PROGRAM | English

By: Rachael Zeleny Chair: Melissa Ianetta

ABSTRACT

This dissertation studies late Victorian actresses and their versatile strategies for obtaining the public’s affection and respect. Drawing from the methods used by theater historians, art historians and literary critics, I conduct a rhetorical analysis of the Victorian actress in order to 1) validate the importance of examining figures outside of the parameters of respectable society in our histories of rhetoric, 2) demonstrate the ways in which employing multiple scholarly traditions—art history, theater history and feminist rhetoric—reveals those interdisciplinary rhetorical arguments made by public women as exemplified by actresses, and 3) enrich our understanding of the trajectory of women’s entry into public spaces. By evaluating the full spectrum of materials that existed during the nineteenth century, we are better able to understand how actresses and their supporters made arguments about women’s rightful place in the public sphere. To this end, the opening chapter, “Actress for Sale: The Visual Rhetoric of the Female Performer from Paintings to Postcards,” considers three visual constructions of ethos available to actresses—domestic ethos, Pre-Raphaelite Ethos and professional ethos–and determines how actresses might appropriate the qualities of each for their own benefit. Exploring how the most subversive of these tropes, the Pre-Raphaelite Stunner, was rendered through text, “The “Born Actress” in Wilkie Collins’s No Name: Natural Acting and the Rise of the Middle-Class Performer” and “The ‘Self-Appointed Executioner’: The Actress’s Agency in George Paston’s A Writer of Books” focus on fictional representations of the actress. I examine these novels to suggest ways in which this medium expanded upon the ethos constructions found in visual ephemera, further nuancing conceptions of the actress and promoting alternatives to domesticity. The last chapter of this dissertation offers the historical Ellen Terry as a woman who created a public ethos by conjoining the arguments and narratives of visual and textual representations, and fashioned a reputation that Sos Eltis refers to as a “collective fiction.” As the previous chapters highlight the potential rhetorical power of visual or textual representations of actresses in shaping a public ethos, this final chapter asserts the value of examining the synergy of these materials, within the context of “what actresses wrote about themselves,” to better appreciate the actresses’ autonomy and resourcefulness in the rhetorical process of identity construction.

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