Catherine the Great and the Culture of Celebrity in the Eighteenth Century

Description

This highly original study provides a detailed analysis of Catherine the Great’s celebrity avant la lettre and how gender, power, and scandal made it commercially successful. In 1762, when Catherine II overthrew her husband to seize the throne of the Russian Empire, her instant popular fame in regions of Europe far from her own domains fit the still new discourse of modern celebrity and soon helped shape it. Catherine the Great and Celebrity Culture in Eighteenth-Century Europe shows that over the next 35 years Catherine was part of a standard troika of celebrity-making agents—intriguing central figure, large-scale media, and an engaged public. Ruth P. Dawson reveals how writers, print makers, newspaper editors, playwrights, and more—the 18th-century’s media workers—laboured to produce marketable representations of the empress, and audiences of non-elite readers, viewers, and listeners savoured the resulting commodities. This book presents long neglected material evidence of the tsarina’s fantasy-inducing fame, examines the 1762 coup as the indispensable story that first constructed her distant public image, and explains how the themes of enlightenment, luxury consumption, clashing gender roles, and exotic Russia continued to attract non-elite fans and anti-fans during the middle decades of her reign. For the later years, the book considers the scrutiny inspired by the French Revolution and Catherine’s skewering in unsparing misogynist cartoons as they applied to visual representations, her achievements as ruler, the long-ago overthrow of her husband, and her gradually revealed list of lovers. Dawson reflects on Catherine II’s demise in 1796 and how this instigated a final burst of adoration, loathing, and ambivalence as new accounts of her life, both real and fictional, claimed to unwrap the final secrets of the first modern international female celebrity – even now the only woman in history widely known as ‘the Great’. Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Illustrations Acknowledgments Note on Translations Note on Spelling Introduction Part I: Celebrity Ingredients Chapter 1: Celebrity-Making Coup of 1762: The Crucial Role of Story Signs of Celebrity Emerging Catherine’s Efforts to Control the Narrative: Her Manifestos and Their Reception The Matrix of Celebrity and Story New Accounts and Their Spread Chapter 2: Scandal and Engrossing Coup Backstories, until 1765 The Tsar’s Scandalous Death and the Tsarina’s Alluringly Uncertain Future Reaching the Least Privileged Audiences with Words and Pictures Celebrity Tropes of Marital and Sexual Squabbles Challenges to Peter’s Masculinity Chapter 3: Media Workers and Their Commodities in Word and Image Representing the Empress Making Visual Images Commodifying Further: Eighteenth-Century Celebrity Endorsements Chapter 4: Fans and Anti-Fans for a Commodity Empress Fan Access to Celebrity Discourse What Celebrity Offered Fans: From Entertainment and Identification to Fantasies of Social Mobility Ambivalence and Rejection: Criticism, Anger, and Anti-Fans “Europe’s Tsarina” Chapter 5: The Star as Contributing Subject and Living Object Where Regal Gloire Meets Popular Celebrity Court Rituals of Seeing and Being Seen Impolitic but Indispensable Body and Mostly Male Watchers Shape, Appearance, and Decorum of the Visible Body and Face The Rude Body Visualized Aging Part II: Engaging Themes, Sustaining Celebrity Chapter 6: Woman Philosopher on the Throne Boundary Breaking Relationships Redemptive Early Projects Mid-Reign Cracks in Catherine’s Enlightened Image, 1773–89 Further Intellectual Engagements Chapter 7: Consuming Catherine II: Gender and Wealth The Complex Mix of Wealth and Gender Glamour Extravagant Display Art, Literature, Learning, and Patronage Chapter 8: Disconcerting Mother of Her Country: Gender and Power Again Russia’s “Petticoat Government” Debut in Satires, Both Textual and Visual: Poland 1772–3 “Astonisher of All Regions,” from Constantinople to Amsterdam and Antwerp Outbreak of the Second Russo-Turkish War: More Political Cartoons Chapter 9: Empress of the Other Russia—Exotic or Barbaric? Pugachev Rebellion, 1773–5 Others Who Spoke for Themselves: Catherine and Her Jewish Subjects 1787: Crimea Trip and the Staged Exotic Part III: Transgressions Accruing and Secrets Revealed Chapter 10: Final Eight Years: Reassessment and Satirical Critique Metaphors of Gender and Sexuality and the Dominance of An Imperial Stride! Force Unsettling Gender: The Indeterminate-Androgynous Woman Ruler Ridiculous Heroine Lascivious Libertine Indecorous and Abject Being Monstrous-Feminine Body Chapter 11: Still Relishing the Failed Marriage, the Coup, and Its Deadly Aftermath The Dribble and Then Flood of Curiosity-Stoking Texts Skillful Narratives Unhappiness, Weakness, and Discord Sexual Difficulties Peter III’s Mysterious Demise Chapter 12: The Lovers: Dabs of Fiction, Grains of Truth, Gobs of Scandal Phases of Lover Publicity Lovers Slipping into Print in Catherine’s Last Decade Celebrity Appeal of Sexuality Reports Love Affair Trajectories The Gush of “Revelations” Posthumously Completing the Record of Catherine’s Intimate Life Venomous Poetry and Further Fiction Chapter 13: Celebrity after Death Accounts and Images of Catherine II’s Demise for All Further Accusations and Complex Response Criminality And Yet Ambivalence Invented Libertine Death as Crime and Punishment Becoming an Icon: Afterlife Notes Bibliography Index