ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN 161

ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN literature it bears truth insofar as it assumes to share and formulate readers’ values, aims to foster belief in itself as a medium, and as long as its continued existence is dependent on success in the marketplace Its various forms—books, periodicals, and photographs—are vital but neglected sources of information about popular culture and sexual lexicography Its image system can be shown to be consistent with men’s readings of stage performance; in Victorian Britain, pornography’s referents did coincide with those of the theatrical mise en scène Many aspects of Victorian mise en scènes become logically coherent when glossed with references to contemporaneous pornography In the writing of theatre history, these glosses restore playgoers’ subjective reading of performance Everyone’s semiotic history is uniquely personal, but given the distribution points and volume of Victorian pornography, it is reasonable to assert that Victorian males interpreted theatrical performance with reference to the staple motifs of sexual fantasy, pursuit, and pleasure from illicit literature It is no wonder, then, that the reputations of actresses in illegitimate genres were tarnished by the conditions of their work As John Elsom observes, this is apparent in the social meanings of actresses’ photographs: If we look back at those postcards of actresses…we are aware that they carried around with them the weight of their context Because this girl had appeared at the Gaiety or the Alhambra, her photograph was fair game for our fantasies: and the significance of these photographs is that they subtly controlled the fantasies, hinting at possibilities in one direction or another A haughty expression and a large hat, wild eyes and crinkled untidy hair, masculine neatness and a riding crop—when eroticism is assumed the deviations need not be stressed.75 The ‘weight of their context’ not only means that postcards were invested with a playgoer’s emotional and physiological memory of watching the actress in the playhouse, but it also means that the actress’s stage persona (her living presence amidst an audience) was invested with the playgoer’s emotional and physiological memory of erotica (if any) A male playgoer’s process of maturation and initiation into the masculine world increased his acuity of vision—as with Thackeray’s character Pendennis—until he could recognize the artificiality of playacting, the degradation of the female by a public 132