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'.
Author(s): Ruth Pritchard Dawson
Series: Cultures of Early Modern Europe
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Year: 2022
Language: English
Pages: 315
City: London
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
