page_title: Rossa Matilda Richter
section_title: Image and legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Rossa Matilda Richter / Image and legacy
context_page_description: Rossa Matilda Richter, who used the stage name Zazel, was an English aerialist and actor who became known as the first human cannonball at the age of 14. She began performing at a very young age, practicing aerial stunts like tightrope walking in an old London church. She took up ballet, gymnastics, and trapeze by the time she was 6 and, at 12, went on tour with a travelling acrobat troupe. In 1877, she was the first person to be fired out of a cannon, in front of a large crowd at the Royal Aquarium.
  Journalists and the public voiced concerns for her safety from the time of her earliest appearances as Zazel. She was named by a lawmaker as one of the reasons for proposed legislation in England to prevent dangerous acrobatic stunts, leading her to take the show to the United States. She toured Europe and North America with circuses including Barnum & Bailey, executing tightrope, trapeze, and high dive routines in addition to the human cannonball. Throughout her career, she suffered several accidents and injuries, the most serious of which largely ended her career in 1891.
context_section_description: Press coverage of Richter's performances remarked on the impressive spectacle of the act and her fearlessness and athleticism. The West Australian wrote that "there was never a more fearless woman gymnast" and said that "fear was to her an unknown quantity". That she also jumped out of buildings to demonstrate the functionality of a safety net further established that she was brave even outside of the confines of a circus tent. The Clipper said that "personally Zazel is bright, intelligent and noted for her acts of charity."
  Though young, Richter was sexualised in advertising materials from the time of her earliest Zazel performances. Whereas The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News explained that women may appreciate her athleticism, it also provided several descriptions of her "most perfect" figure. Brian Tyson speculated that, looking at the advertising materials, some of the act's appeal may have been because "in order to fit into the cannon, she had to shed most of her Victorian clothing." The painter George Frederic Watts asserted both that she was "the bravest woman I ever saw" and that her "form [was] the most perfect he ever saw." When Watts asked her to sit for a portrait, her sister came along as a chaperone. Richter told The Bystander that at some point she asked her manager, likely Farini, whether she should donate Watts' portrait to the National Portrait Gallery. "He just laughed and said 'whatever would they want in the National Gallery with a picture of you!'". As of 2018 the Gallery has three portraits of her in its collections: two lithographs by Alfred Concanen and another by an unknown artist.
  According to historians Janet Davis and Peta Tait, circus performers like Richter challenged stereotypes of femininity through acts that demonstrated unabashed feats of strength and agility. Some began to think she was actually a man dressed like a woman. Tait argued that the cannon spectacle, typically at the end of a show, served not only to provide a powerful conclusion but also to balance her other acts' more physical displays of athleticism with a more feminised, relatively passive helplessness — "a beautiful lady shot from a monstrous cannon." Shane Peacock's description of the show also highlights this dynamic: "Farini stood at the cannon, looking evil in his black beard, commanding the sweet, beautiful young Zazel to enter the mortar, and lighting the fuse to a great flourish, sending her across the [Aquarium's] great hall into a net of his own invention." A commentator wrote extensively about her talents, appearance, and personality, saying that "her nature was as pure and sunshiny as her face and form were beautiful." Elaborating on her "purity," it went on to say that "princes sought her favor, but Zazel remained the pure girl and woman that she is today. Her purity was recognised by Queen Victoria." Circus promoters highlighted their female stars' domesticity so as not to be seen as too revolutionary in terms of women's equality. Interviewers asked Richter about circus life, and her marriage to Starr facilitated discussion of the wholesome, quasi-traditional lives of the performers. She told one interviewer, speaking for women in the circus in general, that "the domestic instinct is very strong among circus women, for the reason that they are deprived of home life a great part of every year. She finds an outlet in many little ways, one of which is an appeal to the chef in charge of the dining car to be allowed to bake a cake." Combining statements about female performers' strength with flattering descriptions of their beauty and figure may have served a similar balancing function.
  Richter's cannon act inspired a scene in the Henry James Byron burlesque, Little Doctor Faust, when it played at the Gaiety Theatre. Nellie Farren's titular character would climb into a cannon, escaping through a hidden trap door in the stage while her costar, Edward O'Connor Terry, used a ramrod to simulate preparing the cannon to fire. After an explosion, she would run back in from the other side of the stage. This act,
caption: Richter in 1879, depicted in a London travel guide
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