2 - Actress as Woman, Woman as Actress

Summary

IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY, the magazine Das Theater published a survey on the question, “Sollen Künstlerinnen heiraten?” (Should Female Artists Marry?). Numerous actresses responded to the poll with differing opinions on the matter. One answered: “In principle I say no; because the greatest sphere of the married woman, being a mother and housewife, is unfortunately very difficult to fulfill” (ibid.). Similar replies outlined the demanding work schedule of the career, concluding that between rehearsals and performances, sewing costumes, and frequent travel, actresses had little time for life outside of the theater. Some flatly denied the possibility for a woman to be an actress, a wife, and a mother. Yet others refuted this claim with personal experience: “I can also say completely objectively that I am a very good housewife, which proves that the artistic career and the domestic can be combined very well” (ibid.). Still others argued that marriage and motherhood were in fact essential to expanding the actress's repertoire. “Stage performers should marry,” Else Wassermann (of the Deutsches Theater) wrote, “because in order to represent the character of many kinds of beings truly, the artist must be familiar with love and sorrow, joy and grief in her own life” (ibid.).

Answering the seemingly straightforward question that the survey posed, the women who responded revealed the complex sociocultural circumstances and a field of ideas encapsulated in the recurring juxtaposition of actress as woman and woman as actress. In Julius Bab and Heinrich Stümcke's two studies of Die Frau als Schauspielerin and in other texts from the period a paradox emerges in simultaneous claims that women are naturally actresses, and that being an actress goes against woman's natural instinct as wife and mother. Bab summarizes the contrast, writing: “While many alluring and compelling possibilities bring woman to the art of acting, just as many deep-seated inhibitions remain and make ‘woman as actress’ into a problematic nature” (FaS, 39). In almost every respect, working actresses did not conform to normative cultural expectations for German women at the turn of the twentieth century; yet Heinrich Mann would assert through one of his dramatic characters: “the quintessential woman is above all the actress.”