Hostname: page-component-76dd75c94c-ccc76 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-30T08:10:06.858Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Spectacle of Absent Costume: Nudity on the Victorian Stage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Tracy C. Davis
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

The recent revaluation and exploration of ninetenth-century theatre has gone almost in parallel with the development of contemporary feminist criticism: yet the one approach has all too rarely meshed with the other. Here, Tracy C. Davis attempts a feminist critique of that distinctively Victorian phenomenon, the display of naked and near-naked female flesh in the theatre – at a time when even the legs of pianos were discreetly veiled in respectable drawing-rooms. She questions how the conventions of stage costume were able to defy conventional proprieties, how that defiance ‘served the heterosexual male hegemonic aesthetic’, and how it related to ways of ‘seeing’ nudity during the nineteenth century. Presently teaching in the Drama Department of the University of Calgary, Tracy C. Davis has contributed widely to theatrical journals, and her study of ‘The Employment of Children in the Victorian Theatre’ was included in NTQ6 (1986).

Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 5 , Issue 20 , November 1989 , pp. 321 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes and References

1. Case, Sue-Ellen, Feminism and Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1988)Google Scholar; Dolan, Jill, The Feminist Spectator as Critic (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988)Google Scholar.

2. de Lauretis, Teresa, Alice Doesn't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1984)Google Scholar; Pollock, Griselda, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity, and Histories of Art (London: Methuen, 1987)Google Scholar.

3. Ryan, Michael, Prostitution in London (London: H. Bailliere, 1839), p. 5Google Scholar.

4. Davis, Tracy C., ‘Sexual Language in Victorian Society and Theatre’, American Journal of Semiotics, VI, No. 1 (1989)Google Scholar; and ‘The Actress in Victorian Pornography’, Theatre Journal (October 1989, forthcoming).

5. See Kuhn, Annette, The Power of the Image (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 4Google Scholar.

6. de Lauretis, Teresa, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana U.P., 1987), p. 25–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7. Windmill Theatre, 24th Programme, Mander and Mitchen-son Theatre Collection.

8. Hollander, Anne, Seeing Through Clothes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. 83Google Scholar.

9. Cited by MrsByrne, William Pitt in Gossip of the Century (London: Ward and Downey, 1892), p. 206Google Scholar.

10. Roberts, Helene R., ‘The Exquisite Slave: the Role of Clothes in the Making of Victorian Woman’, Signs, II (Spring 1977), p. 554–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. ‘A Lady’, Appeal to the Women of England to Discourage the Stage (London: Joseph Masters, 1855), p. 11.

12. Wilhelm, C., ‘Art in the Ballet’, Magazine of Art, 1895, p. 14Google Scholar.

13. Booth, Michael R., Victorian Spectacular Theatre (London: Routledge, 1981), p. 25Google Scholar.

14. Ibid.

15. Illustrated London News, 6 March 1875.

16. Belfort, Roland, ‘The Empire: an Hour at London's Smartest Hall’, Playgoer, 07 1902, p. 235Google Scholar.

17. In this one sense, I concur with Roland Barthes' reading of the costume of striptease. However, in neither the Parisian striptease nor the Victorian theatre do I agree that, in contrast to the costume, the nude body is inscribed as chaste or unsullied – the natural state in contrast to the ‘luxurious shell’ of costumes. See Mythologies (London: Cape, 1972), p. 84.

18. Greater London Records Office, LCC/MIN/10,803 (1894).

19. LCC/MIN/10,803 (1894).

20. This may, incidentally, explain why the costumes of pantomime boys did not come under the attack of moral reformers.

21. LCC/MIN/10,870 (1894).

22. LCC/MIN/10,870 (1895).

23. LCC/MIN/10,870 (1893).

24. Entr-acte, 3 March 1894.

25. LCC/MIN/10,870 (1894).

26. McLuhan, Marshall, Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man (New York: Mentor, 1964), p. 116Google Scholar.

27. Sketch, 10 February 1932, p. 1.

28. Windmill Revudevilles, Numbers 148 and 113 (souvenir programmes, Mander and Mitchenson Theatre Collection).

29. Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I (New York: Pantheon, 1970)Google Scholar; Gay, Peter, The Bourgeois Experience, Vol. I (OxfordU.P., 1984)Google Scholar.