-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Leslie Fishbein, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism. By Susan A. Glenn. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. xii, 294 pp. $35.00, isbn 0-674-00333-0.), Journal of American History, Volume 88, Issue 3, December 2001, Pages 1110–1100, https://doi.org/10.2307/2700482
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
When our mothers warned us not to make spectacles of ourselves, they could not fathom the density of meaning that Susan A. Glenn could extract from that maternal injunction. In an imaginatively researched and elegantly written volume, Glenn has opened a new vista into popular culture at the turn of the twentieth century, exploring the world of theatrical performance by women to limn its influence on the shape of an emerging new womanhood. If film scholarship for many years has fixated on Laura Mulvey's notion of how males have controlled the cinematic g aze by rendering women objects of their visual pleasure, Glenn's book contests that totalizing view in the case of popular theater and vaudeville. Glenn notes that such performers as Sarah Bernhardt, Marie Dressler, and Eva Tan guay were able to exploit their status as female spectacles in roles that accentuated their idiosyncratic and erratic behavior, that failed to conform to traditional gender expectations, and that furthered their artistic autonomy at the same time. Even more important, their public assertiveness revealed new possibilities for female behavior for the women and girls who viewed them perform.
