Framing Affect: Close up to Feeling with Women at the Eighteenth-century Theatre on the Twenty-first Century Screen

Period films and television dramas of the twenty-first century use scenes of attendance at the theatre by women in the (long) eighteenth century as a test of their capacity to feel. Such scenes provide an opportunity to measure the competing affordances of screen and stage regarding affect in the eighteenth century and our present moment. Explored are scenes of theatrical affect from Dangerous Liaisons (1998) to The Duchess (2008), Harlots (2017), Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), Bridgerton (2020). The figure of the liberated, educated, and aesthetically sensitive woman serves in period fiction on stage, screen and page more generally as the "bridge" between the eighteenth century and our own present. Intense investment in this figure makes the past a speculative place to explore our own potential future. We might see her as a "time-traveler" of sorts moving between our (modern, liberated) present and a past not yet ready for her. In recent screen historical fictions we can see the symbolic capital with which the feeling woman is invested when she turns her attention to performance and becomes herself the performer of affect. And this is not only a matter of positive value but also a means of obscuring or deflecting the extradiegetic audience’s attention from the attendant costs and losses for other bodies who are in the shadow of the luminous presence of this normatively white figure.