Dr Kate Flaherty - work in progress talk.
Please click HERE to go to the online talk, titled Elsewhere Within: Meg Merrilies, Charlotte Cushman, and Scotland.
This paper investigates the relationship between two female figures who loomed large in the nineteenth-century popular imagination. The first is the Gypsy woman, Meg Merrilies, from Walter Scott’s second Waverly novel: Guy Mannering; or The Astrologer (1815). The second is the American actress, Charlotte Cushman, who amplified this character’s significance and consolidated her own international renown by performing it in Daniel Terry’s dramatic adaptation of the novel throughout the course of her professional life. Lauded for her mesmerising power and dedication to her art, Cushman’s life was one of striking contradictions. She was an international entrepreneur, she viewed her vocation as continuous with her Unitarian faith, and she cohabited with other women in what her letters reveal were erotically charged relationships. When she died in 1876, she possessed a great fortune and was one of one of the most celebrated women in the English speaking world. The moral example of her life was celebrated in obituaries, biographies and even sermons. But how did her public accommodate her radical unconventionality? This paper uses reception of Cushman’s performances to demonstrate how the Romantic trope of the Scottish gypsy woman offered audiences a way to recognise, categorise, and admire Cushman as an outsider within. This is given context by the broader imperial discourse in which Scotland figures as a literary elsewhere within.
Please note that this seminar begins at the earlier time of 10:00 GMT, rather than our standard lunchtime slot.