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Contemporary artists Elizabeth Colomba and Fabiola Jean-Louis employ eighteenth-century subject matter, iconography, and media to reimagine the visual history of Black women. Putting Colomba’s and Jean-Louis’s work in dialogue with my own, I return to the premises of my book Women, Performance, and the Material of Memory: The Archival Tourist (2019), to re-examine, interrogate, and acknowledge my position as a white scholar.

This article proposes a way to disambiguate the evaluative states currently identified as “adaptive preferences” in development literature. It provides a brief analysis of Serene Khader's Deliberative Perfectionist Approach, and demonstrates that distinguishing between adaptive states has important implications for the theory and practice of development intervention. Although I support Khader's general approach and consider my project to be complementary, I argue that the term preferences be replaced with four distinct terms: beliefs, choices, desires, and values. Distinguishing among adaptive states can serve to prevent inappropriate intervention and appreciate the costs of transforming inappropriate adaptations. I argue that adaptive values are especially problematic, given how central a person's values are to their sense of meaning and self. Attempts to transform adaptive values are likely to produce internal conflict, resulting in psychological distress and diminished agency. Furthermore, some values (referred to in moral psychology as sacred values) preclude deliberation and comparison given their communal status as infinitely valuable. To deliberate about sacred values is to violate them. The emotional and psychological damage that may result from value transformation is thus likely to be extensive, and must be taken into account when determining whether, and what type of, intervention is justified.

Over the past 20 years, the study of eighteenth-century British actresses has blossomed into an emerging interdisciplinary field. Early works on actresses in the 1990's coincided with a heightened interest in recovering non-canonical eighteenth-century texts by female authors as well as the publication of Judith Butler's ground breaking Gender Trouble in 1992. Actresses became, in many ways, the perfect vehicle for looking at how ideologies of femininity, performance, and embodiment materialized in eighteenth-century culture. The publication of Felicity Nussbaum's Rival Queens in 2010 signaled a new phase in actress studies. This article looks closely at the ways in which scholarship on eighteenth-century actresses and celebrity produced since 2010 responds to and/or complicates Nussbaum's invitation to move beyond the parameters of the lady/prostitute divide in actress studies towards more “productive frames of reference” and methodologies. In 2016, actress studies is a truly interdisciplinary field intersecting with art, music, literature, history, economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and fashion. Scholars in actress studies have pioneered new theoretical approaches to theater history, archives and evidence, re-enactment and performance, as well as studies of sound and material culture. Studies of actresses have contributed significantly to the history of early modern women specifically focusing on maternity, professionalism, marriage, domestic life, and kinship networks. Considering “Actress Studies” as a distinct field highlights an important legacy of paradoxical ideologies about women, power, and fame that still operate today.

This essay examines the relationship between actresses and material culture in England in the late eighteenth century, with particular reference to Eliza Farren. Actresses’ images were everywhere in the Georgian and Regency period; they appeared across visual media in portraits, miniatures, prints, caricatures, periodical illustrations, sculpture, and porcelain. The proliferation of materials representing actresses in various formats signalled the public’s interest in women on stage and celebrity culture in general. For female celebrities in particular, the blurred distinction between actresses and things and actresses as things foregrounds a central paradox for women on stage that still persists: i.e. the ways in which the visibility of the female figure and the cultural politics of female embodiment often mask the professionalism, labour, and skill of female performers. The relationship of representations of actresses to material objects, then, is not only about tracing the development of celebrity and fandom in the late eighteenth century, but also about interrogating the relationship between femininity, visibility, embodiment, and agency surrounding women in the theatre and, by extension, women in the public sphere.

The introduction provides context for the main theoretical threads of this book: tourism theory, performance theory, archive theory, and studies of women and material culture. I define and explore the idea of the “archival tourist” along with the strategies involved in curating the individual case studies in the book. In addition, I establish connections among the main figures in the narrative (Elizabeth Inchbald, Sally Siddons, The Countess of Blessington [Marguerite Gardiner], Isabella Beetham, Jane Read, Marie Tussaud, and Amelia M. Watson) and the trajectory of tangible objects (pocket diaries, paintings, magic lanterns, silhouettes, waxworks, and photographs) featured in each chapter.

This chapter examines silhouettes and waxworks by late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women artists in order to consider the ways in which these mysterious artifacts represent traces of the embodied presence of specific individuals. Viewing a silhouette connects the observer directly to the moment of the object’s creation—staging a kind of reenactment scenario across time. The extraordinary skill and technique of silhouette artists such as Isabella Beetham (1750–1825) and her daughter Jane Read (c. 1773–1800) provide insight into modes of late eighteenth-century style, gesture, and expression. In the second part of the chapter, I turn to waxworks, specifically to Madame Tussaud’s self-portraits. Encountering waxworks involves a sense of tangibility that disrupts the boundaries between spectators and objects. Silhouettes and waxworks are both quintessential tourist objects because they are things that are specifically connected to technologies of presence. I argue that the particular properties of silhouettes and waxworks as media are analogous to how women have appeared and disappeared in the archives, as well as the ways in which women’s embodied experiences are mediated through material representations that both preserve and obscure their presence.

In 1915, the illustrator, photographer, and painter Amelia M. Watson, inspired by her fascination with the transatlantic actress, writer, and social historian Fanny Kemble’s memoir Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation (1864), traveled with two female companions to the remains of Kemble’s plantation located on St. Simons Island off the coast of Georgia. Once there she took a stunning series of photographs of the plantation house, the surrounding landscape, and the descendants of the original enslaved people who lived there. In this chapter I explore what I call Amelia Watson’s “plantation tourism,” investigating the overlapping and contradictory narratives of sympathy, voyeurism, and aesthetic practice present in the interplay between Watson’s images, the texts that accompany her photographs, and the original narratives the images were meant to illustrate. Watson’s projects consciously and unconsciously reinforce the ideology of white supremacy, while at the same time specific photographs, particularly of female subjects, recreate and reimagine the haunting realities of the past, potentially providing a more progressive narrative of survival and renewal through their presence.

In this chapter, I consider excerpts from Elizabeth Inchbald’s pocket diaries from 1781–1820 in order to theorize the significance of the pocket diary as an embodied archive—that is, as an object and receptacle of information that is literally and figuratively tied to the body. In particular, I examine Inchbald’s references to clothing—wearing her “white silk” dress onstage and off, and her use of a “cletin” elastic waistcoat, which she wore to alleviate the symptoms of her “complaint” (an ailment that plagued her in her later years). Tracing the larger cultural resonance of these garments connects Inchbald’s daily performances to a range of representations of eighteenth-century women. The chapter also looks at Inchbald’s vexed relationship with the notorious actress Mary Wells. I contend that material about their association recorded in Inchbald’s pocket diary represents a “shadow archive” or an alternative record of theatrical women that does not appear in official documents, memoirs, or biographies. The present-day scholar’s relationship to this text, a hybrid genre of private and public material, resembles a touristic encounter—the diary itself presents an opportunity for “staged intimacy,” a window into the backstage regions of Inchbald’s experience.

A series of letters housed in the Cambridge Library and published in 1904, in a volume entitled An Artist’s Love Story edited by Oswald G. Knapp, tells the story of a tragic love triangle between the celebrated artist Sir Thomas Lawrence and both of the famous actress Sarah Siddons’s daughters—Sally and Maria. During the course of the correspondence (1797–1800), Lawrence completed an extraordinary series of drawings and paintings of Sarah, Sally, and Maria Siddons . The wealth of narrative and visual material (both tangible and imagined) surrounding the actors in this ensemble creates a unique opportunity to consider how tangible materials connect to intangible traces. Using Rebecca Schneider’s concept of performing remains and Hanneke Grootenboer’s theory of “intimate vision,” I explore how as archival tourists we might consider the ways in which these artifacts “look back” at us from the past. Putting these materials together stages a form of reenactment for the archival tourist that mimics the experience of an interactive museum exhibition.

In this chapter, I explore how the theatrical event or tourist attraction of the auction might help us to theorize the ways in which objects act as souvenirs and as conduits to embodied experience. Just after Sir Thomas Lawrence completed his famous portrait of her, Lady Blessington composed a fictional account of an auction in her book The Magic Lantern; or, Sketches of Scenes in the Metropolis (1822). Juxtaposing Blessington’s narrative with a journal article by an “American Traveller” chronicling his experience at the Gore House auction of her possessions in 1849 suggests a number of important things about the connections among auctions, tourism, souvenirs, archives, and ghosts. The operation of magic lanterns, auctions, and tourism share a preoccupation with fantasy, projection, and types of surveillance. Blessington’s use of the magic lantern as a guiding trope serves to remind readers of the spectral and uncanny nature of urban existence as a continuous barrage of the strange and the familiar.

This essay explores images of actresses, queens and princesses in late-century periodicals. Comparing portraits of Sarah Siddons, Mary Robinson, and Elizabeth Inchbald to images of Queen Charlotte and Princess Charlotte Augusta, Laura Engel argues that periodical portraits function as celebrity pin-ups (versions of the same image) as well as markers of individual character (celebrating specificity and originality), thus participating in the creation of ideas about women’s claim to fame, legitimacy, and visibility. Readers could ‘own’ an image of their favourite player by purchasing a periodical, and could also feel connected to royal women, who resembled their most cherished theatrical stars. At the same time, the legitimacy bestowed on queens and princesses transferred visually to famous actresses who appeared in very similar costumes and poses. Looking closely at the ways in which artists employed similar iconography in these portraits, suggests ways of seeing that, Engel contends, connect to contemporary modes of visual display, particularly to the repetition and serial nature of pictures on Facebook, which promote a sense of intimacy and familiarity with the portrait’s subject that is ultimately a construction. Periodical portraits thus foreground the inherent tension between formality and intimacy highlighted in images of celebrated women.

This epilogue looks at an unusual scene occurring at Madame Tussauds in the Katharine Hepburn film A Woman Rebels (1936). The mostly contrived plot of the movie hinges on the episode at the wax museum—where nothing and everything happens. For the spectator or fan, encountering a life size wax figure of a famous person highlights the boundaries between life and death, authenticity and artifice, creating an uncanny effect that is similar to being in close proximity to a celebrity. Famous people’s bodies are in many ways untouchable, sacred, and idealised. The epilogue highlights the collection’s emphasis on the ways in which various technologies work to enhance and promote the illusion of intimacy and identification with famous figures.

Rival Queens: Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theatre FELICITY NUSSBAUM Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010 376 pp., ISBN 978 0 81224 233 1, £36 It is pe...

In this article, I argue that images of muffs in several portraits of actresses from the 1780s and 1790s can be read as ambiguous cultural signs that are analogous to the ambivalent position of actresses as female celebrities in the late eighteenth century. Muffs in portraits of actresses draw attention to the complex boundary between fame and notoriety for eighteenth-century women: in certain images muffs function as signs of aristocracy and glamour, in others of crass accumulation and overt sexuality. At the same time that these portraits were being painted a number of satiric prints appeared featuring female bodies engulfed by enormous muffs. Muffs function in these caricatures as ambiguous signs of gender and sexuality, which may have been directly related to anxieties about actresses acting as consumers, fashion plates, and urban professionals. The dual nature of the muff represents the complexities of fashioning celebrity for eighteenth-century female performers.

In the epilogue, I turn to Hugh Thomson’s illustrated edition of Sense and Sensibility (1902), which features images of each of the primary female characters (Elinor, Marianne, and Lucy) holding muffs. I read these images alongside an entry from the “Ladies Encyclopedia” from 1910 entitled “On Muffs.” Curiously, the afterlife of the muff- its visual translation into editions of Austen’s novels — provides some insight into how readers were directed to conjure representations of the fashionable eighteenth-century past. As accessible and useful accessories, Muffs at the beginning of the twentieth century offered the potential for a more democratic vision of style, one in which every woman could have the opportunity to present themselves as fashionable.

Chapter 2 looks specifically at Austens use of the muff as an accessory in Northanger Abbey and Sense and Sensibility. I argue that Austens use of the muff in these novels emphasizes the conflicts inherent infernale performance, display, and desire, central to images of muffs in portraits and satiric prints. Whereas Marianne’s muff is a representation of her unique embodiment and sexuality -one that cannot survive in the world of the novel — Mrs Allen’s desire to “guess the value” of the muff in a shop window and her obsession with fashion and the dangers of ruining her costume are about her desperation to be visible and to produce herself as a legitimate subject. I propose that representations of muffs in these novels suggest strategies for reading that emphasize the significance of the world outside of the text.

Chapter 1 juxtaposes an analysis of clothing, accessories, and theatricality in Jane Austens earliest writings with the controversies surrounding the private theatricals at Steventon inspired by the arrival of Austens dynamic cousin Eliza de Feuillide. At the same time Eliza was planning performances in Austens home, another Eliza, the actress Eliza Farren, was acting and directing private theatricals at Richmond House. I draw connections between representations of gigantic muffs in satiric prints and the issues surrounding the dynamics of women’s “publick” appearances in Austens Juvenilia and Eliza de Feuillide’s correspondence. Focusing on the muff as a stylish, theatrical, and suggestive accessory highlights the contradictory images of women surrounding Austen in her early teenage years.

Chapter 3 examines James Stanier Clarke’s fashionable sketch of Austen holding a muffin relation to other images we have of her, particularly the famous drawing of Austen by her sister Cassandra, and the recently discovered “unseen” portrait of her by Paula Byrne which, like the muff drawing has not been authenticated. The chapter considers the drawing of Austen, found in Clarke’s friendship book, alongside contemporary fashion plates and as a material artifact in and of itself. Austen’s connection to the muff is a provocative invitation to re-envision her awareness of Regency style and accessories. The way twenty-first-century readers wish to imagine Austen may be very different from the ways in which her contemporaries envisioned her.