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Holly L. Holbrook

MA Paper Submission

April 4, 2012

Thompsonian Burlesque: Battleground for the Sexes, Exploratorium

for Gender

Lydia Thompson’s burlesque extravaganzas are often cited as

the precursors to the American Striptease. While this may be true

(although I have yet to find or create a suitable argument for

such an assumption) Thompson’s productions also presented

something very different from the subsequent exotic dancers of

the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. What makes

Thompsonian burlesque stand out from her successors is what she

was most famous for: cross-dressed roles. The irony for Lydia was

that it was precisely what made her famous that also caused her

type of performance to disappear. It is my intent to explore some

of the possible psychoanalytical reasons for Thompsonian

burlesque to be relatively short lived while at the same time

look at how Lydia’s style of performance may be understood in

relation to contemporary lesbian and queer performance theory.

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Butch/Femme: Reinforcing or Transcendent?

Defining the domain and the appropriate attitudes and

actions for women and men has been an ongoing debate in human

history. The arguments and expostulations continue and are

further complicated by the construct of gender, which many have

adopted as a mean to dismantle the binary paradigm of

male/female. Feminist critics, for example, have taken the issue

of gender under their wings so as to battle the concept of the

dominant male/submissive female. In theoretical circles, sex is

defined as a biological constant based on the sex organs of an

individual; whereas, gender is a social construct, malleable and

mutable, sometimes imposed by sociological forces and sometimes

adopted by the individual. The butch/femme paradigm is a classic

example of a gender model found in lesbian feminism.

Within this paradigm are two people who are women

biologically; but one woman, the butch, has adopted signifiers

understood as being assigned to the male in greater society and

whereby she assumes the gender of male. Often the butch wears

clothing that suggests maleness, she wears her hair cropped

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closely to her head, prefers not to wear make-up, and even walks

and moves in a more traditionally “masculine” way. The all-around

effect, as indicated by the name “butch,” is rather like a tough-

guy. The femme, in contrast, tends to look more conventionally

feminine, complete with make-up, skirts and dresses, longer hair,

etc.

I do not mean to reduce the butch/femme model to an

oversimplification of outward appearance; although, this personal

style of dress and comportment is an important aspect of the

butch/femme ideology. However, according to Joan Nestle in her

article, “The Fem Question,” it has been through these outward

signifiers that women have been able to wage a “cultural warfare”

against the hegemonic heterosexual community. Nestle denounces

the criticism that butch/femme lesbians have simply replicated

the heterosexual model. Instead she argues that these women have

made difficult, sexually complex choices in an “autonomous and

self-directed” way that should be heralded as feminist actions

(232–41). While I tend to agree with Nestle’s assertions, it is

still difficult for me not to view the butch /femme model as a

reflection of the male/female paradigm.

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First, in defense of the butch/femme construct, it is a

lesbian conception. While this statement may seem rather simple

and straightforward, the point I am trying to make here is that

we are talking about two women in a sexual relationship, not a

man and a woman. The very fact that the butch/femme paradigm is

one manifestation of a lesbian way of relating and not a

heterosexual relationship brings the problematics of taboos and

social deviance into the scenario. The paradigm also breaks out

of a binary construct into something that is more of a

quadruplicate: biological woman/male gender with biological

woman/female gender. However, what bothers me about the

butch/femme relationship first is the fact that in choosing their

identities these women are indeed using the heterosexual model

whether they want to admit it or not. The butch dresses like a

“man” and the femme like a “woman.” Regardless of any anti-

patriarchal or sexual-political statements being offered, this

fact remains.

Second, I have some linguistic—or semiotic—concerns about

the butch/femme and male/female binaries. Within the male/female

paradigm, there is an implication of first/second,

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dominant/submissive: the man is the powerful ruler, the hero; the

woman is a weak underling, the victim. This implication poses

problems for the butch/femme model because the butch has been

given the same placement as the male within the paradigm pattern.

In this way it may be inferred that the butch is dominant and the

femme is submissive. Nestle approaches this problem of the femme

as weak in her essay as well, although from a slightly different

perspective. She explains that “fems became the victims [my

emphasis] of a double dismissal; in the past they did not appear

culturally different enough from heterosexual women to be seen as

breaking gender taboos and today they do not appear feminist

enough, even in their historical context, to merit attention or

respect for being ground-breaking women” (234). Even here,

Nestle, a self-professed “fem,” describes the femme as a

“victim.” Is this not problematic for furthering the autonomy of

women in feminist terms? However, Nestle goes on to explain how

for her to wear the “acceptable [lesbian feminist] movement

clothes of sturdy shoes, dungarees, work shirt and backpack…is

not always how [she feels] strongest.” Her personal style choice

of femme represents for her and, hopefully, to others her

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“womanness” and exerts her passion and strength (236). Perhaps

the problem Nestle examines in her article is inherent in the

male/female and butch/femme models. Again, because the “femme”

and the “female” are in the same place within the paradigms,

there is an inclination to associate them both as weak.

What would happen if we switched the placements and

reordered the construct? What if we started talking about the

female/male paradigm and the femme/butch model? If the “female”

and the “femme” are placed first semantically, does that give

them inherent strength? Do the “male” and the “butch” become

victims? Does there always have to be an implication of a power

struggle? Or does the butch/femme model transcend the male/female

because it includes two people who are biologically the same, one

who is a cross dresser, and who are sexually attracted to each

other?

Before considering these questions in relation to the

transgressiveness of Lydia Thompson’s leg shows, I want to look

at the concepts of the male gaze and the female gaze so as to

combine the dynamics of the butch/femme problematic with gaze

theory.

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The Enigma of the Female Gaze

Laura Mulvey’s 1975 article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative

Cinema,” created quite a stir in feminist theory. Mulvey used

Freudian psychoanalytic theory to deconstruct Hollywood film. In

her essay, she unpacks her opinion that the majority of Hollywood

films contain plots which place a male in the position of

protagonist, the beloved hero. Because of the psychoanalytic

constructs of active male/passive female, this positioning of the

male as protagonist fits perfectly within dominant ideology as he

maintains control of the advancement of the story. He is

understood as making things happen within the narrative. The

female character, however, is understood as something to be

obtained, an object of desire. In her discussion, Mulvey

articulates that “the male figure cannot bear the burden of

sexual objectification” and that “[as] the spectator identifies

with the main male protagonist, he projects his look into that of

his like…giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence” (20).

Obviously, here we can note that Mulvey is concerned more with a

male spectator than with a female spectator since a woman cannot

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project her gaze on her like when the “like” is actually a man.

This does not mean, however, that women cannot enjoy the “male

gaze” as defined here, and we will explore this possibility

later.

Mulvey continues her discussion of the male gaze with an

investigation into the theory of castration anxiety. Again, in

her argument that Hollywood narratives set up women as objects of

desire, “displayed for the gaze and enjoyment of men” (21),

Mulvey proceeds to explicate the threat the female figure poses

in its absence of a penis. For Mulvey, there are two coping

mechanisms available to men for escape from this castration

anxiety: voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia. Voyeurism,

according to Mulvey, holds sadistic connotations as it tries to

assert control over the woman through an extreme investigation of

her enigma, ultimately resulting in her devaluation, punishment,

or rescue. Fetishistic scopophilia, in the other hand, erases any

recognition of castration by substituting a fetish object into

the scenario or by raising “the represented figure itself into a

fetish so that it becomes reassuring instead of dangerous” (21–

22).

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Mulvey’s article raised important questions regarding the

patriarchal order of narrative and its implications for male

visual pleasure. Indeed, she was calling for a new way of

constructing cinema that would be counterintuitive to the model

she elucidated. However, the fact that she left out the female

spectators and female protagonists in her discussion caused a

fervor among feminist circles. Other critics started trying to

define a “female gaze.” Mulvey herself revisited her original

article in a subsequent essay, “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure

and Narrative Cinema’ Inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun

(1946).” Mulvey never retracts her initial assertions;

alternately, she explores the possibilities of a female spectator

to enjoy the ride of a central female protagonist. However,

instead of focusing on a strong female character who is

definitely in charge of her destiny, Mulvey takes a look at the

melodramatic heroine who is powerless in achieving sexual

stability. Again, other feminists may have a bone to pick with

Mulvey here. Indeed, as other critics were trying to define a

“female gaze,” they chose to look at independent, self-directed

female characters in television and film as Lorraine Gamman did

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in her article, “Watching the Detectives: The Enigma of the

Female Gaze.”

In her article, Gamman explores the feminist implications in

the television series Cagney & Lacey. Gamman distinguishes Cagney &

Lacey as a program in which women are completely capable of

coping in a “man’s world.” The “man’s world” being primarily that

of the police officer. Unlike Charlie’s Angels, detectives Cagney and

Lacey are not glamorized, thereby achieving female power (10).

Instead, they are recognized as regular women moving successfully

within a traditionally male-dominated profession. Gamman

recognizes criticisms of the show as unable to break the

construct of “woman” because Cagney and Lacey are still shown as

feminine in their dress and make-up and because of the program’s

inability or unwillingness to challenge heterosexual monogamy. At

the same time, however, Gamman delves into an interesting aspect

of the show’s feminist slant when she discusses what she calls a

“mockery of machismo.” Through “witty putdowns of male

aspirations for total control” (15), a “female gaze” is created.

Gamman argues, however, that because these criticisms are made

through mockery, Cagney and Lacey never wholly “invert power

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relations, claiming total mastery for themselves.” Ultimately,

“[the] playfulness of their gaze invites their coworkers, and us,

to join in the fun. Because no one is ultimately in control of

this game, everyone can play” (16). Gamman goes on, self-

reflexively, to explain Julia Kristeva’s suggestion that “women

should reject trying to assume power.” Instead, women should

refuse all roles: active/passive, dominant/submissive,

subject/object, butch/femme, male/female. Kristeva seems to be

calling for an abolition of any sort of power struggle. Can this

be done without first reversing the roles? Can it be done at all?

Lydia Thompson: Horrible Prettiness

Lydia Thompson was a British-born dancer, actor, and singer.

She made her stage debut in her early teens, and because of her

inimitable stage presence she became a popular young performer.

Lydia appeared mostly in spectacle genres, ballet extravaganzas,

pantomimes, and burlesques, which allowed her to show off her

agility and verve as a dancer as well as her dynamic comic

sensibility. She came to the United States in 1868 and performed

a version of F.C. Burnand’s Ixion: or, The Man at the Wheel, a full-

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length burlesque extravaganza, at the opening of the Woods Museum

and Theatre in New York City. The production was met with great

enthusiasm by both critics and the public and quickly moved from

the Wood’s Theatre to Niblo’s Garden. At the time, Niblo’s Garden

was considered by many the “finest theatre in America” (Allen

15). Audiences flocked to see Thompson and her troupe at Niblo’s

and other theatres in the East and Midwest even though critics’

apprisals ranged from highly laudatory to scathing outrage.

Robert C. Allen calls the public’s frantic rush to see Lydia’s

troupe perform “a hysterical antiburlesque discourse” (16), thus

the title for his book: Horrible Prettiness. For Allen, Lydia and her

British Blondes packed houses primarily based on the backlash of

negative press. Whether it was out of sheer morbid curiosity or

true appreciation of the lively performances, Lydia’s style of

burlesque brought full houses and huge box office receipts

prompting other performance groups to mimic this style to great

success as well. In any case, the popularity of Lydia and her

performance company dramatically waned after only its first

season, eventually being pushed out in favor of other performance

styles like vaudeville.

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What made Lydia Thompson’s style of burlesque so different

from previous types of theatrical events? It is important to

remember that we are focusing on the American debut of

Thompsonian burlesque. Certainly the burlesque tradition had been

popular in Britain for centuries, moving through minor mutations

here and there; but, like the country itself, American theatre

was new and still trying to develop its own sense of style.

According to Kurt Gänzl, British burlesque had made its way to

American stages in the earlier part of the nineteenth century but

without much interest. The most popular burlesque in American

history until Lydia’s debut, Gänzl explains, was John Brougham’s

Po-ca-hon-tas; or, The Gentle Savage. I would add that Brougham’s

Metamora; or, The Last of the Pollywogs, a parody of Edwin Forrest’s “war-

horse vehicle” (Wilmeth 59), was equally, if not more popular.

However, Brougham’s productions were tame compared to Lydia’s

Ixion. Additionally, Brougham’s productions did not experience any

true rivalry in the burlesque genre until the arrival of Lydia

Thompson in 1868 (Gänzl 90).

While Thompsonian burlesque is steeped in the traditions of

British burlesque, which creates a broad musical parody of a

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well-known performance piece through a pastiche of the original

work, Lydia’s style of burlesque is set apart from previously

seen burlesques in the U.S. by its combination of other

theatrical genres. Most notably, it integrated traditional

burlesque with ballet extravaganza in the vein of the immensely

popular The Black Crook. The Black Crook made a sensation with its

stage full of scantily clad female dancers. The most significant

difference between The Black Crook and Lydia’s Ixion, for example,

was the fact that the Crook dancers did not speak. Like The Black

Crook, Ixion boasted a bevy of female performers donning breeches,

tights, corsets, and bare shoulders; however, these women not

only danced, like in Crook, but they also sang and, horror of

horrors, acted. Lydia gave her women a voice.

Another distinguishing factor of Ixion from The Black Crook was

the abundance of cross-dressed roles. The original production of

The Black Crook, in 1866, did not have any cross-dressed roles

(Allen 117). The title role of Ixion, however, was played, of

course, by Lydia. In fact, all of the major male roles were

performed by women: women acting as men yet dressed provocatively

accenting their femaleness in tights, bare shoulders, and corsets!

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The single male actor Lydia brought with her from England, Harry

Beckett, played the goddess Minerva; and John Barnes, a member of

George Wood’s stock company, played Ixion’s wife, Queen Dia.

Other minor roles were played by men; but for the most part, the

stage was filled with women. It is for these reasons, provocative

women speaking onstage as men, that Lydia Thompson’s burlesque

genre’s initial critical and popular appeal, subsequent critical

defamation, eventual standard relegation as a sordid pastime for

the lower classes, and final transformation into the striptease

is of feminist interest.

No Angel’s Here

Placing Laura Mulvey’s model of the male gaze within the

construct of Thompsonian burlesque elucidates several

possibilities for the eventual late nineteenth-century American

disdain of this newly introduced form of burlesque. Mulvey’s

model calls for a male protagonist, which Ixion has; however, the

role is played by a woman. This cross-dressing may have generated

several anomalies within Mulvey’s paradigm. First, it disrupts

the process of identification with the male hero for the male

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spectator since the “man” is actually a woman. By extension, the

erotic gaze of the male spectator through the male protagonist

onto the female protagonist is again interrupted by the fact that

the female love interest is played by a male actor. So, instead

of the male spectator embodying himself within the role of male

protagonist through which he projects his amorous gaze onto the

female protagonist, during a performance by Lydia’s troupe the

male audience member is led into a world turned topsy-turvy in

which he becomes a sensuous, outspoken woman barely disguised as

male whose love interest is a man clothed in the guise of a

female. Within this scenario it is not beyond the realm of

possibility for a straight male audience member to feel

emasculated, even to the point of virtual castration. On the

other hand, the frame of Thompsonian burlesque may provide a

completely different experience for the female spectator.

Many nineteenth-century American ideals were spawned by the

mores set as precedent in Victorian England, not the least of

which was the “angel in the house.” For Americans, as for the

English, the precept of the “angel in the house” defined the

quintessential woman—purely devoted to the domestic, a font of

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wholesome spirituality, and chaste to the point of asexuality.

These strictures were antithetical to what Lydia Thompson

presented on the stage; and, perhaps, what Lydia Thompson

provided for the nineteenth-century American woman was a complete

psychic release from the pressures placed upon her by social

ideals. Lydia took female spectators on the ride of their lives;

for, if we use Mulvey’s model once again, the female spectator

sees herself embodied in the sexualized actresses on view for all

to see. Not only are the women in the audience given the thrill

of themselves being sexualized through the actresses onstage, but

they are also made into sexual spectators as the actresses take

the more active role of men pursuing women. Additionally, with

the male perspective actualized for female audience members, they

are not only given the opportunity to visualize themselves as

sexual spectators but they are also given the more general sense

of agency within what is usually relegated to the male sphere.

Finally, the female gaze is made even more transgressive by the

very fact that burlesque depends upon pointed social and

political commentary addressed directly to the audience. Here we

find the female spectator adopting the performer’s gaze, as she

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looks back out into the audience in a critical stance. In a time

when women were considered as children, and when children were

best seen and not heard, the impact of these very vocal women on

all audience members regardless of sex or gender cannot be

underestimated.

The Gaze Reversed

Ellen Donkin’s essay, “Mrs. Siddons Looks Back in Anger,”

provides a basis for the argument that a woman onstage making

direct addresses to the audience can be a supremely powerful act

of self-agency. Sarah Siddons was a hugely popular late

eighteenth-century actress famous for instilling intense

trepidation to the point of audience hysterics in her roles like

Lady Macbeth and Agnes in Lillo’s Fatal Curiosity. Donkin retells the

story of the night in 1784 when Mrs. Siddons, already established

as a tremendous talent, made her stage entrance for the opening

night of The Gamester and was met with the boisterous outcries of

“Off! Off!” A usually captive audience had turned against Siddons

based upon public accusations made by fellow actors of alleged

mistreatment and gross injustice paid them by Siddons. The uproar

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lasted a reported forty minutes, during which time Siddons

retired offstage. She reentered, not as her character Mrs.

Beverly, but as herself, determined to make things right. Siddons

expressed her innocence in the affairs and appealed to her

audience’s confidence in her. After another interval, presumably

for Siddons to ready herself for her performance, the play was

started again to a hushed and captivated audience. Contemporary

James Boaden wrote in his Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, “It was not very

usual to hear a lady [emphasis original] on such occasions; the

delicacy of the sex, while it becomes accustomed to repeat the

sentiments of others, shrinks from the seeming boldness of

publicly uttering their own” (116). Donkin explains how Siddons’

direct defiance of her audience’s accusations resulted in a

reversal of the spectator’s gaze:

Mrs. Siddons…stepped outside of both character and

dramatic narrative…. In that moment she registered what

she thought of them. She forced her audience to deal

with her, not as object but as speaking subject…. The

audience now had the experience of being the object of

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a female gaze in the theater, and it created a shift in

power relations. (326)

Donkin goes on to define the difference between a female

subject inside representation and a female subject outside

representation and how one or the other may or may not affect

what she calls subject position. Donkin argues that Siddons held

a subject position when she confronted her audience with stern

indignation outside the confines of a play script; however, any

chance of Siddons maintaining that subject position throughout

her performance of Mrs. Beverly was nullified by the prescriptive

and ideologically sanitized role itself. As Mrs. Beverly, Siddons

held only a subject voice found in “certain moments of the play

[which] allow displays of power and rage that gesture in the

direction of female subjectivity” (327); but, again, because Mrs.

Beverly is a prescriptive role for eighteenth-century women,

Siddons lost her subject position. This is not to say that just

because a woman plays a role in a play, she cannot hold onto a

subject position. On the contrary, Donkin finds Siddons’ act a

transformational moment in the history of women on stage. “In

speaking to the audience directly…[Siddons] empowered the

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existing subject voice within the play and opened up certain

possibilities for the future in playwriting and female

performance” (327). Here we find the most compelling aspect of

Donkin’s discussion as it pertains to Thompsonian burlesque.

Lydia and her British Blondes were by no means ensconced in

a sanitized ideology of nineteenth-century American femaleness.

Even by today’s standards, tightly corseted women playing male

roles and singing tawdry songs would be considered taboo by many

an American. These women performing in Thompson’s style of

burlesque were boldly pushing the boundaries around contemporary

ideas of femaleness, exactly the kind of transformational moment

on stage Donkin looks forward to after Siddons’ gaze back. In

addition, the Thompson Blondes, by Donkin’s definition, were

actively situated within the subject position and in this way no

longer gave the audience “a safe space in the house from which to

survey the body of the actress” (285).

If we add to the basic shift in gaze the extra insult of the

mockery of failed masculinity, a favorite burlesque and

vaudevillian topic, the men in the audience may have felt rather

powerless. To return for a moment to the article on Cagney & Lacey,

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Gamman suggests that the “Mockery of machismo” does not place the

women in a commanding position because of the use of comedy (16).

However, does not the very fact that Cagney and Lacey are

usurping power from a particular character who constantly tries

to exert his masculinity over them create a shift in power to

their advantage? Additionally, Gamman takes note of the power

plays from the perspective of female and male characters but only

female spectators. How would a male spectator receive this

mockery? While in the 1980s it could be argued that men might be

able to laugh at themselves fairly easily, one hundred years

earlier, the notion of male dominance over female sexuality was

too seriously understood as a matter of importance for the

stability of social mores; and though men may be able to make fun

of themselves, as they did in earlier burlesques and subsequent

vaudeville, women certainly did not have the right and should not

have had the privilege of derisive condemnation of male

attributes. “Delicate sex,” indeed.

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Thompsonian Queerness

It was not just the fact that these women were in cross-

dressed roles while they made their audience-directed gaze, for

other actresses had performed breeches roles without causing a

great disturbance. Charlotte Cushman is a perfect example of an

American actress who was extremely successful in male roles,

including Hamlet and Romeo. Cushman, however, disguised herself

as male. She wore the same kind of costuming a male actor would

for any of the cross-dressed roles she played. She did not make a

spectacle of herself as a woman being a man. It was important to

Cushman that the audience accept her as a man when she was

playing a male role. Lydia Thompson and her company, on the other

hand, made no such attempts at disguising their femininity even

when playing male roles. Thompson had a massive head of long,

blonde, flowing curls, which were always in full view. Her

costuming also helped accentuate her naturally ample curves by

way of corseting her torso. In Cushman, we can see something

resembling a butch aesthetic, with Thompson, however, the gender

issue becomes much more complex.

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Here we have a woman playing a man who still looks like a

woman. This kind of gender play precedes by a century what queer

and lesbian performance groups, like Split Britches, have tried

to do in terms of breaking through binary patterns such as

male/female. Split Britches’ performance style, as described by

Sue Ellen Case, even seems very similar to Thompsonian burlesque:

The troupe created a unique ‘postmodern’ style that

served to embed feminist and lesbian issues of the

times, economic debates, national agendas, personal

relationships, and sex-radical role playing in

spectacular and humorous deconstructions of canonical

texts, vaudeville shtick, cabaret forms, lip-synching

satire, lyrical love scenes, and dark, frightening

explorations of class and gender violence (qtd. in

Wray).

But Tompson’s burlesque seems to do something Split Britches

had a hard time doing. It breaches the binary of butch/femme

within which Split Britches seems trapped. In their production of

Belle Reprieve, although gender roles were played with, they still

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seemed constricted by the construct of male/female. Blanch may

have been a drag queen and Stanley a butch lesbian, but within

these compositions they are still somehow passing as the “Other.”

What comes closer to Thompson’s model was used in a production of

Roger and Hammerstein’s Cinderella I saw years ago at the San Pedro

Playhouse in San Antonio, Texas. The wicked stepsisters were

played by two men who wore dresses but also donned facial hair,

exposed chest hair, sailor tattoos, and masculine swaggers. The

effect was extremely successful as a comic gag. The audience was

never allowed to forget that these were male actors in dresses.

One wonders if Lydia Thompson had the same kind of effect on her

audiences. If so, it may have been difficult for men to assume

the gaze of the leading hero, but it also would have made it

difficult to be attracted to her as a woman as well, since she

was indeed playing a man. To be attracted to this woman playing

a man but looking like a woman may feel too close to homosexual

attraction for the moral majority of the nineteenth century. In

this line of thinking, Mulvey’s assertion that voyeurism would

alleviate any fear of castrations is completely disrupted because

a man should not look at another man in an erotic manner, and it

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becomes doubly annihilated when we add the fact that the women

onstage playing the men are aware of the audience since the

unaware victim of the voyeur is part of the peeping-tom’s thrill

(Carroll 354).

Mulvey’s fetishistic scopophilia is also broken down by

Lydia’s costuming. If we are to assume that to gaze upon a woman

creates castration anxiety and that one of the ways in which men

cope with this anxiety is through fetishizing an object

associated with the woman, Lydia’s corset suspends this relief. A

corset is often considered a fetish object, which is an inanimate

object that often creates the visual sense of stiffening and

lifting and always creates sexual arousal. In this way, fetish

objects emulate an erect penis, the most virile symbol of

masculinity. However, placing a corset on a woman who is playing

a man may be construed as a man in a corset, not particularly

heteronormative. In other words, the male gazer may feel bound

himself, playing the role of the object of fear. In addition, one

could argue that the male spectator is confronted with a double

phallus. This gender confusion completely obliterates any sense

the male spectator may have of feeling in control of the mise en

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scene, and, in turn, erases any sort of visual pleasure for him.

A female spectator, however, is not stymied by the sight of this

“man” in a corset because she is used to wearing one and can

continue to gain visual pleasure as well as a sense of playful

freedom through the “looking-back” gaze previously discussed. In

fact, an item often considered a source of constriction, the

corset becomes a signal of power for the female spectator in this

context—the woman is or has the phallus.

Conclusion

It is true that for a couple of years the Thompsonian style

of burlesque was extremely popular for both men and women; but

after the first season, public criticism started to spread the

ideas that this form of entertainment was sordid, indecent, and

poisonous (Allen 16). In a time that was waging warfare around

sexual difference and definitions, when gender was understood

mostly as a biological factor, it would only have been a matter

of time before the antiburlesque campaigners would sway the

general public. Women and children were the first to leave the

audiences, and eventually men of higher social standing wanted

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nothing to do with such lowbrow entertainment. At that point,

male managers took the reigns from the leading female

actress/managers of burlesque and turned it into a show of

voiceless women with even less to wear. I dare not imply that

women of striptease have absolutely no voice, but that is a

subject for another time. For the present, Lydia Thompson’s

burlesque was a whirlwind of female intensity that proved too

strong for most late-nineteenth-century Americans. It crossed

gender borders, giving women an edge that probably made most men

feel a bit squeamish once they got past the initial shock and

titillation of seeing these “undressed” and unruly women on

stage.

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References

Allen, Robert, C. Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture. ChapelHill: U of North Carolina P, 1991.

Berlanstein, Leonard R. “Breeched and Breaches: Cross-Dress Theater and the Culture of Gender Ambiguity in Modern France.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 38.2 (1996): 338–369.

Boaden, James. Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons: Interspersed with Anecdotes of Authors and Actors. Vol. 2. 2nd ed. London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley, 1831.

Burnand, F.C. Ixion; or, The Man at the Wheel. London: Samuel French,

n.d.

Carroll, Noël. “The Image of Women in Film: A Defense of a Paradigm.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48.4 Fall (1990):349–360.

Davy, Kate. “Fe/male Impersonation: The Discourse of Camp.” Critical Theory and Performance. Eds. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1999. 231–247.

Donkin, Ellen. “Mrs. Siddons Looks Back in Anger: Feminist Historiography for Eighteenth-Century British Theater.” Critical Theory and Performance. Eds. Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2007. 31–333.

Eaves, Elizabeth. Bare: On Women, Dancing, Sex, and Power. New York: Knopf, 2002.

Fleming, Bruce E. Sex, Art, and Audience: Dance Essays. New York: Peter Lang, 2000.

Gamman, Lorraine. “Watching the Detectives: The Enigma of the Female Gaze.” The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture.

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Eds. Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment. London: The Women’s Press, 1988. 8–26.

Gänzl, Kurt. Lydia Thompson: Queen of Burlesque. New York: Routledge, 2002.

Hein, Hilde. “The Role of Feminist Aesthetics in Feminist Theory.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 48.4 Fall (1990): 281–291.

Kuhn, Annette. The Power of the Image: Essays on Representation and Sexuality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985.

Margaret Marshment. “ Substantial Women.” The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture. Eds. Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment. London: The Women’s Press, 1988. 27–43.

Moore, Suzanne. “Here’s Looking at You, Kid!” The Female Gaze: Womenas Viewers of Popular Culture. Eds. Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment. London: The Women’s Press, 1988. 44–59.

Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.

Nagle, Jill, ed. Whores and Other Feminists. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Stacey, Jackie. “Desperately Seeking Difference.” The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture. Eds. Lorraine Gamman and Margaret Marshment. London: The Women’s Press, 1988. 112–129.

Vance, Carol S., ed. Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality. Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.

Wilmeth, Don B. Staging the Nation: Plays from the American Theatre 1787–1909.Boston: Bedford Books, 1998.

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Wray, B.J. “Split Britches.” GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture 2002. 11 April 2004 <http://www.qlbtq.com/arts/split-britches.html>.

Zeidman, Irving. The American Burlesque Show. New York: Hawthorn Books Inc., 1967.

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