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Illegitimate Celebrity in the British Long Eighteenth Century Melissa Wehler

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Illegitimate Celebrity in the British Long Eighteenth Century Melissa Wehler Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations Spring 2013 Illegitimate Celebrity in the British Long Eighteenth Century Melissa Wehler Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Wehler, M. (2013). Illegitimate Celebrity in the British Long Eighteenth Century (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/1347 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. ILLEGITIMATE CELEBRITY IN THE BRITISH LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Melissa Wehler May 2013 Copyright by Melissa A. Wehler 2013 ILLEGITIMATE CELEBRITY IN THE BRITISH LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY By Melissa Wehler Approved March 22, 2013 _____________________________ _____________________________ Laura Engel, Ph.D. Anne Brannen, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English Associate Professor of English (Dissertation Director) (Committee Member) _____________________________ _____________________________ Susan K. Howard, Ph.D. Magali Cornier Michael, Ph.D. Associate Professor of English Professor of English (Committee Member) (Chair, Department of English) _____________________________ James Swindal, Ph.D. Dean, McAnulty College and Graduate School of Liberal Arts Professor of Philosophy iii ABSTRACT ILLEGITIMATE CELEBRITY IN THE BRITISH LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY By Melissa Wehler May 2013 Dissertation Supervised by Professor Laura Engel In the discussions about contemporary celebrities, the femme fatale, the bad boy, the child star, and the wannabe have become accepted and even celebrated figures. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, actors and actresses who challenged acceptable strategies for celebrity behavior were often punished by exile, debt, disgrace, and humiliation. Some performers even faced a veritable textual and historical oblivion. Illegitimate Celebrity considers the careers of Dorothy Jordan, William Henry West Betty, Edmund Kean, and Margaret Agnes Bunn, and offers a historical genealogy of ―illegitimate‖ performers who dared to break with social convention and struggled to define and redefine themselves according to strict social codes that dictated their behavior both onstage and off. By examining celebrity productions, portraits, caricatures, and performances as elements to producing celebrity, I iv demonstrate how the audiences used these public figures to create complex narratives regarding class, femininity, masculinity, marriage, nationalism, among others. Ultimately, the study of illegitimate celebrity reveals the role of celebrity in shaping these discursive structures and provides an important history for modern narratives regarding the role of celebrity in society. v DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this dissertation to my own Great Illegitimates!! David, Kathy, Nikki, Adam, and Matthew vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENT I would like to begin by expressing my sincere gratitude to the McAnulty College and Graduate School for awarding me the 2011-2012 Dissertation Fellowship. The College‘s funding of the project was invaluable to its completion. Over the past six years, I have been fortunate to work with Laura Engel, an outstanding scholar, teacher, and person. The first chapter of this dissertation began in Laura‘s course on Gothic Bodies transformed into an article under her careful supervision in an independent study course before finally becoming a dissertation chapter. Along with Laura, my dissertation committee, Anne Brannen and Susan K. Howard, have also helped to spread and grow this project through their encouragement and feedback, and I would like to sincerely thank them both for shaping the piece. I am sincerely indebted to these three, amazing scholars, teachers, and women. Like all dissertations, this one would not be possible without the support of caring and thoughtful advisors, and I have been fortunate to have so many people who have helped to shape me as an academic and a person. I would like to extend my sincerest thanks to Linda Roth, my high school English teacher, who encouraged me to pursue teaching English as a career through her hard work and dedication to her students. I would also like to acknowledge Kristina Straub, my professor and mentor from Carnegie Mellon University, who first introduce me to the eighteenth century and inspired my passion for fops and macaronis and all things drama. I would also like to thank the outstanding faculty in the Department of English who both formally and informally mentored me not as a student, but as a future colleague. I am especially vii grateful to Daniel P. Watkins who acted as an informal advisor and mentor on the project, and Frederick Newberry whose honest encouragement significantly helped with the completion of the work. I would also be remiss if I did not thank Laura Callanan for her feedback and support during the early stages of the dissertation. During my time at Duquesne, I have been fortunate to be surrounded by some of the most exciting thinkers I have ever met. Without the support of my amazing colleagues and dear friends, Suzanne Cook, Lacy Cunningham, Maureen Gallagher, Megan Kelly, Christopher Hayes, Marcie Panutsos, Amy Criniti Phillips, Timothy Ruppert, and Jason Vanfosson, this project would not have been possible. I would also like to especially thank Maggie Hannan for listening to the many different versions of the project, and Katherine Richards for reading all of them. Finally, I would like to acknowledge my family. My parents, David and Kathy, my sister Nikki, my brother, Adam, and my husband, Matthew, have been a constant source of support and encouragement. Thank you, mom, dad, Nikki and Adam, for being my ―wings,‖ for carrying me when I needed carrying and for flying with me when it was time to fly. Finally, to my brilliant, amazing, and patient husband, Matthew, without whom this project would have been impossible, thank you for changing your direction from thusly to thusly. viii Table of Contents Page Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv Dedication .......................................................................................................................... vi Acknolwedgement ............................................................................................................ vii Introduction ........................................................................................................................ xi 0.1 Rakes to Gentlemen Turned: Illegitimacy and the Historical Context .................. xiv 0.2 Illegitimate Studies: Celebrity Studies as a Critical History ................................ xvii 0.3 My Illegitimates: Dorothy Jordan, Edmund Kean, and William Henry West Betty .................................................................................................................................... xxix 0.4 Illegitimate Subjects: Chapter Summaries .......................................................... xxxii 0.5 An Illegitimate Future ......................................................................................... xxxv Chapter One: The Naturally Unnatural Dorothy Jordan ......................................................1 1.1 The Highbrow Celebrity: Jordan and the Portraitists ............................................... 4 1.2 The Public Jordan: Celebrity and Caricature in the Late Eighteenth Century ........ 14 1.3 The Lady‘s Face: The Delusion of Celebrity .......................................................... 17 1.4 The Crack‘d Jordan: Actresses and Chamber Pots ................................................. 28 1.5 ―I Strumpet, Creature, Pickle‖: Jordan as the Royal Family‘s Burning Shame ..... 39 1.6 The Actress‘ Thighs and Diseased Body Politic..................................................... 45 1.7 Jordan‘s Highbrow/Lowbrow Celebrity ................................................................. 50 1.8 Dueling Legacies: Reconstructing a Celebrity Image ............................................ 52 Chapter Two: I-doll-ized: William Henry West Betty and the Appeal of Thingness .......63 2.1 A Person So Adored: The Cult of Betty ................................................................. 69 2.2 An Image of a God: The Betty-Doll and the Consequences of I-doll Play ............ 81 2.3 Obsessively Worshipping a Thing: The ―It‖ Effect ................................................ 97 2.4 An Incorporeal Phantom: The Idol‘s Afterimage ................................................. 105 Chapter Three: Edmund Kean‘s Monstrous Celebrity .....................................................109 3.1 (Un)Covering History: Cooke and the King of the Yankee Doodles. .................. 112 3.2 Cooke and Kean: The Influence of the Undead .................................................... 124 3.3 The Boston ―Incident‖ and Peter Public ............................................................... 136 3.4 Haunted Kings and Kingdoms: Ghosting, Nationalism, and the Gothic .............. 147 3.5 (Re)covering History: Kean, Cooke, and a New Monument
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