Taking Fame to Market

On the Pre-History and Post-History of Hollywood Stardom

B. King

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137344274
• eBook ISBN: 9781137344281
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Art General

This book explores, from a sociological perspective, the relationship between acting as symbolic work and the commercialization of popular culture. Particular attention is paid to the social conditions that gave rise to stardom in the theatre and cinema, and how shifts in the marketing of stars have impacted upon contemporary celebrity culture.

1

Unsettling Identities: From Custom to Price

The concept of the self as a kind of performance, managing the ­relationship between being and seeming, had emerged in courtly ­circles during the Italian Renaissance. The literature of that time such as Baldasar Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528) and Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo (1558) was widely read and imitated in England – the first targeted at a courtly readership and the second, a guide for general social decorum.¹ The popularity of such guides is evidence of a widespread anxiety over self-transparency, particularly intense in authority contexts where the failure to present an agreeable exterior could jeopardize one’s well-being.

In England, from the latter part of the sixteenth century onwards, a new perspective on identity gained ascendancy. This viewed physical appearance, including dress, demeanour and gesture, as instruments to be controlled in the projection of the person as a respectable being, compliant with one’s ascribed position. Implicit in this view was the conception that the ‘natural’ self was a source of discrepancies that, if not appropriately controlled, could expose the individual’s true condition and intentions. Depending on the circumstances, the failure to control such signs, or more exactly signals, rendered the individual so transparent that s/he might be a ready gull for others or, worse still, would prove incapable of carrying forward his/her own schemes for control and influence.

At first, this heightened awareness of the need to fashion the self – more positively construed as a show of refinement – was largely and pragmatically confined to the milieu of the Court and aristocratic society, where advancement was dependent on Royal favour (Elias, 1978: 56). As Stephen Greenblatt has demonstrated, the notion of self-­fashioning – the studied adoption of an efficacious appearance and demeanour – enjoyed wide currency in Renaissance courts, especially amongst men and women who, because of their origins or religious convictions, were marginal to the Elizabethan Court and the Church of England (Greenblatt, 1980: 2, 7–8, 162).

In English Court circles, Queen Elizabeth I was a powerful proponent of the importance of appearance and personal display in the maintenance of majesty.² Self-fashioning was not, as we might think following Goffman, a democratic form of jockeying for position in which anyone might connive to avoid embarrassment and garner respect (Schudson, 1984). Far from being a process through which formal equals might calibrate their relative advantage, Elizabethan self-fashioning operated within a strictly prescribed social hierarchy in which appearance was circumscribed by rank, with clothes and other items of adornment, positioning the individual in relations of deference.

Whatever individuals thought in private, the public theatre of Court required outward conformity and a prescribed decorum, if preferment was to be gained or the wrath of the Monarch avoided.³ Metaphysically, disrespect for vestimentary codes translated as disrespect for the ‘Great Chain of Being’ – the hierarchical order ordained by God in which all persons were allotted their place at birth and expected to abide by it without complaint or a show of hubris. To infringe the prescribed boundaries of attire for one’s rank was not merely vanity or misrepresentation of one’s due, in the manner of a con artist, but a flouting of God’s larger plan for humanity. Particularly to be feared was a weakening of the sanctifying glue of deference – given by the aristocracy to the Crown, by commoners to the nobility, by women to men and children to their parents.

In such a customary culture, unlike today, where fashion (of appearance and manner) signals the unique choice of an individual, authenticity was seen as inhering in obedience to one’s station (Gregerson, 1990: 1). The legitimate purpose of clothing was to express the man, as God had prescribed, not to make the man. Sumptuary laws codified this intent, drawing upon passages from the Bible to prescribe the relationship between patterns of consumption and social rank. From the time of Henry VIII, the key focus of such laws had been on controlling the consumption of foodstuffs and other luxury items. Successive sumptuary acts in 1363, 1463 and 1483 were justified as curbs against vanity and excess amongst the lower orders, but the real target of such legislation was the middling stratum that harboured aspirations to the rank of gentleman. Indeed, it was those who already had gentleman rank and above who were most vociferous in petitioning the Crown for an increasingly draconian implementation of sumptuary legislation. On her accession to the throne in 1559, Elizabeth I issued a series of proclamations requiring a more rigorous enforcement of sumptuary statutes. These proclamations were specifically aimed at the regulation of apparel, introducing tighter controls over the style and materials that persons of a specific rank might wear. These controls had the narrow aim of preventing impersonation of court and civic officials by confidence tricksters (Hurl-Eamon, 2005). But they were also intended to re-enforce the customary order. In wearing the livery or the dress codes prescribed for his/her station, the individual demonstrated allegiance to the institution, the Crown, which ‘dignified and protected their person’. Dress conformity was the visible marker of a ‘loyal’ subject (Stallybrass, 1996).

It seems likely that Elizabeth’s enthusiasm for sumptuary control had a gender dimension. As Kantorowicz (1997) has shown, medieval thought was concerned with maintaining a distinction between the corporate symbolism of Kingship and the infirmities of the physical body of the King. Elizabeth’s gender was additional ‘infirmity’ that served to compound the problem of incarnating in a frail human body the institution of Monarchy. Her obsession with vestimentary correctness seems to have surpassed vanity. Making extravagant display her prerogative has been read as a conscious strategy to reconcile the ‘male’ attributes of leadership and power with their lodgement in a frail female body (Sponsler, 1992: 266, 281; Montrose, 1991: 1–41, especially 27–28).

At the same time there was also a political dimension to her actions. An increasingly powerful class of merchant capitalists, ironically the source of financial resources for the sumptuary expenditures of the aristocracy and gentry, was in the ascendancy.⁴ As an emergent social category not readily mapped onto the geography of deference, merchants were also responsible for feeding the appetites of even more nebulous and socially undefined groups; urban youth, especially male apprentices, and assorted upstarts whose extravagance of dress and behaviour seemed to mark them as a new and threatening kind of social being (Corfield, 1991). In a manner reminiscent of modern anxieties about youth subcultures, the behaviour of this ‘sort’ was a lightning rod for respectable fears (Bailey, 1998). But the economic power of merchants meant that sumptuary statutes were largely unenforceable. They were repealed in England in 1604, much earlier than on the Continent or in Scotland – even though the underlying concern for a proper deferential equation between social seeming and social being persisted, with bills introduced into Parliament without success until as late as 1640. Notwithstanding the ineffectiveness of sumptuary legislation, a reverse-utopian longing for visible distinctions in ranks and honours remained a persistent theme in political and social life. Thus Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England in 1765–1769 asserted the prescription of appearance as a constitutional necessity (Hooper, 1915: 499).

For some, the waning of sumptuary regulation was an opportunity for self-enhancement in two respects. First, it sustained the narrow pursuit of interactive advantage or the con (Goffman, 1990). Second, it provided a means of demonstrating social superiority – as witnessed by the fad for masques – where the aristocracy, having the wealth for conspicuous consumption and the licence provided by a gentle birth to ‘play’ at identity, had the upper hand (Castle, 1986). In reality the sumptuary status struggle was centred less on the issue of the lower sort dressing above their station – poverty and the effects of hard labour would prevent that – than of ensuring that aristocratic society, the ‘better sort’, was able to exclude parvenus and maintain its leadership. But with the waning of sumptuary laws, the control of appearance became a ‘war for social position’ between an emerging upper middle class and the aristocracy, in which extravagant forms of dress such as big wigs were the weapons of choice.⁵ These manoeuvres, linked to the development or persistence of social types such as the fop and the macaroni or ‘gay’ peacock, on stage and in print, still postulated an equation between the inner being and appearance – by those bent on deception and passing as much as those seeking acceptance, if not admiration, from their peers (Festa, 2005). So, despite the alarm felt by conservatives at breaches of a sumptuary order’s ideals, those who felt undervalued (and therefore challenged), as well as those who affirmed such an order, believed that appearance should reliably communicate a person’s social standing.

As the first features of a consumer society gained ground in England, a reverse-utopian longing for a sumptuary order in which all knew (and looked) of their place remained a persistent theme in conservative thought. Needless to add, those who succeeded in advancing their prestige through the game of masks and manners took their turn asserting that the sumptuary order was a sound indicator of human quality. Nonetheless, by the mid-eighteenth century – the era of Garrick – England as observed by foreign visitors was a realm in which an uncontrollable thirst for novelty, fashion and the shuttlecock of fads held sway (Freudenberger, 1963: 4).

The new order of the market as a risk society

In a risk society, the consequences of individual or collective action are no longer nourished by an overall sense of societal and cosmic order. For the individual – now experienced as a mere entity, abstracted from the imaginative coherence of the social order – ontological insecurity is as pervasive as the drive to resolve it.

The concept of a risk society was developed to explain certain features of late modernity (Beck, 1992). But if a risk society is, amongst other things, a society in which social relationships are no longer clearly discernible – and consequently, no longer nourish a sense of place or the certitudes of being – then it is useful to see life in eighteenth-century urban England as a situation of risk. An important question then turns on what crucial social developments disturbed the expectation that personhood was achieved by submission to a sovereign power, heavenly or secular, permitting the worrying perception that the self as presented was merely a tendentious mask.⁶

So if concepts of self-fashioning remained embroiled in an idea of selfhood as prescribed by – or at least answering to – social status, this connection was increasingly confronted by a different concept of the self that was responsive to the contingencies of commodity exchange. Although, as Harold Perkin (1969) put it, this emergence was bewildering to contemporaries in the eighteenth century, it was a matter not only of perception but of substantial rifts in the social fabric of the city, which emerged as a site of insecurities and risks to life and limb. London had undergone an unprecedented expansion in population; from 1650 to 1801, the population grew from around 350,000, with an approximate increase by 200,000 every 50 years, to nearly a million.⁷ The sheer accumulation of people created a perplexity that exceeded the imaginative economy of the Great Chain of Being, its predictable and reassuring relationships between moral worth, appearance and motivation seemingly breaking down.⁸ A new fluidity of personal identity called for a new cartography, new maps and new guidelines for navigating encounters with strangers who did not sit comfortably within traditional types.

The expansion of bourgeois mercantile and commercial classes in the 18th Century capital was accompanied by both the appearance of many unclassifiable people, materially alike but not cognizant of their similarities, and the loosening of traditional social rankings. Absent was a new language for ‘us’ and ‘them’, insider and outsider, ‘above’ and ‘below’ on the social ladder.

(Sennett, 1978: 49)

On a material level, the increasing sense of social opacity, of disorder and disintegration, stemmed from changes in the social relations of production. In the former, now-declining agrarian order, relations of production were directly embedded in the social units of the manor, estate and village. There a paternalistic regime operated in which the better sort might scrutinize the doings of their socially defined ­inferiors. But by the eighteenth century, the ‘spontaneous’ policing of the ‘meaner sort’ was weakened with the onset of a national market driven and sustained by cash-centred transactions. Even where petty manufactories remained local, their owners and workers gained a measure of autonomy through their engagement with distant (urban or even foreign) markets and by receiving earnings in cash rather than as payments in kind. In time, such petty mode establishments were replaced by manufactories located in urban centres whose productive relationships were shorn of paternalistic norms of reciprocity by the cash nexus.

From the perspective of an agrarian ruling class, the concentration of formally ‘free’ labour in cities created a breeding ground for a placeless and potentially ungovernable mob, a perception compounded by high levels of geographical mobility in and out of urban centres (Stone, 1966: 31). Moreover, if the popular culture of the countryside was brutal, its manifestations in an urban setting were perceived as aggravating its ferocity, especially given the absence of the moderating influence exerted by the aristocracy and gentry.⁹ Social observers were aware that a prosperous urban trade was creating a ‘middling sort’ that by religious conviction and its own desire for respectability entertained a parallel disdain for the urban poor, but this phenomenon was too new to be reassuring. In itself this proto-bourgeoisie ‘buffer’ was unnervingly amoebic:

artisans, shopkeepers and small merchants; surveyors, attorneys, tutors, stewards, eminent clergymen, substantial merchants, rich factors and barristers as well as the inferior clergy, . . . tenant farmers and even Grub street writers, doctors, surgeons, and apothecaries, military and naval professions, the London monied interest, people who worked but ideally did not get their hands dirty with that employment of a servant was one of the basic criteria of something approaching middle-class status.

(French, 2000: 281)

Such a sprawling description was, in part, an attempt to capture embryonic class relationships within a failing lexicon of customary relationships; what had once seemed natural now seemed forced. Hitherto tacit social understandings governing the relationship between the ranks were now perceived as requiring explicit efforts at re-enforcement, a reaffirmation of the letter of the law over the declining comforts of habit. The perceived negative consequences of a growing national market economy were re-enforced in turn by anxieties over political threats from abroad, such as Jacobite conspiracies to restore the Stuarts and, as the century wore on, by egalitarian doctrines that were seen to culminate in the French Revolution.

In response, the ruling elite looked to the State and especially the Law to maintain order (Mingay, 1963).¹⁰ Through a flood of amendments to the criminal code, enlarging the number of offences covered by capital statutes, the High Court and the locally assembled Courts of Assize laid down increasingly severe sentences and, when the full ­letter of the law was applied, the visibility of punishment. State occasions became martial spectacles, and parades demonstrated to enemies at home and abroad the resolution of the State to quell opposition and dissent. Emphasizing the determination of the better so...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Unsettling Identities: From Custom to Price
• 2 The Formation of Stardom
• 3 Garrick as a Personage
• 4 Emergent Modes of Stellar Being
• 5 Writing the Stars
• 6 The High Tide of Biography
• 7 The Rise of Autography
• 8 The End of Seeming
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index