An empire of collars and corsets: Charting body maps on the late-Victorian stage

The late-Victorian period witnessed the emergence of a realistic theatre, explicitly concerned with mirroring upper-class manners and mores from the stage. The bodies of actors and actresses became central to this mirroring. Through their appearances onstage in couture-quality contemporary clothing as characters drawn from London's high society, performers modeled the bodies and bodily behaviors considered "natural" to the well-to-do Englishman or woman of the period. Through an examination of the performance record of plays including Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan, J.M. Barrie's The Admirable Crichton and Peter Pan, A.W. Pinero's The Second Mrs. Tanqueray, and Brandon Thomas's Charley's Aunt, among others, I establish that the performance of the body on the late-Victorian stage worked to reinforce the positivist, socially-Darwinist ethos of the time. My examination extends beyond performances of plays set in the contemporary moment to a reading of Henry Irving and Ellen Terry's 1888 Macbeth, and to the consideration of male impersonator Vesta Tilley. Even within these performances, I argue, actors and actresses demonstrated from the stage bodies that conformed to the expectations of a social and political power structure dedicated to maintaining its own Imperial might. I theorize these demonstrations as performances of historically localized and culturally pervasive body maps. The body map that I frame here draws together the pressures of clothing and social conditioning as they influence the subjective understanding of the physical form. I integrate the art-historical perspective of Anne Hollander and the phenomenological arguments of Bert O. States with the practice-based methodology of the Alexander Technique; what emerges from this combination of theoretical inputs is an understanding of embodiment in which not only posture, carriage, and gait, but gestural systems and the physical observances of polite society may be read as the contour lines and points of interest that are mapped by society and the subject onto the body's topography. These varied theoretical platforms combine with my examination of the photographic record of performances to reveal the heavily-weighted messages conveyed by the clothed bodies of actors as they moved through the Society comedies and realistic problem plays that dominated the late-Victorian stage.