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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. The famous paintings of Gustave Moreau embodies this admiration of the female jewish body, sarah bernhardt and Salome. Moreau’s paintings in the late 1870s offered origins of a new female 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 portraits transformed the image of the Jewish woman at large. The idea of Jewish femininity shifted away from the maternal and womanly features and instead led in the direction of the slender, lean, and girlish figure. 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 portraits, and whose career intersected with it when she accepted the lead role in Oscar Wilde's play in as Salome in 1894. Bernhardt was linked with a quality 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, 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.

In response to these paintings and portrayals, Bernhardt made 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 by modeling 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.

Gustave Moreau and Oscar Wilde generated out of a mass of decadent, and Sarah Bernhardt used this to influences a new model of Jewish female beauty. Sarah Bernhardt herself did much to shape the image of Jewish female beauty, 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 Oscar Wilde's character, and Sarah Bernhardt.

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. The proffession of an actress held a controversial opinion within society. 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 that had previously been restricted to primarily men. "The Eternal Feminine" stated that “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.”

Gender performance

Sarah Bernhardt preforming as Hamlet

Sarah Bernhardt had played many roles within her lifetime, one of those being the role of Hamlet. This role is especially important in the understanding of Sarah Bernhardt as a transgressive actress in the realm of gender performance. Her performance as Hamlet represented a style of cross gender casting, opening up new avenues in which females had accesses to roles formerly preserved for men. Bernhardt's performance as Hamlet emphasizes the manner in productions destabilize the concept of a ‘universal’ Shakespeare: By casting a woman in a male role, these productions work against this notion of universality, particularly through the actresses disruptions of the iconicity of Shakespeare’s greatest male characters.This gap between the gender of the actual actor and the gender of the character opens a discursive space for interpretation, highlighting the ideological and social divides across which these plays are produced.