Matinee Girl

A recent article by Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smart Set, contemplating the waning interest in live performance, reminded me of the matinee girl, a type of audience member who was intensely interested in the stage. A fixture of urban theater culture in the late 19th century, matinee girls were young women who attended the cheaper afternoon performances of plays and, unlike "ordinary" audience members, found pleasure and meaning by engaging with the offstage personas of actors rather than the aesthetic content of the dramatic works. She was among the first widely-identified consumer types in American history, and, until the arrival of the flapper and then the bobbysoxer later in the 20th century, the most visible of America's female fans.

Charles Reade Bacon in "The Reporter's Nosegay" of 1896 said of matinee girls:

The eccentricities of the callow youths who haunt the stage doors of the theatres are well known. Most of them are regarded as harmless, and if they get any enjoyment out of ogling chorus girls as they leave the theatres it is nobody's business. There is another species of stage-door habitues, however, possessing far more interest, in the persons of matinee girls. The stage entrances to most of the Philadelphia theatres are located in dark, dirty and altogether uninviting alleys, but the environments do not deter hosts of nicely-dressed young women from repairing thither immediately after a Wednesday or Saturday matinee. Some of them are regulars, and they are slightly blase, unless some particularly strong matinee hero is the attraction. But it is amusing to watch the actions of those to whom the experience is novel. Their excitement is intense, and occasionally almost hysterical. The matinee stage door girl never speaks to the object of her adoration. She dreams of doing so someday, and in the meantime contents herself with writing him perfumed notes, which come in handy for shaving paper.

Bacon's description of backstage door culture raises issues that are still at work in contemporary fan culture--the hierarchy of more experienced fans and overly-excited neophytes, the reluctance to actually engage with stars, etc. Interestingly, it also pathologizes this kind of audience behavior in ways that are still current. While boys are just being boys while ogling chorus girls, women audience members who long for matinee heroes are portrayed as dreamy and deluded.

The matinee girl was a regular subject for derision in the press. Matinees were created by entrepreneurs in 1870s to move theater away from its reputation as an uncontrolled and dangerous environment and create new, safe entertainment. In fact, matinee performances were meant to help women fulfill the feminine ideal of Victorian culture and to develop their emotional sensibility through participation in the arts. Of course, this was a kind of trap; while it cultivated the feminine ideal, it also enforced that ideal. Genteel women easily slipped into the caricature of the overly-excitable, overly-emotional, easily-manipulated girl, given to romantic fantasy. And for male critics worried about the increasing emasculation wrought by industrialization and urban life in the late 19th century, female consumers were a symbol of everything that was wrong with America's commercialized society. Matinee girls made clear suspected associations between femininity, passivity, and lifeless bourgeois “Culture.”

However, there was also something else going on, here. For many women participating in theater at the turn-of-the-century, the matinee became a source of new power. It provided a rare shared space in which they could gather and express themselves freely in ways forbidden in everyday life—in Peter Rabinowitz’s phrase, with their “own dominant passions.” The matinee girl was commonly portrayed in the press as prone to fantasy and hysteria, but in reality she was also independent, single, unaccompanied by a male escort, and openly displaying desire outside of the usual prescriptions of middle-class courtship. Another thing I didn't know until recently was that apparently matinee girls were as equally fascinated by women actors as men. Thus a 1900 article in Metropolitan Magazine (Vol. XI, No. 6, 611) could state, "Margaret Anglin, the leading lady at the Empire, maintains that she is always at her best at a Saturday matinee. She declares that the sea of uplifted faces, eager, mobile, and attentive, is a source of inspiration...the real matinee girl is more deeply fascinated by young women who depict the lighter emotions of every-day life."

The rise and fall of "matinee girl" as a term between 1890 to 1940.

The height of matinee girl culture in the United States was around 1910. Of course, one can follow the matinee girl into cultural forms beyond theater, including film, popular music, and television. Fred and Judy Vermorel, writing in Fandemonium (1989), argued that the marked cultural position of “the girl” broadly serves as “the key sign for desire itself. The GIRL acts out for all of us our consumerist deliriums of possession and ecstasy.” Perhaps the recent blow-up about the problem of the tween girl audience for American Idol is a good example of that. “Matinee girls” will remain with us as long as public discourse links popular culture consumption and irrationality and then, in turn, portrays irrationality as a marker of nascent femininity.

Of course, girls themselves may have something else to say about it all, which remains an important area of fan research.

The Canon of Great Fans

Canons of great authors, artists, and composers have fallen out of favor in some humanities disciplines lately; judging some work as better than others, once the core work of criticism, has become a bit old-fashioned in the wake of post-structuralism. At least, how scholars understand the power of "good" art has changed. After the first wave of reception-theory in the 1970s, which pointed out the complexity, diversity, unpredictability, and even perversity of audiences as they received and "decoded" creative expression, the Arnoldian idea that a person would simply need to expose himself to works of genius in order to become educated or "cultured," or the modernist notion that structural complexity is a primary marker of artistic significance, needs to be understood with a degree of skepticism. "Canon formation," or how we evaluate the best works in a society, has turned out to involve more than just merit.

Our Great Authors, 1865

I don't really believe that we should abandon the idea of a canon in humanities scholarship, even as we expose its politics. Judgments about worth, after all, are vital for defining shared values and for democratic decision-making. And working through the process of judging is a key component of learning, and doing that through the evaluation of artistic works is useful. However, I do think that canonicity is often too narrowly-focused on authorship. Great works are almost always attributed to the great minds that conceived them. That's why musicologists or literary scholars still tend to develop expertise in particular authors deemed worthy of in-depth study (especially if they want a faculty appointment and/or tenure), or why textbook cultural histories continue to organize their narratives around moments of creative production, conveniently offering decontextualized lineages of creative influence, as if all great artists in history are really just part of one, big, family of geniuses.

It seems to me that if we are going to go through the effort of canonization, we ought to open up the process to all aspects of artistic culture. We can have a canon of great authors, as long as we also have canons of great bookbinders, concert promoters, instrument manufacturers, and audience members. Certainly, judgments could be made in those areas, too. In fact, I've been thinking a lot lately of whether it might be possible to create a canon of great fans, audience members who we might deem as having been the best and the brightest readers, listeners, and spectators of their times.

Some names immediately come to mind from the American nineteenth century (which where I've been spending most of my time for the past eight years). Walt Whitman, for instance, is good initial candidate.

As a young journalist and man-about-town, Whitman was an especially active participant in New York City’s rapidly growing number of theaters, lectures, exhibitions, and concerts in the 1840s. He was a regular at the Bowery Theater and loved the intense emotionalism of actors like Junius Brutus Booth and Edwin Forrest. He was an enthusiastic follower of oratory, attending political rallies and abolitionist meetings at Broadway Tabernacle to study the fiery rhetoric of reformers; he especially was eager for lectures by Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher or temperance speaker John Gough. Perhaps most of all, Whitman was huge opera fan, following what he called his "musical passion." His status as a journalist put him on the “free-list” for concerts in the city, he heard most of the major virtuosos that passed through in the late 1840s and early 1850s. In Specimen Days, he recounts, for instance:

I heard, these years, well render'd, all the Italian and other operas in vogue, "Somnambula," "The Puritans," "Der Freischutz," "Huguenots," "Fille d'Regiment," "Faus," "Etoile du Nord," "Poliuto," and others. Verdi's "Ernani," "Rigoletto," and "Trovatore," with Donizetti's "Lucia" or "Favorita" or "Lucrezia," and Auber's "Massaniello," or Rossini's "William Tell" and "Gazza Ladra," were among my special enjoyments. I heard Alboni every time she sang in New York and vicinity--also Grisi, the tenor Mario, and the baritone Badiali, the finest in the world.

In addition to his obsessive attendance at the cultural events of the city, he had a consistent, almost unbridled excitement about those experiences--his ardent listening, participation, and spectatorship shaped many of the descriptive passages of urban life in Leaves of Grass and shone through his criticism, essays, and reminiscences. Such experiences were important enough for him to note at the end of his life, in "Good-Bye My Fancy" (Complete Prose Works, 511): 

Seems to me I ought to acknowledge my debt to actors, singers, public speakers, conventions, and the stage in New York, my youthful days, from 1835--say to '60 or '61--and to plays and operas generally....Seems to me now when I look back, the Italian contralto Alboni (she is living yet, in Paris, 1891, in good condition, good voice yet, considering) with the then prominent histrions Booth, Edwin Forrest, and Fanny Kemble and the Italian singer Bettini, have had the deepest and most lasting effect upon me. I should like well if Madame Alboni and the old composer Verdi (and Bettini the tenor, if he is living), could know how much noble pleasure and happiness they gave me then, and how deeply I always remember them and thank them to this day.

Of course, there are other great fans in history for whom we have evidence, some famous and some unknown, and I hope to highlight some of them in the coming months on this blog. (James Boswell ought to be here!) The larger point, here, is that thinking about a canon of fans, however reactionary, can re-orient our understanding of what's significant when we think about how art works in society and how we might account for its history. And that re-orientation is worth pursuing further.

Recreating Performance Environments

There are many excellent histories of urban theater architecture; there are few that give us an understanding of actually being a concert or theater-goer on a particular night in 1855 or 1870 or 1903. What was playing? How did the inside of a theater look from various viewpoints? What was it like to sit with others in a crowded house?

Of course, scholarship and narrative description can represent such experience. For example, Thomas Forrest Kelly’s First Nights and First Nights at the Opera address some of these questions for specific premieres of musical works and operas. Vera Brodsky Lawrence’s monumental multi-volume Strong on Music re-creates the whole world of music and theater in New York City between 1840 and 1860, using George T. Strong’s mid-19^th century diary and a detailed mining of journalism from the period.

However, there are also a number of digital approaches, a few of which I will note here:

Mapping the Moment is an interesting interactive map of theater and entertainment in Nottingham, England, in the 19^th century, including performance venues, performances, and census information.

The Lost Museum, is an archive and re-creation of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in New York City. The simulation lets you see and hear the museum's rooms, some of which contain historical commentary.

Virtual Vaudeville engagingly recreates New York City’s Union Square Theater in 1895. It’s a sophisticated simulation that allows you to experience a vaudeville show, in “real” time, while also exploring the space of theater. 

For a related but different take on virtual recreation of entertainment venues, the Urban Simulation Team of UCLA creatied an architectural simulation of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. It needs people, but it's still pretty cool. 

I’m only beginning to explore all this. If Ubisoft can bring 15th-century Italy to life, with attention to historical accuracy, in Assassin's Creed II, why not a night out in an antebellum city? For a scholarly summary of the issues, see Hugh Denard. 

Nightlife in Philadelphia, 1849

Nathan Beekley, a young clerk in Philadelphia, kept a diary in 1849 in which he chronicled his frequent and fascinated attendance at plays, concerts, shows, sermons, and parades. The city's increasing array of commodified entertainments (as fellow resident Joseph Sill remarked in 1840, "There are now 4 Theatres open every night—and 1 Equestrian Circus! Rather too much for Philadelphia!”) was a significant source of new kinds of cultural experiences and obsessions. For some young, rural, white men, away from their families for the first time to work in the city's merchant shops and manufactories, the diversions were almost overwhelming. The American Antiquarian Society, which holds Beekley's remarkable diary, is currently making its contents available online at Clerk and the City.