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On 12 May 1788 in New York, the Daily Advertiser ran a letter to the editor from "Z" a pseudonymous theater fan, commending one Mrs. Harper, an actress with the Old American Company of John Henry and Lewis Hallam Jr. "No actress deserves more esteem for her judgment, assiduity, and theatrical knowledge," declares Z, who also lauds Mrs. Harper's frequent performance of virtuous roles--especially those of "aunt and mother" Z draws Mrs. Harper especially to the attention of the women in the audience of the Old American Company's John Street Theatre, since the onstage depiction of "the amiable virtues of the wife, the unspotted character of the private woman, must, or ought, to interest the sensibility and liberality of the fair." (1) Whether Z intended for the women of New York merely to applaud the inherent good qualities of their sex as performed by Mrs. Harper or to use her onstage example for the betterment of their own characters is unclear. Z has, however, unmistakably singled out not merely a dramatic text or character--the usual vehicles of eighteenth-century arguments in favor of the theater's potential as a school for morality--but an actual performer as a model of female virtue in the early republic. For a critic in eighteenth-century America, this was a bold rhetorical move. (2)
To anyone familiar with the films of John Wayne or the dual careers as actress and charity advocate of Angelina Jolie, the promotion of the (often sexualized) body of a performer as a symbol of a specific model of gendered--and sometimes nationalized--virtue is probably no surprise. Those familiar with the careers of nineteenth-century performers such as Edwin Forrest, the living embodiment of virile Jacksonian democracy, and Jenny Lind, the Swedish singer whom P. T. Barnum transformed into an angel in the house, may likewise yawn. (3) Nor is the phenomenon peculiar to the United States. The Whig-dominated public theaters that evolved in London after the Revolution of 1689 (and later gave rise to the American professional theater) embraced the figure of the professional "stage virgin" Anne Bracegirdle as a national symbol. Bracegirdle's persona helped to cement the symbolic equation of the perpetually threatened liberties of the body politic and the physical form of a woman threatened with sexual violation--a commonplace in Whig propaganda and the period's dramas--in the political culture of the British Atlantic. (4) And although, as Kristina Straub observes, those eighteenth-century actresses who were not stage virgins were often assumed to be libidinous and sexually suspect, these stereotypes had weakened considerably by the 1780's, due in part to the shining star of Sarah Siddons on the London stage. (5)
The professional theater in North America during the 1780s, however, had to prove itself worthy of patronage in the wake of the Revolution. In 1788, theatrical performances were still banned in many cities under a 1774 congressional edict; even in relatively theater-friendly New York, Hallam and Henry had encountered opposition when they reopened the John Street in 1785. The marginal legal and moral status of the theater in the postwar public sphere, then, renders Z's remarks on Mrs. Harper's symbolic value to the public all the more noteworthy. (6) As historian Ruth Bloch notes, however, the 1780s saw a widespread shift in the symbolic representations of American public virtue from masculine to feminine forms as the political culture moved toward "a greater acceptance of institutionalized public order." (7) As had been the case in England after 1689, framing the Revolution as the basis for an established state during the 1780s meant that the state needed a face. More often than not, that face was a woman's.
Z's elevation of an actress into a freestanding symbol for virtuous womanhood, then, has political implications that reach beyond an aesthetic defense of Mrs. Harper from those he calls "the snarling critics." (8) Z's particular choice of Mrs. Harper as the theatrical conduit for proper femininity is further complicated by the inevitable cross-pollination between the identities of popular performers and those of their roles. Mrs. Harper did play a number of virtuous aunts, mothers, and wives in New York, where she and her husband Joseph Harper debuted. Prior to Z's letter in the Advertiser, she had already been singled out (by a critic who considered her only "mediocre") as an example not only to the general public, but also to other actresses for her "modest, humble, and condescending deportment." (9) In the Old American Company's previous season during 1787 she had played Maria Van Rough, Royall Tyler's image of the new republican woman, in the premiere of The Contrast, the first play written by an American to be produced with anything resembling success in the American commercial theater.
Yet Mrs. Harper's first strong New York reviews came in 1787 from her performance as the cast-off royal mistress in Nicholas Rowe's "she--tragedy" Jane Shore (1714). Moreover, she had ignited a small but significant controversy the previous season while playing the cross-dressed "breeches" role of Sylvia Balance in George Farquhar's comedy The Recruiting Officer (1706). To the original script, in which Sylvia dresses as a man in an effort to be impressed into the British army, the American Company had added a piece of stage business in which Sylvia performed the small-arms drill, or manual exercise, of the American armed forces. (10) This transvestite display of martial prowess, labeled by its detractors as "indelicate and masculine" ignited a controversy that dogged the Old American Company's performances in the pages of the Daily Advertiser for several weeks during the 1787 season. (11) Mrs. Harper, then, had been both praised and vilified by the critics, lauded for her feminine delicacy and derided for usurping masculine behavior, before Z singled her out as a model of staged virtue. In the remainder of this essay, I will attempt to draw together the complex and at times seemingly contradictory roles, both theatrical and social, played by Mrs. Harper and other actresses from the Old American Company during 1787 and 1788. This examination of women in the drama (as characters) and in the theater (as performers subject to political and aesthetic scrutiny) will explore the intersection of an upheaval in the representation of women in early American culture and Hallam and Henry's desire to fill the seats of the John Street. I hope to illustrate the ways in which the attempts of the revenant American Company (as the Old American Company was known prior to the war) to please its audience reflected, and occasionally challenged, the changing symbolic role of women in the political culture of the 1780s.
Even a cursory consideration of the various issues connected to women in post-Revolutionary New York suggests the symbolic potency of actresses and their performances of femininity in a society faced with so many unsettling and unsettled issues relating to gender. While the idea of female patriotism featured prominently in patriot propaganda during the Revolution, the chief propagandistic role of women seems to have been the inspiration of men to acts of courage. Women also figured vitally, however, as symbolic mourners for those lost in the war, not to mention bearing the actual economic hardships of war on the home front. Nor had women been absent from the frontlines: the British carried so many officers' wives in their train that the Americans and French mocked them, even as the American war effort was itself bolstered by the presence of women as nurses, powder carriers, and camp workers--to say nothing of women who, like Deborah Sampson (later Gannett), disguised themselves as men and served in the Continental Army. Political leaders who had specifically appealed to female patriotism and leadership in promoting the war effort--as they had been doing since the Stamp Act Crisis--now faced the problem of defining women's proper place in the new republic. While proto-Democratic Republican organizations such as the Tammany Society attempted to downplay the political role of women, early Federalist orators specifically appealed to women as the moral governors of the country, a rhetorical appeal that contributed to the propagation...
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