Chapter 11 - New Approaches to Women Actors and Celebrity in Nineteenth-Century France

Summary

Clare Siviter and Emmanuela Wroth begin their chapter by establishing France’s best known women actors, Sarah Bernhardt and Rachel, as a barometer for the hypervisibility of French women performers’ bodies. Siviter and Wroth explore two case studies that paved the way for the late nineteenth-century celebrity which Bernhardt and Rachel embodied: the ‘Bataille des Dames’ between Mlle George and Mlle Duchesnois at the start of the nineteenth century and the Restoration rivalry between Classicism and Romanticism personified by Mlle Mars and Marie Dorval. They focus on three particular sites: the women’s physical presence and experience of their gendered bodies including their voices; their often sexualized fetishization in contemporary print; and their memorialization both in their autobiographies and in theatre history. Having analysed the roles of class, gender and sexuality, they return to the hypervisibility of Rachel and later Bernhardt’s bodies, and the important questions these women’s bodies raise regarding other marginalized identities, especially in relation to ethnicity and ‘race’.