ACTRESSES AS WORKING WOMEN 154

ACTRESSES AND THE MISE EN SCÈNE the sources for all-male compositions were finite and the taste for male muscles in maillots (one-piece body stockings) was limited The Swell’s Night Guide Through the Metropolis describes living wax works of naked and half clothed women in Windmill Street, Piccadilly, in the 1840s, as well as living picture exhibitions in what were probably taverns in the Waterloo district.54 This staple of illegitimacy was a midnight ritual at the Coal Hole, though it severely disappointed James Greenwood: Amid the breathless silence of the auditory he [the Baron] peeped through the chink [in the back partition], rang the bell, and the curtain rose, and, behold! there were four ordinary and elderly females attired in fleshings and kilts, hand in hand, and revolving on a pedestal, as though the machinery that moved them were a roasting-jack… Fancy a trio of bold-faced women, with noses snub, Roman, and shrewish, with wide mouths and eyes crowsfooted, having the impudence to represent the Graces!… I came away with at least this comforting reflection for my shilling—that an inane and nasty, though old-fashioned, public exhibition was cutting its own throat with laudable expedition.55 The objective of living pictures such as Diana Preparing for the Chase (Parthenon Rooms, Liverpool, 1850) was to provide a narrative of ideal feminine beauty while the paradigmatic male erotic fantasy of voyeurism was legitimized by the pretense of classical mythology Other pictures, such as The Moorish Bath (Palace, 1894) drew on the tradition of Orientalist painting which justified undress in a male voyeuristic fantasy of harem life The naked female form was the ultimate classical ideal, persistently painted by Royal Academicians (especially William Etty, William Frost, Laura Herford, Albert Moore, Edward Poynter, and Lawrence Alma-Tadema).56 Tableaux vivants borrowed the respect that neoclassical themes wielded in fine art Passive, unaware, and sexually vulnerable women could be arranged on stage in perfect propriety because the ‘fancy dress Classicism’57 of the Royal Academy and Parisian Salon was the hegemonic artistic discourse on both sides of the English Channel The theatre borrowed more from fine art than just thematic legitimacy, and for more media than just the living pictures The volupté or reclined female figure, which has a long tradition of voyeuristic representation dating back to the Renaissance, was kept current by Victorian painters such as Alfred Leighton 125