws of Thought” and “The Relation of Intellect to the Natural Sciences.” 91 “It is easy to be misled, as Wilde was, into thinking that “Carlyle’s stormy rhetoric” sprang from enthusiasm. […] Whenever Carlyle writes down his thought as it first arose, in the language of his ordinary speech, it lacks much of the literary embellishment of its published version. Carlyle actually roughens his language into growls, barks, and quixotic wrenchings to emulate the strain inherent in the process of thought, and he retains these signs to convey the struggle by which his finished style has been achieved. His style resembles speech in its dramatic immediacy, but Carlyle arrived at his invented language as a deliberate artistic strategy, no less than Wordsworth had done in inventing a poetic version of the language of “ordinary men.” In short, for all its colloquial vitality, Carlyle’s written prose was the result of considerable artifice and careful contrivance” (Goldberg xxvii). 92 Tillotson footnotes these phrases as coming from articles in Fraser’s and Blackwood’s magazine and Matthew Arnold’s “Preface to Poems,” as well as other remarks, to establish the contemporary view that introspection and autobiography were characteristic of the times and also the differing attitudes taken towards the trend (131-2). 93 Goldberg, lxxvii. 94 Quoted in Dudden, 39. 95 Fuller also praises Mr. Giles’s popular lectures on passages of history as those that “are nearest dramatic representation, in the kind and degree of pleasure communicated, of anything we have had” because of his display of “excitable temperament” “youthful heart,” the “dramatic feeling of his subjects,” comic power in narration” “great fluency and bright genial talent.” She also reviews Lyell’s lecture. Fuller does not restrict herself to the suggestion that the passive, shallow, information-collecting “genius of the time” can be restored to a healthy balance of faculties simply by integrating dramatic values into the written genre of the lecture or its culture of performance. She calls for upper-class support for the arts and rejection of Puritan anti-theatrical prejudices so often heard from the pulpit: “We have been tempted to regret that the better part of the community should have been induced to look so coldly on theatrical exhibitions” (46). 96 More specifically, Roach summarizes that “[r]estating the paradox of acting in terms of Diderot’s dialectic of vitalistic and mechanistic modes of physiological explanation suggests that the real paradox turns on the two meanings of spontaneous. 178 In Diderot’s scheme the actor rehearses his actions until his emotions appear to be spontaneous in our conventional, organic sense of that word—proceeding from natural feeling, produced without being planted and without labor—but in fact they are really spontaneous in Robert Whytt or David Hartley’s mechanical sense of acquired automatisms” (152). 97 “In fact, the narrative function of conventional expressive gesture became more rather than less important in the course of the nineteenth century. But gesture performed that service for narration by expressing the simultaneous relationship of several figures, rather than one man’s passions in serial order; by taking part in a static configuration to symbolize a dramatic situation. A shift in dramaturgy, from a rhetorical to a situational and pictorial mode, coincided here with the shift in problems of narration for the painter who found himself telling a story of private life rather than a history of saints and heroes” (8). Meisel returns to the key word “situation” a few pages later: “the narrative language of painting and that of the drama had much in common. In both, emotion became a typified character, and was subordinated to situation. The fact that a “situation”—a word with static overtones—played so large a part in storytelling in the theater, on canvas, and between boards, is one of the considerations that point to what might be called a common structure or style” (Meisel 10). 98 For succinct and thoughtful analyses of “the body problem” for female performers, and ways in which they circumvented or challenged their objectification, see Dudden, pp. 3-4, 100, 135, and 183. For example, she summarizes Charlotte Cushman’s ability to play Romeo in “breeches” as an effective de-linking of the body’s sex from gender performance, but one that was only possible for a limited period of time, a particular historical moment before breeches were confined to humorous skits and their meaning largely (though never wholly) muted by silliness and marginality. Even before that, the dress reform efforts of the women’s rights movement had made “wearing the pants” too much of a political statement to be tolerated by male audiences unless it was being lampooned. By the 1850s Bloomerism had already become a popular subject for theatrical spoofing. (100) 99 I would argue that the mental and physical stress of a public life was seen by many as applying to both men and women. I have already mentioned that the excitement of Dickens’s performances was seen as leading to his death, and Kemble’s similar belief about actors (see notes x and x). As Jewsbury knew, Thomas Carlyle had chronic illnesses as severe as his wife Jane’s. Dr. John Carlyle said to Espinasse of his brother Thomas, “I preach cheerfulness to him” (109). Espinasse himself calls the effect of Carlyle’s ill health on his work “pathological”: 179 Since his arrival in London he had been intimate with the best and foremost of his brother men of letters. But he had a thorn in the flesh—weak health. Headaches and insomnia were the ailments of which he complained orally; and for the headaches I have known him to make a characteristic attempt to console himself by remembering that they had afflicted some of the greatest of the early German Reformers. […] ‘Ill health has cast a funeral pall over my life,’ he said to me soon after I made his personal acquaintance. With better health he might have been if not happy—one cannot well conceive of Carlyle a happy man—at least not so irritable, with considerable benefit to himself and others. Much in Carlyle and in what flowed from him was, as Goethe said of Schiller, ‘pathological.’ (Espinasse 71) Louisa Alcott’s father Bronson had a nervous collapse when Louisa was a small child, a trauma she never forgot. It is apparent that for the rest of his life, Bronson’s family was careful to avoid stressing him in any way, with Louisa and her mother assuming all responsibility for their survival. Her mother wrote to her brother, “I have taken the guidance of the ship into my own hands,” and thereafter she was the main breadwinner, eventually joined by Louisa. In Frederick Willis’s account of the crisis, as told to him by Mrs. Alcott, who made him a confidante: It was then that Mr. Alcott’s health gave way under the strain. He had firmly believed that he was to found at Fruitlands a Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and so solve for all time the life problem for struggling humanity. His principles were ever a religion to him, and unable to admit defeat even in the face of it, he took to his bed to die. Turning his face to the wall, he refused food and water and silently, with the resignation of a philosopher, waited for death. Mrs. Alcott ministered to him in devotion, silence, and suffering. For weeks, taking but little food at her urgent supplications, his life hovered in the balance […]. (Shealy, Alcott in Her Own Time, 176) Another Concordian believed that the life of the philosophical writer/public lecturer was literally killing: How Emerson accomplished what he did, with his slight physique and slender strength, will always be one of the marvels of biography. His is the only instance, I believe, on record of a man who was able to support a family by writing and talking on abstract subjects. It is true that he inherited a small property, enough to support a single man in a modest way, and without this his career would not have been 180 possible; but the main source of his income was winter lecturing—a practice which evidently killed Theodore Parker, naturally a strong and powerful man. (Frank Preston Stearns, Sketches from Concord and Appledore (1895), in Shealy, Alcott in Her Own Time, 79) 100 Stephen Jay Gould "The Great Physiologist of Heidelberg." Natural History. FindArticles.com. 20 Jan, 2011. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_6_108/ai_55127879/ 181 Chapter Four Hard Work and Channeled Emotion: The Stage Actress in the Kunstlerromans of Jewsbury and Alcott Formal similarities suggesting ways of organizing and perceiving reality, and shared expressive and narrative conventions, the two most pervasive of my announced concerns, are by no means independent of each other; but the latter are much easier to point to and talk about. That there were conventions for the representation of character and emotion or the embodiment of a situation in the nineteenth century we know from old movies and the crude relics that survive even today as mock melodrama. The iconography of character and emotion was less limited than those relics suggest, and it was available for serious uses, while its clichés—like those of any conventional system or language—were even then vulnerable to burlesque. (Meisel 5) During Cushman’s long career as an actress, acting style reportedly changed from the dignified, Kemble-Siddons school to a more “natural,” less declamatory one that met the different aesthetic demands of melodrama. Edmund Kean is often noted to have been the first in this wave of change (Downer 525). Cushman herself was not sure she had a particular “style,” but her recollection was that her style did change: “All the English actors and actresses of that time were of the Siddons and Kemble school, 101 and I cannot but think that these early impressions must have been powerful toward the formation of a style of acting afterward slowly eliminated through the various stages of my artistic career” (Stebbins 15). Artists are notorious for changing their own assessments of their process and style, but nonetheless, many Romantic actors noted a general change after Kean, and in addition to the influence of his popularity, the shift was often attributed to the different demands of tragedy compared to the newer melodramas from France. As 182 the productions translated from the French were joined by English melodrama, there was a change from epic heroes who acted in tension with the crowd, to the hero in a more intimate setting: a more “domestic” form in both senses. 102 Kean made his tragic heroes more “human,” and both of Cushman’s most respected leading men, Charles Macready and Edwin Forrest, incorporated Kean’s inclusion of recognizable human behavior into heroic character. 103 Actors of the mid-nineteenth century could draw on a range of gestural conventions from those inherited from classical rhetoric to attitudes copied from genre painting, and once the gestures were “second nature” from repetition, they were available to actors like Cushman as free modes of expression. As we know, the more complex the role, the more Cushman liked to leave herself free from “rules” (of classical decorum) and “pointing” (attitudes struck at key moments of meaning). Becoming absorbed left her largely unconscious of the received interpretive history of gesture and text, which gave her more leeway to behave spontaneously according to her own internal script and the behavior of her fellow actors “in the moment.” 104 Tremendous admirers of Cushman’s ability to blend the tragic and melodramatic in unique interpretations, as experienced theatergoers Alcott and Jewsbury drew on the melodramatic aesthetic in their actress novels as subject—that is, their actresses perform melodrama—and also as form, a narrative drama realized through bodily expression of emotion. Alcott and Jewsbury use melodramatic aesthetics to educate their readers about excessive repression and expression of emotion; they stress that an actorly attention to inner and outer manifestations of 183 feeling establishes a clear flow between feeling and thought and communication that avoids either extreme, and that such emotional “training” is essential to mental and physical health. Attention and reflective analysis play a key role, because rote repetition of unhealthy patterns without reflection can create conditioned reflexes so strong that reactions cannot be diverted by the power of the will. Both The Half Sisters and Work stage melodramas of neurological peril, where in a negative environment, inheritance and conditioning can prove to be fatal. For persons with “sensitive nervous organizations,” attention to psychophysical balance is crucial for survival. The neurologically gifted person is constantly, restlessly observant and responsive, because the nervous system is “irritable” in the biological sense of being highly reactive to stimuli. It had been shown that the nervous system could carry an electrical charge that activated reflex motion in the muscles. Because emotions are a way of thinking and also of communication, these embodied minds must be able to transmit energy through multiple channels of expression so that the system (person) transmits and receives clear signals while it maintains clear communication with itself (feedback). “Awareness” can describe one aspect of this system, which has both an inherited capacity and potential learned accuracy and effectiveness. If not matched by a strong, healthy body that can carry the strong emotions of this highly reactive system, this active, energetic mind can be a dangerous inheritance. A determining factor in maintaining the necessary balance between the highly strung nervous system and a healthy, communicative body is the organism’s 184 cognitive environment. In The Half Sisters and Work, great importance is placed on environment and nurture, that is, the individual’s learned behavior is crucial in creating “nervous reflexes” that at moments of crisis may override the conscious will. Habitual behavior of all kinds, of thinking, feeling, and physical embodiment, shaped by the cognitive ecology, together determine the potential of the gifted person to grow towards or away its potential “genius.” Structurally, the actor character is set against a variety of different “neurological” characters encountered at points along the life journey. Ultimately, the figure of the actor is the person least at risk in these two novels because her work rehearses both emotional retrospective analysis and melodramatic expression. This chapter will show how the novels combine a melodramatic aesthetic with a scientifically informed view of the neuroscience of emotion and its role as a form of thinking about, and communicating to, oneself and others. Jewsbury and Alcott attempt to bridge the distance from a melodrama that foregrounds the authenticity of action and emotion over the mind, to a Romantic literary character that privileges the mind’s mediation of emotion and constructs interior depth as more authentic. On the level of aesthetics, melodrama’s association of the sublime to trauma works in tandem with the imaginative activity of recollected sublime emotion (as in Romantic poetry), each playing a part in the heroine’s training on and off stage. In both recollected emotion and melodramatic trauma, the sublime is significant because it links the seen with the unseen. As a felt discovery of truth, the sublime seems to operate variously as a means of narrative dilation and compression: 185 a felt discovery, it may telescope an extended temporal series of seen quotidian moments into a previously unrealized narrative pattern, or reveal an extended narrative that lies behind a single picture. 105 In the realism of Jewsbury and Alcott, the sublime links quotidian life with larger meaning. On the level of the individual character in The Half Sisters and Work, the sublime “proves” the close interplay between the mind, emotions and the body. There is a close correspondence between Alcott and Jewsbury in the ways they “realize” this interplay. In the analyses that follow, I look at certain representative elements of the bildungsroman—the false partner from whom the actor-heroine must detach in order to continue on her journey, and the habitus (positive emotional environment or structures of feeling of a community) that must be located or constructed. In these bildungsroman orphan novels, the actress-character’s journey is toward a densely packed meaning of “home.” I. Like de Staёl’s Corinne, Bianca in Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters is half Italian, half English. Her mother is a passionate Italian woman of “beauty, genius, generosity, and a whole mine of precious things in her character, not scientifically balanced, but poured out in lavish profusion on her English lover,” Philip Helmsby, a young man who loves art and becomes a discriminating collector. They elope together in Italy but do not formally marry because of her family’s opposition. He is suddenly called home on his father’s death to take over his extensive iron works. He 186 promises to return to Italy, but once away from her his emotions dissipate, he turns away from her too-complete passionate devotion, and he eventually marries a traditional Englishwoman. He does not know of the birth of his daughter Bianca in Italy. He and his English wife produce Alice, Bianca’s half sister. Bianca’s mother is prevented by her family from leaving the house, let alone Italy, to search for him. She waits and hopes for years that she can present him with his daughter, becoming “feeble both of body and mind” as a result. When her strict uncle dies, she gathers her scant mental and financial resources and finally takes Bianca to England. The difficult journey and her excitement makes her critically ill and her capacity diminishes severely, leaving Bianca at fifteen responsible for them both in a strange country where she does not speak the language. The traumatic moment that Bianca learns from the doctor that her mother will not recover is an example of a static arrest that “realizes” a narrative that extends both backwards and forwards in time and is lived intensely in the immobile body. Jewsbury is able to convey this through physiological detail: As the door closed after him, the child sank on her knees beside the bed, sick with fear. A horrible future had just disclosed itself to her— her girlhood was strangled by this sudden fearful anxiety, and the life curdled in her heart. …her heart trembled and died within her. She sat thus overwhelmed for several hours, during which she became laden with as many years. At length, the heavy necessity which had at first stunned her, acted as a stimulus; besides, in the deepest sorrow there is always a reaction towards hope. People who are called to suffer much always have great elasticity of heart, for without that it must give way and break (5). 187 Later in the text Jewsbury revisits this moment to refigure it as a specifically neurological event: The shock that came on Bianca that fearful day beside her mother’s bed, when the knowledge of her helplessness came in its full extent upon her, quenched the last spark of youth from her heart; henceforth, the burden and anxiety of providing for the passing day came upon her; she was face to face with destitution, and with nothing but her own hands to stave it off herself and her mother. A strong and indomitable resolution—an energy that would shrink from nothing, was then first roused; it was the strong bass note of her nature, the finer harmonies were not yet unloosed (31). This is a contemporary view of the nerve network operating by sympathetic movement like a stringed instrument. A shock such as this one overwhelms the system (figured by her motionless pose of kneeling by the bed for hours) and the motion continues almost endlessly. This event marks the beginning of a nerve pattern that is continually reinforced by events, that will powerfully shape Bianca’s habitual reactions and choices. Bianca is helped by the landlord of the inn and two travelers there, a successful equestrian circus manager and Conrad, a Cambridge student who is the son of a privately wealthy barrister. They quickly find that her father has died. With the help of Conrad’s Italian and her own expressiveness, she is hired by the circus manager as a “dumb show” performer while Conrad pays the bills for the doctor and their lodging at the inn. Bianca works her way up in the traveling circus while taking care of her mother, keeping the memory of Conrad as her “hidden source of life and comfort” (36). She meets Conrad again, who solidifies his status as her guardian angel and 188 idol when he supplies her with some books on theater (Shakespeare of course, but also Hazlitt, Schlegel, Schiller and Goethe) and helps her to transfer to a regional theater through his father’s influence. Bianca finds a mentor in a great starring actor who periodically comes to act at her provincial theater. She begins to develops her talent in earnest, but after rejecting the advances of the theater manager, falls on hard times. She encounters Alice, who has married a wealthy businessman. Alice is drawn to Bianca and offers charitable help to her sick mother. Bianca discovers through matching portraits of their late father that they are half sisters, but she does not tell Alice since she knows her husband would not welcome her. Bianca pins her hopes of being worthy to disclose herself as Alice’s sister on becoming a great actress. Conrad makes a visit to Alice and her husband, who is a business partner of his father’s. Conrad finds Alice to be stiflingly domestic and boring, but discovers Bianca is performing in the nearby town and falls shatteringly in love with Bianca when he sees her act Juliet. When his father discovers their engagement he makes Bianca promise to wait and cunningly sends Conrad off to the fleshpots of Europe. Bianca vows that while he is away she will become worthy of Conrad by becoming a great actress and he vows to come back. Conrad then repeats Bianca’s father’s pattern of gradual emotional disengagement and stays abroad for several years. In the meantime Bianca serves her apprenticeship to her art, becomes a great actress and on her mentor’s advice, is ready to make her debut in London. She is a great success but learns that although Conrad has just returned to England, he did not 189 come to see her acting triumph. He spurns the laurels that she believes she has won for his sake. He attends the theater several days later when she is a confirmed sensation, and upon their reunion Conrad honors the letter of their engagement but actively negates its spirit. Her mentor meets Conrad and immediately discerns that Conrad does not love her. He warns that, in his experience of actresses and their love affairs, both she and her art are at great risk if she does not take action on her inner knowledge of Conrad’s emotional desertion. Bianca refuses to withdraw her pledge and her trust, preferring to blame herself as having unrealistic expectations of Conrad being able to demonstrate his love. Bianca is partially correct in that after years of traumatic struggle when she held Conrad and his love as perfect, she is addicted to her one ideal (thus ignoring the cautionary tale of her mother). Indeed, in her use of imagination in acting in melodrama she has rehearsed what is by now an unbreakable pattern of thought: “He was the ideal hero to whom she acted, he was the type to which she referred all the qualities attributed to the heroes in the pieces they acted” (36). Reacting against the invisible pressure of Bianca’s abjection to him, her inner desolation and his own cowardice in not setting her free, Conrad is critical of everything she does, abusing her emotionally. The situation drags on, undermining Bianca’s health even as she solidifies her acting success and social position. Eventually at an evening party she overhears Conrad rail against actresses in general and her in particular. She releases him from their engagement, cannot eat or rest, and works herself into a collapse. 190 Conrad encounters Alice again, and this time finds her the acme of womanly perfection because unlike Bianca, an active and “public” woman, Alice is cloistered in domesticity and perfectly passive. She is also unhappy, terribly lonely, feels neglected by her husband, and fears he doesn’t love her. Conrad exploits Alice’s neediness, declares his love, and then stays away until Alice agrees to run away with him while her husband is away. Alice believes she already has lost her immortal soul and broken her marriage vows simply by feeling love for Conrad. Her husband returns unexpectedly while Alice is writing her goodbye note. Startled, she falls into screaming convulsions, is unable to stop, and dies a day or so later. Conrad also falls ill and eventually Bianca helps him to regain some of his health in a sisterly way, risking her reputation as a morally upright actress in the process. In his weak and guilt-ridden state Conrad turns to a dissenting religion and becomes the opposite of the young man who selfishly indulged himself; he is now the man who denies himself everything and idolizes his excoriating preacher, who has made him see his “own self weakness, never to trust in my own heart more” (326). He divests himself of his worldly goods and disappears. Once Conrad has removed himself, the way is clear for Bianca and her good friend Lord Melton, a champion of women’s equality, to find their way to each other. Broadly, Jewsbury uses the device of the two half-sisters to show how the possibilities for self culture and development for two women born with related sensibilities and capacities for expression are affected by different national origin, class, and education. But these differences between Alice and Bianca gradually 191 diminish as the actress Bianca adapts to life in England and works for her success. A more crucial difference between them grows fatal over the course of the novel. Alice marries a successful, driven businessman, while Bianca travels with acting troupes or moves between regional theaters, all the while caring for her mother, who has dementia. Their human environments—the habitus or “cognitive ecology” of each sister—provide very different models of emotionality. The habitus of “home,” whether it is viewed as local (for Alice, a suburban estate, and Bianca, a traveling theater troupe), or viewed as a regional or nationally characteristic pattern of expression (mentioned in the previous chapter), is made up of persons who seek, allow or deny an exchange of sympathy. The domestic sister Alice’s businessman husband Bryant is loving, and he can express his love, but he is not a character who can model a clear path from sensing emotion to productive thought and action. In fact, he has refused to share his own business worries with Alice, saying “I cannot speak of matters at the time they are pressing on my mind” (106). For her part, Alice “shrank from all outward manifestation of taste or feeling, except when sanctioned by someone to whom she looked up”(41). Bryant is capable of noticing when Alice is “changed,” and he urges her to tell him her fears, which turn out to be that his love for her was diminishing. But he can only offer brisk prescriptive advice to change her thinking: “whenever you see me silent as I have been, you must not think me unkind…never doubt my affection, because I do not make a demonstration of it. I have many things to harass me.” He cannot help her to unpack the emotional process by which they mutually keep each other in the dark. 192 Upon the death of Alice’s mother, a “weight of depression… fell on Alice, which no effort could shake off.” Because Alice has been schooled both by her mother and sister-in-law to hide her feelings from her husband, we can easily believe, as the narrator tells us, that after her mother’s death, Alice’s husband “had no conception of the morbid sinking of heart and deadly sadness which so easily beset imaginative temperaments, whose owners are not subject to the necessity to work” (108). So it is not only the necessity to work, but the difference in habitus, that makes the crucial difference in the sisters’ differing capacities for survival. At this dangerously low point for Alice, the narrator makes an extended, fervent comparison of the differing emotional habitus of the two half sisters, strongly invoking Carlyle’s doctrine of work as a point of access to the ideal: “No matter how mean or trivial may be the occupations which are appointed to us,—we can work at them with courage and perseverance, so long as we do not feel condemned to them as the ‘be all and end all’, the realisation of our life—so long as there is a side on which we may escape from that which is seen and definite, into that which is unseen and indefinite” (109). “Realization” has a particular meaning in the performance culture of this post-Romantic period, as Martin Meisel has shown. Arts such as painting and theater crossed over as each “realized” the other: dramatizing a painting, for example, so that it becomes a narrative extended in time and space, dynamic with sound, text, and movement. A series of paintings or prints may realize the turning points of an entire story taken from a stage play, or extend an iconic moment of 193 melodrama: the moment after a woman has jumped off a bridge, her body endlessly falling toward the water, her eyes wide, her gown fluttering (see Meisel 137, Plate VIII). This cross dramatization between artistic worlds was possible because of shared goals: “a union of inward signification, moral and teleological as well as affective, with a weighty, vivid, detailed and documented rendering of reality… the Realization of the Ideal” (Meisel 13). As Jewsbury’s narrator applies this crossing between the seen and the unseen, “realising” life is a life-giving, creative process whereby work, the daily quotidian, can be dramatized into an extended narrative of unseen meaning—and it also means that the unseen narrative can be realized in a seen moment. In The Half Sisters, as Bianca’s story and chosen profession as actress illustrates, realization of life draws on the same skills of bodily sense that the actor develops and hones in practicing her craft. The narrator makes it clear that sensitive attention to the body’s emotional signals is the path to creating meaning: the ability to make of life something more than its present day materiality, precisely to “realize” that material into a significant and coherent story. This ability to listen to the physical signs of one’s “yearnings” allows the mind to translate them into thoughts, thoughts which build a structure of meaning which lends larger purpose to even the most commonplace actions. The narrator passionately asserts, “Every action we do, means more than it says;—it is the symbol of some thought, some hope, some effort.” Under the right conditions, this sensitive attention becomes a habit of “philosophy” or informed reflection. 194 For Bianca, those conditions are enabled by her acting as she strives to make the unseen visible. Though she has “no one’s affection to feed and stimulate her with words and looks of sympathy” (108), she is part of a creative environment of making theatrical meaning with others who “realized,” or staged, the transformational process of emotion emerging into thought, who gave their attention to its larger meaning. Alice has potential creative power, but with no one to show her the way, the passage between the real and ideal becomes increasingly blocked: She had the sensibility of genius without its creative power; she had not force enough to break through the rough husk of her actual life and assert her inner soul; she had not the gift of utterance in any way, and the life was almost choked out of her by the rank, over-fed, material prosperity which surrounded her” (41-2). The problem for Alice is being “hemmed in by people who cared for none of these things,” “condemned to live with those who lead mechanical lives.” “Mechanical lives” are formed by repeated gestures, as an automated pottery factory makes three- dimensional objects: “If we were built up in our daily life, and all glazed over to the smooth compactness of surface into which our actions are each set in its own place— meaning neither more nor less than the mechanical result of the concurrence of certain pitiful necessities—the spirit of life would be stifled out of us;—we should become dead jars of clay, instead of aspiring, palpitating, living human souls” (109). The “glazing over” is the end of the process, an end that reduces the ongoing dynamism of formation into a static, fixed series of surface designs. In this way, Jewsbury shows that Alice is paradoxically denied access to the ideal because she does not invest any attention in her “yearnings.” She only dimly 195 perceives them at all because in her world, she has been trained to give her attention to the minutiae of material comfort, hushing the emotional messages of the body that are the living source of the immaterial thoughts of the mind, and to realize only the basic display of an achieved social position. This is where acting skill versus rote imitation makes the difference, because instead of developing a habit of attention to her inner instincts and channeling her emotions into thought, strengthening her independent will, Alice can only imitate those around her: She had not confidence enough in her own yearnings to make a way for herself; she did not sufficiently believe in her own aspirations to incur the comment, and censure, and want of sympathy of those around her; she endeavored, instead, to make herself like them, to feel satisfied with what satisfied them; she was haunted by a dull sense of self-reproach, she was divided against herself, weak, helpless, and dissatisfied (109-110). Rote imitation of the community lifestyle, a round of drearily identical dinner parties, leaves Alice bored, lonely and guilty that she finds the way the people in her community live to be worthless in spite of her efforts to feel “satisfied” as they appear to feel. Any innate ability to sense the emotional clues of the body—her self- knowledge—is secondary to her habit of ignoring her “yearnings” since she has never found anyone who shares them and her mother has always dismissed them. Jewsbury is attempting to show that “independent” will is best learned and practiced in a human community that allows exchanges of sympathy through readable expressivity: “words and looks of sympathy” are needed to release “the gift of utterance.” The narrator sums up the crucial difference in the sisters’ emotional habitus to hammer the argument home, “This was Bianca’s supreme blessing, which 196 rendered all the hardships of her life as dust on the balance,” since, in Jewsbury’s understanding, it creates the “one opening through which the everlasting universe of things may breathe upon us [so] we can feel strong and cheerful.” Without this opening, Alice is at risk, for it is daily routine without a perspective of anything “beyond” which “drives passionate souls mad” (109). Melodrama is linked to the experience of the sublime—that which is beyond speech—and in these novels, as we shall shortly see, to trauma. The psycho-physical process of the sublime was a large part of the discourse on emotions and mind, as Byerly points out: The sublime scene, however, is not consciously analyzed—it is apprehended almost involuntarily by the spectator who absorbs its power. Burke defines the sublime as ‘whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible.’ The mind, in contemplating such objects, responds by ‘claiming to itself some part of the dignity and importance of the things which it contemplates’ (Burke, Philosophical Enquiry 39: 50- 1). While the picturesque scene is framed by clear boundaries, the sublime, according to Kant, is found in ‘boundless’ objects that alternately attract and repel the mind (Kant, Critique of Judgment 83) (Byerly 30). As in Romantic poetry, melodrama tries to find correlates to realize the silence of the sublime in a moment of stasis, creating a vacuum that must be filled with signs. The human voice and body in the person of the actor cannot express the sublime, but the character that the actor plays can. The icon of the character deflects away from the actor’s limitations as a sign and creates larger possibilities of representation. 106 At the moment of trauma, the character signals the sublime by embodying an ultimate feeling and naming it. 197 Melodrama and the theater had a conflicted relationship to Romantic poetry, however. Wordsworth’s complex attitudes toward the theater demonstrate the unique difficulty of ascribing a moral value to its aesthetics. The critique of later Romantics, including some of Wordsworth’s poetry, uses art to criticize art: the emotional distancing of the picturesque mode of perception—a concentration on surface details—uses the metaphor of a “motley spectacle” that dazzles the poet’s eye, inhibiting his response, but elsewhere, the sublime—that is, powerfully dynamic natural spectacles—massive mountain storms for example—mobilize the active movement of emotional response, mind, and thought (Byerly 30). In theatrical terms, a theater that frames its drama with clear boundaries is inauthentic and deceptive in that it merely encourages a picturesque mode of perception in its spectators; while one that engages with the sublime, alternately attracting and repelling the mind with its associations with pain and danger, is authentic and “real.” Given an actor who can embody the extremities of this terror, the iconic characters of melodrama connect the spectators to the real. In novels that subscribe to these late Romantic values, characters are judged by their aesthetic perception, and a character locked in the detached picturesque mode is a person who cannot distinguish between imagination and reality. In the theatrical novel, the actor’s method and her ability to sustain it in her performance adds analysis of a dynamic process that must be repeated over and over to maintain its aesthetic and moral value, intensifying and particularizing this process of judgment. Various characters’ responses to the actor’s process and performance 198 further dramatize its personal and social effects—both onstage, and offstage social performance. In The Half Sisters, for example, Jewsbury contrasts Bianca’s ongoing task of “moving” her audience to an experience of the sublime to her half sister Alice’s imitation of the behavior of those around her while not understanding it (in an almost autistic inability to read what their actions mean and where their expressions come from). In this way, both character and narrative action are effectively generated by a process modeled on that of the successful actor. Jewsbury attempts to bridge the distance between a melodramatic aesthetic that foregrounds the authenticity of action and emotion over the mind, and a Romantic literary character that privileges the mind’s mediation of emotion, constructing interior depth as more authentic—as we will see is also the case with Alcott. In a melodramatic aesthetic, characters who are demonstrative are trustworthy, while those who perform a high Romantic interiority and secrete their feelings are often villains—their conspicuous hoarding of information is the clue to a false performance of sincerity. As Juliet John explains in writing of the hybrid aesthetic of Dickens, these writers do not actually render interiority, but rather imply character through plot, action, visual description, and dramatic confrontation, all of which give a post-Romantic reader a sense of reality by “implying” insights into the character’s ‘psychology’ (235). Importantly, “[m]elodrama is an anti-intellectual genre which eschews subject-centred, psychological models of identity. In melodrama, the villain is a threat because he is individualistic, valuing self before society. […] In melodrama, such Romantic 199 figures must often be vanquished or socialized before the moral and social order can be restored” (48-49). 107 Jewsbury modifies the melodramatic marginalization of mind in her writing by attending to the multiple paths between embodied emotion and thought; their novels include retrospective analysis of key moments of trauma which they have rendered earlier in melodramatic terms. In one example, Bianca recalls how she felt as she lay prostrate on the floor, felled by the knowledge that her lover is back in London after living abroad for four years, but that he has not attended her London debut, the very night she has felt she has mastered her art: Oh, that night! Well, I can suffer nothing worse. I have felt the worst a human being can endure, and—live. I am convinced people never died under the torture: pain kept them alive. I left the theatre, the instant I came off. I could not have remained a moment—I was crushed and suffocated. I came home and flung myself, in my stage dress, just as I was, on the ground; not weeping, but my very heart crumbling away with dry agony—there I lay, all my sorrow crushed down into my soul—so deep, no words could reach it. […] My despair was in my soul, and had left no traces of its entrance. So I was complimented on my equanimity [after her complete success]. They little knew the fearful ballast that kept me down! At night I was to act again. Strange as it may seem, I was the better for it; I felt as if my profession would not be ungrateful for all the life-blood I had spent upon it (199-200). Here Jewsbury shows Bianca engaged in a retrospective mental process of mediating the melodramatic sensations of the worst moments of her life, a so-called high Romantic activity. That this aesthetic merging should take place in the figure of the actor makes sense, given that actors performed Shakespearean characters and melodramatic ones, and that novelists actively engaged with acting and actors should 200 want to bridge the gap. As Jonathan Arac has argued, the figure of Hamlet, and high Romantic readings of his alienated interiority, was a major contributor to the nineteenth century association of interiority with realism; earlier I have pointed out the influence of actress’s character “biographies” of Shakespeare’s women. The calmness of Bianca’s telling of the unspeakable moment, however, does not erase the reader’s memory of her inert body on the floor; it measures the distance she has traveled since then. Melodrama’s gestural power has been theorized as the power of metaphor and as evoking a primal language: The use of mute gesture in melodrama reintroduces a figuration of the primal language on the stage, where it carries immediate, primal spiritual meanings which the language code, in its demonetization, has obscured, alienated, lost. Mute gesture is an expressionistic means—precisely the means of melodrama—to render meanings which are ineffable, but nonetheless operative within the sphere if human ethical relationships. Gesture could then perhaps be typed as in the manner of a catachresis, the figure used when there is no “proper” name for something. In Roland Barthes’s description, catachresis “restores the blank of the compared [the tenor], whose existence is completely given over to the word of the comparer [the vehicle]”. Yet of course it is the fullness, the pregnancy, of the blank that is significant: meaning-full though unspeakable” (Brooks 72-73). What makes The Half Sisters so fascinating is its combination of the melodramatic and the clinical. The Half Sisters embraces melodrama by structuring eruptions of the unseen around peak moments of trauma. Moments of shock reveal the mind-body connection—they show how person is wired as well as establish a possible pattern that will add up to the performance of personality. Bianca at times evokes the sublime by lying mute and prostrate in moments of stasis that sometimes extend for hours. However, Jewsbury treats Bianca’s final orphaning by the death of 201 her mother differently, not as sublime pain but a disintegration of mind and body that is a psychotic break from sublime meaning. Before the trauma of her mother’s final illness and death, Bianca had lost her place in the acting company due to the sexual and monetary appetites of the manipulative manager. Bianca’s strong, disciplined instrument breaks down after a long period of stress and deprivation when she has been nursing her mother night and day. She has not eaten or slept well for a long period, and when she realizes her mother is dead she disintegrates: Bianca fell beside the bed. The mistress of the house fortunately entered, and she was removed to the other room, but she remained for many hours in a most distressing state; all her strength had been overstretched, and all her nerves were unstrung. Calm, self-governed as she generally was, she had lost all control of herself, and a violent nervous crisis was the result. […] The death of her mother broke the only tie that bound her to the world—she no longer belonged to any one. In the intervals of that terrible day, when she was able to think calmly for a moment, a horrible fright seized on her soul as she felt herself standing utterly detached both from the world on which she stood, and the unknown world whence she came forth. To her disordered fancy it seemed as if a breath of wind would carry her away from the face of the earth, and whirl her she knew not whither. A sense of the vast loneliness in which she stood, terrified her. She felt like a child whom its companions leave alone in a strange place; and she filled the air with screams (130). The shock amplifies the effects of the nervous signals sent and received, so that thoughts and feelings take place in a disembodied state. Bianca alternates for several days between “stupor” and “violent excitement,” and faints when her mother’s coffin is carried away, but she has no further “violent convulsions.” The habitual presence of Bianca’s mother, though she was senile, had meant Bianca’s “home.” 202 At the end of the novel is another scene which is a break from the sublime. Bianca’s sister Alice reacts similarly to a sudden shock, alternately fainting, becoming “seized by frightful spasms,” and screaming piercingly in terror. Her husband Bryant has surprised her in the act of writing a farewell letter moments before she is to leave the house, deserting him for another man. Like Bianca, Alice’s nervous attack has calmer moments, but despite her husband’s ultimate expressions of love, understanding, and assumption of blame, she cannot control her thinking— that she is evil and deserves to die—or her crying. Over the course of the novel, a repeated pattern of fearful thoughts and accompanying tears has become unbreakable: Her tears were falling fast;—at first, they came like a painless gentle rain; but they became more violent; the convulsions returned, and though not so severe as at first, she had not the strength to rally; fainting followed, and at length she fell into a dead, heavy stupor, from which she never awoke” (292). Both her husband and her lover are crushed by the knowledge that they had admired the purity of Alice’s clinging trust but had failed to help her develop and learn to live. 108 A less intensely physical melodramatic moment is the major turning point for Bianca as a working actress. After working in shows staged by an equestrian circus, (a hippodroma equestrian troupe that staged battle scenes, for example 109 ) she is hired into the company of a provincial Theater Royal. Her first night becomes a scene of revelation when she sees the leading actor of the day play King Lear: 203 It was a glimpse of the supernatural; she was baffled in her attempt to comprehend it; her powers of body and mind gave way under the intense excitement; she sank on the ground and leaned her head against one of the scenes, half-drowned in a flood of passionate tears that welled up from the deepest depths of her soul—such as can be only called from their source by the Divine soul shining into our hearts, and giving us a glimpse of ineffable things that no man may utter. An ocean, cloven to its depths seemed revealed for an instant before her eyes, and she sank like a weed upon the brink of what she dared not gaze on. Her tears brought her back to her mortality, and relieved her from the oppressed and overwrought state which, if it had continued, must have brought on serious illness. We are girt round with weakness, and this very weakness is the refuge and defence of humanity, as well as its limitation (97-8). As we have seen in the intense physical scenes of nervous collapse, there is a threat of disembodiment, even death. In the last sentence the body is the “weakness” girding the supernatural, and should be allowed to ground the mind in physical reality as refuge and defence from the “cloven ocean” of sublime performance—it is not the time to cross the sea. As a result of her reading of neurobiological investigations into motor and sensory nerves, reflex and conditioned responses, Jewsbury believed that trauma has lasting effects on the mind and body and will—in the response, patterns are laid down. The stamina to carry the resolve through also depends on the body’s capacities and environment. As Jewsbury pictures how emotion is felt by the body, registered in the mind, and how the mind’s thoughts combine with body’s nervous capacities to generate either will and resolve, or resignation, she illuminates both the experience of the unspeakable void and the tiny stirrings of movement away from it: a dramatized scientific analysis of mind, body and emotion and will. The last two 204 sentences in the quotation above are a clear statement of the “middle road” that must be practiced by actors and other “realizers” of life who connect the unseen to the seen. Not all of the novel’s turning points are sudden or revelatory melodramatic moments. After achieving enormous success, Bianca reaffirms and extends her credentials as an authentic artist by undertaking the training of a young girl who has a singing voice and a passion for music. One of the ways novelists create a plausible fictional world is to represent multiple arts, and a theater novel provides natural advantages for a novelist to leverage these references. Romantic and post-romantic culture constructed music as an art of genuine self expression that was less problematic than using acting as a model, and moreover, the theater mixes the arts. Byerly explains singing was “a new model for art: a natural art that would allow the expression of genuine feeling in a structured form which can communicate that feeling to others” (48-49). It drew on powerful metaphors of the spontaneity of birdsong, for example, and like narrative, it had the requisite dynamism and temporal extension actively to engage the listener’s faculties of perception, feeling and thought. The subplot of Bianca’s education of her protégé Clara helps to shift her own kunstlerroman into new paths of self development. Although Clara is allowed to practice music in school in a casual way, the education there is focused on developing principled habits in the girls even more than useful accomplishments to fit them for life’s vagaries: “It is not so much what they learn, after all, that is the most valuable—it is the habit which is burnt into them 205 of being in earnest, of doing thoroughly all that they profess to do” (239). As enlightened as this approach is, Clara feels a powerful vocation for music that is making her desperately restless and rebellious, and that culminates in her being discovered “scaling the garden wall.” Clara explains that she had intended to sing in the streets to earn money to go to Italy. Like the now dead Alice, who was denied any training for her yearnings toward visual art, Clara’s life and sanity are at risk: “she has grown willful and sulky, and eccentric, of late” (358). At this point in Bianca’s path as an artist, she has been at the pinnacle of her profession for some time. She is still an actress to her core, but she is beginning to feel the almost total separation of the world of the theater and actors from other worlds and people, and feel as well how she is being shaped by its preoccupations and values. “Bianca was fulfilling her vocation, but not at all with satisfaction to herself. She was still engrossed with her art. But other feelings had taken possession of her, and prevented its being the only object in her life” (354). Her perspective on her past actions has changed: “She reproached herself for her former coldness and indifference, as if, at the time, she could have been other than she had been” (35). Bianca had previously questioned her male mentor’s model of total devotion to art—for women the role of vestal virgin—as necessary or healthy. Nonetheless, adherence to this model had brought her through an unreciprocated romantic attachment, so she tries to repeat the effort: She endeavored to give her whole soul more and more to her art; tried to make herself believe, that to live a calm, self-sustained existence, dedicated like that of a priestess, cold, strong, and pure, to the 206 utterance of the oracle confided to her, was indeed the noblest and highest vocation she could embrace. But it would not do, she had to have some more human motive to sustain her (355). It is a “human motive” and not necessarily a lover that Bianca needs, but the “common blessing, which yet is more precious than life—the natural affection of friends and kinfolks; which comes from God, and is given when men enter on this weary life, to be a rest and refreshing for them, and that they should not walk through the desert alone” (356). Fortuitously, it is at this very moment of self- questioning that Clara needs her help, and Bianca can deepen her ties to her circle of friends and create the kinfolks that she needs. As an actress, Bianca had been “obliged to study [singing] in some degree;” and although she had “very little voice,” she “threw into it the same intellect and passionate earnestness that marked her acting, so that they that once heard her, rarely forgot her” (241). Bianca knows that Clara must be taught to channel her passionate responses into a disciplined creative method, and asks for permission from the school and Clara’s relatives to take her in hand. At first she exposes Clara to a course of the best performing art in London to test her potential for real genius. Clara’s ecstatic response mirrors that of Bianca to her first exposure to her mentor’s performance of Lear; having proved her ability to travel imaginatively into the sublime while remaining responsively embodied, Clara then must commit to the intensive study of voice and musicianship. Significantly, during her apprenticeship she must show that she can take care of herself physically, mentally, and emotionally, by eating and sleeping regularly and well, and keeping her personal environment—rooms in 207 Bianca’s house—orderly and calm. Bianca is emphatically not “mothering” Clara, but chooses her to teach and mentor after testing her, including the crucial selection of a voice teacher. The novel’s extension of Bianca’s acting into the realm of “pure” expression of vocal music provides the theoretical bridge that lends authority to Bianca’s project of rescuing Clara’s genius. Bianca applies the principles derived from her own education and experience, testing her own theories of the education of the performing artist. As an artist, and most emphatically as an actor who must use herself as instrument, Bianca must maintain a dynamic connection to her yearnings to continue to “realize” her life, even if this entails acknowledging inner changes that may threaten the established form of her artistic expression. Bianca is still “looking round” in search of the “beyond,” or the unseen (109). This pinpoints what is different about The Half Sisters and Work: A Story of Experience, both of which are clearly examples of what Howe terms a “typical” English mixture of three German/French novel genres—the novel of education in the sense of pedagogy, the bildungsroman (a conscious quest for self culture in a larger sense), and the kunstlerroman (specifically about the artist’s apprenticeship to life as an artist). They incorporate into their narrative plots various changes in the artist as she passes through life stages. This perhaps could be considered a process of aging, but refreshingly, the novels resist valorizing any progression of stages in a telos of maturation, or an ultimate state of fulfillment as “success.” 208 This is intimately related to the novels’ concern with pedagogy. They are not merely advocating a progressive style of education that would be called ‘developmental’ or ‘teaching the whole child/person’ today; or a social vision of gender and race equality, economic and social class inclusiveness; but a different way to live that looks both inward and outward at the mind/body of oneself and that of others as one entity. Interestingly, both Jewsbury and Alcott were the products of very public educational experiments. Geraldine’s older sister Maria Jane, who raised her after their mother’s death (while becoming a famous author) published a collection of a series of letters she wrote to Geraldine at school as an exemplary guide for girls, starring Geraldine as the unruly subject. Alcott’s father Bronson was a visionary educator whose Boston school famously and spectacularly failed, but his theories became widely known, with Louisa May as “the lively girl,” the one who rebelled the most against a strict schedule in which every hour must be filled with improving activity. As writers of bildungsromans, which often take on a quasi-autobiographical aspect, their own history as exemplary characters and tomboys must have amplified their attraction to melodrama, that mode of excess and action where the heroine is the center of the action and often saves the day. Peter Brooks writes of the movement in France from tragedy to melodrama as a movement toward the exemplary role of the heroine: Pixerecourt is modifying what Corneille presented in his tragedies, which cannot be understood in the context of “pity and terror,” but must rather be seen as dramas of a heroism constantly tensed to 209 surpass itself, to reach a point of self-mastery and self-renunciation which is truly exemplary, and which elicits the wonderment and applause, the admiratio, of characters and spectators alike. The moral character trait that permits such exemplary behavior is heroic generosite: that nobility of soul, self-knowledge and self-fulfillment, that allows a moral triumph over the pettiness of ambition, calculation, worldly victories. . . . Both [Pixerecourt’s] effects and the moral conditions that they signify are more exteriorized than Corneille’s, more simplified and hyperbolic. He presents, and his plays work toward, the eclat of virtue, its dramatic representation and enunciation as a real and invisible force in a universe beset with forces working toward its undoing. (26) It cannot be denied that Bianca’s retirement from the stage is disappointing for readers who want an ending where she has it all: a feminist aristocrat for a husband and a never-ending stage career that reforms society by uplifting the moral tone of the theater. Even if readerly demands are less grandiose, and attention is paid to the moments when Jewsbury clearly signals the change in Bianca’s goals for herself, it is hard to understand Bianca’s sudden retirement as Jewsbury has written it. But read as melodrama, a “moral triumph over the pettiness of ambition,” the exemplary gesture of heroic generosity of the hero of melodrama, it makes more sense, even if we have lost the habitus created by the long reign of melodrama, our sense of what the gestures mean. After Bianca and Melton become engaged, and her protégé Clara’s future has been settled, Bianca is asked to marry quickly: Bianca pleaded for some time to acquit herself of her professional engagements. The point of time was stoutly contended, but in the end Bianca found herself obliged to yield, especially when Lady Vernon said: ‘My dear Bianca, will not, I am sure, refuse the first request made by her sister; which is, that she will not again appear on the stage, now that she belongs to us.’ ‘So be it, then,’ said Bianca, gracefully; ‘arrange all as you wish it to be, and I will be conformable’” (389). 210 As we have seen, Bianca dangerously identified Conrad with melodrama’s ideal heroes, and there is an implication in the quotation above that Bianca has acted “gracefully” in melodrama a little too long for her own good (even a star nineteenth- century actress cannot always perform Shakespeare). Thus, Jewsbury does not endorse the grand gestures of melodrama—its “moral triumph over the pettiness of ambition—without reservation, but she does allows it a place among other theatrical genres as able to provide access to the sublime through acting. In the following chapter, which is set by their fireside and takes place six months after their marriage, we get the burlesque of this graceful waving away of petty ambition: domestic comedy, with Bianca as the termagant wife. Lord Melton (playfully but sincerely) wonders at her adaptability, and compliments her on “what shall I say?—the housekeeping qualities, which have developed in you are so marvelous, as to make you seem what the Scotch folks would call ‘not canny’.” Thus accused of being a witch, Bianca flings the Scot back in his face with a vengeance: “Why you Turk, you heathen, you unbelieving Jew!” cried Bianca, flinging down her work—“is this positively the first time you have discovered that I am a clever woman? You are like all the rest of men, and have no faith in a woman’s genius, until it is shown in the practical manifestation of arranging your breakfasts, dinners, and servants.” We are in the low comedy part of melodrama, where the lively girl has her say—and Bianca is keeping Melton aware of living up to his professed feminism. Work is work and deserves respect. 211 Alcott provides a similar debunking of romantic melodrama in Work, mixing her own satire with the characteristics of the exemplary heroine of woman’s fiction. Christie discovers that she has fallen in love with David by some very dangerous signs, among them that “restless ambitions of all sorts were quite gone” and “home was woman’s sphere after all, and the perfect roasting of beef, brewing of tea, and concocting of delectable puddings, an end worth living for, if masculine commendation rewarded the labor.” Christie, “after evading any explanation of these phenomena in the most skillful manner for a time, suddenly faced the fact, saying to herself with great candor and decision: ‘I know what this all means: I’m beginning to like David more than is good for me. I see this clearly, and won’t dodge any longer, but put a stop to it at once.’” Christie then seeks another job and leaves for the city. The ostensible reason for Christie’s departure is that she believes David to be pining for a dead or absent lover. But why shouldn’t she stay and let things develop? As confusing to the modern reader as Bianca’s graceful “generous” gesture—written as it is in the lost language of the melodramatic heroine—Christie’s oddly motivated decision comes from the ideology of woman’s fiction, as Nina Baym explains: The plots repeatedly identify immersion in feeling as one of the great temptations and dangers for a developing woman. They show that feeling must be controlled, and they exalt heroines who have as much intelligence and will as emotion. Merely to feel strongly is to be at the mercy of oneself and others; it is to be self-absorbed and passive. Although committed to an ethic of social love, the authors differentiated it from self-love and linked love to wisdom, responsibility, rationality, and self-command. From their point of 212 view, the merely feelingful person was selfish and superficial, hence incapable of love” (25). In other words, romantic love may be natural (for example, Christie first became aware of her attachment by noticing her own contented nest-building behavior), but if mutual caring isolates the couple from the rest of the world’s needs, they are shirking social responsibility and are essentially selfish. To counter this ideology of the “selfish” feelingful person, the actress in these novels must find a place for emotion as a form of thinking, or wisdom, of the body: feeling that is controlled, yet fully expressed. II. Although I have not uncovered direct evidence that Alcott read Jewsbury’s The Half Sisters, or that Jewsbury read Alcott, given that Jewsbury’s 1848 novel was popular, and given Alcott’s particular interest in acting and in stories of women artists, it is more likely than not that at some point between 1848 and the 1870s Alcott did read it. The most suggestive evidence is in the novels themselves, where strikingly parallel scenes occur. In both novels the high tension of an intimate scene of repressed emotion between the heroine and her potential lover is broken by the heroine suddenly cutting her hand. In Work the heroine is Christie, and her potential lover is her employer David. In The Half Sisters the (married) heroine is Alice, the actress Bianca’s domestic half-sister, and her potential lover is Conrad, formerly a Bianca’s fiancée. After Christie and Alice cut their hands, the shock and the sight of 213 blood briefly make them feel faint. Both David and Conrad rush to help. Before turning to Work I will consider how, in both novels, through almost identically staged actions and posed tableaux, the reflexive reactions of two romantic leading men realizes their authentic feelings and their moral character. Moreover, both writers write about how performance techniques in everyday life are related to health and survival. A habit of acting with attentive awareness promotes health and survival, while a too-complete concentration is a dangerously dreamy absorption that puts the actor at risk. Christie has been living with David and his mother following her collapse from overwork, loneliness, and hunger in the city. Their farm grows flowers for market, and their home takes in sick and troubled women like Christie to make use of a healthy country environment, light outdoor labor, and an atmosphere of non- judgment and peace to heal them. After some months Christie looks within, is honest with herself about the meaning of her odd feelings and behavior, and faces that she is beginning to fall in love with David: “I see this clearly, and won’t dodge any longer, but put a stop to it at once. Of course I can if I choose, and now is the time to do it; for I understand myself perfectly, and if I reach a certain point it is all over with me” (289). In the hope that distance will clarify both the basis of her attraction and whether David holds reciprocal feelings, she resolves to leave. Leaving is “not an easy task and one that taxed all her wit and wisdom to execute without betraying the motive for it” (289). 214 On her last morning they are alone together doing morning chores before others come to breakfast. Christie thanks David for his kindness, speaking “fervently, and for an instant her heart shone in her face. Then she checked herself, and fearing that she had said too much, fell to slicing bread with an energetic rapidity that resulted in a cut finger.” Her attention divided because she is mimicking interest in her work in order to mask her involuntary expression of passionate affection, Christie ‘s motion control fails. Like Christie, Conrad has been staying with Alice and her husband as a place to recuperate after an illness. In contrast with Christie’s self analysis and conscious exercise of will, Alice has not reflected on why she so enjoyed her houseguest Conrad’s company or why he seeks her company so often. In the scene of symbolic wounding that I want to focus on as a comparison to Christie’s accident, Alice is busy decorating her drawing room with cushions, lamps and flowers for a dinner party, while Conrad surreptitiously adores her every movement while he pretends to read; “very much absorbed in her employment,” Alice “did not perceive the intense expression of Conrad’s eyes” (274). In “acting” terms, Conrad and Alice are poor directors of cognitive attention in different ways—Conrad is hyperaware, and Alice too absorbed, but both are habitually passive. They neither imaginatively project into the future, nor exercise enough introspection to engage conscious will. Because Conrad is allowing his eyes to caress Alice as he thinks about her, he is unable to control his passionate feelings. If he were following a long-term objective directed by higher centers of cognition, 215 preferably an unselfish one that took Alice’s wellbeing into account, he would seek out an environment that did not stir his feelings. Jewsbury’s description of his inner sensations and outer behavior clearly show his objective is the opposite: he is living in the present only, and wants to conceal his passion in order to remain near Alice and indulge in his sense of his own “noble and generous impulses,” for his idolization of Alice as a pure and innocent being mainly takes the form of imagining he is protecting her. As with Christie while talking to David and slicing the bread, Conrad’s attention is split between watching Alice, feeling, and mimicking dispassionate, casual bodily expression. When Alice dangles for a compliment about her artistic arrangement of the room, Conrad’s voice, echoing Christie’s too fervent thanks to David, betrays him: “You do all things well!” said Conrad with involuntary energy.” Hearing his own uncontrolled voice makes him self conscious: “confused at his own warmth, he walked into the inner room, and pretended to be altering the position of the lamp; but he scarcely knew what he was about, and lifting it awkwardly, the heavy lamp overbalanced in his hands, and fell to the ground with a terrible crash.” Alice puts “her hand down heedlessly on a large jagged piece, which cut it severely” (275). The depths of Conrad’s unregulated passion become realized when he presses her bleeding hand to his lips: “it seemed to him like sacrilege to let any of the precious drops be lost” (275). The inappropriateness of this gesture is underlined when Alice “faintly” asks for water. Instead of preserving the “precious drops” of 216 blood that have already spilled by drinking them, Conrad should be restoring her with water. The shattering trauma for Conrad is the breaking of his notion of himself as the benign protector of Alice; suddenly he finds he has deeply wounded her instead. Conrad feels his part too intensely, and his control of dissimulation fails spectacularly under the pressure. Indeed, he shudders and hides his face, and “the couch shook with the sobs that burst from his bosom.” Of course Alice is concerned and asks him what the matter is. Declaring with bloody lips “I love you, Alice!” Conrad rushes from the room leaving her stunned and horrified. Alice realizes along with the reader that this declaration pushes her life and the plot into one of two mutually exclusive possibilities: they will run away together or they will part forever. When we next see her, it is her turn to act the part of the concealer as she stands with bandaged hand greeting her dinner guests. In Work we immediately recognize that David is Christie’s future equal marriage partner, when he “silently, but so tenderly” springs to help Christie, and “for one happy moment her head lay on his arm.” It is highly typical of Alcott (and nineteenth-century theater) that having effectively conveyed emotion by the mute bodily gestures that are the language of melodrama, she promptly burlesques the brief tableau and its loaded icons, adding that Christie “wished she might die then and there, though a bread knife was not a romantic weapon, nor a cut finger as interesting as a broken heart” (304). 217 As Alcott pokes fun at our attraction to melodrama’s embodied emotional rhetoric and its ties to the excesses of romantic love, is she also responding to Jewsbury’s “cut hand scene” in The Half Sisters? Whether responding to The Half Sisters or not, Alcott clearly marks Christie’s ability to look within, imagine the future, form resolutions and carry them out. Christie and David’s verbal restraint respects the other’s privacy and leaves room for mutual trust expressed by gesture. Jewsbury marks Conrad’s explosive revelation of his feelings as selfish egotism, and not as a guarantor of their depth or authenticity. As readers we cannot trust Conrad’s love for Alice because he had already professed undying love for Bianca, then allowed time to erode his commitment. Now in love with a married woman, but too egotistical to leave Alice alone, Conrad is unmistakably the “false ” lover the protagonist of the bildungsroman must demystify to find her true partner, as first rehearsed with Bianca and then with Alice (who fully reconciles herself with Bryant as she is dying). Bianca suffers, but she survives and learns. The “false man” is strikingly similar to the villain of melodrama, noted by many critics as the least “flat” character, a forerunner of mixed motivation and a probable engine of increased representation of interiority in the novel. The villainous false lover in the novels is again modified by a scientific view of the embodied mind, and their characters are more susceptible to change by action and environment, but only up to a point—their egotism can only be somewhat reduced, and tragic events make them more conscious of their selfish habits, but leaves a core 218 mental reflex to a “me first” position unchanged. Jewsbury’s treatment of Conrad’s religious conversion makes this clear. Alice’s actions are the reverse of the actor heroine (Bianca/Christie) who has used her embodied mind, making the most of her opportunities to introspect, analyze, envision, plan, and act. Alice’s habitual turning away from introspection, observation and analysis sets her loose in a wilderness of ungrounded interpretation. These passive habits are the result of her training by her mother, a caustically critical woman who has denied Alice her own choices and insisted a program of womanly domestic education, for which Alice has little talent. Though Alice does not internalize her mother’s values, her trust in her own thinking, feelings and instincts has become so attenuated that she cannot perceive, interpret, or communicate even those cues necessary for her survival. Jewsbury marks Alice’s over-absorption in the aesthetic appearance of her home as a poor acting technique. Alice is not only unconscious that she is performing for Conrad, but she cannot pick up an obvious signal of (dangerous) interior meaning—Conrad’s “intense” gaze. Because of her mother’s training, Alice invokes not only one, but two types of women who are the foils to the exemplary heroine of woman’s fiction. Her mother is “the ballroom belle ‘who lived for excitement,’ who is crippled by her ‘woman’s education’ into the marketplace as a voracious consumer of wealth.” Alice knows no other way to live, and so she combines the consumer with “the passive woman: incompetent, ignorant, cowed, emotionally and intellectually undeveloped” who “sinks quickly under life’s demands to an early death or a life of 219 apathy, debility, and obscurity” (Baym 28). It is significant that Alice herself feels that Bianca could have helped her if only her husband Bryant hadn’t disapproved of her acquaintance with an actress. He believes that England’s national genius is for business (Europe’s for art), and that artists should remain apart: Professional people live in a world of their own; and it is very undesirable that they should be introduced into the private circles of the middle classes: it tends to destroy that sobriety and balance of conduct which makes their peculiar virtue, without introducing at the same time the abilities, and powers of pleasing, which are the redeeming qualities of the other class.” (262) He also takes an anti-theatrical view that naturalizes his discomfort: “persons whose profession it is to amuse others, and make themselves pleasing, cannot in the nature of things expect to take a very high position. Men cannot feel reverence or respect for those who aspire to amuse them” (263). After Alice’s death, Alice’s grieving maid seeks out Bianca and gives her the news, and echoes Alice’s belief that Bianca could have helped Alice how to live if they had been permitted to be friends. Bianca hires the maid in memory of her sister, building a family of kindred spirits. Lord Melton and Bianca help to bring Alice’s widower back from despair and into their family circle, and he reverses his position on the value of artists and their art to society. In Work, to which I now turn in detail, Christie faces the same lack of respect because she has acted on stage. Like Elizabeth Bennett before her, governess Christie receives an offer of marriage from a rich man so condescending (“I made up my mind to forgive and forget that my wife had ever been an actress”) that the temptation to marry for financial security becomes easy to resist (84). 220 III. It would be a pleasant task to paint the vicissitudes and victories of a successful actress; but Christie was no dramatic genius born to shine before the world and leave a name behind her. She had no talent except that which may be developed in any girl possessing the lively fancy, sympathetic nature, and ambitious spirit which make such girls naturally dramatic. This was to be only one of many experiences which were to show her her own weakness and strength, and through effort, pain and disappointment fit her to play a nobler part on a wider stage (Work, 43-44). Work: A Story of Experience is the story of Christie Devon from the time she leaves her uncle’s farm at 21 to her 40 th birthday. The novel is self-consciously ordered in chronological patterns. (The Half Sisters similarly follows Bianca from age 15 to 30.) Most obviously, the initial six chapters can be grouped together: the first is named for Christie and introduces her, and the following five track her “progress” through her first jobs: “Servant,” “Actress,” Governess,” “Companion,” and “Seamstress.” The next nine chapters can be grouped as three phases of three chapters each, and the novel ends with a final two. Although only the third chapter is titled “Actress,” encompassing the time period when Christie acts professionally as a stock company member, the entire novel is saturated with acting skills in various forms: an ability to speak eloquently while feeling deeply; the telling of stories as therapy; performing private theatricals; and public speaking. The novel’s obtrusive structure has been much remarked and criticized. Within each chapter, however, Alcott deliberately uses an astonishing collage of novelistic and theatrical genres and techniques, plays with particular novels, or 221 scenes and characters, and makes reference to art of all kinds. For example, “Servant” sets up the next chapter, “Actress,” by highlighting Christie’s habit of observing people and their mannerisms, using Austenian social satire to critique upper class dilettantism. The chapter ends with a comic Dickens-like flair when the voracious novel-reading maidservant Christie sets the house on fire by falling asleep with her candle burning. “Governess” openly plays with Jane Eyre’s inconspicuously conspicuous theatricality and the dubious wisdom of her marrying a sinner-turned-saintly Rochester. “Companion” is an overwrought sensation story of inherited melancholia and suicide. In the same way as Cushman constantly incorporated melodrama into tragedy, dismaying members of the audience who tried to resist its obvious appeals to the emotions, Alcott her generic modes into tragedy, but sometimes takes on the tone and action of comedy, farce, and then into melodrama again. It’s a full length evening at the nineteenth-century theater. Cumulatively, the effect of this shifting from one mode to another is to highlight the reference points that genres use to distinguish authenticity of expression from the artificial, reality from fiction, sincerity from hypocrisy, real people from actors—and a sense that generic endings or resolutions may be worn out and ripe for change. Early in the “Actress” chapter, as the epigraph to this section makes clear, Alcott takes pains to steer the reader away from expecting a Bianca-like success story for Christie. She is not to be the Tragic Muse, no matter how hard she works, and we should prepare ourselves for an end to her “glamorous” stage career. Christie 222 is introduced into the theater by boarding house friends, a mother and daughter who work at a “respectable” theater, when she has been unable to find work for a bit too long. She starts by playing the “Queen of the Amazons” in “The Demon’s Daughter, or The Castle of the Sun!! The most Magnificent Spectacle ever produced upon the American Stage!!!” 110 She gets her break when the “first soubrette” dies suddenly, and she is asked to fill in temporarily because she can sing. “She did her best, and though many of the parts were distasteful to her she got through them successfully.” However, like Alcott, it turns out that Christie excels at playing Dickensian grotesques, Tilly Slowboy, Miss Miggs, and Mrs. Gummage: She loved those books, and seemed by instinct to understand and personate the humor and pathos of many of those grotesque creations. Believing she had little beauty to sacrifice, she dressed such parts to the life, and played them with a spirit and ease that surprised those who had considered her a dignified and rather dull young person. Christie’s earnest efforts gain her an elder male mentor, not the leading tragedian of the day as with Bianca’s mentor in the Half Sisters, but the leading comedian, an actor who “belonged to the old school”: I’ll tell you what it is, Sharp, that girl is going to make a capital character actress. When her parts suit, she forgets herself entirely and does admirably well. Her Miggs was nearly the death of me tonight. She’s got that one gift, and it’s a good one. You’d better give her a chance, for I think she’ll be a credit for the old concern. Christie is hired into the regular company and earns a large salary. She becomes addicted to the feverish excitement of the life and to the applause, realizes she is not becoming what she wanted to be and is departing from her resolution at the outset of her journey to “be missed when [life] ends, and to leave something behind besides 223 ashes” (7), but cannot summon the “wish to change” the life. She has “a growing appetite for its unsatisfactory delights, an ever-increasing forgetfulness of any higher aspiration than dramatic fame” (49) and grows selfish and self-centered. It is not acting, or actors, but her own temperament that is the problem—her own intensity, sincerity, and earnestness. Others might lead that life of alternate excitement and hard work unharmed, but she could not. The very ardor and insight which gave power to the actress made that mimic life unsatisfactory to the woman, for hers was an earnest nature that took fast hold of whatever task she gave herself to do, and lived in it heartily while duty made it right, or novelty lent it charms. She later understands this, and resolves: The stage is not for me… . I have no genius to glorify the drudgery, keep me from temptation, and repay me for any sacrifice I make. Other women can lead this life safely and happily: I cannot, and I must not go back into it, because, with all my past-experience, and in spite of all my present good resolutions, I should do no better, and I might do worse. I’m not wise enough to keep steady there; I must return to the old ways, dull but safe, and plod along till I find my real place and work. (58) In melodramatic tradition, the environment reflects the moral imperative in the underlying action: during a performance in the theater one evening a sudden accident occurs onstage that reveals the unconscious wisdom of the body in summoning up Christie’s neglected capacity for unselfish caring and latent heroic action. It is not a summoning of will that changes Christie’s course away from the theater, but her “quick eye” at a “rending sound” above, an “impulsive spring” toward danger to save a friend, an “unpremeditated action”: “It was only a second’s work, but it cost her much; for in the act, down crashed one of the mechanical contrivances used in a 224 late spectacle, and in its fall stretched Christie stunned and senseless on the stage.” According to the melodramatic mode, an unmistakable sign appears, like that of a lightning bolt or birthmark: it is the “mechanical contrivance” of a spectacle, the kind of theater piece that Christie dislikes most, that precipitates her literal fall and loss of consciousness. She does not hear the applause the audience gives her for her real act of heroism, louder than she had ever received for rendering heroic deeds onstage. During the next few weeks Christie learned the worth of many things she had valued very lightly until then. Health became a boon too precious to be trifled with; life assumed a deeper significance when death’s shadow fell upon its light, and she discovered that dependence might be made endurable by the sympathy of unsuspected friends (56). After this point Work becomes increasingly concerned with health and the effects of the body on the mind. In the “Jane Eyre” chapter a chronically ill rich suitor, Philip Fletcher, courts Christie the governess as a caregiver wife and she refuses the task of “amusing” and “serving” him because of his snobbery, conveying to him the emotional burden of such a marriage is insupportable, not the practical burden (87). With Christie’s pointed refusal, Philip Fletcher begins to change his self- preoccupation. In the sensation chapter Christie the companion provides hope and talk therapy to a family afflicted with hereditary melancholic insanity, rescuing some but losing her main charge to suicide. Finally, the novel’s preoccupation with intertwined mental and physical ill health comes to a head when Christie herself 225 loses her mental and physical health through lack of work that provides a living wage, which leads to overwork. Work’s representation of Christie’s thoughts is in the form of direct speech to herself—monologue in the form of dialogue. To convey reactions, Alcott describes movement and facial expressions, and the abundant conversation, like melodrama, directly speaks what the characters think and feel. The only exceptions to this are moments of trauma, when Alcott renders interiority as physical description, resembling Jewsbury’s method in The Half Sisters. One of the best examples is Christie’s “progress” toward suicide and the lack of will to resist impulse. Following her job as a companion, Christie seeks a more independent job working in a hat factory, but is fired when she defends her friend Rachel, who is discovered to have a past as a “fallen woman.” Since then, Christie has been sewing in her boardinghouse room alone doing the only work she can get, the cottage industry of piecework: sewing. It is painstaking, time intensive labor, and the payment for each piece small. As Alcott shows, the market was flooded by women seeking such work, and the private employers had little incentive to pay after the work was completed, since they could simply use someone else the next time. The ceaseless knocking on doors begging for payment on work already delivered, and trying to get more commissions, embitters Christie and alienates her from society, compounded by the seclusion of working alone. But her bodily state provides the tipping point that breaks her desire to live. She has an illness, and this saps her savings until she owes rent. She barely eats, and 226 the body that had once been so active and “wise” in the close-knit work community of the theater, springing to action without conscious volition, is now inactive. To trace the suicidal decline Alcott constructs through the interrelatedness of mind and body requires extended quotation from the text: Day after day she sat there sewing health of mind and body into the long seams or dainty stitching that passed through her busy hands, and while she sewed she thought sad, bitter, oftentimes rebellious thoughts. It was the worst life she could have led just then, for, deprived of the active, cheerful influences she most needed, her mind preyed on itself, slowly and surely, preparing her for the dark experience to come. Christie begins to doubt the nervous stamina of her body and the endurance of her normal mind, to fear the lonely emotions that emerge from her darkened thinking: For the first time she began to feel that she had nerves that would rebel, and a heart that could not long endure isolation from its kind without losing the cheerful courage which hitherto had been her staunchest friend. At the end of a day of seeking payment and more work and finding neither, she pauses by a river bridge and goes down to the bank before crossing it, drawn to the rushing water. Alcott draws out the moments Christie is transfixed by the river until the scene is a fully realized picture, and contrasts Christie’s outward immobility with an unnamed, growing inner impulse: As she stood there the heavy air seemed to clog her breath and wrap her in its chilly arms. She felt as if the springs of life were running down, and presently would stop; for, even when the old questions, ‘What shall I do?’ came haunting her, she no longer cared even to try to answer it, and had no feeling but one of utter weariness. She tried to shake off the strange mood that was stealing over her, but spent 227 body and spent brain were not strong enough to obey her will, and, in spite of her efforts to control it, the impulse that had seized her grew more intense each moment. Like Bianca, who reached a turning point in the solitary pursuit of her high- minded goals for her work when she began to feel that “standing alone, with only an abstract motive in life, all was hollow, cold, and dead” (HS 355), Christie asks herself the same questions. Crystallizing her emotions into thoughts, and then her thoughts into words, creates overwhelming despair, and at this point her conscious mind ceases to register the voluntary actions of her body: ‘Why should I work and suffer any longer for myself alone?’ she thought; ‘why wear out my life struggling for the bread I have no heart to eat? I am not wise enough to find my place, nor patient enough to wait until it comes to me. Better give up trying, and leave room for those who have something to live for.’ As she stood there, that sorrowful bewilderment which we call despair came over her, and ruled her with a power she could not resist. … With a vague desire to sit still somewhere, and think her way out of the mist that seemed to obscure her mind. . . presently she found herself leaning her hot forehead against the iron pillar, while she watched with curious interest the black water rolling sluggishly below. Her conscious thoughts now disconnected from her will, her visual sense begins to create “awesome” mental pictures, turning shapes into images that evolve into scenes. Appropriate to the remembered mental images taken from Christie’s acting life, Alcott describes these scenes as dynamic, “realized” paintings of Shakespeare’s Ophelia floating with “folded hands:” 228 She knew it was no place for her, yet no one waited for her, no one would care if she staid for ever, and, yielding to the perilous fascination that drew her there, she lingered with a heavy throbbing in her temples, and a troop of wild fancies whirling through her brain. Something white swept by below,—only a broken oar—but she began to wonder how a human body would look floating through the night. It was an awesome fancy, but it took possession of her, and, as it grew, her eyes dilated, her breath came fast, and her lips feel apart, for she seemed to see the phantom she had conjured up, and it wore the likeness of herself. … So plainly did she see it, so peaceful was the white face, so full of rest the folded hands, so strangely like, and yet unlike, herself, that she seemed to lose her identity, and wondered which was the real and which the imaginary Christie. Lower and lower she bent; looser and looser grew her hold upon the pillar; faster and faster beat the pulses in her temples, and the rush of some blind impulse was swiftly coming on, when a hand seized and caught her back. (148-158) Here Christie’s training in expressivity, rehearsing as it does an awareness of impulse (“I need to see if that is really me”) and allowing it to manifest as action, literally pushes her over the river’s edge. Her actor’s visual imagination reproduces the illustrations of Ophelia in the water as if it were a three dimensional still life setup for the painting. Without the anchor of a healthy body, the path from the seen to the unseen becomes too slippery. What saves Christie is the readable desperation in her bodily expression: her friend Rachel, who has been working with “lost” women, does not recognize Christie personally, but identifies a woman in peril: I passed you on the bridge. I did not see your face, but you stood leaning there so wearily, , and looking down into the water, as I used to look, that I wanted to speak, but did not; and I went on to comfort a poor girl who is dying yonder. Something turned me back, however; and when I saw you down here I knew why I was sent. (162) 229 When Christie’s will fails from bodily weakness, complementary skills learned from trained experience--Rachel’s ability to read a suicide’s intent in her body and Christie’s ability to project her intent in her body—combine to save her life. Professional stage acting may have been left behind with the “Actress” chapter, but Christie’s acting training is her chief asset in many ways. She is eloquent and impressive when she feels compelled to express her feelings; she can tell stories that elicit active participation in her auditors and act as healing parables; and she is able to detach and view her own behavior critically and with humor. To view the “Actress” chapter as a self-contained embedded kunstlerroman within a larger bildungsroman is to ignore the prominent role Christie the actress plays in the rest of the novel. Acting skill is a tool that can both threaten and save life; neither absorption or detachment must take precedence, neither the body nor the mind should be starved. There is much more that could be said about the visually realized emotion in melodrama’s “mode of excess” and its fascinating encounter with neurobiology in both of these novels, as well as competing narrative strands of the bildungsroman and kunstlerroman. In one example, the novels alter the famous melodramatic trope of “the call of blood,” that is, how relatives unknown to each other are strangely attracted to each other. In Work Christie and Rachel, a “fallen woman,” fall in love after they meet as fellow workers in a hat factory. Rachel turns out to be Christie’s future husband David’s lost sister. In the Half Sisters this attraction occurs between Alice and Bianca, and Bianca and Alice’s widower after Alice’s death. The 230 supernatural “call of the blood” in the melodrama is variously modified in the novels by psychophysiology. The people surrounding these actress heroes, including men, change and are changed by each others’ modes of emotional expression and create a shared habitus that then draws in others, creating the novels’ forward-looking social vision that structures both endings. In The Half Sisters, Alice’s widower Bryant devotes himself to bettering the situation of the laborers in his business, Bianca becomes an educator, and her husband a reformer of landlord/tenant relations (with his own estates as an example). Their equal marriage allows them separate vocations, and the same is true of David and Christie. In Work, Christie and David delay their marriage to get to know one another as future marriage partners. They finally marry in the final hours before they each go off to serve in the Civil War, David as a soldier and Christie as a nurse. Christie insists on getting married in her gray nurse’s dress, since David will wear his uniform. In this, as in other ways, the actress is figured as a natural soldier. In the opening paragraph of the first Civl War chapter, titled “Mustered In,” Alcott makes an extended comparison of Christie’s roles in spectacles as Amazon warrior queens in her three years as rehearsal preparation for her two years of war service in a national tragedy: Ten years earlier Christie made her debut as an Amazon, now she had a braver part to play on a larger stage, with a nation for audience, martial music and the boom of cannon for orchestra; the glare of battlefields was the “red light;” danger, disease, and death, the foes she was to contend against; and the troupe she joined, not timid girls, but high-hearted women, who fought gallantly until the “demon” lay 231 dead, and sang their song of exaltation with bleeding hearts, for this great spectacle was a tragedy to them. (384) Here Alcott explicitly plays with actor and spectator positions and the differing “picturesque” framing of spectacle and the sublime involvement of tragedy: to be a war hero is to act simultaneously on a grand stage as a spectacle and to embody a tragedy. Alcott again “realizes” this movement from spectacle to tragedy/melodrama when Christie first sees David in his uniform. At first, unlike his mother and sister, she stands “aloof” looking at the spectacle “with something more than admiration in the face that kindled beautifully as she exclaimed, ‘Yes, Mr. Power, I’ve found my hero at last! Here he is, my knight without reproach or fear, going out to take his part in the grandest battle ever fought. I wouldn’t keep him if I could’ (366). But then Christie becomes the involved actor in the scene: Then, having poured out the love and pride and confidence that enriched her sacrifice, she broke down and clung to him, weeping as so many clung and wept in those hard days when men and women gave their dearest, and those who prayed and waited suffered almost as much as those who fought and died. (366) Christie’s position as spectator/actor is the same as that of the entire nation, for heroism demands detachment, feeling, and a connection to the “beyond,” to the ideal behind the quotidian horror of war. Like Bianca upon her marriage, Christie discovers she has a flexible set of working skills and that she can do anything. For the two years of her war service before David is killed, she is a highly valued because of her detachment (she doesn’t cry over the men or “everlastingly swab” their brows, but her practical detachment is 232 matched by her expression of feeling, so that the men respond to her “firm yet pitiful way” (384-5). The war is the picaresque part of Christie’s bildungsroman, for “In her wanderings to and fro, Christie not only made many new friends, but met some old ones.” Like Bianca, who nurses the shattered Conrad back to health after his part in killing Alice, Christie nurses her old suitor Philip Fletcher back to health after he loses an arm leading his men in battle. Thanks in part to Christie, the actress who rejected him, Fletcher has lost his self-centered detachment from life along with his class snobbery and is beloved by his men. The ending of Work brings together the strands of Christie’s varied experience to focus on her ability as an inspirational speaker who identifies as a worker but has the respect of all—a woman who can bridge class divisions in the way of Gaskell’s heroines, who felt “a strong desire to bring the helpers and the helped into truer relations with each other” (427). She finally gets up to speak: In a clear, steady voice, with the sympathetic undertone to it that is so magical in its effect, Christie made her first speech in public since she left the stage. That early training stood her in good stead now, giving her self- possession, power of voice, and ease of gesture; while the purpose at her heart lent her the sort of simple eloquence that touches, persuades, and convinces better than logic, flattery, or oratory. (428) Tellingly, it is Christie’s presence as “an example to comfort, touch and inspire them” that provides the best form of persuasion. She is an integrated whole of mind and body, expressive and healthy: “this figure with health on the cheeks, hope in the eyes, courage on the lips, and the ardor of a wide benevolence warming the whole 233 countenance…full of unconscious dignity and beauty” (429). Here again we may hear echoes of the inspiration of the figure of the “noble” Charlotte Cushman, where the Yankee “lively girl” of stage melodrama can become the Yankee nurse and the Yankee reformer, linked by heroism. Christie herself is not sure that she should continue public speaking, but her circle of friends believes she should continue to speak for the working women’s reform movement. On her fortieth birthday, representative friends and family— David’s survivors, the “fallen sister” Rachel, his aged mother, Christie’s tiny daughter, and Christie herself; the freed slave Hepsey, who was cook in the household where Christie worked as a maid; the laundress Mrs. Wilkins (Christie’s “private oracle” who nursed her back to health after her breakdown); the rich melancholic Bella from her days as a companion—all join hands in a final tableau of a community of women who dedicate themselves to working together for a happier future. Such an ending makes it difficult indeed to say that Christie’s kunstlerroman, her development into an artist, is “embedded” or “subsumed” by her bildungsroman, her quest for self development. It could also be argued that a more general “education” or “spiritual quest” is the guiding structure. For example, Alcott’s work in general often refers to Pilgrim’s Progress, including this final tableau, which takes place below a painting of one of its most dramatic scenes. Still, given Alcott’s complex relationships to mentors and literary forbears, and her complex understanding of genre, her use of such a pattern would not be simple or straightforward. 234 Nina Baym’s introduction to the second edition of Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and About Women in America has been helpful to my thinking about this project for two reasons. One reason is her distinction between the novel of education and the bildungsroman (one focuses on pedagogy and the other on self- culture). The other is her useful clarification of antebellum cultural concepts of the artist and their relationship to the widely used term “genius.” To take the second reason first, Baym reminds us that in mid-century, the general consensus was there had not yet been truly distinctive writing in America (except possibly Hawthorne). Because during most of the nineteenth century in America there were no “art novels,” there was no operating distinction between art novels and the popular novel—and hence no operating distinction between “the artist” and “the professional.” Any published writer was “simply a genius—i.e., somebody who transcended norms altogether.” But for most of the nineteenth century, it was almost unthinkable for women writers to identify themselves as “geniuses.” Aside from writing, acting was one of the only “professions” available to women. A competent working actress or published writer was referred to as a professional as a term of respect. Perhaps because the formation of the star system in theater singled out individuals, it seems as if the word genius was more readily applied to actresses and then moved into discourse about women writers later in the century. This may be because books can be re-read and become familiar. Also the task of the actor is to “move” the audience through aural, verbal, and visual means, which creates strong, yet non-specific memories. And because performances are 235 ephemeral, they can create nostalgia for a “genius” performance that can never be recovered, and thus the use of the term for an actress can’t be defended “objectively” by referring to a fixed text, as might be done with a novelist’s body of work. The word “genius” tends to appear when the critic wants to convey sustained excellence. Baym compares the mid-century, undifferentiated concept of writers as exceptional professionals to the distinct types in use by the end of the century. By then women novelists could identify themselves as “artists” because the term now conveyed particular aesthetic and expressive purposes. In fact, the “art novel” developed later partly as a reaction against the overt teaching of Victorian exemplary novels—including the large and popular sub-genre of the “woman’s novel.” The “positive” figure of the actress in popular novels, as in other cultural representations, thus paradoxically may have promoted the new category of art literature in modernist rendering of cognitive processes. In terms of the bildungsroman and related novelistic traditions, we have considered in previous chapters how Jewsbury and Alcott revisioned a body of earlier female artist stories, in addition to a male-dominant Romantic and transcendentalist view of creative genius and public performance. By emphasizing a cognitive ecology of mind and body—an environment that gives space to both the overt expression of melodrama and the analytic processing of retrospection—their novels rehearse the tools by which individuals can come to trust themselves and others. In the process they reverse an earlier novelistic tradition of betrayal of the heroine by seduction or abandonment. This emphasis on neurological inheritance 236 and its conditioning by a cognitive/behavioral environment, summed up by the term “cognitive ecology,” causes another important generic shift as well. It remains an important element in the novels that the heroines’ drive for “self culture” at least temporarily, takes the form of a specific artistic vocation for acting, a key theme in bildungsromans influenced by Goethe. During the youthful theatrical apprenticeship, the protagonist encounters a variety of inappropriate partners. The narrative then finds closure in the protagonist’s ability to recognize an authentic love relationship—an actual marriage or a planned future one. As in the male tradition, in Jewsbury and Alcott the life journey encompasses an “authentic” marriage, but they extend the story beyond into the character’s mature life. Alcott and Jewsbury build on the genre’s insistent telos of finding a true relation by adding a particular feminist twist that defines the deep basis of that truth: both partners not only feel mutual respect but prize their mutual equality. In this way The Half Sisters and Work satisfy their readers with feminist wish fulfillment, but upon recognition of this mutuality of value and feeling as a “true relation,” the episodic narrative of youthful experience should “gracefully” conclude. Alcott and Jewsbury frustrate the generic expectations of both the kunstlerroman and the bildungsroman; their handling of closure irritates readers’ expectations to the point that the framed security of fiction’s “suspended disbelief” becomes outright disbelief in the plot’s realism or plausibility. For the actress heroine, marriage is not an ending, but an ongoing challenge best encountered in maturity. But this twist goes further, refusing to be read as simply a “rhetoric of maturity,” a well-learned 237 lesson. It turns out that navigating the equal marriage, or even combining or reconciling this challenge with her creative drive to make art, is not the (revised) vocation of the married actress. Rather, in her maturity she consciously chooses the crushingly less spectacular role of teacher. For readers and critics, accepting the fairy tale of a mutually respectful, equal marriage is (relatively) easy to swallow; trading acting for teaching dashes the wish that the actress is incapable of giving up her vocation—positive proof of her status as an artistic genius, and perhaps the most apparent backing for her status as “equal.” Linda Lewis bluntly says that Jewsbury’s assumption that brilliant women are adaptable in many departments will not do. …Having first insisted that Bianca’s gift compels her to perform on the stage, Jewsbury does not persuade the reader that being a wife and an educator will do just as well. …Jewsbury successfully propagandizes [Carlyle’s] the Gospel of Work, but she fails to acquit herself in the department of the inspired artist. She answers the question of what to do with a creative, gifted woman, but not the question of female genius.” (97) My response to Lewis—as I have been arguing throughout this project—is that Jewsbury is not subscribing to Romantic ideas of genius, though she may have employed some of its rhetoric of inspiration. Bianca does not ascribe this kind of “genius” to herself. Instead, Jewsbury shows Bianca as devoted to her profession in concrete ways: rehearsing every morning and performing every night, traveling between towns on a theater circuit, finding affordable local lodgings, contacting the right people to advance her career, attending social events to promote the value of her work and the theater to upper class audiences. She takes pride and pleasure in 238 researching and assembling the perfect costume that will “realize” that idea and her character. One of the clues that Conrad is a destructive lover for Bianca is that he cannot stand to see the “tinsel” of backstage labor, while Melton enters into the details of making art wholeheartedly, advising Bianca on the right kind of headpiece for a Greek costume and lending her the proper kind of dagger. Bianca pursues the “art” of acting by reading poetry to hone her sense of language and also to create a strong guiding “idea,” by studying texts to find an interpretation, and most of all by continually thinking about her work. If we read The Half Sisters as a story of a working artist who achieves excellence by attending to the painstaking details of her craft, as well as psychophysiological practice of acting technique, it is the spectators who see only the results of her daily work, and not the process, who feel they are witnessing “genius” in action. Hence my concerns are somewhat different. What has become of the richly fulfilling artistic process, the daily satisfactions of practicing the art that has made a more or less brilliant career possible, an exercise of trained ability that should end only in death by old age? It might be said that up until the ends of their texts, Alcott and Jewsbury have met the expectations of the bildungsroman so thoroughly, that it is no wonder that both authors fail to craft such “middle-aged” endings in a way satisfying to the reader. As mentioned at the beginning of this study, many critics have read these oddly awkward non-resolutions as a failure of nerve: an artistic sphere, the theater, has been made into a “home” by talented actresses, but is finally engulfed by the 239 centrifugal power of nineteenth-century domestic ideologies. I argue that a “cognitive” reading that takes acting seriously as a deep engagement of the embodied mind—feeling as a form of thinking—helps us to redirect our attention to the weight of earlier episodes. Teaching in the sense used by Alcott and Jewsbury in these novels does not appear as suddenly and unreasonably, or as opposed to acting, as it might seem. The heroines have been teaching others by their behavioral example for some time, more than they do by the verbal articulation of their thinking. They slowly add individuals to their community of friends; some, like Conrad in The Half Sisters, subtract themselves from that community. During this process of group formation, or community-building, Bianca and Christie grow into an appreciation for their own knowledge of how to trust their embodied minds and its appeal to others. They realize the importance of actively creating the environment and habits that foster neurological balance—a holistic health of individual and community. This “unseen” work underlies the novels’ emphasis on the benefits and dangers of the work available to women of all classes, or denied them. As readers we must pay attention to this unseen work. The Half Sisters’ and Work’s depictions of the neurobiology of mind, body and emotion were informed by contemporary science. They deliberately use a theatrical, popular melodramatic aesthetic; they express innovative views on physical and emotional health, with unique results for the Anglo-American hybrid form of the bildungsroman/kunstlerroman as those narrative structures rub against the active heroine of melodrama and the exemplary heroines of novels of education. I have 240 been arguing that these two novels extend the young artist’s story into a midlife newly understood as the developmental impulse to social responsibility, subsuming the generic teleological tensions between the female artist’s artistic development and a romantic marriage. The novels promote this actor as an exemplary role model and reformer in a society in need of better understanding of the role of emotion as a means of thinking, enabling better understanding across social boundaries—for example, an individual better able to build solid, egalitarian marital relationships. The actor’s heightened sense of the dynamics of emotion in the embodied mind are necessary human equipment for individual growth and social progress, and the heroine both learns and teaches a positive example of emotional expression, building and sustaining a healthier community habitus with quasi-utopian potential. 241 Notes to Chapter Four 101 This classical style was also known as the “teapot” school because while speaking, one arm was anchored at the waist or “bosom” while the other gestured in a descending pattern down to the side. Then the weight was shifted to the other hip and the pattern was then repeated using the opposite arms. The demeanor was dignified and the voice declamatory, with a high flutey tone. There was a regular rise and fall with emphatic words marked with a “church service” prolonged swelling of sound (Downer 528-31). 102 Meisel, Realizations. Meisel discusses this in several places throughout; see pp. 7-10 and Chapter 12, for example. 103 Hazlitt was uneasy about Macready’s breaking of the classical decorum of high tragedy with gestures taken from ordinary life, calling it “too natural” and “neither graceful nor natural in extraordinary situations,” but Macready was on the side of history: “his leveling down of high sentiment to the manner of the Victorian drawing-room presages the direction both drama and acting were to take later in the century” (Actors on Acting 322). 104 Meisel argues that “nineteenth-century narrative in general engage[s] not a fixed set of signs or a closed system of iconic representation, but an expanding universe of discourse, rule-governed but open, using a recognizable vocabulary of gesture, expression, configuration, object, and ambience. …It actualizes potential meaning in the midst of a fresh statement whose aim is to unite the commonplace and the individual, character and situation, in a single representation” (Meisel 11). 105 Here I am drawing generally on Meisel’s Realizations and his insights into the intertextual relationships between narrative pictorial artists such as Hogarth and theorists of acting such as Diderot. Unexpectedly, it is Diderot who reads Hogarth and profits from his ideas: Hogarth’s prints offered a lesson in visually composed, serially ordered dramatic narrative. But Diderot also knew and used, to the point of trespass, Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty (1753), which concludes with some striking observations on stage action. … Hogarth’s basic idea is that physical action, “the lines of the movements belonging to each character” should convey meaning such that words are not necessary (Meisel 107). 106 For a book length treatment of this theory of how the actor and his character function semiotically and theatrically, see Rozik, The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin.. 242 107 In general, John argues that Dickens inverts the reason-emotion hierarchy that underpins high and low culture: “The upward mobility of Mr. Whelks demands the cultivation of his intellectual faculties; but, as Dickens makes particularly clear in Hard Times, the kind of intellectual development which is socially constructive begins with the imagination and the feelings” (7). More specifically, John argues that “Dickens associates interiority, particularly the psychological variety, with deviance.” She reads John Jasper in Edwin Drood as the merging of the Romantic and melodramatic types which function dialectically in so many of Dickens’s late novels. … But Dickens is not adopting Romantic aesthetics: what is interesting about Jasper is that his typically ‘Romantic’ traits are melodramatically rendered. On the evidence of the first drug-induced scene it is tempting to argue that Dickens has adapted conventional melodramatic aesthetics to render what Brooks calls ‘melodrama of consciousness.’ Even this scene, however, is inside the deviant mind only as it paradoxically tries to escape from itself. The rest of the novel returns to business as usual. As a mystery story and a detective tale, it tends to rely on melodramatic aesthetics… (John 235). 108 As she has paired the half-sisters, Jewsbury pairs the two stricken men, Conrad and Bryant, to examine the differing nature and process of their recoveries. Conrad falls ill at the sight of Alice’s body, and after Bianca nurses him back to a semblance of health, he retreats from emotional exchange with his fellow human beings, instead turning to his imagined relationship with an angry God, thereby keeping himself at the center of his universe as before. Bryant is injured in a carriage accident abroad, and his process of recovery takes the form of talk therapy with another man, Lord Melton, and the lessening of his reluctance to express his emotions leads to the deepening of his relationships and a better understanding of others. 109 For an account of hippdramas, or circus theaters, see Meisel 213 ff. 110 Because the almost every detail in the description of this elaborate spectacle matches The Naiad Queen the young Charlotte Cushman’s earliest role, it strengthens the likelihood that Alcott had talked with Cushman about her career in detail, perhaps as part of expert advice to a young aspirant. The description of Cushman’s costume included in the script of The Naiad Queen exactly parallels that Christie wears. Alcott may also have seen a revival of The Naiad Queen in New York at Niblo’s Garden in February or March 1872, but there were many such spectacles mounted with similar elements of song, dance, processions and battles. Still, The Naiad Queen was one of the most well received and expensively produced. 243 Conclusion: Future Work I plan to extend this study to those novels about actors written somewhat later in the long nineteenth century. As neuroscience develops, and the resulting discourse surrounding the mind/body problem intersects with debates about acting and acting theory, how does the actor figure in the novel change the representation of emotion, mind, and body—and novel form, particularly as naturalism takes hold? Further work on this project includes other novels by Jewsbury and Alcott that have been mentioned only briefly: Jewsbury’s fascinating Zoe, and Alcott’s unfinished book Diana and Persis. To ground and to broaden further the inquiry into cross- generic influences, future research will include other theatrical novels in the mid nineteenth-century (listed in note 6), actors’ autobiographies, fiction, and authors’ correspondence, particularly with scientists and medical professionals. With all these materials in hand, we can truly begin to extend an inquiry into cross- fertilizations between neuroscience and acting theory and practice. This dissertation has examined nineteenth-century public and private discourse on how and why physical and mental states were thought to affect each other, and this lens can yield variant readings of how Victorians understood personal responsibility and the limits of human will in regard to choices and behavior. Statements that may appear to attribute typical behavior of culturally constructed groups such as nation, race, gender, and class to either essential qualities or 244 immutable inheritance may actually be rooted in an understanding of the power of habitual group behavior. The intense nineteenth-century interest in physical culture, persistent emotional states, the effects of trauma, and addictive behavior such as alcoholism is prompted by a desire for “evidence” that would test and clarify new discoveries and theories about the intertwining of body and mind, just as we fascinate ourselves with these stories today. How much can we change ourselves, and how? How much does the behavior of others affect us? What is our character? In the history of the nineteenth-century novel, marriage is one of the representational sites that provides a laboratory to examine these questions, and artistic mentorships and acting is another. Other novels that stand to profit from such a perspective include George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, G.H. Lewes’s Ranthorpe, Henry James’s The Tragic Muse, The Bostonians, and The Golden Bowl; Moore’s The Mummer’s Wife, Du Maurier’s Trilby, Maugham’s Theatre, Hawthorne’s The Blithesdale Romance, Phelps’s The Story of Avis, Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, and Austin’s A Woman of Genius. Relevant prose writing worthy of within this cognitive field of mind/body relations includes the literary and theater criticism of William Archer, and the theater, literary, and history of philosophy and scientific writing of G.H. Lewes. Writers and theorists on acting include G.H. Lewes and Boucicault, Archer, Pavlov, and Meyerhold. Scientists would include Darwin, Spencer, and William James. Theorists on the novel are many, but particularly Bakhtin’s writing on the bildungsroman. 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University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

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Creator DeTar, Judith S. (author)

Core Title Real work: the stage actress in the Bildungsromans of Geraldine Jewsbury and Louisa May Alcott

School College of Letters, Arts and Sciences

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Publication Date 05/15/2013

Defense Date 11/16/2010

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