Stage Mothers

Women, Work, and the Theater, 16601830

Contributions by Helen E.M. Brooks, Gilli Bush-Bailey, Marilyn Francus, Judith Hawley, Jade Higa, Emrys D. Jones, Ellen Malenas Ledoux, Kathryn Lowerre, J.D. Philopsen, Laura J. Rosenthal University of Maryland Edited by Laura Engel, Elaine M. McGirr

Publication date:

06 November 2014

Length of book:

290 pages

Publisher

Bucknell University Press

Dimensions:

236x162mm
6x9"

ISBN-13: 9781611486032

Stage Mothers explores the connections between motherhood and the theater both on and off stage throughout the long eighteenth century. Although the realities of eighteenth-century motherhood and representations of maternity have recently been investigated in relation to the novel, social history, and political economy, the idea of motherhood and its connection to the theatre as a professional, material, literary, and cultural site has received little critical attention. The essays in this volume, spanning the period from the Restoration to Regency, address these forgotten maternal narratives, focusing on: the representation of motherhood as the defining female role; the interplay between an actress’s celebrity persona and her chosen roles; the performative balance between the cults of maternity and that of the “passionate” actress; and tensions between sex and maternity and/or maternity and public authority. In examining the overlaps and disconnections between representations and realities of maternity in the long eighteenth century, and by looking at written, received, visual, and performed records of motherhood, Stage Mothers makes an important contribution to debates central to eighteenth-century cultural history.

Contents
Introduction
Elaine M. McGirr and Laura Engel
Part One: Actresses, Motherhood, and the Profession of the Stage
Chapter 1. “The Divided Heart of the Actress”: Late Eighteenth-Century Actresses and the “Cult of Maternity”
Helen E.M. Brooks
Chapter 2. The Inconvenience of the Female Condition: Anne Oldfield’s Pregnancies
J.D. Phillipson
Chapter 3. “Inimitable Sensibility”: Susannah Cibber’s Performance of Maternity
Elaine M. McGirr
Chapter 4. Working Mothers on the Romantic Stage: Sarah Siddons and Mary Robinson
Ellen Malenas Ledoux
Part Two. Representations of Mothers on the Stage and the Page
Chapter 5. Rebels for Love: Maternity, Absolutism, and the Earl of Orrery’s Mustapha
Laura R. Rosenthal
Chapter 6. Rowe’s The Ambitious Stepmother: Motherhood and the Politics of the Blended Family
Marilyn Francus
Chapter 7. Staged Virtue: Anastasia Robinson as Ideal Mother in Two Operas of the 1720
Kathryn Lowerre
Chapter 8. Maternal Duties and Filial Malapropisms: Frances Sheridan and the Problems of Theatrical Inheritance
Emrys Jones
Chapter 9. My Son, My Lover: Gothic Contagion and Maternal Sexuality in the Mysterious Mother
Jade Higa
Part Three. Actresses and their Children
Chapter 10. Elizabeth and Keppel Craven and the Domestic Drama of Mother-Son
Relations
Judith Hawley
Chapter 11. Mommy Diva: The Divided Loyalities of Sarah Siddons
Laura Engel
Chapter 12. The Gerbini Letters: or, A Tale of Two Mothers
Gilli Bush-Bailey
Bibliography
About the Contributors

This collection offers readers a fascinating study of English actresses during the long eighteenth century and the motherly roles they played on and off stage. . . . While some readers may be familiar with the actresses or the plays featured in this collection, they will surely learn a great deal about these eighteenth-century celebrities and the subject of motherhood as it was understood between 1660 and 1830. This book should be useful to readers interested in eighteenth-century studies, theater studies, performance history, women’s studies, drama as literature, and even art history, for portraiture and drawings are included and analyzed in a number of essays. In addition, this volume is important for its subtle-but-present reminder that a study of theatrical performers is also a study of class due to the vital connection between theater and social standing. All in all, Stage Mothers has a wonderful way of giving actress-mothers credit for their attempts to balance domestic and theatrical life, the (re)negotiation of their place in private and public spheres, and their painstaking fashioning of their selves and careers.