In the winter of 1889 Elizabeth Robins was still struggling to break into the London theatre scene. Living in a boarding house and saving precious coins by walking long distances across London instead of taking the bus, she wore holes in her shoes, and suffered frequent colds. Oscar Wilde encouraged her to stay in England, took her under his wing and helped her get an agent. Some of the advice he gave over tea and cigarettes, however, may have done more harm than good to her career. Wilde advised his protĂ©gĂ©e against taking the lead she was offered in A Fair Bigamist, a woman-centred play written by a woman,1 and instead directed her towards male actor-managers, introducing her to the celebrated and powerful Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Ten years older and married, Tree flirted with her career hopes for months but while he frequently sent her box seats to watch him perform, the parts he promised her never materialized.In January, Robins was barely making ends meet playing the young widow Mrs Errol2 in the saccharine drama Little Lord Fauntleroy at the Opera Comique (on Saturday matinees only). Robinsâs luck seemed to be changing when the successful playwright Arthur Wing Pinero admired her performance and invited her for a meeting. During their interview she described a preference for unconventional parts, and he fixed her âlineâ as âsympathetic Outcastsâ (Robins, 1940, p. 176). As the company for his new play, The Profligate, was already engaged, he could only offer her the tantalizing but thankless work of understudying the coveted âfallen womanâ role of Janet Preece. The play ran for months, but never with Robins in the part she so desperately wanted to play. Registering her frustration, Robins confided to her diary, âI would be made in London if I could play that partâ (p. 183).The vexations of Robinsâs early London career shines a light on some of the complexities of the Victorian double standard in relation to actresses. Codes of behaviour for men like Tree who owned theatres were infinitely freer and less dangerous than for the women who sought work in them. Being an actress, a profession still sometimes associated with prostitution, relied on pleasing men to get work and made keeping oneâs reputation tricky. Tree propositioned Robins to become his mistress and in refusing his sexual advances she forfeited the parts she might have played at The Haymarket. Robins likened the shock of the episode to being stung by a hornet, extrapolating the general precariousness of life for single actresses from the experience: âI knew now how this might come to anybody, since it had come to meâ (p. 243). This was by no means the only unwelcome sexual attention Robins received from men in her professional circle. In exasperation, she sometimes resorted to brandishing a pistol to deter them.3 George Bernard Shaw punished her for rejecting his advances â mocking her as âSaint Elizabethâ he did not cast her in his plays. Actresses, Robins frankly acknowledged, had to deal with âconsiderations humiliatingly different from those that confronted the actorâ (1932, p. 33). As a single woman, Robins also frequently experienced anonymous sexual harassment in public. A woman on her own, she wrote, could not âbe without fearâ even in the open street in broad daylight and was not safe âeven in St. Paulâs Cathedralâ.4 But while carefully guarding her personal reputation off stage, Robins knew that playing parts like the mawkish Mrs Errol would not make her a star; on stage she needed a part like the sexually transgressive Janet Preece to âmakeâ her. Like many women of her generation, Robins was caught somewhere between the moral standards of the sexually pure Victorian âangelâ and London theatreâs fin de siĂšcle fascination with the âfallen womanâ. To be an actress with a future, you needed to play a woman with a past on stage without becoming a woman with a reputation off stage.
The Angel in the House and the Fallen Woman
Thereâs nothing left of what she was;
Back to the babe the woman dies,
And all the wisdom that she has
Is to love him for being wise.
(Patmore, 1890, p. 123)
âSeparate spheresâ had become a widespread middle-class ideology in the mid-Victorian period, famously typified in Coventry Patmoreâs wildly popular 1854 poem The Angel in the House, 5 which glorified the womanâs total evacuation of self (âThereâs nothing left of what she wasâ) in subservience to her husband. In upper- and middle-class âseparate spheresâ ideology men and women didnât simply perform different gender roles, they inhabited different worlds: his the temporal and public, hers the spiritual and domestic.6 The prominent philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer rationalized the gender and class divisions of Victorian society by describing it as a body with upper- and middle-class men ruling from the head, upper and middle-class women exerting benign influence from the heart and working-class men and women performing the menial work of the hands, while criminals, prostitutes and paupers made up the nether regions.7
In step with the new evangelical movement of the nineteenth century, the womanâs domestic sphere was conceived of as the centre of purity and the higher sentiments while the male sphere encompassed the material world of industry and commerce. The Victorian man was defined in terms of public action, the woman in terms of domestic influence achieved modestly through piety, self-sacrifice and motherhood. From early in Victoriaâs reign, women were constructed as the moral guardians of the home and, by extension, protectors of the moral worth of the nation.8 Estranged from paid labour, middle-class women were increasingly called on to turn their energies to softening the ugly aspects of industrial capitalism through their angelic influence on men.9 For women to exercise influence in this paradigm, they had to renounce independent public action, putting them in a complex and often contradictory relationship with power in the temporal world.
The rhetoric of âseparate spheresâ advice given through books, pamphlets, poetry, speeches and sermons was not, of course, as nuanced as womenâs actual lives,10 but there were some very real social restrictions on what middle-class women could and couldnât do without ruining their reputations: pre-marital and extra-marital sex or romance were forbidden, education was limited, and earning money was frowned upon. Employing notions of their angelic purity and talent for caretaking, some women used âseparate spheresâ logic to extend their influence into the public realm through casual and organized charity work.11 Much of this public work was rendered invisible, therefore permissible, through the nineteenth-century definition of work as a paid extra-domestic activity (a definition that continues to make vast swathes of primarily female labour invisible). By the 1890s, public spaces like department stores,12 womenâs colleges and theatres provided women with more access to the modern freedoms of the cities, blurring some of the boundaries of male and female spheres.
As more middle-class women benefited from legal and educational reforms, taking advantage of new opportunities for independence, a backlash rose to counter the instability of changes to social convention. The theatre became not only a physical site where men and women both participated publicly as consumers of culture, it became an ideological battleground where female transgressions could be thrillingly observed and symbolically punished, mining the excitement of a new order while pandering to the conventions of the old. Female characters in late-Victorian theatre were frequently polarized as either pure âangelsâ or tainted âfallen womenâ, outcast from society through sexual transgression. As a dramatic character the fallen woman unsurprisingly held a much greater fascination for dramatists than the angel. Sin has always been more marketable than virtue and the fin de siĂšcle obsession with âthe woman questionâ made issues of womenâs independence and sexual morality paramount. Because chastity was regarded as a womanâs highest virtue, and because Victorians didnât draw clear distinctions between romantic seduction and sexual assault, the term âfallen womanâ could encompass anything from a deflowered ingĂ©nue to an unwed mother to a mistress, a courtesan, a prostitute or a victim of sexual abuse. In theatre, the fallen womanâs fate was often a shame-driven suicide which allowed the audience to be titillated by her past and pity her wretched remorse without having to worry about her future. Fallen woman characters appear frequently in problem plays of this era, peaking in the mid-1890s in works such as Oscar Wildeâs Lady Windermereâs Fan (1892), Arthur Wing Pineroâs The Second Mrs Tanqueray (1893), Janet Achurchâs Mrs Daintreeâs Daughter (1894) and Constance Fletcherâs Mrs Lessingham (1894). Variations on the fallen woman theme continued into the twentieth century with plays such as Clotilde Gravesâs London Vendetta (1906), Elizabeth Robinsâs Votes for Women! (1907) and Githa Sowerbyâs Rutherford and Son (1912).
Fallen women often share characteristics in common with the New Woman and many female characters in this period are both âfallenâ and âNewâ. (Readers unfamiliar with the term âNew Womanâ will find a detailed description at the start of the next chapter.) The fallen woman characters discussed in this chapter are sexual transgressors, while the next chapter focuses on social transgressors who are often, but not always, sexually active. Sos Eltis, whose book Acts of Desire is the consummate study of the stage history of the fallen woman, cites first-wave feminismâs campaigns for expanded rights and opportunities for women as causative factors in the ubiquity of fallen woman plays at the turn of the twentieth century (2013a, p. 115). When linked to the independent figure of the New Woman, the fallen woman could serve as a reactionary anti-feminist warning, dramatizing the perils awaiting women who ventured beyond their proper sphere and took sexual liberties reserved for men.
Profligate Men and Fallen Women
I open this survey of the fallen woman where Robins started as an understudy â with Pineroâs play The Profligate. Its two female leads are incarnations of the Victorian âfallen womanâ and âangelâ dichotomy as encountered through the past and present of the playâs protagonist, Dunstan Renshaw, who seduces one and marries the other. The play opens on the morning of Dunstanâs wedding to the angel, Leslie Brudenell. Dunstan calls in at the office of Leslieâs solicitor, Hugh Murray. Dunstan, who is hung-over if not drunk, brags openly about his technique for seducing schoolgirls. Having learnt of the groomâs disreputable past, Hugh decides he cannot in good conscience attend the wedding, a moral stance the other men find ridiculous: under the widely accepted terms of the double standard, there is no such thing as a âfallen manâ. As Dunstan heads for the registry office, the fallen woman, Janet Preece, comes to Hughâs office to seek help in tracking down the man who seduced and abandoned her. Though Janet doesnât know his real name (he used a seducerâs alias), she makes a precise forensic sketch of Dunstan. Too late to save Leslie from marrying the profligate, Hugh condemns Dunstan for his treachery to both women and predicts that Leslie will find her âheart a granary bursting with the load of shame your profligacy has stored thereâ (p. 39).
The second and third acts take place in the Renshawsâ Florentine honeymoon villa. Under Leslieâs angelic influence the profligate man has âlost his dissipated lookâ and become âgentle, watchful and tenderâ (p. 46), a change he acknowledges, saying âI married her, as it were, in darkness; she seemed to take me by the hand and lead me out into the lightâ (p. 67). By extraordinary coincidence Janet arrives at the Renshawsâ villa in a state of collapse with no knowledge that her seducer lives there â Dunstan is conveniently out of town for a few days. Leslie, who has no idea that Janet is her husbandâs discarded lover, nurses her back to health. After lying in a faint for three days, Janet wakes and marvels that she has âdied and come into a beautiful new worldâ where Leslie âis the Angelâ (p. 75). In this new world, Janet even imagines she might marry Leslieâs brother Wilfrid who, unaware of her past, has fallen in love with her. When Dunstan returns, he and Janet face each other in horror, their secret revealed. The act ends with the disillusioned wife Leslie commanding Dunstan to âGo!â (p. 104).
Dunstan returns to London, despairs of a reconciliation with his wife and drinks poison just before Leslie returns to him with words of redemption, âWe are one and we will make atonement for the past together. I will be your Wife, not your Judgeâ (p. 123). In Pineroâs original version the play ends with Leslieâs horrified realization that Dunstan is already dead. On the advice of actor-manager John Hare, however, Pinero stopped short of killing Dunstan in the London premiere production. Instead, the curtain closes on the conciliatory stage picture of a husband kneeling at his wifeâs side as she bows her head down to his. Though the profligate dies in one version and lives in the other, he is redeemed in both versions by his wifeâs forgiveness in keeping with the social norm of the double standard, where men err and women forgive. The subplot reinforces this: while Leslie forgives her husband, she decidedly prefers that the fallen woman Janet should emigrate to Australia rather than marry her brother.
Pinero scored his greatest commercial and critical success in 1893 with The Second Mrs Tanqueray, which established him as the most popular dramatist in England as well as making its leading lady, Stella Campbell (popularly known as Mrs Pat13), a star. A comparison of Pineroâs earlier âfallen manâ play with this fallen woman play clearly illustrates the Victorian double standard: The Profligate asks if a man with a dissolute past can be redeemed and answers âYesâ; The Second Mrs Tanqueray asks if a woman with a sexual past can be redeemed and answers âNoâ. The Second Mrs Tanqueray opens on a heartily masculine scene as the widower Aubrey Tanqueray entertains friends to dinner at his chambers at the Albany14 and confides his plan to marry a courtesan, Paula Rey. The other men tell him frankly that the marriage is a terrible idea. The act ends with Aubrey unexpectedly receiving word that his daughter Ellean is planning t...