User:Mdiev1000149992/Sarah Bernhardt

The Jewish Female Body

Sarah Bernhardt's identity as a Jewish woman elicits a greater idea of the representation of Jewish women in film, cinema and theatre. The former representation of Jewish women revolved heavily around notions of femininity and the Jewish body. However, through looking at Sarah Bernhardt’s role as Salome, there is a relevant shift in the way Jewish women are portrayed, and viewed throughout theatrical performances and art. Gustave Moreau's 1870s Salome painting]] The ways in which female Jewish body types are represented in 19th century art and theatrics provides a more in depth look into the work of Sarah Barnhardt as a modernizing force of Jewish representation. Specifically the role of Salome shapes the way the female body is admired and viewed by audiences. An example of this discussed in Jonathan freedman’s Transformations of a Jewish Princess: Salome and the Remaking of the Jewish Female Body from Sarah Bernhardt to Betty Boop., was the famous painting of Gustave Moreau. Moreau’s paintings in the late 1870s offered origins of a new Jewishness, and especially Jewish femininity. Based on the figure of Salome, Moreau created three famous paintings devoted to the subject, In which they attracted enormous crowds of more than 500,000 people viewed them in an 1876 salon .Moreau’s paintings represented an eroticized Jewish body, one that made Salomé into a slender adolescent in which the image transformed the image of the Jewish woman at large, to shift away from the maternal or the amply womanly in the direction of the slender, lean, and girlish. As such, the effect is to foreground and frame an entirely different model of female beauty than that on offer in Orientalist representations of the Jewish woman.

Sarah Bernhardt, whose rise to prominence paralleled Moreau's Salomé and whose career intersected with it when she accepted the lead role in Wilde's play in as salome in 1894. Bernhardt was linked with a quality, that of thinness. This quality was persistently foregrounded in the multiple representations of her proliferating in art, caricature, and photography. "Her thinness is really quite remarkable," wrote Henry James of Georges Clarin's 1876 Portrait of Sarah Bernhard, on display at the same salon where Moreau's Salomés made their debut." These arguments to her thinness, to be sure, fed in with a general sense that as a Jew, Bernhardt was sickly, malnourished, diseased—perhaps syphilitic or tubercular, as Sander Gilman has powerfully argued. Bernhardt's efforts to present herself as a star of fashion as well as of theater had to do with appropriating this label and resituating it, re-signifying it in her own terms. To the perception that she was emaciated, sick, skeletal, Bernhardt responded in kind. She modeled sculptures of death's heads, had herself photographed in a coffin, and marketed the pictures. She made her thinness fashionable"—by her flamboyant persona, in her role in dress reform, and in her writing and other public pronouncements.

If Moreau, Beardsley, and Wilde generated out of a mass of decadent, Pre-Raphaelite, Orientalist, and other influences a new model of Jewish female beauty, Sarah Bernhardt herself did much to shape that image, seizing upon the means by which she, like so many Jewish women, was represented in order to make a new look her own. As such, she helped create a new style, a new fashion, which defined the Jewish woman for the next generations— one which combined clothing, jewelry, and especially what Pierre Bourdieu provocatively calls "bodily hexis" to create a new model of feminine beauty.-' Going forward the image of Bernhardt and Salomé intertwined, as more and more Jewish women took up the role and modeled themselves on Wilde's character, or Beardsley's reification of Bernhardt, or both.

Sarah Bernhardt and The New Women's Movement in Brazil

The new women's movement that took place in late nineteenth century and early twentieth century brazil, was a movement built around a woman's ability to gain access to public spaces in Brazil. Among middle class women, new opportunities and possibilities opened up for women allowing them professional positions in the workforce. Some women also found the acting profession to afford them freedom and independence. The theater offered women an environment relatively free of social constraints. As stated by Jame N Green “on one hand, high society embraced women who appeared in plays or opera representing a high culture. While on the other hand, female performers could suffer public scrutiny and gossip for leading unconventional lives.”

“The Eternal Feminine” was published January 16th 1886 by Revista Illstrada in Brazil six months prior to the first visiting of sarah bernhardt. “The Eternal Feminine” discussed advances of middle class and elite women in Brazil, citing expanding educational opportunities, acknowledging that women were capable of entering many new professions and industries taht had previously been restricted to primarily men. Although there was one catch, “The bello sexo", as journalists so often called women, may move into new occupations, but their beauty, elegance, and eternal femininity needed to remain in place.”

Bernhardt’s performances in Brazil had lasting effects in the sense that they encouraged new notions of possibilities for women in a patriarchal and traditional society. Bernhardt made use of an array of tropes assigned to women to create a public personality that afforded her freedom, independence, and immense popularity at home and abroad.” Even her famous cross-dressing roles such as Hamlet intervened in the tension between the traditional woman and the New Woman.

To quote the article Sarah Barnhardt's Knee;

“In an era of debate about gender norms, Bernhardt’s star image presented a similar fantasy scenario that fulfilled a need on the part of her public for unity, resolution, and reassurance. To her more socially conservative fans, Bernhardt appeased fears concerning the threat of the New Woman and the demise of female seduction as an everyday pleasure. She transcended the perceived conflict between the independent New Woman and the séductrice. [. . .] [S]he was a living example of Marguerite Durand’s contention that a woman need not lose her femininity to compete in a man’s world.”

Androgyny and Gender Performance

link=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bernhardt_Hamlet2.jpg|left|thumb|Sarah Bernhardt preforming as Hamlet In the greater lens of feminism, Barnhardt's role in Hamlet has influenced roles of preforming gender.