ebook img

Tasmanian actress/celebrities of the nineteenth century PDF

437 Pages·2014·25.45 MB·English
by  
Save to my drive
Quick download
Download
Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.

Preview Tasmanian actress/celebrities of the nineteenth century

R T A E H T E H T • a:, r . ai L! r A ti R al T S r U af A G N U O Y V) 2 Declaration of Originality This thesis contains no material accepted for a degree or diploma by the University or any other institution, except by way of background information and duly acknowledged in the thesis, and to the best of my knowledge and belief no material published by any other person except where due acknowledgement is made in the text of this thesis. Date: /7 //- as— Statement of Authority This thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968. Date: / 1,- °5 3 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 4 Illustrations 5 Introduction Statement of the Topic 6 Women, Theatre, Tasmania 8 PART ONE: Colonial Actresses: "The Vanguards of others who are to follow" 27 Chapter One: Setting the Stage; Nineteenth Century Tasmanian Press Culture & Theatre 28 Chapter Two: Stage Actresses in Tasmania, c. 1835 — 1845 46 Anne Clarke 49 Jane Thomson 60 Emma Young 71 Chapter Three: Madame Marie Carandini 84 PART TWO: International Players and Tasmanian Cultural Identity.... 119 Chapter Four: Celebrity Touring Stars of the 1850s 120 Chapter Five: CASE STUDY — The Child "Star" Anna Maria Quinn in Tasmania, 1855 147 PART THREE: "First Wave" "Home Grown" Stars and Celebrity Culture in the 1860s 173 Chapter Six: The "Tasmanian Nightingales" and their Repertoires 185 Chapter Seven: The Carandini Sisters 197 Chapter Eight: Emma and Clelia Howson 228 Chapter Nine: Hattie Shepparde 259 PART FOUR: The 1870s — Tasmanian "Stars" and "The Music of the Future" 288 Chapter Ten "Home Grown" Celebrities of the Era 289 Chapter Eleven: Amy Sherwin: The Nineteenth Century's Last "Tasmanian Nightingale" 308 Conclusion: Women, Identity and Actresses' Social Power 333 Works Cited 353 Notes 387 4 Acknowledgements This work could not have been done without the patience and criticism of my supervisor, Dr. Rosemary Gaby. I am very appreciative of the support of the University of Tasmania, in particular being awarded a Research Scholarship for this project. Having spent hundreds of hours in libraries and archives searching through documents, microforms and microfiches, I would like to express my gratitude to the many professionals who have guided my discoveries. Particular thanks go to the Document Delivery Service at the University of Tasmania, and to the State Library of Victoria for kindly giving me permission to reproduce a number of photographs for this work. I would also like to acknowledge the contribution of the growing number of theatre historians whose work has been so vital to my own. 5 Illustrations Launceston Theatricals in the 1840s............................................................... ..... ........31 John Davies.. .41 Anne Clarke Debut as "Miss Remens" .52 Anne Clarke "fits-out" a Promenade ...... ............................ ..... ............ ..... ..................59 G. H. Rogers .74 Marie Carandini Bill, 1840s..... ..... ..............................................................................91 Monsieur E. Coulon with Catherine Hayes, Illustrated Sydney News, 21 October 1854...96 Mrs. Brougham .98 Marie Carandini from Lavenu's "I Cannot Sing To Night" ..... ...............................103 G. V. Brooke .127 Romeo and Juliet Burlesque 130 Catherine Hayes, Illustrated Sydney News, 21 October 1854........................................133 Mrs. Charles Poole .135 The Gougenheim Sisters.. 139 Laura Keene 143 Joseph Jefferson .176 Emilia Don as the Earl of Leicester .178 Sir William Don .179 Mary Provost as "Medea" .189 Avonia Jones 192 Rosina Carandini's Debut in Hobart .201 Alliance Rooms. .203 Emma Carandini (Mrs. Gilbert Wilson)....................................................................216 Clelia Howson .235 Clelia Howson .239 "Circumstance" .251 Nellie Stewart. .255 Hattie Shepparde in The Wicked World. ......... ........................ ............ ......... ..... 283 Lucy Chambers Portrait 294 Lucy Chambers Bill. . 299 Docy Stewart and Marion Amy Sherwin ......317 Amy Sherwin 328 6 Statement of the Topic Australian celebrity culture of the nineteenth century combines personal success, and the ideal constructions.of the individual and homeland, with the persuasive power of the media to offer the celebrated a means of public visibility and nationality. This thesis engages with the intersections between media and celebrity culture of the nineteenth century by exploring the intimate relationships between the construction of gender and the "localisation" of place. It examines the representation of a number of Tasmanian-born actresses received as celebrities during the period and historicises about the slippery nature of state of origin when contextualised in what developed into a greater picture of global media culture. It places these representations alongside those of off-shore actresses and presents a "new" picture of women's engagement in colonial culture and their social power. The thesis also argues that the Tasmanian provenance of celebrated stage women such as Emma and Clelia Howson, Hattie Shepparde, the Carandini Sisters, Lucy Chambers, Amy Sherwin, and others, offered the State's population a lively and highly visible collection of cultural exemplars. The thesis will interweave the narratives of their careers into an analysis of contemporary and modern-day understandings of Australian identity in two ways. First, it contends that these women heralded the dawn of a new public visibility for women as professionals, decades before the mobilisation of women's groups and suffrage leagues in this country. Second, it traces their international successes as a way of demonstrating their contribution to establishing the cultural roots of what is now known collectively as "the Australian context." My research reveals that an important cultural breakthrough coincided with the international tours of these women because their achievement popularised, and therefore revolutionised, a new means of gesturing Australian homeland offshore. A historicised and "localised" concept 7 of celebrity is a valuable tool of analysis when considering that actresses generally are continually overlooked as proactive conduits of social change, and especially since their achievements as legitimate cultural agents were celebrated in an era that is routinely considered as oppressive and restrictive for women. The aim of the thesis is to explore how colonial society relied on Tasmanian-born actresses as sources of cultural identification and how such figures enabled the performance of identity as a result. There is, in the development of Australian celebrity culture from the 1840s until the early twentieth century, an overt politicisation of Tasmanian cultural identity. Coupled with this phenomenon is a social evolution in changes to attitudes about "Tasmanian-ness" that can be traced directly to the instrumental achievements of Tasmanian-born celebrity actresses of the period. 8 Women, Performance, Tasmania Tasmania has enjoyed a long tradition of producing "home grown" theatre stars. Errol Flynn is probably the best known of the twentieth century exports. The antics of the dashing, charismatic and thrice-married actor of the 1930s were so notorious that they earned for him the epithet "the Tasmanian Devil." One of the better known female stars was Merle Oberon, whose publicists claimed during the 1930s and 40s that she was Tasmanian-born: specifically into a wealthy Hobart family. While her provenance has since been the subject of some debate, Oberon's rank as "Tasmanian-born" did cast a glowing light on the island's cultural credibility, despite the fact that she was 10 000 miles away and only once set foot on the island, in 1978. The more recent Tasmanian-born actresses, such as Genevieve Picot, Alison Whyte and Essie Davis similarly experience an emphasis on homeland. Domestic audiences are perhaps more familiar with Picot and Whyte than those internationally, but actress Essie Davis has received considerable attention since her role playing the wife of Dutch artist Vermeer in Peter Webber's film, Girl With a Pearl Earring (2003). When Danielle Wood wrote in the Sunday Tasmanian on 7 March 2004 that, "Essie Davis is making her Tasmanian family feel proud for good reason," she used a traditional journalistic practice that recruited the "home grown" star to uplift Tasmanian community pride. Wood makes a direct connection between Davis' provenance and her success. Tim Cox's ABC Radio interview with Davis, which went to air on Wednesday 12 March 2003, also places significant emphasis her provenance. "When Essie Davis is in London she is known as an Australian actress," claims Cox, "but when she arrives in Australia she is known as a Tasmanian actress." Any examination of how women such as Davis inform the process of constructing versions of identity leads to questions concerning women's social 9 power. Reflected in the narratives claiming Davis' significance are traditional approaches to writing about public women, specifically theatre women, formalised in the colonial era. The publicity of profoundly popular Tasmanian- born theatre women of the period—such as Emma and Clelia Howson, the Carandini sisters, Lizzie, Fanny, Rosina, Emma and Isabella, Hattie Shepparde, and Maggie and Docy Stewart, and singers including Lucy Chambers and Amy Sherwin, as well as others—all read remarkably like those written by modern- day journalists about this century's contemporaries of the theatre world. This suggests that not only do modern day actresses retain a level of social power comparable to that of their colonial contemporaries, but also that the practice of looking to actresses as exemplars of culture has its roots in the nineteenth century. This thesis examines "celebrated" Tasmanian-born actresses and singers of the nineteenth century such as Shepparde, Chambers, Sherwin, the Howson, Carandini, and Stewart sisters, and others, to explore how theatre women informed processes of cultural meaning-making in order to exemplify how little this faith in actresses as markers of social meaning has changed over time. Clearly, in the case of stage women, there are connections between popular culture and colonial social life that need to be made in order to understand their public visibility. In the case of some women, particularly the Tasmanian-born women studied here, they were "celebrated" because of the successes they achieved in the dramatic and musical arts, and this was manifest as "celebrity": a valuable asset to local culture. Celebrity in the colonial era was a powerful tool legitimising the social and cultural worth of the communities in which the celebrity was born, and if the lion's share of their social meaning was linked to provenance—and their publicity suggests that it was—then discrete cultures could gesture ownership of a celebrity as a way of legitimating community. The process is very clear in Tasmanian press culture's response to the women 10 studied here, and one of the most interesting phenomena this case study reveals is that it is possible to take the process one step further. Once the public visibility of these celebrity women grew to embrace the global market, then their social meaning was, like that of Essie Davis nowadays, specifically linked to nationality, and this connection therefore validated not only Tasmanian community culture, but also the Australian homeland. Women's crucial significance in this reciprocal interchange is the central issue at the heart of this thesis. Women's "otherness" of course facilitated this cultural meaning-making, and any analysis of women's social activity must explore this "otherness" as integral to their public visibility and their popular utility as cultural exemplars. But before proceeding to offer a more in-depth discussion of the theoretical objectives of the thesis, as well as its organisation, there are a number of issues relating to women, performance, and Tasmania requiring examination. In order to understand the importance of these women to defining what, to paraphrase Graeme Turner, "Australian-ness" was and did' in the colonial period, one must first recognise the marginalised "place" of women generally in contemporary scholarship. For instance, it is not too surprising to find that most historiographies about the Australian stage reflect meticulous research into the careers of many male actors and entrepreneurs. But history, however, has not been as kind to its theatre women, and recognising why scholarship continues to underplay the significance of stage actresses as proactive catalysts of change in Australian social history is a crucial step in redressing their under- representation. I argue that the root cause of the problem is twofold: approaches to writing women's historiography, and generalisations about colonial actresses that seriously underestimate their social power. Gaps in scholarship are traceable to traditional approaches to writing and researching women's historiography. For the most part, the usual approach

Description:
the initial prime-movers of theatre, for it was the scores, scripts and compositions production of Donizetti's opera Lucia di Lammermoor (c. 1835) that:
See more

The list of books you might like

Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.