In this world and the next

“Perhaps in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this.” SARAH SIDDONS (1755 - 1831)

PART THREE: An obvious conclusion

 Sarah Siddons as Zara in Congreve's tragedy 'The Mourning Bride', engraving by after painting by Thomas Lawrence, 1783. Image © Victoria and Albert Museum. This is the face of a determined, passionate, brave, intelligent individual, transcending gender. "Independence I will ever secure..." Mary Wollstonecraft.
"...she did look so beautiful! It is a part I like to see her act extremely." Sally Siddons, writing in a letter on February 8th, 1799, about her mother as Zara. 

Sarah Siddons was socially acquainted with Mary Wollstonecraft and only four years older. Temperamentally, the reserved actress, who regulated her emotions and the impulsive, radical feminist, who acted on her desires, were far apart. Siddons did not see herself as a rebel other than in being an actor, which, in the glory days, before it was confused with showing-off, was a form of rebellion in itself.

She craved social acceptance, for herself and her children. She was more interested in improving her life through her art than suffering for it. In private, this passionate artist was conventional, religious and moral. She never compromised her right to have a career, children and a husband, and she earned it all herself.


Frequently when Wollstonecraft wrote about an emancipated woman, independent of men and men's money, she unintentionally described Siddons: “It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.”


“Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.”  Mary Wollstonecraft wrote the words; you can hear Sarah Siddons saying them.

In this world and the next:a tragedy of gender and celebrity

“Perhaps in the next world women will be more valued than they are in this.”
SARAH SIDDONS (1755 - 1831)

PART ONE - A Celebrity's Tragedy

 

Sarah Siddons, oil on canvas c 1784, attributed to William Hamilton (or Thomas Beech).
© Victoria and Albert Museum.

Siddons dominated the female tragic roles on the English stage for over 30 years. Her stately performances in the most emotionally immediate of art forms articulated the eighteenth century's ideal of the sublime, and her representations of the classical passions, in combination with her outwardly virtuous private life, won over audiences as diverse as George III, who appointed her Reader to his family, and Lord Byron, who admired her more than any other actor, male or female, worth more than Cooke, Kemble and Kean all put together. Even the Duke of Wellington, as famous for dry understatement as she was for grand pathos, was a fan.

Going to see her act was like an ecumenical religious event. Hazlitt said she was a goddess, Tragedy personified. By the time she died in 1831, she had outlived two kings, her friend, the portraitist Lawrence, the poet Byron, her brother and fellow-actor John Philip Kemble, her upstaged and discarded husband William Siddons, and, worse than anything that a mother should endure, five of their children, but not her reputation.

The mystique of the Tragic Muse had been preserved, but only just. Even before her formal retirement in 1812, something had gone wrong. "She was no longer the same...." complained Hazlitt of her inaudibility and disproportionate emphases. She kept making ill-advised and distressing comebacks: "her voice appeared to have lost its brilliancy"; "....she laboured her delivery most anxiously as if she feared her power of expression was gone" (Robinson).

She had gone from goddess to joke.