ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the representations of realist fictional women spectators and performers in a selection of excerpts to demonstrate that –unlike men writers – women writers in this historical period foregrounded women spectators’ desire for, and pleasure in watching women performers, regardless of their class, age, or race. It also explores that women writers’ realist fictional presentations of theatre and opera scenes were portents heralding a nascent, self-affirming, and emboldened imaginary “female gaze” at the turn of the twentieth century in the manner articulated by Matilde Serao as a spectatrix of the silent screen in 1916, in which she called upon dramatists, cineasts, and writers to “please her”. The chapter then explores the concomitant emergence on the tragic opera stage of the Fallen Woman trope and the curious absence of the femme fatale on Italy’s stage and screen at the fin de siècle, before turning finally to an analysis of representations of women performers and spectators in realist fiction.
