ABSTRACT
A series of paradoxes characterizes actresses’ appearance on stage: while embodying the ideals of feminine beauty and setting the standards for female fashion, they were ‘defeminized’ by the very act of taking up a public career in the theatre. The same women who impersonated Dianas and Vestias also claimed a place in a competitive co-sexual world of work, spent their evenings away from home, and exhibited themselves before the public gaze. To complicate matters, femininity was the quality traditionally credited with making women the objects of male desire, yet actresses’ ‘defeminization’ made them more desirable than ever in a sexual sense. On stage, femininity and sexual desirability co-existed, yet in order to accept the fiction of an idealized femininity in a stage persona, Victorians were required to separate the defeminized actress from her roles. They then had to decide which part of the individual would receive moral strictures.
