Male Impersonation in the Music Hall:

Music hall has only recently been treated to 'serious ' as distinct from anecdotal study, and the 'turns ' of its leading performers remain largely unexplored. Particularly revealing, perhaps, are the acts of the male impersonators-whose ancestry in 'legit' performance had been a long one. yet whose particular approach to cross-dressing had a special social and sexual significance during the ascendancy of music hall, with its curious mixture of working-class directness, commercial knowingness, and 'pre-Freudian innocence'. The most successful of the male impersonators was Vesta Tilley. whose various disguises, the nature of their hidden appeal, and the 'messages ' they delivered are here analyzed by Elaine Aston. THE DOMINANT IDEOLOGY of Victorian and Edwardian England supported the conserva-tive image of women as 'angels in the house': as beautiful, chaste, domestic creatures. How-ever, stereotyped femininity did not go un-challenged, and among those dissenters wh