ESC: English Studies in Canada

HISTORICAL SHAKESPEARE: ANNA JAMESON AND WOMANLINESS JESSICA SLIGHTS McGill University I W hile much has been done in recent years to historicize both Shake­ speare’s plays and the body of criticism surrounding them, the work of nineteenth-century female critics has largely and significantly been excluded from this process. Despite widespread interest in female literary characters, women writers, and female audiences, little has been done in Shakespeare studies to examine either the works or the impact of nineteenth-century fe­ male critics.1This essay attempts to recover one of the most influential of these critics, Anna Jameson. I am interested not simply by what Jameson’s work says about nineteenth-century female writers’ attempts to empower themselves via the Shakespearean play-text, but also by what their schol­ arship tells us about the ways in which texts are reproduced in successive ages. By reading critics like Anna Jameson, we can investigate the cultural functions that both a play-text and the criticism it generates perform. Characteristics of Women, Moral, Poetical, and Historical (1832)2 pro­ vides a convenient entry through the back-door of literary criticism into the arena of debate over the position of women in nineteenth-century English society. The dialogue prefacing Jameson’s text consists of a discussion be­ tween two fictitious characters, Alda and Medon, about the relative status of women and men in their society. Through the persona of Alda, Jameson distances herself from overtly political women writers. She says that she has no interest in either “maintaining the superiority, or speculating on the rights of women” (3): I do not choose presumptuously to fling these opinions in the face of the world, in the form of essays on morality and treatises on education. I have rather chosen to illustrate certain positions by examples, and leave my readers to deduce the moral themselves, and draw their own inferences. (4) E n g lish St u d ie s in C a n a d a , 19, 4, December 1993 She suggests that her task is to illustrate the “various modifications of which the female character is susceptible, with their causes and results” (3). De­ spite her claim to political neutrality, however, Alda stresses that “the con­ dition of women in society, as at present constituted, is false in itself, and injurious to them” (4). Although Jameson chooses to dissociate herself and her text from conspicuous participation in the debate fired by such works as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Charac­ teristics of Women nonetheless plays a significant role in the textual and ideological controversy about the position of women in the nineteenth cen­ tury. Jameson’s text can not only enlighten the culturally specific analysis of nineteenth-century ideology, but also help in a more general theoretical in­ vestigation of the cultural reproduction of Shakespeare. Her project is to use the Shakespearean canon in order to construct an argument for change by giving voice to women who have been silenced by male history; in some ways, however, Jameson’s text appears to reproduce the cultural and critical values of her time. She participates in a blurring of the boundary between the theatrical and the living that was pervasive in Victorian society. In The Idea of the Actor, William B. Worthen argues that the “peculiarly Victorian confidence in the intelligible relation between the physical world, character, and action” (146) was the source for a conflation within Victo­ rian society of living actors with the dramatic characters they portrayed on stage. The Victorian theatre tradition, dominated by the overwhelming in­ dividuality of the actor—an acting tradition in which the main characters, played by major stars, took centre stage and in which the action of a play was often delayed for the applause of an appreciative audience—adulated its stars not for their technical skills but rather as embodiments of cultural heroes. This connection between the life of the stage and non-theatrical life was particularly complex where female actors were concerned. While in 1932 George Bernard Shaw praised women on the stage for their work and defended them from accusations of impurity (“If an actress has command­ ing talent, and...