Your Own Art Language: Performing Womanhood in the Delsarte Schools of Expression

Abstract

This thesis considers the expansion of the Delsarte System of Expression in the late nineteenth century United States and seeks to understand why this pedagogical framework for acting and elocution was especially embraced by upper-middle-class white women at the height of the Progressive Era. Drawing on extensive archival materials, I consider the work of three notable "Delsarteans" and their respective institutions: Genevieve Stebbins' New York School of Expression, Anna Morgan's Studios in Chicago, and Emily M. Bishop's Department of Delsarte at the Chautauqua Assembly. These leading practitioners used space, rhetoric, and performance material in their curricula to prepare their female students for life in both the private and public spheres in a way that significantly reflects the cultural shift away from defining American womanhood as a cult of domesticity. Their approaches allowed theatrical training to become synonymous with the cultural practices of educated womanhood, granting their students a new vocabulary to understand their bodies and their minds in distinctly public forums. I argue that the Delsarteans serve as a case study for how women in the United States performed their identities in a multitude of ways, and that by re-examining the archive, their work can be further integrated into the history of American theatre.