This book argues that the Victorian theatre conspired in producing repressive codes of gender even as it provided women with a rare opportunity to experience independence and power. It revises the familiar narrative in which women of the theatre achieved social acceptance gradually over the Victorian period. But it also opposes the idea that such women were the helpless victims of tyranny, despite uncovering a Victorian discourse of the theatre that perpetuated social control where gender was concerned. This book demonstrates instead that the theatre was a battleground for competing ideologies of gender at the end of the Victorian era no less than at the beginning; indeed, that in certain ways this combat of the mind intensified over time.

Women were exhilarated, sometimes liberated, by the authoritative speaking voice and the professional opportunity that, uniquely, the theatre offered them. Men, at once attracted and repelled by female power on stage, reacted with speech of their own–a strategic rhetoric designed to ensure male dominance in their own personal lives, in the theatre, and in society as a whole. By formulating the actress as intrinsically different from other women, having little or nothing in common with their own wives and daughters, Victorian men defended themselves, and society at large, against the apocalyptic terrors which female power evoked for them.

Victorian rhetoric therefore worked to gender the theatre as being distinctively, irrevocably, masculine. Actresses, even the greatest, were absorbed in this formulation, for in their supposed excesses performing women were represented as diseased or inhuman monstrosities, not women at all. Furthermore, and crucially, the executive functions of theatre-manager and playwright were carefully defined as requiring supposedly masculine qualities of mind and personality.