| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Renée M. Sentilles. Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity. New York: Cambridge University Press. 2003. Pp. xi, 313. $45.00.

In her own time (the Civil War and the post-Civil War eras), Adah Isaacs Menken was as infamous as Madonna is in ours. Like Madonna, Menken defined herself through sexual adventures and scandal and, like Madonna, she routinely transmutated and redefined herself through increasingly outrageous performance and public behavior. From the outset, even before the public discovered that she possessed writing and acting talent, Menken had achieved celebrity status—what the late Daniel Boorstin characterized as "being well known for being well-known"—by allegedly marrying prize fighter John Heenan, a union that Menken's first husband vehemently denied. Yet, the suspicion of bigamy was raised and a scandal followed. For the remainder of her brief life (thirty-three years), Menken's semi-nude performances and illicit liaisons, many with famous men (poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and novelist Alexandre Dumas among them), provided ample fodder for an emerging mass press. So infamous had Menken become by the Civil War that she was already being compared to another "notorious woman," the dancer Lola Montez, who reputedly carried pistols, challenged adversaries to "duels by poison," and was credited with bringing down a foreign government by carrying on a very public affair with its ruler.

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