In the Limelight and Under the Microscope

Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity

Diane Negra, Su Holmes, Diane Negra, Su Holmes, Diane Negra, Su Holmes

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441189172
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This timely collection explores the politics of female celebrity across a range of contemporary and historical media contexts. Amidst concerns about the apparent 'decline' in the currency of modern fame ('famous for being famous'), as well as debates about the shifting parameters of public/private visibility, it is female celebrities who are positioned as the most active discursive terrain.

This collection seeks to interrogate such phenomena by forging a greater conceptual, theoretical and historical dialogue between celebrity studies and critical gender studies. It takes as its starting point the understanding that female celebrity is a particularly fraught cultural phenomenon with ideological and industrial implications that warrant careful scrutiny. In moving across case studies from the 19th century to the present day, this book works from the assumption that the case study should play a crucial role in generating debate about the dialogue between 'past' and 'present', and the individual essays seek to reflect this spirit of enquiry

1

“Mrs. Langtry Seems to Be on the Way to a Fortune”

The Jersey Lily and Models of Late Nineteenth-Century Fame³⁶

Catherine Hindson

The Royal Academy of Art’s 1878 annual exhibition attracted thousands of visitors to London’s Piccadilly. Amid the estimated 1,200 exhibits on display at Burlington House, three portraits of a young woman from Jersey attracted, and sustained, the attention of the press and the public. The model was Lillie Langtry (1853–1929), a young married woman who had arrived in London in 1876 and “startled” the city with the “finish of her features and the fineness of her complexion.”³⁷ By the opening of the 1878 Academy exhibition, Langtry was London’s “reigning beauty”; a style icon and the female celebrity of her day.³⁸ Langtry was to remain a creature of notoriety until her death in 1929: as a beauty, an actress, and a businesswoman, her public identity encapsulated the leisure industries of modernity and forged a new and enduring model of female celebrity.

Yet, on her arrival in London in January 1876, Langtry was a social outsider. Born Emilie Charlotte Le Breton, she was the only daughter of the Dean of Jersey and had rarely left the Channel Islands before her 1874 marriage to Edward Langtry.³⁹ For an upper-middle-class young woman of the mid-nineteenth century, Langtry was relatively well educated. She had been tutored at home in the necessary “feminine skills” of French, German, music, and drawing, but she had also joined her five brothers’ evening tutorials in Latin, Greek, and mathematics.⁴⁰ While her father’s clerical vocation had made philanthropic activities and small-scale social entertaining familiar, Langtry had scant experience or knowledge of the social etiquette and practices of fashionable metropolitan life. After an uneventful first year in London, a chance encounter with a Jersey acquaintance, Lord Ranelagh, launched Langtry into the fashionable bohemian circles he patronized and entertained. At garden and dinner parties, salons and balls, she encountered the artists, writers, and aristocrats who were to aid her in the creation of a public identity and spread her celebrity. By the close of the 1877 season, Langtry’s dark-haired, violet-eyed beauty had secured her widespread fame and popularity. Moreover, as the acknowledged mistress of the Prince of Wales she had become a fixture on the guest lists of the British social calendar’s most exclusive events.

Celebrity identities operate in a complex dialogical relationship with culture: as Jo Burr Margadant has noted, “no one ‘invents’ a self apart from the cultural notions available to them in a particular historical setting.”⁴¹ As a model, a mistress, an actress and a celebrity, Langtry maintained a persona rooted in rapidly evolving concepts of gender, popular entertainment, and commercial culture. In Langtry’s era urbanization and industrialization were unsettling dominant ideologies and constructs of masculinity and femininity struggled to incorporate the changing roles of men and women in the modern city, while the growth of popular culture prompted new attempts to redefine and entrench a sustainable division between “high” and “low” cultural categories. Langtry’s public identity distilled these debates, locating her as a symbol of a threatening “low,” “feminized” celebrity culture.

Mid-Victorian gender classifications were underpinned by a belief in innate differences between men and women.⁴² A set of domestic ideologies affiliated women with the private world of the home, marriage, and spirituality, ostracizing them from the worlds of politics, industry, and the embodied experiences of public and modern life. Yet this ideal of domestic femininity was inevitably troubled by its inherent tensions and inconsistencies. Women were “spiritual yet sexualized, the irresistible object of desire and a certain kind of especially contemplative subject”; the embodiment of a set of unsustainable dualities.⁴³ These internal tensions increased as the century progressed and women became more necessary to commercial culture, both as workers and consumers. This construct of femininity — challenged and threatening to implode as the role of women changed — functioned as a particularly significant element of Langtry’s celebrity identity. By 1877, she was sitting for Britain’s most celebrated artists. At the same time, Langtry postcards, sketches, prints, and photographs filled London’s shop windows, attracting crowds that blocked the pavements as they struggled to see and purchase the latest representations of London’s newest celebrity. Langtry’s face was ubiquitous: as she recalled in her autobiography, people were “so familiar with my features that wherever I went — to theatres, picture galleries, shops — I was actually mobbed.”⁴⁴ Her features presented a recognized ideal of female beauty to aesthetes and to consumers: she was simultaneously an icon of femininity and a modern metropolitan woman. Symbolically, the public and the private collided in Langtry’s image. This complex dichotomy was at the core of Langtry’s success: as a beautiful middle-class woman and daughter of a clergyman, her background made her a paragon of feminine ideals. Yet her public profile, the consumption of her image and her extra-marital affairs clearly removed her from the private space of the home and rejected the sanctified state of marriage and the role of the wife. Langtry’s social and celebrity status thus spanned the unsettling dualities of modern life.

The Lillie Langtry phenomenon was greeted with adoration and trepidation. The scale of her celebrity, the “magnetism of her living presence” and the extent of her social and cultural influence was to provoke wonder and concern well into the twentieth century.⁴⁵ In spite of her notoriety, her fan base was diverse: as The Sketch noted, “there are few women whose individuality appeals to a constituency so varied and so extensive.”⁴⁶ The scale of the Langtry model of fame was new. Richard Schickel has suggested that “there was no such thing as celebrity prior to the beginning of the twentieth century,” arguing that earlier well-known figures were successful individuals and it was to this success that they owed their fame.⁴⁷ Yet the construction and circulation of Langtry’s celebrity disputes this. Prior to attaining fame Langtry had no social position and no vocation, as illustrated by the magazine Moonshine’s 1888 comment that “Mrs. Langtry seems to be on the way to a fortune, thanks to her good start as a celebrity” (my emphasis).⁴⁸ When viewed in relation to Schickel’s assertion, Langtry’s celebrity status appears historically anomalous: a significant and influential precursor to fame’s manifestations and representations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Considering the two categories of public identity that Langtry occupied — the professional beauty and the professional actress — offers an insight into the emergence of a mass celebrity culture, the pervasive anxieties prompted by celebrity women and a model of fame that continues to shape patterns of responses to celebrity culture today.

“Rooms of the Lily”: The Professional Beauty and the Royal Academy⁴⁹

Langtry was mobbed when she arrived at the Royal Academy exhibition’s star-studded private viewing.⁵⁰ Her attendance was a coup for the event’s organizers; her presence at any social occasion secured valuable column space in the press and the public’s attention.⁵¹ On this occasion, however, Langtry brought critical and social commentary, as well as crowds. During May 1878, Burlington House — the home of the Royal Academy and London’s bastion of high culture and the visual arts — became another site for reflection on the cultural implications of a previously unknown Jersey girl’s rapid ascent to fame, sparking an outpouring of press coverage that ranged from gentle satire to outright condemnation. At the height of this press commentary the comic magazine Fun published a satirical ode, “Among the Pictures,” that illustrates the centrality of the Langtry craze. Inviting the reader to accept “the arm of poet Fun” and “seek the house of Burlington, where Mrs Langtry reigns supreme,” the ode offers a guided tour of the exhibition’s most notable works in five stanzas:

What noble efforts here there be —

What noble efforts for our good!

The crowd’s so great we cannot see

“The Road to Ruin” if we would.

This woolly picture, called “May Dew,”

May dew for others — not for us;

(Of Mrs Langtry’s portrait, too,

There’s some appear to make a fuss).

At the conclusion of each stanza, the reader is returned to Langtry’s image, with the ode concluding that “Fun is proud of British art […], Once more it’s nobly done its part, (And Mrs Langtry’s over all).”⁵² Characteristic of the humorous strand of commentaries in newspapers, popular journals and comic magazines, Fun’s satirical response barely conceals the cultural anxieties that underpin it.

In this context, Royal Academy portraits of Langtry were interpreted as disquieting engagements with a new celebrity species — the professional beauty. Emerging from London’s social circles, the professional beauties were a sensation of the late 1870s. Headed by Langtry and Mary “Patsy” Cornwallis-West (1835–1917), they achieved a level of quintessentially modern, metropolitan celebrity founded entirely on their beauty and the new set of economic, social, and technological conditions that fostered the burgeoning commercial photographic industry. By “contriv[ing] to combine the two important modern agencies of advertisement and photography in their thirst for admiration,”⁵³ professional beauties sat for mass-reproduced, affordable postcards that made their image familiar to spectators across Britain, America and the colonial outposts of the British Empire. While the visual image of the professional beauty dominated, she also behaved according to a definable set of characteristics — in private and in public. It was essential that she was married and that her beauty was affirmed by a panel of “fashionable men of the faster sort”; generally those who circulated around the Prince of Wales. She was impetuous and habitually subverted social codes: the professional beauty would happily be led into dinner by a host, at the expense of guests whose social rank was higher than her own; at house parties she would borrow a horse and eschew a gentle sidesaddle ride for a vigorous gallop through the surrounding villages; she would instigate practical jokes and start food fights at dinner. Ensconced in the social arena, she disrupted its behavioral norms and occasioned a shift in notions of women in the public gaze, securing “an attention which used to be accorded to royalty only […] the privilege of being unblushingly stared at is no longer confined to the blood royal.”⁵⁴

For many, the professional beauties’ public image and reputation rendered them unfitting subjects for a work of art. Langtry, Cornwallis-West and their contemporaries were not ano...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Introduction
• 1: `Mrs. Langtry Seems to Be on the Way to a Fortune'
• 2: Helen Keller, Hollywood and Political Celebrity
• 3: Bloody Blondes and Bobbed-Haired Bandits
• 4: Rocket Scientist!
• 5: Grotesquerie as Marker of Success in Aging Female Stars
• 6: `I'm Like a Kaleidoscope'
• 7: Girls Imagining Careers in the Limelight
• 8: Cool Postfeminism
• 9: The Insanity Plea
• 10: The Horror of Something to See
• 11: Strengthening as They Undermine
• 12: Living The Hills Life
• 13: Immigration, Authorship, Censorship, and Terrorism
• 14: We Love This Trainwreck!
• eCopyright