The Female Subject on the Stage: Self-fashioning and Performing Femininity in Elizabeth Robins’ The Convert (1907)
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Women’s self-fashioning and performativity effectively functioned to camouflage their ambition and assertiveness in pursuing their political aims; lurking under the mask of conformity to and compliance with Victorian/Edwardian expectations was the beginning of the destruction of women’s roles. Self-fashioning and performativity endowed women with a multiplicity that was not confined to a single identity but conferred social identities on women in both the public and political spheres, resisting patriarchal gender codification. Vida, the main protagonist, adopts actresses’ methods of self-fashioning and performativity by disguising herself as a miserable heroine of melodrama in order to unite herself with women of other classes and transform her agony into a negotiating point for obtaining women’s right to vote. Vida’s body becomes a venue to overcome class differences among women and a locus for achieving better legal status for women. Her versatility demonstrates the multi-faceted features of the modern woman and the possibility of women’s active involvement in political actions in the public sphere. Vida’s multiplicity of social identities, attained through self-fashioning and performativity, offer Edwardian society an opportunity to include other genders and classes in the political space after the fin de siècle moment. Vida’s conversion to a suffragist is a conversion that society must undergo as well. The Convert, published at a critical point in time with regard to political change, needs to reflect the change society must make in order to be just to all genders and classes.
Abstract
Women’s self-fashioning and performativity effectively functioned to camouflage their ambition and assertiveness in pursuing their political aims; lurking under the mask of conformity to and compliance with Victorian/Edwardian expectations was the beginning of the destruction of women’s roles. Self-fashioning and performativity endowed women with a multiplicity that was not confined to a single identity but conferred social identities on women in both the public and political spheres, resisting patriarchal gender codification. Vida, the main protagonist, adopts actresses’ methods of self-fashioning and performativity by disguising herself as a miserable heroine of melodrama in order to unite herself with women of other classes and transform her agony into a negotiating point for obtaining women’s right to vote. Vida’s body becomes a venue to overcome class differences among women and a locus for achieving better legal status for women. Her versatility demonstrates the multi-faceted features of the modern woman and the possibility of women’s active involvement in political actions in the public sphere. Vida’s multiplicity of social identities, attained through self-fashioning and performativity, offer Edwardian society an opportunity to include other genders and classes in the political space after the fin de siècle moment. Vida’s conversion to a suffragist is a conversion that society must undergo as well. The Convert, published at a critical point in time with regard to political change, needs to reflect the change society must make in order to be just to all genders and classes.
참고문헌 (18)
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