From seduced maidens to adulterous wives, bigamists, courtesans,
kept women and streetwalkers, the so-called 'fallen woman' was a
ubiquitous and enduring figure on the Victorian and Edwardian
stage. Acts of Desire traces the theatrical representation of
illicit female sexuality from early nineteenth-century melodramas,
through sensation dramas, Ibsenite sex-problem plays and suffrage
dramas, to early social realism and the well-made plays of Pinero,
Jones, Maugham, and Coward. This study reveals and analyses
enduring plot lines and tropes that continue to influence
contemporary theatre and film. Women's illicit desires became a
theatrical focus for anxieties and debates surrounding gender
roles, women's rights, sexual morality, class conflict, economics,
eugenics, and female employment. The theatre played a central role
in both establishing and challenging sexual norms, and many
playwrights exploited the ambiguities and implications of
performance to stage disruptive spectacles of female desire,
agency, energy, and resourcefulness, using ingenuity and skill to
evade the control of that ever watchful state censor, the Lord
Chamberlain. Covering an astonishing range of theatrical, social,
literary, and political texts, this study challenges the currency
and validity of the long-established critical term 'the fallen
woman', and establishes the centrality of the theatre to cultural
and sexual debates throughout the period. Acts of Desire
encompasses published and unpublished plays, archival material,
censorship records, and contemporary reviews to reveal the
surprising continuities, complex debates, covert meanings, and
exuberant spectacles which marked the history of theatrical
representations of female sexuality. Engaging with popular and
'high art' performances, this study also reveals the vital
connections between theatre and its sister arts, tracing the
exchange of influences between Victorian drama, narrative painting
and the novel, and showing theatre to be a crucial but neglected
element in the cultural history of women's sexuality.
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