The late nineteenth century British stage was hopelessly confused. It couldn’t decide whether it was London’s principle source of entertainment—mainstream and respectable enoughfor Queen Victoria herself to patronize—or the seedbed of all corruption and deviance in Victorian society. At the center of this split identity was the actress, a figure both well-beloved (in the case of stars like Ellen Terry) and the literal embodiment of everything a Victorian women shouldn’t be—loose, sexualized, and working (in the case of her contemporary, Olga Nethersole). Because of this liminal position, Victorian actresses thus create a fascinatingmicrocosm in which to study the implications of performativity and performance in late nineteenth century society. I argue that stars like Terry and Nethersole, though they did so by opposite means, deliberately performed multiple roles, both on stage and in society, in order to enjoy the autonomy they craved—one unavailable to the majority of Victorian women.The biographies of both actresses reveal compelling paradoxes. Terry, though respectedenough to be compared to the “ideal” Victorian woman (the proverbial “Angel in the House”), was in reality a fallen woman. Olga Nethersole, on the other hand, built her career on playing fallen woman roles, yet lived an upright and unremarkable private life. Despite these differences, however, both women rose to great heights of fame and earned careers, funds, and power overtheir lives and relationships that most women of the century would never dream of. This thesis investigates the anomaly of autonomous Victorian actresses through the lens of performance theory. Drawing upon the concepts of liminality and social performativity, introduced largely by performance studies scholars like Richard Schechner and Marvin Carlson, I work toward a practical connection between performance on the stage and performativity in society that remainslargely unexplored in the field of Victorian theatrical studies. Ultimately, I am shedding light onthe paradoxical, dual function of performance; as demonstrated in the lives of these two actresses, it has the potential to simultaneously reinforce societal norms and to protest against them.

No description available.

I examine Wilde’s Hellenism in terms of the specific texts, editions and institutions through which he encountered ancient Greece. The late-nineteenth-century professionalisation of classical scholarship and the rise of the new science of archaeology from the 1870s onwards endangered the status of antiquity as a textual source of ideal fictions rather than a material object of positivist study. The major theme of my thesis is Wilde’s relationship with archaeology and his efforts to preserve Greece as an imaginative resource and a model for right conduct. From his childhood Wilde had accompanied his father Sir William Wilde on digs around Ireland. Sir William’s ethnological interests led him to posit a common racial origin for Celts and Greeks; thus, for Wilde, to read a Greek text was to intuit native affinity. Chapters 1–3 trace his education, his travels in Greece, his involvement with the founding of the Hellenic Society, and his defence of the archaeologically accurate stage spectaculars of the 1880s, arguing that in his close association with supporters of archaeology such as J.P. Mahaffy and George Macmillan Wilde exemplifies the new kind of Hellenist opposed by Benjamin Jowett and R.C. Jebb. Chapter 4 makes a case for Wilde’s final repudiation of archaeology and his return to the textual remains of Greek antiquity, present as an intertexual resource in his mature works. Thus I examine the role of Aristotle’s Ethics in ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’ and of Platonism in the critical dialogues, The Picture of Dorian Gray and ‘The Portrait of Mr W.H.’ I present The Importance of Being Earnest as a self-conscious exercise in the New Comedy of Menander, concluding that Wilde ultimately returned to the anachronistic eclecticism of the Renaissance attitude to ancient texts.