| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 105.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Lisa Merrill. When Romeo Was a Woman: Charlotte Cushman and Her Circle of Female Spectators. (Triangulations.) Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 1999. Pp. xxv, 318. $35.00.

Lisa Merrill explores the controversial yet highly successful life and career of Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876), the most famous and respected American actress of the nineteenth century. As an actress and a lesbian, Cushman flouted many of the social conventions of her era, but she was still revered as a "true woman." Merrill's biography is a fascinating, well-researched answer to this paradox of Cushman's life. Merrill argues that Cushman's public and private pursuits legitimated each other: her disinterest in men gave her a moral reputation, contrary to the usually debased image of actresses in this period, and her stage career brought her financial independence and adoring female fans, some of whom became part of her intimate social circle. 1

Merrill focuses on the different representations of Cushman: her stage roles, Cushman's public and private constructions of herself, and other writers' trivialization of Cushman after her death. Cushman's characters on stage mirrored her own ambition and defiance, often dramatizing the expanding roles for women that were developing off stage. She frequently appeared as powerful, sometimes wild, female characters, such as the gypsy Meg Merrilies from Sir Walter Scott's Guy Mannering (1829). And her performances of many significant male roles, including Romeo, matched her masculine role off stage as the breadwinner for her mother and siblings. Although Cushman's Romeo was criticized by some for its gender transgressions, her interpretation was also praised as a chaste version of William Shakespeare's love story. According to Merrill, Cushman's theatrical roles could support dominant social values, such as women's passionlessness, or challenge convention, sometimes providing a lesbian subtext. . . .

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