Strike a Pose: Performing Gestures of Female Madness Across Media Circa 1900

Author

Elyse S. Singer, The Graduate Center, City University of New YorkFollow

Date of Degree

6-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Program

Theatre and Performance

Advisor

David Savran

Committee Members

Alison Griffiths

Erika T. Lin

Edward Miller

Subject Categories

Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Film and Media Studies | History of Gender | History of Science, Technology, and Medicine | Performance Studies | Theatre and Performance Studies

Keywords

theatre, cinema, gesture, performance, dance, hysteria

Abstract

This dissertation examines methods for performing female madness onstage, in the medical theatre, and before the camera circa 1900. My focus is on Western techniques for imitating white women’s hysteria in the United States, England, and France. I argue that theatrical gesture served—and continues to serve—as a safeguard, a survival technique, for the actor (and the spectator) to preserve rationality in the enactment or viewing of mentally ill characters. At the same time, these resilient mad gestures carry traces of the oppressive structures of power that have fostered their legibility. Embodying a person in mental distress is a high-stakes endeavor. Theatrical gestures of madness possess great power to dehumanize or spread empathy. Although mental health treatments and cultural attitudes towards people with disabilities have evolved since the beginning of the last century, Western acting methods for representing neuropathologies are still enmeshed in archaic binary frameworks.

In Chapter 1, “Body as All-in-One: Sarah Bernhardt’s Hysterical Star Turn,” I reconstruct and speculate about Sarah Bernhardt’s 1884 visit to the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, where she reportedly enacted an impromptu mad solo performance behind the bars of an asylum cell. Years later, in a medical journal, she claimed the visit was research for playing the title role in Scribe and Legouvé’s tragic play Adrienne Lecouvreur. I argue that Bernhardt’s site-specific spectacle exemplifies how artists circa 1900 theatricalized enactments of pathologies in the name of reality. My second chapter, “Blood and Guts: Women’s Bodies, Virality, and Madness Across Medical Stages,” interrogates the Western healthcare industry’s practice of staging demonstrations of neuropathologies circa 1900. My focus is on enactments of fits before the institutionalized moving picture camera and the circulation of these filmic texts beyond the asylum walls. Racial coding of gestures of madness is central to Chapter 3, “Unmediated Madness and the ‘Savage’ Body: Race, Resistance, and (un)Reason.” Here, I dissect how Western performers approached, resisted, or subverted enactments of the madwoman-as-savage at the turn of the twentieth century. Ideologies of race and unreason collided in distinctive gestural evocations through dance and related popular culture forms. The avatar of the “savage” madwoman subsequently migrated through minstrelized and animalistic mad gestures into early motion pictures.

My dissertation argues that mad gestures carry traces of oppressive structures of power related to race, gender, and national origin. These historical gestic objects have circulated and left residue across multiple media forms. I contest that performers craft mad corporeal expressions to be particularly legible and gestures of madness have been especially resilient to changes across performance modes. This legibility is on a semiotic level and is exacerbated by impulses, often sincere, to prove scientific empiricism and authenticity.

Recommended Citation

Singer, Elyse S., "Strike a Pose: Performing Gestures of Female Madness Across Media Circa 1900" (2024). CUNY Academic Works.
https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/5823