Sarah Bernhardt and the Representation of the Oriental Woman: Focusing on Victorien Sardou's Théodora

Abstract

In the 1880s, Sarah Bernhardt, famous actress of the fin-de-siècle in France, started playing oriental heroines in historical dramas. Above all, her performance in Victorien Sardou's Théodora became an immense hit. Reading the script of Théodora and the reviews from the time, we can clearly recognize that Sardou strategically made use of various images attached to Sarah Bernhardt—an exotic Jewish woman, a courtesan, or a woman of endless gossip—as dramaturgical elements for his well-made play.

In Théodora, Sarah Bernhardt played the role of the Byzantine empress who died for love of a young Greek. Here the implication was: “The East-Woman sacrifices herself for the West-Man.” This way of representing an oriental woman appealed so much to the spectators' desire for cathartic fantasy, who were living in the spiritual climate of France in the late 19th century with its colonialism, racism, and anxiety about the modern “New Woman”.

Although the box-office-success of Théodora and other oriental pieces enabled Sarah Bernhardt to establish herself as an independent actress, she was not satisfied with the commercialist and stereotypic heroines in that direction. That was the reason why she later sought certain “self-representation” in male roles and patriotic dramas. The gendered racial representation in her oriental pieces should be evaluated as a motivation to recover her “self-representation” in French male roles.