Theatre Journal

In Elizabeth Robins’s preview of the Coronation Suffrage Pageant of 1911—the largest and most spectacular demonstration of the British suffrage campaign—she announced that the Actresses’ Franchise League contingent would be “led by Hedda Gabler, in the accomplished person of the Princess Bariatinsky on horseback.” ¹ The actresses’ choice of a leader was at once fitting and incongruous. On the one hand, Hedda Gabler signified an anger that the actresses’ professional reliance on popularity with audiences prohibited them from expressing more directly and assertively; ² and Hedda’s anger, together with her brilliance and desperation, had immediately established her as one of the great roles for women in the dramatic repertory. On the other hand, Hedda hardly qualified to marshal feminist followers toward their goal of emancipation, since she lacks the courage and conviction of the many suffragists who endured such hardships as jail sentences and forced feedings. She does, after all, opt to commit suicide rather than to confront in a more constructive manner the circumstances of her life that she finds so intolerable. Still, mitigating this apparently incongruous aspect of the actresses’ choice of Hedda as their leader was the fact that, though Ibsen included in his exposition the information that Hedda used to go riding in a long black skirt and with a feather in her hat prior to her marriage, she does not go riding within the time span of the play’s action. Paradoxically, then, the recognizable figure whom the actresses were to rally behind was not the character that Ibsen depicted in his 1890 play but, rather, the character that they themselves imagined Hedda would have been had she somehow existed outside Ibsen’s play. [End Page 59]

This revisionist Hedda of the Coronation Suffrage Pageant encapsulates the challenges that faced early feminist theatre artists such as Elizabeth Robins as they attempted to create dramatic roles that were interesting theatrically yet acceptable within emerging feminist terms. Robins, who lived to the age of ninety, identified her performance of the title role in the English-language premiere of Hedda Gabler in London in 1891 as the defining moment of her long and varied career as an actress, writer, and suffragist. By her own account, this “epoch-making event,” which catapulted her to fame as a daring theatrical innovator, caused her “to think of [her] early life as divisible in two parts ‘Before Hedda or after Hedda’” ³ and “was to remain the active principle/force shaping existence for [her] as long as life would last . . . .” ⁴ Yet though Robins recognized Ibsen’s impact on her career and claimed that “no [other] dramatist [had] ever meant so much to the women of the stage,” ⁵ she was not simply uncritically admiring of the “father” of modern drama whose notorious “women’s plays,” with their central female characters who defy prevailing standards of acceptable feminine behaviour, had made him the darling of the late-nineteenth-century women’s movement. On the contrary, Robins stated in her 1928 essay “Ibsen and the Actress,” “If we had been thinking politically, concerning ourselves with the emancipation of women, we would not have given the Ibsen plays the particular kind of wholehearted, enchanted devotion we did give” (“IA” 31). What Ibsen offered in the 1890s “had nothing to do with the New Woman; it had everything to do with our particular business—with the art of acting” (“IA” 32–33). Thus, Robins did not hail Ibsen as a champion of feminism, but distinguished between his contribution to the cause of actresses and his non-contribution, by her standards, to the cause of women’s emancipation. Her own 1907 suffrage play, Votes for Women, sought to redress Ibsen’s failings, but as a revisionary effort was itself problematic, for though it broadened the scope of theatrical realism by bringing to the stage the real-life drama and spectacle of the suffrage campaign, it was at the same time heavily implicated in the ideas and practices that, to Robins’s mind, had characterized the male-dominated commercial theatre prior to the advent of...