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Performing Illness in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Theatre

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Performing Illness in the Late-Nineteenth-Century Theatre STAGES OF SUFFERING: PERFORMING ILLNESS IN THE LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY THEATRE by Meredith Ann Conti Bachelor of Fine Arts, Denison University, 2001 Master of Arts, University of Pittsburgh, 2007 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of The School of Arts and Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2011 UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF ARTS AND SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Meredith Ann Conti It was defended on April 11, 2011 and approved by Attilio Favorini, PhD, Professor, Theatre Arts Kathleen George, PhD, Professor, Theatre Arts Michael Chemers, PhD, Associate Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, Drama Dissertation Advisor: Bruce McConachie, PhD, Professor, Theatre Arts ii Copyright © by Meredith Ann Conti 2011 iii STAGES OF SUFFERING: PERFORMING ILLNESS IN THE LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY THEATRE Meredith Ann Conti, PhD University of Pittsburgh, 2011 Few life occurrences shaped individual and collective identities within Victorian society as critically as suffering (or witnessing a loved one suffering) from illness. Boasting both a material reality of pathologies, morbidities, and symptoms and a metaphorical life of stigmas, icons, and sentiments, the cultural construct of illness was an indisputable staple on the late-nineteenth- century stage. This dissertation analyzes popular performances of illness (both somatic and psychological) to determine how such embodiments confirmed or counteracted salient medical, cultural, and individualized expressions of illness. I also locate within general nineteenth-century acting practices an embodied lexicon of performed illness (comprised of readily identifiable physical and vocal signs) that traversed generic divides and aesthetic movements. Performances of contagious disease are evaluated using over sixty years of consumptive Camilles; William Gillette’s embodiment of the cocaine-injecting Sherlock Holmes and Richard Mansfield’s fiendishly grotesque transformations in the double role of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are employed in an investigation of performances of drug addiction; and the psychological disorders enacted by Henry Irving and Ellen Terry at the Lyceum Theatre serve as the centerpiece of an exploration of performances of mental illness. Each performance type is further illuminated using a dominant identity category: I contend that contagion was subtly tethered to notions of nationality and boundary crossings, Victorian class strata informed performances of addiction, iv and prevailing understandings of the masculine and feminine inspired the gendering of mental illness categories. In an age in which the expansion of physician authority and the public’s faith in the findings of medical science encouraged a gradual decentralization of the patient from her own diagnosis and treatment, I see Victorian performances of illness as potentially curative. Even on the popular stage, where the primary objective was to entertain, performances of illness crucially restored the patient and his illness (both figuratively and literally) to center stage in ways unsurpassed by the period’s novelists, painters, social reformers, and journalists. The difficulty of articulating experiential suffering with words or brushstrokes was partially ameliorated in theatrical enactments of illness. After all, theatre’s very nature guarantees that when words fail, bodies take up the cause. v TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ....................................................................................................... IX 1.0 INTRODUCTION: MEDICINE AND MIMESIS .................................................... 1 2.0 PERFORMANCES OF CONTAGION ................................................................... 30 2.1 DISEASE AND THE VICTORIAN IMAGINATION ................................... 36 2.2 AN ICON OF ILLNESS: THEATRICAL EMBODIMENTS OF CAMILLE FROM 1853 TO 1914 ......................................................................................................... 43 2.2.1 The Romantic Myth of Consumption .......................................................... 45 2.2.2 Consumptive Camilles: Externalizing and Eternalizing the Romantic Myth ......................................................................................................................... 54 2.2.2.1 The Actresses ....................................................................................... 59 2.2.2.2 Camille as the Exceptional Consumptive .......................................... 62 2.2.2.3 Fading in Death, Blooming in Beauty: The Consumptive Diathesis .. ............................................................................................................... 66 2.2.2.4 The Mythic Mildness of Consumption .............................................. 71 2.2.2.5 Camille’s Tragic End .......................................................................... 76 2.2.3 Clinical Tuberculosis ..................................................................................... 78 2.2.4 Stages of Tuberculosis: Medicalizing Marguerite Before, During, and After the Epidemiologic Revolution ......................................................................... 84 vi 2.2.4.1 The Actresses ....................................................................................... 86 2.2.4.2 Camille as an Unexceptional Tubercular .......................................... 92 2.2.4.3 Unmasking the Consumptive Diathesis ............................................. 97 2.2.4.4 Enacting Chronic Tuberculosis ....................................................... 102 2.2.4.5 Demythologizing Tubercular Deaths .............................................. 106 2.2.5 Divine Sarah, Legendary Marguerite ........................................................ 114 2.3 CONCLUSION: CONTAGION INVASIONS: GERMS, NATIONALITY, AND CAMILLE ............................................................................................................... 128 3.0 PERFORMANCES OF ADDICTION ................................................................... 132 3.1 VICTORIANS AND THEIR DRUGS ........................................................... 139 3.1.1 The Drug Triumvirate: Opiates, Chloral Hydrate, and Cocaine ............ 140 3.1.2 Victorian Theories of Addiction: Illnesses of Biology and Morality....... 148 3.2 (UN)-GENTLEMANLY HABITS: DRUG ADDICTION IN GILLETTE’S SHERLOCK HOLMES AND MANSFIELD’S JEKYLL/HYDE ............................... 156 3.2.1 Setting the Stage: The Dramaturgy of Addiction in Sherlock Holmes and Jekyll and Hyde ......................................................................................................... 156 3.2.2 Icons of Addiction: Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes and Mansfield’s Jekyll/Hyde ............................................................................................................... 174 3.2.2.1 William Gillette as Sherlock Holmes ............................................... 174 3.2.2.2 Richard Mansfield as Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr. Edward Hyde .. 182 3.3 CONCLUSION: THE ANATOMY OF A FIN-DE-SIECLE ADDICT ...... 207 4.0 PERFORMANCES OF MENTAL ILLNESS ....................................................... 216 vii 4.1 PERFORMANCES OF MENTAL ILLNESS AT IRVING’S LYCEUM: GENDERING THE UNSTABLE MIND ....................................................................... 225 4.1.1 Normalizing the Abnormal: Female Mental Illness in Victorian England .. ....................................................................................................................... 225 4.1.1.1 Ellen Terry and the Feminine Mind: Delicate Madness ............... 241 4.1.1.2 Over the Precipice ............................................................................. 267 4.1.2 The Tragedy Waged Within: Masculine States of Mental Illness........... 268 4.1.2.1 States Unnatural: Henry Irving’s Madmen .................................... 280 4.1.2.2 Illness and Anomaly: Feminizing Male Madness on the Victorian Stage ............................................................................................................. 308 4.2 CONCLUSION: THE DOCTOR IS OUT: THE CLOSING OF THE LYCEUM LABORATORY ............................................................................................. 311 5.0 CONCLUSION: PATHOLOGY AND PERFORMANCE .................................. 315 APPENDIX A ............................................................................................................................ 328 BIBLIOGRAPHY ..................................................................................................................... 335 viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS When I was a little girl, my mother’s nickname for me was Camille. It was, I’ll concede, a fitting one. Given to overdramatic displays of emotions, from effusive joy to smoldering indignation, I never left my parents uncertain as to my mood. My forte, you may surmise from my nickname, was pathos. I learned my first French words because of these theatrics. “Pauvre petite, vous n'avez pas de chance, vraiment,” my amused (or perhaps bemused) mother would say to her Camille: “Poor little one, you never had a chance, really.” After months of researching the character of Camille, I now understand that my nickname was actually a term of endearment. Yes, from our modern perspective she seems a little ridiculous, a little operatic, perhaps even a little cringe-worthy. But to thousands of nineteenth-century theatergoers, Camille was beloved for her sincerity,
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