ABSTRACT

The interest in creative work as a revelation of personality was not only a phenomenon encountered by authors in the second half of the nineteenth century. Writing in 1867 about the actress Helen Faucit, the Art Journal noted the priority given to the personal attributes of the performer over her performance when it commented that ‘it is not of the art we think, while she is before us, but of the perfect picture of an ideal woman’.1 Victorian critics were well aware of the cult of personality which determined the public’s relationship with both male and female performers; it was, as Mowbray Morris argued in 1883, the defining characteristic of the art of acting:

Although Morris overestimated the public’s indifference to discovering the personality behind a poem, he points out a crucial distinction between the stage and other artistic professions. As the other chapters have shown, the propriety of women working in other artistic professions could be demonstrated by the assertion of compatibility between their work and their domestic duties. Arguments for this compatibility depended on two closely related factors. Firstly, compatibility relied upon the convenience of work that could be done at home. Needlework, painting, and writing could all be quietly and privately produced in the drawing room in between the demands of the household duties. As the English Woman’s Journal noted in 1859, ‘The writer, the painter, any other artist in fact, can work independently’. But, because of the nature of theatrical work, the Journal added, ‘the dramatic artist cannot’.3