In 1893, Mrs. Patrick (Stella) Campbell appeared as the title character in Arthur Wing Pinero's The Second Mrs Tanqueray at the St James's Theatre in London. The play told of a respectable widower, Aubrey Tanqueray, and his doomed second marriage to Paula, a younger woman with a past. Good wives did not have “pasts,” and Paula's is particularly scandalous for she has, since adolescence, “kept house” with a series of men. Aware that their marriage is unlikely to be accepted by their peers, Paula and Aubrey retreat to the country, where they are joined by Aubrey's adult daughter, Ellean. Ellean subsequently becomes engaged to a young soldier, Hugh Ardale. The crisis of the play occurs when Paula and Ardale come face to face and the audience learns that the pair had once lived together in London. With this revelation, Paula becomes convinced that she cannot outrun her past, and the play closes with her suicide. Despite the conventionality of its ending, the play was considered modern and daring and is remembered as one of the first attempts to represent the “fallen woman” sympathetically and to question the sexual double standard that operated in Victorian society.Footnote 1 Campbell's clarity of expression and relatively unmannered delivery enhanced Pinero's uncommonly sympathetic portrait of a former courtesan. However, it was the actress's physical presence that particularly captured the audience's imagination. Campbell was tall, pale, and thin to the point of angularity—a representative example of the fashionable “neurasthenic” woman of the 1890s. Pinero's characterization joined with Campbell's playing style and (most important) her physicality to create the entity I dub “Paula Tanqueray circa 1893.” This entity haunted Campbell's entire career, acting as a ghostly double to her living body both onstage and off. Campbell continued to play the role of Paula Tanqueray into the 1920s, yet as the actress's body matured and changed, that of the ghost retained its svelte 1893 proportions and youthful charm, creating a corporeal dissonance that disrupted audience reception.
Paula Tanqueray transformed Campbell's career, moving the actress, at the age of twenty-eight, from the margins to the center of her profession. This was her landmark performance. I use the term “landmark” to describe a performance in which player and role fuse so that this role comes to dominate the player's identity and her reading functions as a template for later interpreters of the character. The documents of theatre history both record and create and sustain landmark performances, such as Sarah Siddons's Lady Macbeth, James O'Neill's Count of Monte Cristo, John Barrymore's Hamlet, and Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski. We use these performances to help us mark time, to navigate trends in acting, developments in dramatic style, and the ups and downs of a performing career. In its popularity, the landmark performance can create celebrity and move a struggling or marginal performer from periphery to center, transforming her performance identity and, consequently, her career. Yet this movement may be limiting rather than liberating. In the excess of meaning and visibility that is created around landmark performance, the player can become bound to the role, “ghosted” by its presence. It is this process of binding—of Paula to Campbell and Campbell to Paula—that I wish to examine here.
Becoming Paula Tanqueray
In his book The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine, Marvin Carlson uses the term “ghosting” to describe the ways a performer is connected to his or her past roles: “The recycled body of an actor, already a complex bearer of semiotic messages, will almost inevitably in a new role evoke the ghost or ghosts of previous roles if they have made any impression whatever on the audience.” Carlson goes on to note that “even when an actor strives to vary his roles, he is, especially as his reputation grows, entrapped by the memories of his public, so that each new appearance requires a renegotiation with those memories.”Footnote 2 I would suggest that when a performance is recognized as a “landmark” (in the history of dramatic representation, in the history of acting styles, or in the career of the performer), it enacts a particularly significant form of entrapment.
The role of Paula Tanqueray was a difficult one to move beyond, as it is peculiarly expressive of its moment in time. In Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater, Bert States comments on the timeliness of The Second Mrs Tanqueray in 1893. States locates the innovation of the play in its treatment of its protagonist, arguing that Pinero dealt with the “lot of the ostracized woman” with a “psychological complexion” that was unprecedented in English drama.Footnote 3 The timeliness of the role was enhanced by the timeliness of Campbell's playing. She rejected popular melodramatic effects to craft a performance that was read by its audience as strikingly “true to life.” In act 3, for example, the stage directions state that Paula “suddenly drops upon the ottoman in a paroxysm of weeping.”Footnote 4 In an effort to make the action more believable, Campbell decided to interrupt the crying by blowing her nose.Footnote 5 Viewing this scene, Kate Terry Gielgud declared it “the best [moment] of its kind.”Footnote 6 Throughout her performance, Campbell emphasized Paula's negative but very human qualities. The reviewer for The Times found the character's “petulance, her flightiness, her irresponsibility, her vanity, her sordid selfishness and ingratitude, her incurable vulgarity are all portrayed in master-strokes.”Footnote 7 Terms such as “petulance” and “irresponsibility” are suggestive of immaturity; the childishness of her Paula became a hallmark of Campbell's performance.
The reviews of the first production erased the distinction between actress and role. One critic wrote that Campbell “was the character to the life. She never appeared to be acting.”Footnote 8 Critic William Archer described her Paula Tanqueray as “incarnate reality, the haggard truth.”Footnote 9 Such comments raise a question: The “truth” of what, exactly? Did Campbell fulfill some popular model of the fallen woman? Yet there was no public model for Paula, at least not on the mainstream London stage.Footnote 10 So Mrs. Patrick Campbell herself became the model. What Campbell was faithfully reproducing was the public's idea of herself. This was an entity in the making, created out of the interchange among Campbell's performance, her public, and the press.
Campbell's physical appearance, like her acting, was also timely; it was very much in vogue. At the first production of The Second Mrs Tanqueray the actress was tall, thin, pale, and somewhat sickly looking, having only recently recovered from a lengthy battle with typhoid fever.Footnote 11 The nervousness and fragility suggested by Campbell's physicality were well matched to the high-strung Paula. In effect, Paula Tanqueray claimed ownership of Campbell's body and held tight to the meanings it evoked.
Campbell's appearance also aligned the actress and the character she played with the highly visible contemporary stereotype of the hysterical, anorectic “New Woman,” one of the most significant public figures of the 1890s. In any discussion of the New Woman it is important to remember that she held multiple meanings and that her image could be manipulated to support a variety of viewpoints.Footnote 12 The New Woman was essentially the modern woman who rejected traditional models of female behavior. Feminist writers felt that allowing women equal access to education and encouraging their participation in social and political life would strengthen the family and the community. Antifeminist writers aligned the New Woman with the anarchic forces of socialism, economic unrest, and antifamilial values. There were thus contradictions in the representation of the New Woman: she could incorporate the “masculine iconography” of cigarettes and bicycles or be emblematic of “almost excessive femininity.”Footnote 13 She could be oversexed or asexual, debauched or straitlaced, dangerous or benign. She “was a symbol of progress and modernity and at the same time seemed to embody decadence and decay.”Footnote 14
The Second Mrs Tanqueray raises concerns that were important to the New Woman, such as women's “purpose,” women's education, and the sexual double standard in Victorian society. However, there is no explicit reference to the New Woman in the play or the criticism; as with her presence in the mainstream press, she existed as an idea on the West End stage before she was explicitly identified.Footnote 15 Campbell's Paula was most forcibly aligned to the New Woman by her physicality; emaciation and a pale, sickly appearance were key features of New Woman iconography.Footnote 16 Aubrey Beardsley's sketch “Portrait of Mrs Patrick Campbell,” which appeared in the first edition of his journal The Yellow Book in April 1894, caricatured Campbell's distinctive physicality in terms that were suggestive of the New Woman. He depicted the actress as an exquisitely dressed but grotesquely emaciated, almost skeletal, figure. Joel Kaplan and Sheila Stowell suggest that Beardsley's portrait captured the moment in the play when Paula was faced with the specter of her impending decay, a moment that propels her to suicide (and one to which I will return later). Beardsley's portrait crystallized the idiosyncratic quality of Campbell's physical presence in the 1890s, a quality Kaplan and Stowell describe as her “anorexic eroticism.”Footnote 17 The actress herself later wrote: “I look my best when I am very ill, which means the bones of my face are good and my features are placed well.”Footnote 18
The particular meanings of Campbell's body in the 1890s are perhaps best evoked through the writings of Chicago critic Winifred Black, who viewed the actress on her first, highly publicized US tour of 1901. Black's reviews concur with the publicity that identified Campbell as a major star of the English stage. However, she located the actress's appeal in her physical appearance rather than in her acting ability. In Black's analysis, Campbell's offerings are all exterior: “You can leave your handkerchief at home, ladies, when you go to see Mrs Campbell play Mrs Tanqueray. But be sure and take your opera glasses.”Footnote 19 In her reviews of The Second Mrs Tanqueray and Magda, Black described Campbell as an “actress” only twice.Footnote 20 Instead, she saw her as a haute-couture mannequin (“[she] has the most beautiful clothes I ever saw”) or a piece of visual art (“[she is a] stunning and a fascinating thing for the eye to rest upon”).Footnote 21 Campbell could dazzle but she could not blind the astute US critic: “As soon as she begins to speak the spell is broken. [She] discourses as a silly hen clucking in the barn yard,” and does “nothing” with the “wondrous gamut of emotions which Mr. Pinero has so kindly provided her.”Footnote 22 Black was critical of a performance style that she found to be painfully direct and unromantic. Campbell did not engage in grand displays of emotion that might offer the audience catharsis. Unlike American stars such as Mrs. Leslie Carter and Minnie Maddern Fiske, her acting “left the audience utterly dry-eyed when it should have been dissolved in tears.”Footnote 23
Black tied Campbell's body to markers of Englishness, particularly the aesthetic of decadence—she wrote that the actress was “the high priestess of the Decadent, the Saint of the Order of the Degenerates”—and the art of Aubrey Beardsley.Footnote 24 She cited the “green sickness joke” Beardsley built around Campbell in his Yellow Book sketch as the catalyst for her success: “If it had not been for you, Mr. Beardsley … Mrs. Campbell would be in this year of grace and plenty touring the English provinces in a No. 2 company.”Footnote 25 Taken together, Black's reviews read as her “writing back” to empire, refusing to accord Campbell any kind of imperial authority. This is a theme other writers took up during the tour, as the actress became representative of an “English” style that her fans were advised not to follow. One writer identified Campbell as the “leader” of the current English fashion, the main features of which were a “long-limbed and long-waisted, spineless shape” and “cultivated thinness almost approaching angularity.” This piece aligned Campbell's physicality with illness and inertia and compared it negatively to that of the “healthy athletic out-door type” of English woman and the “trim and modish” modern American woman.Footnote 26
Although many American critics, including Norman Hapgood, Acton Davies, and Henry Austin Clapp, applauded Campbell's work, their voices were eclipsed by news reports and feature stories that focused on the more sensational aspects of the actress's celebrity identity. By the late nineteenth century it had become customary for established English performers to tour in North America, but unlike Ellen Terry or Madge Kendal, Campbell was not appearing as one half of a famous couple but as the singular attraction and was thus exposed to far greater scrutiny. Campbell was constructed as “different” from her fellow English actresses. While Terry, for example, possessed the “kind of beauty which irresistibly suggests the poetry of Tennyson and the painting of Millais,” Campbell was associated with Pinero's neurotic New Women and Beardsley's ghoulish sketches.Footnote 27 She was repeatedly figured in terms of the “unnatural,” the “perverse,” and the “Decadent,” and these figurations served to diminish her status as an actress and deny the significance of her achievements. Associating this actress with a series of fin-de-siècle stereotypes also worked to contain her in the moment and would limit her development into the twentieth century. Campbell's pale, anorectic figure was the ideal vehicle for the doomed New Women and neurotic femmes fatales of the 1890s, but her body refused to remain within the bounds of these images. It grew old, it grew fat, and, most transgressively of all, it kept working.
Paula after 1893
At the end of the 1893 run of the play, Paula Tanqueray reemerged as a powerful ghost, distracting audiences and foiling Campbell's attempts to essay other characters. When Campbell appeared in an adaptation of Victorien Sardou's play Fedora in 1895, The Times found a “vast deal of the second Mrs Tanqueray” in her performance. The same year, critic Arthur Warren suggested that “everything that this actress has done has had the trail of the Tanqueray over it.”Footnote 28 Paula's ghost was such a forceful presence during Campbell's appearance in Romeo and Juliet at the Lyceum in 1895 that she displaced Juliet altogether for one reviewer; he found that ” Mrs Tanqueray has come upon the scene and Juliet has no place.”Footnote 29 When Janet Achurch viewed Campbell as Rita Allmers in Ibsen's Little Eyolf in 1896, she wrote to fellow actress Elizabeth Robins that she “honestly [did] not think Ibsen would have seen much of his Rita—there was too much of Pinero's Paula!”Footnote 30 Even Campbell's appearance in later, quite different plays tended to realign her with Paula. Viewing her Eliza Doolittle in the first English production of George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion in 1914, Vanity Fair felt “the Eliza of the streets faded before one's memories of Paula Tanqueray.”Footnote 31
The ghost of Campbell's Paula also haunted other actresses' attempts in the role. When Eleonora Duse appeared in an Italian translation of the play (La seconda moglie) at the Lyceum in 1900, she offered a tender portrait of a troubled woman that was acknowledged to be an interesting psychological study but was deemed “less convincing … than the epoch-making Paula of Mrs Patrick Campbell.”Footnote 32 Duse's Paula was described in terms of what it was not: her Paula is “scarcely ever a virago,” is “never vulgar [and] not really soiled,” and is incapable of “petty laches of bad form.”Footnote 33 Consequently, “with all Paula's insolences, petulances, jealousies and ferocity removed, we are shown a high-bred, loving and unhappy woman quite unlike the neuropathic demi-mondaine of Mr Pinero's imagination and Mrs Campbell's realization.”Footnote 34 The reviewers' idea of Paula expressed here is derived from Campbell's original performance: the qualities they describe as essential to the character—her moodiness, rages, insolence, and vulgarity—were expressed not in Pinero's dramatic text (Duse and other actresses who essayed the role at this time, such as Madge Kendal and Olga Nethersole, did not achieve them) but in Campbell's performance text of 1893. By 1900, Pinero's text was being actively haunted by Campbell's interpretation—her Paula had become so authentic in the eyes of London audiences that it was now assumed to be the author's construction of the character.
Campbell appeared in revivals of The Second Mrs Tanqueray in London in 1901, 1903, and 1913 to significant critical acclaim. In the reviews that greeted these productions, Campbell's 1893 performance and, to a lesser extent, Pinero's playtext were identified as landmarks of English theatre history. The significance of Campbell's performance is made apparent by its movement into the discourse of theatre history less than a decade after its initial appearance. In 1901, the role of Paula was described as Campbell's “famous part,” and her performance was deemed “too well-known to require discussion.”Footnote 35 The revival was regarded as the return of a singular play and player. In 1903, the critics found little distance between the current production and that of 1893. Campbell acted with “all her old power and subtlety,” and her “superb art” “once again … thrilled and gripped an audience immensely appreciative of such splendid acting.”Footnote 36 The reviews of 1903 were more nostalgic. The Era recalled that “historic first night” at the St James's when Campbell “first asserted her genius, and turned the ‘dust of servile opportunity into gold.’”Footnote 37 Her 1903 performance succeeded as nostalgia because it held so much of the original: it supported the expectations her performance of 1893 had raised. Campbell's performances in 1901 and 1903 appeared all the more splendid when considered alongside the disappointing experiments of other actresses in the role. Her interpretation was declared “the very thing” and the “ideal Paula” and she herself was described as an actress who “quite outshines her rivals.”Footnote 38 There is no sense in these reviews that Campbell's authority as Paula might fade; indeed, the critic of The Stage instructed her “never to play a season in London without appearing as Paula.”Footnote 39
However, a decade was to pass before Campbell again appeared as Paula in the West End. In Pinero's play, Paula develops a rivalry with a middle-aged neighbor for the affections of her new stepdaughter. “I have my revenge,” Paula declares of this neighbor; “she's six-and-forty, and I wish nothing worse to happen to any woman.”Footnote 40 Campbell revived the role of Paula in 1913, by which time she was herself “eight-and-forty” and, having gained considerable weight, no longer physically representative of the neurasthenic ideal of the early 1890s. Campbell's gradual movement away from this model does not seem to have adversely affected reception of her playing in the 1901 and 1903 productions. As her figure matured, it corresponded to contemporary ideals of beauty in the early Edwardian era. Valerie Steele has noted the “social and erotic importance of the matron” in this period.Footnote 41 Cultural attitudes that prevailed before the war valorized the older woman. Lois Banner has also described the extraordinary appeal the mature female body held at the fin de siècle, as older women led suffrage campaigns and entered politics and mature opera singers and actresses became style icons. The fully developed body became the ideal of beauty: “large hips and bosoms and weightiness of form were preferred.”Footnote 42 However, Steele notes that from around 1910 a shift in consciousness occurred as the “fashionable Edwardian figure was gradually replaced by a slender and sinuous body type with smaller breasts, slimmer hips, and long legs.” She identifies “the promotion of the slender figure” as the “most important development” of early twentieth-century fashion.Footnote 43
In the 1890s, Campbell's pronounced thinness had brought particular associations to the audience's understanding of the character of Paula. These associations persisted in later productions through the ghost of the 1893 Paula Tanqueray. However, the reviewers of the 1913 production resolutely blocked the appearance of the ghost. They made scant mention of Campbell's age or physicality. The body could not be safely discussed, for it is around consideration of the body that the ghost's power is at its strongest, threatening to disrupt the spectacle by reminding the viewer that what they are witnessing is inauthentic, an approximation of the original marked by lack. As if to compensate for this sense of lack, the reviews repeatedly noted positive developments in Campbell's playing: “a new subtlety,” an “improvement in technique,” “a surer touch.”Footnote 44 Her playing had become more confident and grounded and the performance smoother: there was “less harshness in contrast.”Footnote 45 This Paula was quieter, more self-assured, and, as one critic noted approvingly, “not so neurotic.”Footnote 46 And yet the actress's performance still held the aura of the New Woman—The Times found that her “caprices, her rages, her fits of repentance, her fits of ‘naughtiness,’ her general neuropathic exhibition make up an incomparable and unforgettable delineation.”Footnote 47
Paula and the Aging Body
Campbell's continued success as Paula Tanqueray up to 1913 was facilitated by the prominence of older practitioners within the theatrical scene. These performers were supported by the actor-management system of theatrical production that remained influential prior to World War I.Footnote 48 This system allowed a celebrated actor to finance and thus control his or her own career. A performer such as Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, or Johnston Forbes-Robertson could continue playing his or her star parts into old age. Such performances were applauded by critics and audience members who fondly remembered the original and by younger viewers eager to encounter a legend. Thus, the incongruity of the aging body was a convention of the stage that an audience learned to read around. The influence of this system helps explain how an audience could accommodate a forty-eight-year-old actress as Paula.
However, in the youth-centric postwar world there was little market for a Paula nearing her sixties, and Campbell never again played the role in the West End. Yet the actress's ability to make meaning in the present and to forge a new direction in the theatre was circumscribed by the ghost of Paula Tanqueray. In 1905, she wrote to a friend about her upcoming tour of the United States, during which she would visit Chicago, “but in the old plays which is rather a dull thought.”Footnote 49 During her tour of the United States with Shaw's Pygmalion in 1915, she sent her business manager ahead to “find out whether we had better do The Second Mrs Tanqueray as well,” in an effort to “push business.”Footnote 50 Thus, the “nostalgia circuit” of provincial England and the United States increasingly became her focus.
When Campbell's appearance as Paula became the vehicle for nostalgia, the ghost was displaced. The nostalgic production openly recognized the distance between the original and the later incarnation. The ghost is acknowledged, although not necessarily welcomed. Nostalgia can be a form of celebration,Footnote 51 but it can also be emblematic of loss. Cecil Beaton saw Campbell—“our living legend,” as he called her—play Paula in Bournemouth in 1924. After the performance he wrote in his diary: “Mrs Pat looked physically unbelievable—like a huge, falling blancmange.” He went on: “It's tragic that she should be appearing at this stage of her life in the part that ‘made’ her in the heyday of her beauty. Poor old thing, she did seem a repulsive sight, twice as large as any man on the stage.”Footnote 52 Beaton was performing a double viewing: while observing Campbell's 1924 body he also “saw” her 1893 body, which in itself was doubly removed from him as he was born in 1904 and had no firsthand experience of the earlier performance. He admitted that Campbell had a “wonderful voice” and delivered “certain very splendid little tricks,”Footnote 53 but ultimately his hypercritical aesthete's eye was unable to read past a body he figured as grotesque. Here Beaton voiced the perspective of his youth-obsessed generation, which increasingly viewed the aging body as aberrant. This propelled a discourse of “improvement” around the older body, dictating that signs of aging—particularly fat—needed to be fought against.Footnote 54 Campbell's “failure” to comply with this ideology compounded the transgression of her performance in this production.Footnote 55
In his book It, Joseph Roach examines the peculiar qualities of otherness—or “It”—that set the celebrity body apart. He describes the celebrity performer as “double-bodied,” possessed of both the “body natural, which decays and dies,” and the “immortal body,” the body that exists in “the memory of the theatergoing public as an afterimage.” In his analysis, “these double-bodied persons foreground a peculiar combination of contradictory attributes expressed through outward signs of the union of their imperishable and mortal bodies. These include the simultaneous appearance of strength and vulnerability in the same performance, even in the same gesture.”Footnote 56 Roach calls these marks of strength charismata and those of vulnerability stigmata. The actor John Gielgud, who also saw Campbell play Paula Tanqueray in the early 1920s, read her performance in terms of charismata. He later wrote approvingly of her skill with stage business: “I can see her now in The Second Mrs Tanqueray … peeling muscat grapes with her fingers and cramming them into her mouth[,] … stabbing the hat on her lap with a furious hatpin[,] … gazing at her face in a hand-mirror at the end of the play.”Footnote 57 Gielgud's record was ghosted not by a secondhand impression of the 1893 Paula but by his personal memories of Campbell, with whom he had developed a close relationship. His flesh-and-blood acquaintance with the actress kept the ghost at bay in his recollection, whereas Beaton, haunted by a borrowed vision of the young Campbell as Paula, was mesmerized by the stigmata.
Roach suggests that “when stigmata so far overrun charismata, the embarrassed celebrity becomes too available to the identification of the audience.”Footnote 58 We can hear the discomfort engendered by such unsettling identification in every sentence of Beaton's. Later that night, following his viewing of Campbell's performance, Beaton staged a very different encounter with the body. At the close of the diary entry, he noted: “We came home to the Hydro, thankful to have missed the hotel dance. I drew myself naked from the glass. It's good practice; and with a shilling in the gas meter I felt warm enough.”Footnote 59 Margot Peters, Campbell's biographer, recounts these events with the observation that Beaton was “vastly pleased, no doubt, at the difference between the reflected image and the old brute who had entertained him that night.”Footnote 60 Beaton captured his own body in a state of “wholeness,” performing a confirmation of his youth and vigor and assuaging the anxiety generated by his discovery of the corporeal disjunction between the Paula of 1924 and the Campbell of legend.Footnote 61
Cecil Beaton's reaction to Campbell's performance was influenced by yet another ghost. He had seen 34-year-old Gladys Cooper play Paula at the Playhouse in London in 1922. The reviews of this production demonstrate Campbell's continued association with Paula: the role is described as her “creation,” her “famous part,” and her “brilliant performance.”Footnote 62 Despite this, Cooper's performance was generally compared favorably to Campbell's even while acknowledging its difference. The younger actress's interpretation offered “a harder, more petulant, and less sympathetic type.”Footnote 63 As with Campbell's 1893 performance, a key aspect of the 1922 production was its focus on Paula's visual presence. This required a transformation on Cooper's part, as Beaton himself later remarked, for she was seen as an English rose, a “cream-and-roses fluffy blonde,” and thus “inadequate in the name part that was considered to belong forever to its creator, the Beardsleyesque Mrs Campbell.”Footnote 64 It's a comment that again underscores the extent to which understanding of this character was aligned with Campbell's 1893 body. As Campbell had done, Cooper viewed Paula Tanqueray as an up-to-date modern woman; in 1922, the model of the New Woman had become the flapper. Yet whereas the aura of chic and newness around Campbell's Paula were generated by qualities that were considered inherent to the actress herself, Cooper's Paula was dependent on a calculated adoption of the modern through costume. Reflecting in 1924 on the two performances, Beaton decided that Campbell was “not as convincing” as Cooper and supposed that “that was because Gladys looked so marvellous.”Footnote 65 Campbell, “by contrast, might have been a terrible old landlady, all insolent ways and untidy black hair about to fall down.”Footnote 66 Whereas Cooper was resplendent in “Molyneux's encrusted gold and chinchilla dresses,” “poor old Mrs Pat … must make do with pea-soup hand-me-downs and washed out old Spanish shawls. She was continuously meddling with fringes and pulling at bodices to keep her dresses from falling off her shoulders.”Footnote 67 Beaton was struck by the lack of “fashionability” in Campbell's costuming (the “pea-soup” coloring) and its make-do quality. The bodices that threatened to slip from this actress's shoulders had most definitely not been fitted by a society couturier. Beaton's perception of Campbell's crimes against fashion combined with the failure of her body to conform to a regime of physical self-improvement, enhancing the sense of anachronism he built around her.Footnote 68 The descriptions of Cooper's hard, sleek, dazzling appearance against Campbell's messy, shabby, dull one recall Mary Russo's contrast between the classical body and the grotesque body. Russo envisages the latter as “the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process, and change.” The classical body is “monumental, static, closed, and sleek.”Footnote 69 In 1924, Campbell was opposed by not one but two “classical” bodies—Cooper's and that of her own younger self—against which to try and make meaning.
Beaton's horror at Campbell's body derived not just from its appearance but from its actions. He noted how Campbell moved “horribly to the front each time she sauntered onstage, even when she ought to have faded into the background. Instead of quietly playing the piano, she strummed so loud no one could hear a word spoken by the other actors.”Footnote 70 In her analysis of weight in Western culture, Nita Mary McKinley has described how women must “take up little space both physically and symbolically.”Footnote 71 In the 1920s, Campbell's body—being “horribly to the front”—claimed space to which it was not considered entitled. McKinley reads such unruly bodies as forces of resistance: “a fat body, especially when the woman refuses to apologize for her size, can … embody protest against the control and limitations of the female gender role.”Footnote 72 Campbell did not “apologize” for her stature: she unashamedly pursued roles that the commercial theatre and conventional society deemed inappropriate for a woman of her age and physique. Even Beaton found himself admiring her audacity and bravura: “But she knows she is a monster, is the first to laugh at herself. The way she took her call struck me as highly amusing. She waddled to the footlights, leaned forward, held up her skirt with one hand and bowed with a grotesque sneer on her face.”Footnote 73 Following Russo, we can read Campbell's behavior as “carnivalesque.” She refused to adopt the proper space for a mature woman or the decorous attitude suitable to one deemed a living legend. She exceeded her allocation onstage—of both space and attention—and mocked the civilities of the profession. Like the carnival, her grotesque body became a “site of insurgency.”Footnote 74
It was not just the natural and immortal bodies of Mrs. Patrick Campbell coming onstage together in BournemouthFootnote 75 in 1924 but also the natural and immortal bodies of Paula Tanqueray herself. In the final moments of Pinero's play, the text is ghosted by the specter of Paula's future self. Following the confrontation with Paula's former lover, Hugh Ardale, and her stepdaughter's discovery of her past life, Paula and her husband Aubrey consider their options. She refutes his claim that they can let go of the past and forge a new life. He tells her: “There's no reason why the future shouldn't be happy for us. … We'll make our calculations solely for the future, talk about the future, think about the future.” Paula responds: “I believe the future is only the past again, entered through another gate.”Footnote 76 As Heather Anne Wozniak notes: “Defined only as a sexual being, as a woman with a past rather than a New Woman, Paula sees no future for herself.”Footnote 77 In this context, Paula figures her beauty as a mirage, a mask that distracts Aubrey from seeing her true self:
Of course I'm pretty now—I'm pretty still—and a pretty woman, whatever else she may be, is always—well, endurable. But even now I notice that the lines of my face are getting deeper; so are the hollows about my eyes. Yes, my face is covered with little shadows that usen't to be there. … [S]ome day—perhaps very suddenly, under a queer, fantastic light at night or in the glare of the morning—that horrid, irresistible truth that physical repulsion forces on men and women will come to you, and you'll sicken at me.
She goes on:
You'll see me then, at last, with other people's eyes. … And I shall have no weapon to fight with—not one serviceable little bit of prettiness left me to defend myself with! A worn-out creature—broken up, very likely, some time before I ought to be—my hair bright, my eyes dull, my body too thin or too stout, my cheeks raddled and ruddled—a ghost, a wreck, a caricature, a candle that gutters, call such an end what you like!Footnote 78
Joseph Roach describes the “trace left behind by the It-Effect” as the “afterimage.” The afterimage “does not exist as an object, but rather as a sensation that persists even after the external stimulation that caused it has disappeared, like the shape of a flame that lingers in the eye after the candle has gone out.”Footnote 79 In 1893, Paula's vision of her own future—“a candle that gutters”—is thrillingly ghoulish but remains a distant projection from the mouth of a gorgeously dressed young woman. In 1924, the effect of these lines was entirely different. Cecil Beaton saw the future Paula envisaged for herself played out on Campbell's body and shuddered at the result.
Mrs. Patrick Campbell's career was made by her appearance as Paula Tanqueray in 1893. She was also ultimately marked by it; the role became a burden, weighing down her career and her celebrity. The ghosting process demonstrates how a landmark performance can place a performer subsequently out of time, robbing her or him of an expressive present and a dynamic future. Such a performance renders the performer always already representative of that earlier moment.
