Victorian men, including the male coterie of drama critics, reacted with anxiety as well as admiration when they beheld displays of female control on stage. Captivated by the power of an exceptional actress, they experienced under her influence a sense of danger to themselves and an apprehension – often frankly expressed, sometimes covertly – that social codes of gender were being challenged before their eyes. Could women so commanding be women at all? Could their multiple assumed identities be reconciled with the narrow domesticity which ordinarily defined femininity? In exceeding the limits of what was thought proper to woman's nature, could actresses be considered healthy specimens of their gender in either a physical or mental sense? From such misgivings the Victorians constructed a rhetoric of the actress which functioned to monitor and control her excesses even as it allowed a space for her intimidating performances.

G. H. Lewes, for example, writes most confidently of the actress famed for her pathos-charged enactments of Phedre when he metaphorizes her in nonhuman terms.