Book Review

Canada and the United States

Susan A. Glenn has produced an important study of women in the theater and their relationship to the early twentieth century's feminist movement. She argues that through spectacle, women of vaudeville and theater "became agents and metaphors of changing gender relations" (p. 3). Her book adds to a body of scholarship on women in the theater that includes Faye Dudden's Women and American Theatre: Actresses and Audiences, 1790–1870 (1994) and Robert Allen's Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (1991). All three of these works demonstrate that theater's formative or transitional periods permit women a fair amount of power over their performance that declines rapidly as male theater impresarios establish their control.

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Glenn's work argues that female performance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century projected a protofeminism that redefined women's images, challenged gender expectations, and even presaged modern feminism. Organizing her work thematically, she begins with a discussion of France's Sarah Bernhardt as the archetype of the transgressive spectacular woman. Bernhardt's numerous United States farewell tours demonstrated her massive appeal with American theater-goers. Although she performed exclusively in French, Bernhardt's technique, resting on physical exaggeration and blatant emoting, proved especially attractive to U.S. women. Glenn contends that "female audiences in particular strongly identified with and wanted to see actresses giving free reign to their passion" (p. 21). Such emotional displays countered rigid standards of appropriate female behavior and encouraged women to express their feelings as well as their individuality.

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