Celebrity as a Category of Historical Analysis

In their efforts to define and to historicise celebrity, scholars have focused on what celebrity is as well as on what celebrity does. Broadly speaking, celebrity connotes a ‘known individual’, a recognisable, larger-than-life ‘public subject’ who, through the intertwined mechanisms of the mass media and the mass market, has transformed into a merchandisable commodity.Footnote ¹⁰ Within this rubric scholars have parsed the celebrity category further, distinguishing between ‘celebrity’ and ‘star’, and they have ascertained the ways in which celebrity both overlaps with and splinters from analogous categories of charisma and fame.Footnote ¹¹ By mediating the space between the individual and society, moreover, celebrities provide blueprints for social belonging and exercise a ‘lasting effect on everyday life’.Footnote ¹² Despite these commonalities, celebrity does not, as the books under consideration clarify, come in a one size fits all package. Indeed, focusing on imperial heroes, stage performers, scientists and intellectuals, these texts introduce four prominent celebrity taxonomies – the hero, the beauty, the talent and the innovator – who broadened the definition of celebrity in meaningful ways.

Heroic Imperialists in Africa: The Promotion of British and French Colonial Heroes, 1870–1939 examines how imperial heroes, ‘embodied the symbolic implementation of the colonial project’ (1). Sèbe traces the development of this celebrity type through what he calls the ‘hero making process’, offering fifteen case studies dedicated to prominent explorers, military leaders and religious envoys who served as the public faces of the British and French imperial project (17). Imperialist propaganda portrayed Jean-Baptiste Marchand, Sirdar Kitchener, Cecile Rhodes, Louis Lyautey and Pierre Brazza, for example, as imbued with ‘charismatic qualities, in the Weberian sense’, as ‘possessing “a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which [the hero] is set apart from ordinary men and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman or at least superficially exceptional qualities”’ (176). For Sèbe, as for Edward Berenson, who also conjugates Weberian charisma with the imperial hero, charisma defines this typology and provides the rationale for its public appeal.Footnote ¹³ Moreover, within an international context in which imperial power intertwined national identity, propagandists capitalised on the hero’s ability to elicit emotion, to inspire hope and to epitomise values of ‘duty, respect, and justice’ (1). In these ways, the imperial hero’s celebrity popularised the colonial mission and fostered national cohesion around a divisive political issue.

Whereas imperial propagandists mobilised the male hero to cultivate patriotism and national belonging,Footnote ¹⁴ the female beauty, as Garval demonstrates in Cléo de Mérode and the Rise of Modern Celebrity Culture, could also unify national publics. Praised for her pulchritude, fetishised for her ears (or rather their mysterious concealment) and frequently absolved by French audiences for her limited talent, Mérode exemplified the ‘possibility of a fundamental gap between accomplishment and renown’ that would characterise twentieth-century celebrity (35). Although she ascended to prominence as a professional ballerina, Mérode became famous for her physical appearance, for her (mostly manufactured if not entirely fabricated) amorous pursuits and for her uncanny ability to embody a particular kind of Frenchness. Casting Mérode as a prototype for the late-modern celebutante, and declaring her the ‘first modern icon’, Garval argues that her story illuminates a key transition in French thinking about fame and that it establishes the salient features of modern celebrity culture (5). As the ‘reverence for “great men”’ faded ‘to a fascination with predominantly female stage performers’, Garval explains, Mérode anticipated the ‘paradoxical place of celebrated feminine beauty within our mass culture, between commodification and creative self-fashioning, exploitation and empowerment’ (4).

Mérode’s celebrity derived in large part from her extraordinarily pleasing female face; but for her contemporary Marie Curie, celebrity originated from her exceptionally clever female mind. As a woman scientist in early twentieth-century France, Curie, as Hemmungs Wirten asserts in Making Marie Curie: Intellectual Property and Celebrity Culture in an Age of Information, built her celebrity through achievement (43). Although eventually esteemed for her scientific work, Curie understood that her talent was circumscribed by her status as a both a woman and a foreigner (2). Working in a man’s profession in a country that did not recognise women as legal persons, Curie, a Polish national, could neither rightfully own her scientific accomplishments nor could she be considered among the masculine cult of heroes that comprised the French intellectual pantheon (13, 36, 59). Aware of these limitations, Curie curated a persona that played to the French status quo: she dressed simply and comported herself as a proper bourgeois; she embodied the good wife, memorialising her husband and their collective work in her publications after his death; and she eschewed the limelight, working to acquire patents for her intellectual property (59). In these ways, Curie blazed a trail for female celebrity rooted in the mind rather than in the body.

During the Belle Époque, Curie and her scientific contemporaries garnered considerable attention; yet their visibility and level of influence would be eclipsed in scope and scale by the post-1945 public intellectual. In the second half of the twentieth century, as Heynders argues in Writers as Public Intellectuals: Literature, Celebrity, Democracy, public intellectuals flourished in a new age of mass media generated ‘infotainment’ (12). Through ‘seven showcases’ featuring prominent journalists, fiction writers and screenwriters from across Europe, Heynders demonstrates how in the media saturated modern age, Elif Shafak, Hamed Abdel-Samad and others achieved celebrity status by ‘advancing a “grand idea” or encouraging a new argument’ that was simple enough to permeate public consciousness (x, 2, 12). Within the media, and sometimes within the intellectual works themselves, this grand idea was framed through the writer’s private life and shaped by his or her personal experiences (13). Thus the ‘celebrity or media intellectual’ became ‘a blended construction, where status, appearance and discursive meaning shift depending on context, issue, style, and media specificity’ (15).

Celebrity and the Mass Media

Indeed, the role of the mass media in creating, generating and sustaining modern celebrity cannot be overstated. Scholars have demonstrated the ways in which ‘celebrity and media are mutually constitutive’, and they have argued that, as one of a range of ancillary sites, the media provides a ‘public stage on which celebrities perform’.Footnote ¹⁵ ‘Mass journalism, photography and new, rapid means of communication’, as Berenson and Giloi explain, ‘helped create cultures of charisma, celebrity, and fame; cultures that divided societies into leaders and followers, stars and fans, even as it narrowed the distance between them’.Footnote ¹⁶ Central to the production of celebrity, media transmission publicises the private person to large audiences and, in so doing, designates celebrity as a ‘common cultural type’, as well as a ‘new and powerful social force’.Footnote ¹⁷

In the late nineteenth century, Sèbe maintains, imperial campaigns created ‘new regimes of heroes’; but it was the development of an inexpensive, widely-circulated mass press that catered to an increasingly literate populace which converted those heroes into celebrities (11). A product of the second Industrial Revolution in which advancements in communications and transportation facilitated the rise of print capitalism, New Journalism became a prominent conduit of celebrity’s promotion. Within this new genre, war correspondents, journalists, publishers, editors, politicians and others functioned as ‘hero makers’, using innovations like the interview and the photograph to popularise individual personalities (10). New Journalism, Sèbe contends, ‘marked the beginning of media interest in the lives of famous people: a prototype of “celebrity coverage,” prefiguring the “human interest” story in popular magazines and newspapers’, and predicting the media’s central role in twentieth-century celebrity making (60, 61, 65).

Alongside New Journalism, the illustrated press, posters and postcards also shaped how celebrity was manufactured and transmitted in the late nineteenth century. As Garval argues, these media transformed Mérode from a young, familiar dancer into a ‘mass culture phenomenon’ (133). A master of self-fashioning, Mérode ‘styled herself with confidence, sophistication, and resolve, prefiguring the movie studios’ publicity machine in the years ahead’ (5). Her carefully crafted portraits – featured on cigarette cards and pinbacks, circulated within the press and purchasable in Paris shops – rarely referenced her profession or alluded to a specific stage performance. In these photographs Mérode ‘performed the spectacle of her own beauty’, offering her image (rather than her talent) for public consumption (46). Lending her stylised portrait (often in close-up) to inexpensive postcards, Mérode used the ‘seductive illusion of intimacy’ to disseminate her image to a global fan base (133). In the process she exploited the postcard’s ‘fame-making potential’ and helped pioneer the ‘visual media-driven, international celebrity that has dominated popular culture over the intervening century’ (163).

Much like Mérode, Curie also fashioned her celebrity in the media. The ‘mass press and journals popularizing science’, Hemmungs Wirten explains, offered a ‘new platform from which the full-blown celebrity scientist materialized’ (5). To the extent that it did not disrupt their work, the Curies welcomed reportage. They were less enthusiastic, however, about exposing the details of their private life to public scrutiny (46). Curie reluctantly authorised in-home interviews during her husband’s lifetime, but after his untimely death she more carefully managed her own public image. ‘Widowhood meant that new lines had to be drawn between Marie Curie and the press, borders that demarcated an unknown territory’, Hemmungs Wirten elucidates. ‘There were familiar enough images and words to describe him, but someone like her had not really existed before. Marie Curie sans Pierre was a clean slate’ (46–7). In the case of Marie Curie, the press might have invented the scientist as celebrity but it did not create the celebrity scientist.

The relationship between the press and the public intellectual proved even more fluid and symbiotic in the post-war period. Whereas the press made the intellectual knowable to the public, the intellectual used the press as the primary platform for promoting his or her ideas to non-specialist audiences (3). Orchestrated through a range of media (interviews, clips, blogs) and engineered to elicit audience response, the ‘celebrity-intellectual performance’ facilitated and democratised critical debate (14). Given the public intellectual’s heightened visibility, a large part of this performance entailed constructing a marketable persona. Thus, in the age of late-modern mass media, Heynders submits, figures like the French philosopher activist Bernard-Henri Lévy and Somali asylum-seeker turned Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali became as renowned for their glamourous lifestyles and fashionable look as for their political message (76, 100).

Celebrity and the Consumer Market

It was primarily through the media that heroes, performers, scientists and intellectuals produced their celebrity; yet as the media and the consumer market intertwined it became almost impossible to discern the extent to which ‘celebrity status was the result of a deliberate process of self-promotion and media manipulation’, and the degree to which celebrities ‘were simply objectified by an emerging mass culture based on print and mass-produced commodities’.Footnote ¹⁸ Scholars have disputed this issue throughout the twentieth century – some arguing that because celebrity is ‘part of an industrial scale of rationalization and standardization’, that it is merely ‘another object of mass consumption’, with others rejecting this notion, maintaining that celebrity is not determined by an abstracted capitalism but adheres to its own logic and operates according to its own cultural system.Footnote ¹⁹ In light of these debates scholars have shown that celebrities both create and are created by the consumer market and that it is through this market that they achieve status as cultural icons even as they circulate as mass commodities.

Sèbe explicitly connects celebrity production to the consumer market through his exploration of ‘hero-makers’, intermediaries central to the imperial hero’s cultural and commercial production (87). Acknowledging that celebrities always matriculate within a market economy in which financial considerations dominate, Sèbe illustrates how the promotion of imperial heroes involved mobilising a variety of commercial forms, most notably advertisements, posters, postcards and cigarette cards (97). Throughout the book, but especially in his extended analysis of the production and commodification of Marchand Legend between 1895 and 1906, Sèbe unequivocally attributes the rise of the imperial hero to the ‘commercial bourgeoisie’. This group, even more than the celebrities themselves, invented the hero’s persona, mediated his legend and manipulated his political and commercial capital. Although the imperial hero was perhaps most admired by the working class, Sèbe concludes, his celebrity was ultimately manufactured and disseminated by middle-class intercessors who packaged his image for mass consumption.

Much like her imperial hero counterparts, Mérode also relied upon the flourishing Belle Époque consumer market to expand her celebrity. To this end she performed at the 1900 World Expo, and she endorsed or lent her name to a variety commodities including cigars, dolls, artificial flowers, night gowns, skirts and undergarments that were distributed throughout Europe and the United States (92–3, 131–3). At the same time that she embarked upon these schemes she also engaged in a process of double commodification that would become the hallmark of her notoriety. Although Mérode refused to (literally) sell her body, she freely sold her image through photographic reproductions and peddled her talents through stage performance. In both venues, moreover, she frequently adopted the ‘courtesan’s pose’, facilitating her own commodification by brokering her most valuable asset, her beauty. In so doing, she became an ‘article of Paris’, associated with sexualised femininity at home and with ‘over-priced foreign goods, especially frivolous French ones’, abroad (52–3, 106).

Although considerably more ambivalent about her celebrity than Mérode, Curie nevertheless promoted her brand. According to Hemmungs Wirten, Curie forged her public persona through ‘her published writing’ but especially through authoring her husband’s biography (25, 28). Throughout this text she associated the Curie name with ‘radium, scientific progress, and real science’, relying on the quality of the work to protect the family’s legacy (61). Attempting to uphold the family name and to associate it exclusively with scientific excellence, Curie simultaneously resisted and encouraged its commodification. On the one hand, she fought vigilantly against fraudulent manufacturers who attempted to promote their products under the Curie name and without her consent (101). On the other hand, she willingly transformed herself into a public attraction when it enabled her to promote the family’s work or to further the role of women in science.Footnote ²⁰

Whereas Curie tolerated her branding more than she embraced her celebrity, like Mérode, public intellectuals found it much more difficult to separate product from performance. As Heynders explains, public intellectuals not only had to act the part of the celebrity, they also invited the public into their private lives to bridge the divide between the detached intellectual and popular culture. The case of Bernard-Henri Lévy, for example, ‘shows that the current media celebrity intellectual is becoming a more hybrid public figure’. The public intellectual’s visibility, ‘his awareness of acting as a media figure in order to interest the audience in a political case’, Heynders argues, encourages him to cultivate a marketable persona (94). This process is most overt in examples such as Lévy’s political diary of Libya. By centring himself in this narrative, Lévy writes a ‘story he wants to participate in’, manipulating the power of his own visibility to highlight the ‘intersection of stardom and intellectualism’ (95). In this way, Lévy, like the public intellectual more broadly, becomes both the producer and the product of his own celebrity.

Celebrity and the Production of Meaning

The media and the market provided the institutional frameworks and technological apparatuses necessary for the development of a modern celebrity culture; however, they did not determine how the public consumed celebrity. As Redmond and Holmes argue, celebrities educe public responses because they are ‘decidedly “personal” in the way that they articulate what it means to be an individual to another individual’, and they shape ‘our own identity, self-image, and sense of belonging’, by establishing the ‘boundaries of our aspirations and achievements’.Footnote ²¹ This personal connection, moreover, is what enables celebrities to fuel the popular imagination, to engage fantasies of the self, to provide aspirational models of human achievement and to foster a shared social reality. Connecting to the public in these ways, Gaffney and Holmes suggest, celebrities capture the ‘preoccupations, values, conflicts, [and] contradictions’ of an age and provide a ‘symbolic portal’ into a culture.Footnote ²² Media generated mass commodities, celebrities enter public consciousness because they have been deemed exceptional; however, even as they challenge the limits of social probity, they retain their popularity because they also embody the values of the dominant culture and so appear to be ‘just like us’.Footnote ²³

Imperial heroes, Sèbe argues, linked the individual to the imperial nation state by encouraging vicarious identification.Footnote ²⁴ Unlike the average British or French citizen who never left his native soil, the imperial hero navigated the globe, encountered exotic peoples, foods and landscapes and embarked upon exciting adventures. By romanticising the hero’s exploits in the media, middle-class hero makers fuelled the (targeted) workingman’s desire to escape the mundane at the same time as they aroused his patriotism. Portrayed as ambassadors of European civilisation and imbued with the qualities attributed to this designation (culture, morality, Christian religiosity, etc.), imperial heroes like Horatio Kitchener as depicted in With Kitchener to Khartoum, inspired national pride and promoted images of cultural superiority intended to strengthen support for the imperial mission (264–85). Reinforcing ‘the patriotic beliefs of their fellow countrymen in an age of triumphant nationalism’, Kitchener, alongside Livingstone, Lavigerie, Marchand, Brazza and others, ‘informed cultural practices and beliefs’ and ‘embodied values associated with their “exemplarity”’ (15, 194). The work of celebrity in the example of the imperial hero was thus to secure public investment in shared cultural values and in controversial political initiatives. By fantasising about the imperial hero, the ordinary citizen also imagined himself within and even as an integral part of an internationally powerful empire.

Yet by connecting citizens with states through male imperial heroes, Sèbe inadvertently perpetuates a masculine narrative of empire that obscures women’s contributions to the colonial mission and that replicates their exclusion from national politics. Women were engaged in imperial campaigns, they traversed the colonies and a few, like Hubertine Auclert, influenced national debates. A feminist activist who established the Women’s Suffrage Society (1883) and directed the monthly La Citoyenne from 1881–1900, Auclert was a known personality within France before she travelled to Algeria with her husband in 1888. In the colony she challenged Islamic law, advocated for Algerian women’s rights and argued for improving female education and for abolishing polygamy. French imperialists co-opted her work and capitalised on her name to justify colonialism, which suggests that she shared much in common with the male imperial heroes Sèbe features in his work. Including women within the cadre of imperial heroes, Sèbe could more effectively nuance his claims about the cultural work of these celebrities and bolster his argument about the political and commercial necessity of imperial heroes.

Like the imperial hero, Mérode also stimulated the imagination and invited vicarious identifications. Exalted for her exceptional physical beauty, Mérode’s body elicited artistic appreciation and incited sexual fantasy. When Falguière immortalised her nude figure in his sensual statue La Danseuse, he also implicated her within a ‘whole visual culture climate surrounding the “crisis of the nude” in later nineteenth-century French painting’ (54). Falguière’s sculpture titillated because it ‘offered a palpable rendering of living, female flesh’, that, Garval maintains, represented the ‘captivating female performer’s current celebrity, a renown perhaps as fragile and fleeting as the youthful pulchritude that the work recorded’ (56). At the same time that Mérode’s nubile body evoked broader aesthetic debates, it also stirred men’s passions and provided women a model of feminine beauty to emulate. Indeed, Mérode cultivated her fan base by playing on the desires of both men and women to possess her body. Through her photographic reproductions, particularly the postcard, she injected her celebrity into the personal lives of her admirers; dramatising the ‘dynamics of presence and absence, possession and loss’ that would characterise the public’s relationship to celebrity throughout the twentieth century (148).

In many respects Mérode undeniably foreshadowed twentieth-century celebrity; but to what extent is Garval’s celebrity genealogy too facile and to what degree is his insistence on Mérode’s role too limiting? As Garval himself acknowledges, Mérode’s star emerged at a moment when female performers were overtaking male heroes as consequential public figures and the dancer certainly had to compete with numerous other women to establish herself as the ‘first modern icon’. Although he gestures to many of her competitors, Garval minimises their centrality to the celebrity making process. Known throughout the world, Sarah Bernhardt, like Mérode, endorsed consumer products, elicited men’s fantasies and stoked women’s imaginations. Yet Bernhardt had real talent, so Garval dismisses her as a candidate for celebrity. But what of the dozens of other famous women with whom Mérode competed? Was Polaire’s extremely tight-corseted waist or Marguerite Durand’s striking blonde hair any less mesmerising than Mérode’s hidden ears? Did Carolina Otero or Jane Avril defy celebrity because rather than simply act like courtesans they lived as them? By more explicitly delineating the differences among Mérode and her peers, Garval could strengthen his claim for Mérode and more effectively illustrate how modern celebrity emerged in late-nineteenth century France.

The meanings attached to Marie Curie’s celebrity had everything to do with her remarkable role as a female scientist. In contrast to male scientists, Hemmungs Wirten contends, she could not be abstracted or generalised because as a woman in science she never fit; rather she circulated ‘in a closed loop reserved for a specific historical actor, whose experience as a woman is so extraordinary’ that “the only story” she can tell us is the ‘one about her’ (2). As a woman Curie could not lay claim to the values of male heroism (duty, discipline, sacrifice) that she embodied as a scientist but instead crafted her image through feminine middle-class attributes, notably seriousness and sobriety (45, 49). ‘Her black dresses and grave demeanour epitomized’ not the radical individualism displayed by other female celebrities but “‘the celebrity of ordinariness”’ admired by the bourgeois readers of Femina (59). Despite her ‘just like us’ appeal, Curie nevertheless resisted conventional gender norms, fighting for intellectual property rights, contesting patent law and working in a male-dominated profession. As a celebrated woman scientist, Curie challenged the politics of science as well as the politics of gender that together shaped her celebrity.

Hemmungs Wirten deftly analyses how Curie manipulated social norms and the commercial media to produce her celebrity; what is less clear, however, is the extent to which Curie drew upon conventions of gender and genre to author her celebrity. To that end, reception, audience and the wider context in which Curie worked and wrote could be more fully developed. The author sketches the public frame of Curie’s celebrity, for example, examining her reception in the United States and addressing her legacy; however, because she limits her primary source material to Curie’s writings, intermittent press coverage, professional notebooks and personal correspondences, she misses the opportunity to more firmly establish Curie’s position within an internationalising twentieth-century celebrity culture.

Whereas imperial heroes Mérode and Curie circulated through the celebrity economy as value-laden cultural signifiers, post-war intellectuals generated meanings more explicitly in their capacity as political messengers. In their ‘public intellectual performances, that of ironical cultural critic as well as that of earnest journalist using imagination to give people a face and to humanize them’, Dubravka Ugresić and Slavenka Drakulić became mouthpieces for Eastern Europeans under communism, providing a ‘public private voice’ through which shared experiences could be individuated and articulated (52). Public intellectuals like Ugresić and Drakulić cultivate intimacy with the public not only by inserting themselves into the story or offering their personal diaries for public consumption, but also by adopting literary techniques that obscure boundaries between the real and the fictive, between personal truth and social reality. In this way, they mediate viewpoints, intervene into political debates and even, Heynders suggests, act as democratic foot soldiers.

Although to a somewhat lesser extent than Hemmungs Wirten, Heynders also privileges the production of celebrity over its reception. A case in point: while many of the public intellectuals in her study are recognisable personalities in Europe, they are unfamiliar to Americans for whom intellectuals generally garner only limited attention and are primarily known only to academics. Heynders might have more rigorously interrogated this distinction, especially given her insistence on the significance of transnational political exchanges. Such analysis would also enhance her claim that ideas (especially when linked to charismatic personalities) continue to exercise power in Europe and therefore position the public intellectual as important interlocutors in late-modern democracies.