Adah Isaacs Menken: Race and Transgendered Performance in the Nineteenth Century

"Mrs. Stowe," she supposedly gushed, "I have dreamed of this moment, for I am a great admirer of your work." "I do not admire yours, Mrs. Menken," Harriet Beecher Stowe is said to have replied. (1) (Gersom 108) "My darling, a woman with such beautiful legs should not bother about poetry!" (Swinburne 2) Adah Isaacs Menken (183?-1868) was an author and an actress whose constructions of identity result in a figure who has been customarily explained as both a transgressive force in a domestic economy, as well as a deviant sexual aberration (Brooks 43). Her elusively gendered public presence and performances confounded the critical descriptions of her contemporaries and have proven a difficult subject for subsequent biographers. I introduce Menken's history and stage performance for two reasons. First, since comparatively little is known about Menken, her history will serve as an indication of how problematic any construction of Menken is, and how there are a multiplicity of discourses surrounding her life which are, at best, conflicting. Second, I suggest that these conflicting discourses are a generative discursive space wherein Menken (and others) derive a multiplicity of resultant constructions of her identity. Moreover, through an investigation of these two points, I suggest that Menken articulates her inconsistent racial and gendered identities as performative and permeable constructions that do not accommodate a reading of Menken through any one racial or gendered category. Menken's identity constructions enable multiple, conflicting readings of her body and utterances which Menken deftly manipulates and, to an extent, controls. (2) The narrative offered by Menken's history and performance exists as an amalgamation of several quasi-mythical narrative lines proliferated by Menken, her contemporaries, and subsequent biographers. Aside from purported affairs with Algernon Swinburne and Alexander Dumas, (arguably) six marriages, tantalizing correspondence with Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Walt Whitman, and a variety of largely unsubstantiated conjectures on what may have been her Jewish, Spanish, Irish, Creole and/or black ancestry, Adah Isaacs Menken (as she is most frequently known) (3) was one of the highest paid actors in the world during the early to mid-1860s, largely for her scandalously revealing male-impersonation in H.M. Milner's Byronically derived Mazeppa. Menken's accounts of her origins are varied and seldom consistent. Menken identified herself variously as Black, as Jewish, as Spanish, and as Caucasian, among others. Ed James, a journalist and Menken's colorful acquaintance, wrote that Menken was (despite her frequent public and printed attestations to the contrary) (4) "not born a Jewess, and there was nothing about her features except, perhaps, her lustrous eyes to lead anyone to suppose so. Her real name was Adelaide McCord, and she was born at Milneburg, near New Orleans, on June 15, 1835" (James 3), an assessment with which her other early biographer, George Barclay, concurred (Barclay 19). Typical of most aspects of Menken's contentious biography, no one agrees with what James and Barclay wrote. The more recent narrative lines of Menken bio-criticism, here citing John Cofran's use of 1850 census data, suggest that Menken is actually Ada C. McCord, born in Memphis in 1835 (52). While this does account for several aspects of Menken's autobiographical outbursts, Menken's use of the surname "Theodore" on what were probably her first two marriage certificates, indicates some complication of the McCord theory. Wolf Mankowitz and others, taking Menken's oft repeated designation of New Orleans as her birthplace and using Board of Health records, cite Menken as the "legitimate offspring" of an Auguste Theodore (a "free man of color") and a Magdaleine Jean Louis Janneaux (Mankowitz 34). While Menken's early history remains largely unverifiable, Menken undoubtedly took her name from what was arguably her second husband, Alexander Isaac Menken. …