Grappling with Celebrity Status: Women, Theatre, and the Mechanisms of Celebrity in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain

ABSTRACT

During the late eighteenth century, the emergence of popular and print culture facilitated the rise of celebrity and created an environment in which women’s bodies were consistently sexualized and materialized. Women increasingly became the targets of public scrutiny as printed texts and images proliferated. This paper traces this distinct kind of celebrity and its relationship with gendered discourses of the period. Utilizing Sarah Siddons (1755–1831) and Mary Robinson (1757–1800) as case studies, this paper examines how they accumulated celebrity, investigates the social and cultural aspects of celebrity culture, and explores the intersections of celebrity and femininity at that time. This paper argues for the significance of celebrity actresses and their roles in the shifting development of a celebrity in the late 1700s, illustrating how a modern kind of celebrity discourse emerged, and helping us understand celebrity culture in its current form.

KEYWORDS:

• Celebrity
• theatre
• Sarah Siddons
• Mary Robinson
• media

Disclosure of potential conflicts of interest

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The relationship between art (portraiture in particular) and celebrity in eighteenth-century Britain has drawn a great deal of attention in recent years. See, for example, Pointon’s (1997) interdisciplinary study on women, art, and material culture; Perry (2007) on actresses’ role in art and theatre in this period; and Fay (2010) on portraiture and romanticism.

2. Lilti is contentious here; some scholars, such as Blanning (2019), have suggested that this celebrity culture was not ‘new’ at all and can be found in much earlier historical periods.

3. According to West (2007), Reynolds’s portrait of Siddons had a noticeable influence on Thomas Lawrence’s portrait of Queen Charlotte.

4. For a study of the preoccupation with voices in the Romantic period, in particular, the legacy of Siddons’s famous voice, see Pascoe (2011).

5. Straub (1992) makes a clear analysis of the power politics of the spectator and the spectacle and argues for the cultural positioning of eighteenth-century players in a complex power relationship.

6. Scholars have noticed inconsistencies and gaps in Robinson’s Memoirs. Ty argues that the memoirs represent ‘her struggle with her subjectivity’ (1995, p. 414), while Civale views them as ‘innovations’ that enabled her to ‘balance opposing elements of her character’ (2018, p. 192), and Weng claims that they are ‘evidence of her ways of mediating traditional feminine decorum and codes to negotiate possible narratives for herself’ (2021).

7. Lilti (2017), for example, wrote that Robinson ‘had a very ambivalent attitude’ when it comes to the celebrity system; although she was aware that her fame significantly contributed to the popularity of her texts, she somehow ‘criticiz[ed] the uncivilized pursuit of celebrities’ (p. 31).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Young Scholar Fellowship Program, Ministry of Science and Technology (Taiwan), under Grant MOST 109-2636-H-002-003.

Notes on contributors

Yi-cheng Weng

Yi-cheng Weng is assistant professor at National Taiwan University. She has previously taken visiting fellowships at Chawton House Library and Academia Sinica. Her previous publications consider and explore the diversity of women’s writing in the 18th and early 19th centuries, but the novel has always been a central concern for her. She is currently engaged in a cross-disciplinary research project on visual art and literature.