Acting naturally: Bronte, Lewes and the problem of gender performance. (Charlotte Bronte; George Henry Lewes)

I

During the summer of 1851, Charlotte Bronte visited London and saw Rachel Felix, the famous French actress, perform in several plays. "Thackeray's lectures and Rachel's acting," she wrote to Elizabeth Gaskell, "are the two things in this great Babylon which have stirred and interested me most - simply because in them I found most of what was genuine whether for good or evil. . . ."(1) Bronte's adjective, "genuine," affiliates her assessment of Rachel with a mid-century theatrical discourse that increasingly represented the stage and the most favored acting styles as "natural." Although it turns up in many texts and contexts, George Henry Lewes, in his role as drama critic, articulated principles of "natural acting" that influentially framed the discourse for both its onstage and offstage versions.(2) When he too saw Rachel on stage in 1851, Lewes, echoing Bronte, accordingly pronounced the actress "exquisitely natural" and set her up as a positive exemplar for what he perceived to be a theater in decline.(3)

Bronte's and Lewes's assessments register a paradoxical cultural impulse that led them both to specify a controversial actress as the embodiment of naturalness. Recent studies of theatricality have underscored its potential to upset traditional gender categories; in particular, such studies have recognized women's capacities to elude naturalized sexual and gender roles in the theatre and to construct their own identities on stage.(4) While these studies have influenced my arguments, I also suggest that the structure of mid-Victorian theatricality accommodated an essentialist version of gendered identity. In the context of the 1850s, moreover, a careful assessment of some such conceptions of identity must modify what we usually see as the restrictive tendencies of essentialism. Jonathan Dollimore has recently argued for the transgressive potential of certain appropriations of dominant ideologies, even essentialist ones, at specific historical moments.(5) My readings of Lewes and Bronte support Dollimore's point: while they both viewed Rachel as essentially "natural," they surveyed her from markedly different gendered positions within Victorian culture. Their affiliated constructions of theatricality thus instantiate nature in the service of divergent cultural goals.

The discourse of natural acting exhibits the prominent features of a high culture conception of Victorian theatricality. This conception distinguished "genuine" or "natural" essence from a material and artificial medium of performance, a distinction that speaks to our current theoretical debates about identity. In postmodern critiques of the coherent humanist subject, theatricality often functions to disrupt conceptions of an originary self and essential identity that ostensibly exist apart from the discourses and practices of specific cultures. Delineating this disruptive theatricality is a project integral to many feminist dismantlings of monolithic, ahistorical conceptions of "the Feminine." These welcome efforts at cultural concreteness, however, cannot fully explain the Victorians' yoking of theatricality and gender, for their theatricality prefigured but was not a prototype of the postmodern version. Unlike postmodernists, many Victorians believed in a theatricality that sometimes revealed and sometimes obscured a timeless, innate self; in this view, an authentic core identity is separated from an external, performing, artificial self.(6) If the portents of postmodern disintegration lurk in the fissures of this divided self, the binary construction nonetheless permitted the Victorians to privilege the "authentic core" in an effort to maintain what they saw as the integrity of a coherent identity.

As Lewes's assessment of Rachel suggests, adherents of natural acting aimed to save the stage from what many mid-century observers saw as the excesses of its own artifice, what playgoer Henry Morley called its "flashy stage-effects."(7) Natural actors avoided such excesses by acknowledging and exploiting the divide between essence and performance. In his 1859 biography of Charles Kean, for example, John William Cole uses the term "natural acting" to describe a joint performance of Charles and his father Edmund Kean. When the spectators responded to the "last pathetic interview" with "prolonged peals of approbation," the biographer approvingly reports that Edmund whispered to his son, "'Charley, we are doing the trick.'" Quoting Talma to gloss the anecdote, Cole explains that to turn the "trick" of acting, the player must "study from himself" and "produce nature."(8) In Cole's example, the natural actor wields the material tools of performance - gestures, props, declamation, scenery, bodies - with just the right mixture and amount of physical cues to materialize a character's essence. Natural actors, that is, represent rather than reveal nature.

But when players relied too heavily on these performative tools, some critics argued, they impaired not only the aesthetics of the performance but also, more critically, the spectators' "real" emotional and imaginative capacities. Critic W. B. Donne, paralleling what he saw as the over-refined society of his age to its over-materialized stage, lamented the loss of "strong and natural emotions" and the "lack of imagination in the spectators." Compared to their contemporaries in the audience, he complained, playgoers of a previous age, however "far astray [they] may have gone in the principles of good taste . . . at least brought to the theatre an antecedent faith and earnestness from which we now shrink. . . ."(9) Like Cole, Donne testifies to an emotive core distinct from its theatrical embodiment, a distinction that, in his mind, mattered decisively for the world beyond the stage. In this cultural context, what Bronte described as Rachel's "genuine" performance was more than high praise for her talent. While Bronte's letters finally align Thackeray with "good" and the actress with "evil," she and Lewes both believed that Rachel had dissolved the theatrical false fronts which could block the spectators' view of the "genuine" or "natural" in life as well as in the theatre. Natural acting on stage is thus linked to natural feeling offstage, a type of authenticity Victorians both believed in and prescribed.

Such links were crucial for both Bronte and Lewes. One of the central appeals of natural acting was its offstage relevance, what was seen as its capacity to reach and train the emotions of the audience. It was in the construction of these onstage/offstage links that Bronte and Lewes, to some degree, parted ways. For Lewes, the natural actor directed the spectator's gaze to an ideal, universal Nature that authenticated not only the impersonations of professional players but also the everyday roles of ordinary people. For Bronte, in contrast, the natural player refocused the audience's view on the essential, interiorized, individual subject. Both constructed within the essence/performance dichotomy of Victorian theatricality, these affiliated conceptions of subjectivity nonetheless display competing, gendered visions of the "natural" actress and feminine identity. Bronte's insistence on individual female experience counters the naturalizing tendency of Lewes's aesthetic, the tendency to anchor feminine identity to universal ideals detached from the actual conditions of women's ordinary lives. Such divergent visions open to our view the multiple and varied uses of essentialism at specific historical moments, an understanding that we must cultivate if we are to render women's experience in the mid-Victorian period with accuracy and richness.