"Actresses as Working Women" by Tracy C. Davis

(Routledge, Oxon, 1991)

One of the great unknown nineteenth-century novels is a book called The Golovliov Family by Mikhail Saltykov-Schedrin. Among its many virtues is a sympathetic portrayal of the lives of two actresses: they are the twin grand-daughters of the absolutely despicable main character of the novel, Vladimir Mikhailovich Golovliov, and despite being shunned by the family for their profession and living in misery because of this, they wind up being the only ones capable of loving their grandfather after his life finally falls apart. (1) There are, in fact, many actresses in Russian literature and theatre – Arkadina being a latecomer in a long tradition – and in my opinion, they are among the most interesting characters in the Russian canon. Because most of these writers were dedicated realists, their take on the women was often, precisely, “actresses as working women”. (2) Alexander Ostrovsky, Russia’s greatest playwright, has at least four plays where actresses are the main characters, and which develop the impossible conflicts they are thrown into by a context that judges them harshly but relies on them emotionally: where they are vehicles for satirizing a world full of vices, with these actresses being, well, quite normal.

Tracy Davis’ book reminded me of Ostrovsky and Saltykov-Schedrin precisely because her meticulous description of a complex situation succeeds, without a word of admiration, to provoke admiration and compassion from the reader for these young women who, before a scarcity of options, choose the dangerous business of the theatre. Good historical writing is, in my opinion, like good play- or novel-writing: the reader should clearly see the complexity and even the inevitability of conflicts that at first glance seem bizarre, foreign and even maddeningly avoidable. Many of these situations would make wonderful settings for plays, because we would immediately connect to the actresses of the time, and retelling the stories might tell us much about how little has changed in our times. Her five key observations – the acting profession as an alternative to drudgery for poor women, female solidarity leading to social reforms to aid poor women and the poor in general (3), sexual harassment on the workplace masked by false philanthropy, the fetishization of the actress through staging that evoked common pornographic tropes, and the sexualization of actresses through a kind of geographical entrapment, still plague the theatre today. And situations like philanthropic blackmail or social hypocrisy are common scenarios in numerous other contexts. (4)

The story of the critic Clement Scott is a typical example of Davis’ keen analysis of the fundamental conflicts of the period. Here is an experienced professional who wants to protect young women from ruining their lives in the theatre by publicly telling the truth about what will probably happen to them, and who winds up vilified for his honesty and his sincere attempt to do a public good. There is nothing more dangerous for an embattled minority than to have its faults publicized, especially when these faults involve the debasement and violence conducted on an even smaller and more helpless minority. It is a fascinating conflict because those who protest the most loudly truly think that they are protecting the women whose good name they want to defend: one of those situations where it is hard to imagine what course of action could possibly be taken to break the endless cycle. Philanthropic attitudes, such as those expressed by the defenders of the actresses’ good name, believe in the system, and therefore perpetuate a system that is inherently prejudiced and violent. (5)

From a certain perspective, Davis’ treatment of the Clement Scott incident illustrates how she proceeds in this wonderful book, where each chapter criticizes, deconstructs, then builds upon the preceding ones. In order to understand the Scott scandal fully and see how impossibly difficult reform was in the theatre, it is necessary to have carefully studied the first two chapters of the book. We see, in chapter one, that some women choose the theatre as a viable option away from situations of indentured slavery, such as teaching or being a prostitute; and we know that from a certain point of view, women in the theatre are treated more democratically than in any other profession – Davis paints a traditional picture of the improving situation of the Victorian actress. But then in chapter two, she submits the statistics to a critical analysis, and shows that the situation was often so difficult for the actresses that some theatres had to organize welfare for them and their children, and this of course was done by the women themselves. Then in chapter three, Davis shows the constant sexual harassment the actresses must submit to in order to survive: it becomes clear that most of the young women who try to “escape” into the theatre wind up in a situation as miserable as the working-class life they wanted to avoid. So when she finally describes Scott’s well-meaning denunciation of the situation of women in the theatre, the vitriolic reaction of the theatre directors and managers (mostly male) is perfectly clear: speaking relatively, they have the moral high ground, because they know they do “more” for women than any other profession – but the reality is their treatment of their female colleagues is in some sense more terrible than in other professions. And there is nothing more ideological than violence disguised as generosity, especially when the surrounding violence is more openly aggressive.

(1) Saltykov-Schedrin, Mikhail. Gospodá Golovliovy. Khudozhestvennaya Literatura, Moskva, 1980.
(2) Chekhov is a curious exception to this rule.
(3) Ostrovsky was also famous for his reforms to the theatre, and for his attempts to professionalize acting companies and to secure decent salaries for their members. See V. Y. Lakshin, Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky. Iskusstvo, Moscú, 1982.
(4) For a fascinating analysis of the humiliating philanthropy and social hypocrisy of the white elites to African American artists during the Harlem Renaissance, see Chapter 3 of Nathan Irvin Huggins’ book, Harlem Renaissance (Oxford University Press, New York, 1971).
(5) This collusive and violent “image-consciousness” is an important point of Huggins’ Harlem Renaissance, where the spokespeople for the image are community leaders trying to “live up to” white standards, even while the white community, as in Davis’ London, was looking for something else altogether in the Harlem arts scene.