While reading about Erith’s fascinating research, I noticed many similarities between her work and mine and began to understand more clearly some of the issues regarding the general examination of bodies past. It seems that in investigating what a body looked like on stage, two central questions control one’s analysis: [1] What did the body look like? How do we see it? What primary source material do we employ in order to understand most thoroughly how the body looked? and [2] What does the body mean? How do we read it? What theoretical approaches can we apply to guide us in our interpretation of the historical body? We might even add a third question: What are we looking for? Do our agendas as scholars cause us to see the body in a specific way, despite our historical evidence (can evidence ever be read objectively?), and do we select certain theoretical tools based on our subjective hunches?
The above questions seem to correspond to questions Erith asks in her response: [a] What did “nudity” on the Italian Renaissance stage actually translate to? and [b] What did nudity and the appearance of an actual, speaking woman mean then? She asks these questions in order to interpret the performance of Isabella Andreini in The Madness of Isabella, particularly the moment during which Andreini, who as an actress performing this role transgressed in many ways, “’tore’ her clothes from her body in a scene in which the character Isabella expressed anguish over her lost lover.” Erith argues, as do I in much of my work, that Isabella’s performance of gender was subversive. That she both privileged women (spoke directly to the bride as opposed to the groom at this nuptial theatric) and she spoke many different languages on stage during an era when women were largely silent. She perhaps projected, Erith suggests, “an empowered, verbally assertive self-identity.”
The trajectory of this argument is very similar to many of my interpretations of performances by nineteenth-century American women who performed a resistant identity that they themselves constructed in an age of rigid, binary notions of femininity and masculinity. I have found in my own work, however, that oftentimes in a patriarchal culture, a feminist or proto-feminist subversion is contained by a hegemony that refuses to acknowledge the transgression or fears the transgression, and I talk in my work on transvestism about “discourses of containment”—systems of repression that were constructed to re-imagine women in a hegemonic/”feminine” way. And I wonder how Andreini’s transgressive acts—especially her desire to display her “nude” body on stage by tearing her clothes and her performance of madness—was read by the Renaissance audience. Was her nudity resistant--a display of women’s flesh engineered and controlled by a woman in an age of masculine constructions of feminine beauty? Or might it be hegemonic, a containment strategy—a woman’s nude body seen as titillating, thus reducing the idea of Woman to a sexual object during a time when women were first entering the profession of acting (a way to contain the threat of usurping the prerogative of the male actor?). [Erith’s caution about how nude is nude, is really important I think when exploring the above questions. Was simply displaying a limb considered transgressive (as leg display was in nineteenth-century America) or did Andreini and other professional actresses during this era wear body stockings? What information might other forms of literature reveal? Or medical records? Did newspaper or pamphlet media attempt to market this nudity in a particular fashion? I am thinking of all the hype surrounding Adah Isaacs Menken’s nude (bodystockinged) performance of Mazeppa in the 1860s.]
I was also really interested in the ways in which Andreini’s body might be read as carnivalesque and look forward to hearing Erith elaborate on this idea, as I am also working on carnival bodies and would be aided in my own work by hearing how other scholars apply Bakhtin’s theories to their historical subjects. Does Andreini’s nudity materialize her performance? In other words, are “high” notions about sacred femininity, motherhood, etc. . . brought “low” by her bodily display? If so, one might see her performance as resistant indeed, a seeming mockery of Renaissance standards of femininity. Or is Andreini’s body carnivalesque in its ambivalence? Is her performance of nudity and madness both hegemonic (women can only be objects of desire on stage, and if they are intelligent and articulate must actually be mad) and subversive? Is the actress trying to convey a message to the bride about ways in which to work against cultural constructions while simultaneously seeming to comply? All of these questions raised by Erith’s research really resonate, I think, with these larger historiographical challenges regarding seeing and reading bodies past. I look forward to our discussion in August!