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Elizabeth Robins, 1862â"1952
Actress, Novelist, Feminist
By Joanne E. Gates The University of Alabama Press
Copyright © 1994 The University of Alabama Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8173-8940-6
CHAPTER 1
"I Was Born in the Superlative"
Girlhood and American Stage Career, 1862–1888
My disposition is made up of fragments from the mental organization of dead forefathers and each trait intensified by circumstances.... I can even trace this apparently new passion of mine for the stage. Our family are all fine readers, we are great reciters from Grandpapa Robins down to Raimond; Aunt Sarah wrote one play and read many a score, was thrilled by Rachel's acting; Mama was the finest reader in the Shakespeare Club and I have seen her worked up to that pitch of passion at home when her face was something to curdle men's blood, her gestures eloquent and noble and her voice bell-like, sonorous and such an intense expression of turbid passion, that I have looked at her and forgotten she was anathematising me for very wonder and admiration. This dark thread of Tragedy that has run through the daily lives and final fate of many of our house I will cut out of my personal experience and transfer to a profession where it will turn to gold.
—Elizabeth Robins to her grandmother, January 14, 1882
The scene: Zanesville, Ohio. May, 1881. The recently opened Schultz's Opera House is the latest attraction for touring theatrical companies. Young Bessie Robins knew she had dramatic inclinations when she began to keep scrapbooks of the famous actresses of her day. At the age of twelve, she saw Macbeth performed in Louisville, Kentucky, the city of her birth. She recalled it later, when she attended the Putnam Female Seminary. As a child she organized theatricals among her younger siblings and her school friends. Later, at the seminary, she excelled in elocution.
Voice Over (Young Elizabeth Robins) [Describing the scene to her father]. Papa, I am writing this to you because no one here understands. You must be the first to know that our journey to New York and Washington and those many evenings spent in the theater last winter were not for naught.
Last night I went to the theater and heard Lawrence Barrett play "Richelieu" most grandly. While the curtain was down, between the acts, my thoughts turned from "My Lord Cardinal"—his plots and counter plots—to my own little drama and its still unknown dénouement.
Sitting there in the glare of the gas, and staring vacantly at the drop curtain, I formed a little new plot for this Drama of mine. I took a regret card and wrote "Will Mr. Barrett see a lady privately a few minutes? It will cost him little and will greatly oblige——— ———."
[Shot of young Bessie Robins approaching "Ladies Entrance" of Zanesville's Zane House. Closeup of the neatly printed card with its two blanks. Zoom out to questioning expression on butler's face as he reads the card. The young girl gestures, indicating that she must gain entrance. With a shrug and a smile, the butler obliges and shows her into a parlor.]
Voice Over (Young Elizabeth Robins). "Enter Richelieu" with his stage step. He sat down. I launched into the subject.
[Overlap into dialogue of the scene:]
Bessie Robins.... your opinion on ... If you believed it possible for a young girl to become a fine actress without going through a course of dramatic training?
Barrett. No great actress has ever been "made" by dramatic or elocutionary training previous to her appearance on the stage.... The famous actors train themselves—they begin at the lowest rung of the ladder.
Bessie Robins. Mary Anderson was a success almost from the beginning of her career.
Barrett. Yes, she has beauty and a sort of charm of manner but her acting is nothing to admire. You have finished school? You don't seem old enough to be ready for a life of touring.
Bessie Robins. I received highest honors for my recitations at Commencement. I am nearly nineteen.
Barrett (Looking at her more attentively). Eighteen is a good age to start. An actress must take subordinate parts, work and study, and then if in her prime at about thirty-five she had drawn the eyes of the world upon her and established her position, she will hold it.
Bessie Robins. I think you make the actress too old before you give her success.
Barrett. Charlotte Cushman died at sixty; she played constantly for twenty-five years before her death.
Bessie Robins. Yes, but such horrid old women characters as Meg Merriles.
Barrett (Counting on his fingers). Queen Catherine, Bianca....
Voice Over of Young Elizabeth Robins [As Barrett continues his lecture]. Oh, papa he must have talked to me for half an hour or more.
Barrett.... I suppose you think I have influence—not so. Why, I once wrote a letter to the New York Herald advising that we must organize an association of American actors for the purpose of examining aspirants for the stage. This actress that is to be is not the beautiful Mary Anderson but some obscure girl now playing some subordinate part.
Bessie Robins. She may not be doing so yet.
Barrett (with a laugh at her directness). No, for it may be yourself.
Voice Over (Young Elizabeth Robins). Oh, papa—if I was intended for the stage I would reach it in spite of fate. I would overcome all obstacles, and as you would say, "being naturally selected and showing myself 'fit' I would survive." For youth there is no such word as "fail."
[Shot of Bessie Robins writing letter to her father, sealing and addressing it, and walking to post it. Superimposed over her journey are her images of herself in later life, first as a schoolteacher and maid, sternly drilling her pupils, shriveled and severe, and next as a bright and vibrant young performer.]
I have the choice of two lives: one is that of a single woman living much alone and reading with a sort of dogged pertinacity and gaining but little solace out of books in English and German. When this impoverished old maid must come out of her older fortress and go into some small school and lose her small stock of patience teaching the young not to shoot paper wads, I turn with a shudder to the alternative, brilliant by contrast:
A young girl calling herself—some assumed name—gets a promising subordinate part in a Theatrical Company, and has for her whole life an intense active interest in the Drama; unlike the school teacher she has constantly a great aim before her; her ambition has full sweep. It is limitless. Besides the interest such a life may have from an artistic point of view I do not think that woman will want bread. Papa I am in earnest. Just as soon as Grandma does not need me I will in some way get such a position as named. This shall be my life. It is not the fancy of a moment—but the only thing I feel fitted to undertake.
Notes on the Scene: The eighteen-year-old Bessie Robins had been struggling to find support for her dramatic ambitions long before her interview with Lawrence Barrett. She was the first child of Charles Ephraim Robins. Her mother was his first cousin and second wife, Hannah Maria Crow Robins. At age ten, young Bessie was sent from her first remembered home, on Staten Island, to her grandmother's house in Zanesville, Ohio, to attend the Putnam Female Seminary. After Bessie Robins became Elizabeth Robins, and after she took up her pen, which she did with an outlook influenced by the women's movement, she reflected upon the early years and playfully acknowledged her debt to Putnam Female Seminary with this brief composition:
In 1872, Susan B. Anthony went to the polls, voted, was arrested, tried and fined for her audacity.
In the same year Victoria Woodhull, a woman notorious for relations with men, ran for the Presidency and her equally disrespectable sister ran for Congress.
In the same year Elizabeth Robins, aged 10, left Staten Island to live with her grandmother and go to school.
Ergo, the year 1872 was one of considerable feminist activity in the U.S.A.
Zanesville, in the decade between 1872 and 1881, was a smoky town in southeastern Ohio where the Licking River joins the Muskingum. The town's distinguishing feature is its "Y-Bridge," uniting Zanesville proper with the township of Putnam on the northern shore. Putnam, settled by Northerners who were outspoken abolitionists, boasted the Putnam Female Seminary and, a few short blocks away, a large brick residence, constructed in 1809 in order to lure the state legislature to Zanesville. It had been turned into the "Stone Academy" before becoming the Robins residence. A tunnel starting below the cellar stairs and running to the outside indicates that the house was a stop along the Underground Railroad. This was her father's mother's house. Jane Hussey Robins, originally from Baltimore, had occupied the Stone House for several years when Elizabeth arrived to attend school.
Robins remembered scenes of her childhood, in Cliffwood, Staten Island, in poignant but incomplete impressions—of a mother who sang beautifully and a father who showed her the majestic sea. One of her earliest letters, addressed to her father, describes a birthday spent in Central Park. Her father would be away on business a great deal during her formative years, and Elizabeth in her later fiction would elaborate upon, and embellish, her one memorable experience with him.
Some time after Robins started school in Zanesville, the rest of the family followed her there. Charles Robins regretted the breakup of the Staten Island homestead, where he had formulated development plans and apparently took part in promoting the settlement of an ideal living community in Cliffwood. In Zanesville, Hannah's health wore out, quite possibly aggravated by marital difficulties. The young girl had watched her mother's mental and physical health decline as she gave birth to six additional children. Two babies died in infancy and were buried on Staten Island. Hannah fled from the Zanesville home of her aunt and mother-in-law, Jane Robins, to her married sister and their girlhood home in Louisville, Kentucky. Robins's next oldest brother, Saxton, was sent to Louisville, where Hannah was put under the care of her brother-in-law, Dr. James Bodine. Yet she lived, near poverty, in a public boardinghouse. Vernon, Eunice, and Raymond remained with Elizabeth at their grandmother's home in Zanesville. Recalling her mother's condition later, Robins focused, where possible, on her mother's positive influence and either forgave, suppressed, or subsequently fictionalized the struggles of a family disrupted by Hannah's breakdown.
Several factors made up for the lack of a close bond with her mother. Her grandmother and aunts, as well as the superior schooling she received at Putnam, were important forces in her life. She relished the confidential though infrequent talks that she had with her father. The family could see that she would make something of herself. Robins's grandmother, Jane Hussey Robins, deeply religious and wearied not only by the sad death of her artistically gifted daughter, Sarah Elizabeth Robins, but also from rearing a second generation of children, had seen the family fortunes wane. After witnessing the family's financial decline, Elizabeth Robins imagined that her own stage success could save the family from money worries. She also began to hope, as she paid visits to her mother, that money would make it possible to restore her mother's health, for she saw how Hannah suffered when she was away from the younger children.
Elizabeth was the oldest surviving child of Charles Robins. An older son, Eugene, by his first wife, Sarah Sullivan, had died in his teens while away at school. It was natural for Elizabeth to attract her father's attention, given his belief in the value of education. Charles Robins stimulated and encouraged his daughter's intellectual curiosity. Under his guidance, Elizabeth came to question religion freely. In this respect she contrasted sharply with her younger sister, Eunice, nicknamed Una, who, early in her stay with their grandmother, adopted a pious faith. Soon after Robins began regular stage employment in Boston, she wrote her father a summary of her views, which reflected not simply her rebellious instincts but also her exposure to many sermons and theological debates. As far as she was concerned, she told her father, God should spelled with two o's; "Man," she continued, "is doing the best he can; God isn't." She added: "Agnosticism to me is a gigantic trapeze upon which I may swing myself from theory to theory and from every Science to every 'ism.' I don't want to be settled anymore than I want to lie down in my grave" (ER to CER, September 12, 1883).
The Formative Years, 1862–1880
Bessie Robins had few memories of Louisville, Kentucky. She was born there, in the midst of a thunderstorm and at the height of the Civil War, on August 6, 1862. Her mother had been raised with a sense of Southern breeding, and her father had been a self-made man in the Northern business world. Charles wrote his mother of the happy occasion, but Jane expressed alarm for the health of the baby because she was informed that the birth was complicated by extra strong doses of chloroform. Although the abuses of chloroform were documented only later by medical historians, some of the family correspondence makes it plain that the effects of chloroform during delivery caused much concern. When the infant developed croup, Jane wrote to suggest the best remedy she knew, strong liquor. Later in her life, Elizabeth would be overly concerned about the nature of the relationship between her parents at the time of her birth. Robins allayed her anxiety by rereading her mother's diary of 1862; she was relieved to discover that her mother had been very much in love and looking forward to her birth. Charles's letters during the immediate months following Elizabeth's birth confirm his passionate love for his wife.
A number of Elizabeth's kin—including her mother, her mother's sister, and her father's poetically minded sister, Sarah Elizabeth—attended Putnam Female Seminary before her. Several of Robins's early school compositions testify to her creative spirit. One, "The Herstory of a Button," composed in 1875 and published in the American Voice in 1990, is noteworthy as a playful feminist satire on schooling. With a perceptiveness that marked her later parodies as well, Robins narrates the adventures of a button through its escapades, first on the shoe of a schoolgirl and later after being left behind on the schoolroom floor. Young Bessie's love for the stage originated in such creativity as well as in the "family theatricals" that she arranged.
None of Elizabeth's immediate family understood or encouraged her drive to become an actress; so, as she excelled in elocution at school and directed family performances, she clung to the dream of being like the renowned Mary Anderson, herself from Louisville, who had achieved fame on two continents. Long before Elizabeth's graduation performance of Schiller's Maria Stuart, she filled scrapbooks documenting the accomplishments of Anderson and other American women who had proved successful on European and English stages. Through a distant relative in St. Louis, the philanthropic Wayman Crow, she claimed an association with the most respected actress of the previous generation, Charlotte Cushman. Cushman's nephew had married Wayman Crow's daughter. (The Wayman Crows not only built the St. Louis Art Museum but also paid for the European training of the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, the classmate of another Crow daughter.) At the time she introduced herself to Lawrence Barrett, Wayman Crow had just sent Bessie Robins a letter in which he told her that he could not help her financially.
During the previous summer, her father had attempted to distract her from the stage by taking Bessie to a goldmining camp in Summit, Colorado. There she could study nature firsthand and, under his tutelage, prepare for college. The summer adventure failed to achieve its intended purpose, however. Robins understood that her father had no money to send her to school, and after making a trip east to attend theatrical performances in New York and Washington, she reaffirmed her decision to pursue her schoolgirl dream in hopes of improving the family finances. In 1882, on the day after Elizabeth's twentieth birthday, her mother, Hannah, wrote from Louisville to inform her oldest daughter that she had succeeded in obtaining from her brother-in-law and doctor, James Morrison Bodine, a five-hundred-dollar loan to help finance Elizabeth's stage career in New York. In the letter her mother expressed the fervent wish that Elizabeth might one day be self-supporting.
When Elizabeth Robins was fifty, she sifted through her diaries and letters to her family and made them the source for a projected fictional trilogy about an actress's early years on the American stage. After the first volume had been rejected by a New York publisher, she continued to work at later parts of "Theodora: A Pilgrimage," but she never completed it. In particular she dwelled on the struggle of the young Theodora to find her first job. Robins seems to have been hindered in her effort to finish the story by her inability to resolve a romantic relationship in the life of her central character. She created a fictional lawyer, modeled upon her own actor husband, who begged Theodora to marry him and give up her career. In her autobiography as well, Robins focused on the obstacles and false leads that she had encountered in her pursuit of a theatrical career. The performance of Hedda Gabler in London, which Robins had intended as the climax of the first volume, had to be postponed to a never-published subsequent volume. Any biography that focuses in too great detail, as Robins did, on her formative years overlooks her real achievement. Essentially an expatriate artist and women's rights advocate, Robins did not come into her own until she reached English soil. Only abroad did she experience success, both as a novelist and as an actress of Ibsen. Accordingly, the brief account in this chapter of her American career outlines the events that were most essential to her personal and professional development.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Elizabeth Robins, 1862â"1952 by Joanne E. Gates. Copyright © 1994 The University of Alabama Press. Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
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