Staging the Self: Life-Writings of Fatima Rushdi and Sarah Bernhardt as Emblems of Fin-de-Siècle New Womanhood

1.1 The Power of Self-Writing: Crafting the “New Woman” Identity

At the turn of the twentieth century, autobiography was more than a private narrative form for it became a cultural tool through which individuals, especially women, negotiated their place in rapidly transforming societies. Furthermore, autobiographical narratives emerged as a medium by which women/authors not only wrote but also performed their identities, to borrow Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’s assertion in their Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader, that life writing is not merely a recounting of events, but a performance of identity shaped by social, political, and historical contexts. Smith and Watson (2016) discuss how autobiographical writing serves as a means of self-construction, noting that life narratives are not merely reflections of a pre-existing self but are instrumental in shaping and performing identity, making these writings an act of creating the self within the narrative. This dynamic might be particularly pronounced in the case of women who were performers by profession, specifically, actresses whose life writings may offer a unique intersection between narrative self-construction and the theatrical performance of a persona. For actresses/women authors such as Sarah Bernhardt and Fatima Rushdi, writing the self was an act of defiance and self-authorization, particularly in cultural climates where female agency was heavily policed. Their autobiographical narratives offer insight into how theatrical women performers used self-writing to assert authority over their public image and resist the confines of traditional gender roles.

Compared to nineteenth-century female autobiographies, male autobiographies of the same period were often shaped by Enlightenment ideals of the rational, autonomous self, as figures like Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Benjamin Franklin framed their life stories as linear narratives of progress, mastery, and public achievement. These texts typically emphasized individual will, moral fortitude, and the pursuit of greatness, mirroring patriarchal structures that encouraged male self-expression and public recognition. Alternatively, women’s autobiographies from the same period were frequently constrained by expectations of modesty, domesticity, and sentimentality. As Marcus (1994) notes in Auto/biographical Discourses, female self-writing was often “apologetic,” embedded within discourses of respectability that limited women’s ability to assert ambition or desire. However, rather than simply replicating these conventions, many women subverted them, using emotional candor, relational narratives, or performative self-fashioning to claim authority.^[1] For theatrical women like Bernhardt and Rushdi, whose careers depended on visibility and transformation, autobiography became a stage in itself: a space where the traditionally private female self could become legible, political, and powerful, both written in text and played on stage.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the New Woman archetype emerged and was discussed in relation to the rise of feminism and shifts in societal roles during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the section titled “New Woman”, Rabinovitch-Fox (2017) discusses how education and employment reshaped women’s identities insofar as [the] New Woman became associated with the rise of feminism and the campaign for women’s suffrage, as well as with the rise of consumerism, mass media, and changes in women’s education, employment, and family roles. The figure of the “New Woman” embodied a growing challenge to established gender norms, symbolizing women’s increasing access to education, professions, and public life. In Europe, the New Woman appeared in fiction, periodicals, and political debates as both an aspirational model and a social threat, at once emancipated and deviant. Her emergence coincided with urbanization, industrialization, and the expansion of print culture, all of which facilitated new forms of female visibility. In Egypt, the New Woman archetype was shaped by overlapping forces of colonialism, nationalism, and modernity. Among other contributing factors, fin-de-siècle discourse on women’s liberation in Egypt is most commonly associated with the pioneering work of the Egyptian jurist and Islamic modernist/nationalist Qasim Amin (1863–1908), whose groundbreaking treatise Tahrir al-Mar’a (The Liberation of Women, first published in 1899) and its book-form addendum al-Marʾa al-Jadida (The New Woman, 1900) advocated female emancipation and national advancement and underscored the essential role of education in achieving it:

Hence, if Egyptians want to reform their current situation, they must begin with the roots of reform. They must believe that there is no hope that they will become a vibrant community, one that can play an important role alongside the developed countries, with a place in the world of human civilization, until their homes and families become a proper environment for providing men with the characteristics upon which success in the world depends. And there is no hope that Egyptian homes become that proper environment unless women are educated and unless they participate alongside men in their thoughts, hopes and pains, even if they do not participate in all their activities. (Amin, 2002, p. 66)

Accordingly, within the broader framework of this fin-de-siècle movement, a transnational cultural phenomenon marked by women’s increased visibility in the public sphere; life writings by Egyptian female authors of the time not only documented individual careers but also contributed to the evolving archetype of modern Egypt and modern womanhood.

For both Sarah Bernhardt and Fatima Rushdi, theatre became a crucial site where the boundaries of gender, identity, and cultural belonging were questioned and reimagined. Their decision to cross-dress onstage, playing figures like Hamlet and Napoleon II, was not merely artistic but symbolic: an embodied critique of the roles women were expected to inhabit offstage. To illustrate, Bernhardt’s portrayal of Hamlet in 1899 was groundbreaking, as she was among the first women to take on this iconic male role and that of Napoleon was highly praised by her audiences and the press. The following first portrait (Figure 1) likely by Theobald Chartran, a frequent portraitist of Bernhardt, captures her in full regalia in the role of Napoleon II, the Duke of Reichstadt, wearing a white military uniform, complete with a long white cape, black boots, and sword, emblems of nobility and masculine military power, in an upright and commanding posture, with her hand resting confidently on a pedestal, eyes gazing upward with a dreamy and noble expression. Although Bernhardt does not explicitly pinpoint this role in her memoirs, she speaks of the Prince with admiration on the few occasions she recounts meeting him, portraying him as a man of great complexity and a richly layered personality. “The conversation of this man was brilliant, earnest, and witty; he laced his speeches and retorts with somewhat coarse expressions, yet everything he said was both engaging and enlightening” (Bernhardt, 1907b, p. 165). It is not surprising that Bernhardt embraced this role in Edmond Rostand’s play, which follows the Prince as he emigrates to Austria after the fall of the Empire – a trajectory marked by decline yet underscored by a persistent desire to maintain stature amidst the disintegration of a once-powerful kingdom. The second classic role played by Bernhardt is the character of Lorenzaccio, in the play by Alfred de Musset, which is based on Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449–1492), the most powerful of the Medicis, who ruled the city-state of Florence. In the play, Lorenzaccio struggles desperately to save Florence, which had grown rich during his reign, from the grip of a power-hungry conqueror. Figure 2 is a portrait by Alphonse Mucha, who represents this tyranny by a dragon menacing the city’s coat of arms and portrays Lorenzaccio pondering the course of his action. Sarah Bernhardt, never afraid to tackle a male role, made Lorenzaccio into the classic roles of her repertoire. By portraying such male historical figures, she subverted conventional gender norms, showcasing the performative nature of both gender and identity. In broader terms, these paintings are not just records of theatrical moments, but artifacts of Bernhardt’s self-fashioning as an icon of the fin-de-siècle: bold, androgynous, charismatic, and always in command of her public image.

Figure 1

Sarah Bernhardt in the title role of the play by Edmond Rostrand, “L’Aiglon”, by Theobald Chartran, © Villa Arnaga, Musée Edmond Rostand, Cambo-les-Bains (Credit Napoleon.org).

Figure 2

Sarah Bernhardt playing the character of Lorenzaccio, in the play by Alfred de Musset, by Alphonse Mucha in 1986 (Credit Mucha Museum).

Similarly, Rushdi enjoyed taking on male roles, such as that of Mark Antony in an Egyptian version of Julius Caesar in 1928, as well as the roles of Tosca and Salambo. The following figure (Figure 3) shows her portrait in the same role played by her counterpart Bernhardt: Napoleon II in L’Aiglon.

Figure 3

Fatima Rushdi for the role of Napoleon II in L’Aiglon (Credit: Bibliotheca Alexandrina).

Through roles such as these, she became known as Sara Birnar al-Sharq (“Sarah Bernhardt of the East”) as well as the “Prima Donna of the East”. In an interview with her that was published in the famous Cairene Al-Kawakib magazine under the title “Uhib adwar al-rijal” (“I Like Men’s Roles”) (originally published in Arabic in February 1951), Fatima Rushdi explicitly expresses her preference to play male roles by stating that “[when] all is said and done, an actress can take it upon herself to render the male character more and better than the male portrayed, to give a performance less flat and more fulfilled than that given by a man. And herein lies the beauty of a feminine expression of the male, and the splendor of her creation” (1951). Indeed, Rushdi boldly asserts that a woman – an actress – can master male roles not merely adequately, but surpassingly, thus reclaiming creative mastery for women in a domain long considered the preserve of men: the portrayal of male power, complexity, and identity. The use of the term “creation” (or the “natural power of [women] art” in the original) frames performance not as mimicry, but as an act of “naturally powerful” artistic generation, countering traditional patriarchal logic, which often privileges male authorship, male experience, and male quintessence. For both women, these performances, reinforced by their autobiographical writings, constructed them as New Women not just in their societies, but in the broader history of gendered self-fashioning.

Both Rushdi and Bernhardt approached autobiography as a form of strategic self-fashioning, yet their narrative modes reflect distinct cultural, temporal, and ideological concerns. In her memoir Ma Double Vie [My Double Life] (1907), Sarah Bernhardt merges memory with spectacle, crafting an autobiography that is as much a performance as any she gave on stage. Her narrative style is flamboyant, fragmented, and unapologetically dramatic, often blurring the boundaries between fact and theatrical embellishment. She states: “When the curtain rose, slowly, I thought I might faint. It was, indeed, the very curtain of my life that was rising” (Bernhardt, 1907a, p. 73) (my translation). This deliberate theatricality is central to her self-representation: Bernhardt fashions herself not as a passive subject of fame but as its author, mastering both the stage and the page. Notably, her descriptions of playing male roles, such as Hamlet and Napoleon II, are not defensive but celebratory. She presents these performances as expressions of artistic freedom and intellectual equality, suggesting that gender is not a limitation but a theatrical tool to be wielded. Despite a clear coolness on the part of her audience for “the public never accepted her turning to cross-dress roles as one of her endearing quirks,” Bernhardt persisted in her endeavor of male roles as many more followed throughout her career (Berlanstein, 1996, p. 348). In her treatise on acting, she includes a chapter titled “Why I Have Played Male Roles” in which she confesses her admiration of “male brains,” more interesting to perform (1923, p. 137). More specifically, Bernhardt identifies strongly with the “Hamlet” roles and declares them to be her finest parts insofar as she emphasizes the psychological complexity of the variations of such character, aligning herself with Shakespearean depth rather than mere novelty. “No female character has opened up such a wide field for the exploration of human feelings and pain as Hamlet. […] I can say that I have had the rare, and I think unique, opportunity to play three Hamlets: Shakespeare’s black Hamlet, Rostand’s white Hamlet, L’Aiglon, and Alfred de Musset’s Florentine Hamlet, Lorenzaccio” (1923, pp. 137–141).

Bernhardt’s Ma Double Vie exudes theatrical flair and deliberate mythmaking. Her cosmopolitan identity – fluent in multiple languages, adored across Europe, the Americas, and worldwide even in the Middle East, notably in Egypt as she first performed in Cairo Opera House during the winter of 1888–1889, and returned two decades later, in 1908, where she once again witnessed firsthand the enthusiasm and fervor of the Egyptian audience (Cormack, 2021) – is reflected in a memoir that resists national anchoring, presenting her life as a transgressive, borderless journey. As she narrates/fictionalizes the different stages of her life travelling around from one place to another, she constructs a persona that transcends not only nationality, gender, and genre, but also surpasses all kinds of challenges. Indeed, she recounts moments of public scandal, physical suffering, and professional triumph with a tone that veers between irony and grandeur, reinforcing her mythic status as “Divine Sarah.” For example, despite her rather thin curve-less body described by Chili, one of the theatre’s managers, as “a wisp of a figure for society’s elite, so slight, not even a morsel within” (1907a, p. 159) (my translation), Bernhardt would take on all kinds of roles in her beginnings in L’Odeon theater, even those typically written for female performers meant for pleasure and entertainment in plays such as Le Jeu de l’amour et du hasard (The Game of Love and Chance). She declares “I was not made for Marivaux, who demands a flair for coquetry and preciosity – qualities that were not mine then, and are still not mine. Besides, I was a little too slender” (1907a, p. 159) (my translation). Yet, she was determined to take on such challenges and make the best use of her other qualities, mainly her sweet, enchanting voice. Her efforts are rewarded as she describes the glorious aftermath: “The audience, captivated by the softness of my voice and the crystalline purity of its tone, called for an encore of the spoken chorus, and three rounds of applause rewarded me” (1907a, p. 161) (my translation). The intention is not solely for readers to acknowledge her perseverance, but to craft a figure imbued with an air of the extraordinary, one that rises above mere endurance to embody something almost divine. As her memoir oscillates between fact and fiction, it underscores her belief in identity as performance, a view that aligns with her career of shape-shifting onstage. Her narrating voice is confident, ironic, and unapologetically self-assured, embracing contradiction as part of her public mystique. Through her memoir, Bernhardt articulates a version of the New Woman rooted in performance, cosmopolitanism, and flagrant self-possession, challenging the gendered norms of her time, not through overt polemic, but through the seductive power of narrative control.

Yet, one of the most striking features of Bernhardt’s Ma Double Vie is its deliberate mythmaking, which often glosses over the harsher realities of her childhood and early struggles. Born to a Dutch Jewish courtesan who largely abandoned her, Bernhardt spent her formative years in convent schools and foster care, oscillating between neglect and precarious patronage. Yet her memoirs rarely dwell on these conditions of vulnerability. Instead, she constructs narratives of destiny, in which hardship is transfigured into theatrical opportunity. As Marcus (1994) notes, women’s autobiographies of the period often employed strategies of “apology or evasion” when addressing disreputable aspects of their past, reflecting the cultural suspicion directed at female self-exposure. Bernhardt’s memoir exemplifies this tendency: her silences around her mother’s profession, her illegitimacy, and her economic precarity reveal a calculated attempt to control the terms of her visibility. By transforming herself into a heroine of spectacle, she shields her readers from the stigmas attached to actresses, a group often associated with sexual availability and moral laxity (Berlanstein, 1996). In this way, the omissions in her memoirs are as performative as the flamboyant episodes she recounts: they underscore the precarious balance between asserting autonomy and defending respectability in a cultural context that policed women’s public presence.

These silences can be read as integral to Bernhardt’s strategy of self-authoring. Rather than presenting her life as a narrative of deprivation, she retroactively casts herself as an almost predestined figure, a woman born to command the stage and transcend circumstance. In doing so, she enacts what Smith and Watson (2016) call the “performative function” of autobiography: identity is not merely recalled but shaped through narrative omissions and emphases. Bernhardt’s refusal to dwell on abandonment or poverty was not only an act of concealment but also a means of transforming vulnerability into authority. Her romanticized drama of the self, complete with moments of irony, wit, and theatrical exaggeration, allowed her to overwrite the stigmatized subject position of the courtesan’s daughter with that of the “Divine Sarah,” the global icon who bent audiences to her will. At the same time, these omissions reveal the gendered pressures of her context: to confess too much risked reinforcing patriarchal suspicions about actresses, but to remain entirely silent about hardship risked undermining the narrative of triumph. The result is a contradictory text, where empowerment is staged through performance, but fragility lingers in what is unsaid. Reading these silences alongside her overt self-dramatization underscores how Bernhardt’s life writing functioned as a dual act: a claim to power and a shield against marginalization, both essential to her negotiation of authority as a woman artist at the fin-de-siècle.

Writing decades later and within a colonially imbued Egyptian context, Rushdi adopts a more documentary tone in her memoirs published in four sets under the titles Kifahi fi-l-Masrah wa-l-Sinima (My Struggle in Theater and Cinema) (1971), Fatima Rushdi bayn al-Hubb wa-l-Fann (Fatima Rushdi between Love and Art) (1971), and Mudhakkirat Fatima Rushdi: Sara Birnar al-Sharq (Memoir of Fatima Rushdi: Sarah Bernhardt of the East) (1990, could originally be traced back to the 1960s) edited by Muhammad Rif’at. Her narrative is shaped by both nationalist ideals and a personal quest for modernity; it traces her journey from illiteracy to cultural leadership, from the margins of respectability to the center of Egypt’s artistic revival. While Bernhardt revels in theatrical exaggeration, Rushdi’s self-presentation is more grounded, aimed at legitimizing her transgressive roles as both actress and director within a society that was still negotiating women’s place in public life. Yet despite their differences, both women use life writing as a means of narrative control, crafting public identities that challenge the binaries of masculine/feminine, East/West, and self/other.

In Al-Hubb wa-l-Fann, Fatima Rushdi crafts a narrative of self-emergence that intertwines personal struggle with national aspiration. While she uses a realistic style, Rushdi presents her life as a metaphor for Egypt’s own pursuit of cultural modernity, as it shows when she recounts her move from Alexandria to Cairo “where the theatrical atmosphere and artistic life stood poised, ready to launch into vast and distant horizons” (Rif‘at, 1990, p. 16) (my translation). Her tone is candid yet calculated, drawing attention to the obstacles she faced not only as a woman but as an artist entering a field considered disreputable at the time. One of the most striking aspects of her narrative is the way she frames her illiteracy, not as a source of shame, but as a symbol of determination and transformation. By recounting how she was taught to read and write to elevate her theatrical craft, Rushdi positions herself as both student and innovator of Egyptian modernity while cementing her sisterhood/mentorship bond with world-class actors and actresses, notably Sarah Bernhardt, her artistic namesake.^[2]

Furthermore, her accounts of playing male roles, most notably Hamlet and Napoleon II, serve as moments of narrative rupture, where gender boundaries are blurred and reclaimed.^[3] In describing these roles, she emphasizes not just the technical difficulty, but the emotional and intellectual depth they required, implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) arguing for the legitimacy of her authority as an actress, director, and cultural figure. In other words, in her autobiographical narratives, she carves out something like an equation in which she incorporates dedication, hard work, perseverance, and extraordinary talent to get an output she succinctly sums up in her own words: “I have become the prima donna of Ramsis theatrical [troupe] for three years, I have become the greatest actress of the East, I have become the queen of hearts, the hearts of the audiences who loved me in Egypt and in all the Arab countries I have been to” (1971a, p. 60, my translation). Her portrayal of herself as a leader in the national theatre movement – managing a troupe, producing plays, and touring internationally – further challenges the domestic roles traditionally reserved for women. In this way, Rushdi’s autobiography functions as a political and aesthetic act: a self-written testimony of gender defiance, artistic ambition, and Egyptian womanhood in the early twentieth century.

While Rushdi and Bernhardt emerge from vastly different cultural and historical contexts, their autobiographical narratives reveal strikingly similar strategies of self-construction through performance. Both women use life writing to assert control over their public image, leveraging the authority of the autobiographical “I” to validate lives lived outside normative gender roles. Their portrayals of cross-gender theatrical roles – Hamlet and Napoleon II – function not only as artistic milestones but as symbolic acts of gender transgression, illustrating how the stage became a site of identity negotiation. Yet the tone and purpose of their narratives diverge meaningfully. Bernhardt’s Ma Double Vie revels in theatrical spectacle and mythmaking; she presents herself as a global icon whose defiance of gender norms is woven seamlessly into a cosmopolitan narrative of fame and excess. In effect, her sobriquet “the godmother of modern celebrity culture” (Marcus, 2020, p. 14) is well earned. Rushdi’s Al-Hubb wal-Fann (and her other memoir sets, especially her 1971 Kifahi fi al-Masrah wa-al-Sinima (My Struggle in Theater and Cinema), in contrast, are anchored in the national and the didactic, offering her life as both a personal testimony and a blueprint for the modern Egyptian (New) Woman. Her account foregrounds education, discipline, and national service, aligning her artistic ambition with the project of Egyptian cultural renewal. Such combination of the “personal” and the “political,” in a different and richer sense of the word, is evidently manifest in the first pages of her set of memoirs edited by Muhammad Rif’at when she pinpoints, in the course of her recounts of her late father, that she inherited from him “the desire to rely on myself, to adopt self-reliance as a guiding principle, and to step into the vast arena – the arena of success and failure, of struggle and perseverance, of individual and collective responsibility toward society – the very arena that Egyptians at the time often left to foreigners: the field of private enterprises” (Rif‘at, 1990, p. 10). Thus, while both autobiographies stage the self in ways that defy traditional femininity, they do so through distinct rhetorical strategies – Bernhardt through flamboyant cosmopolitanism and performative myth, and Rushdi through grounded realism and national consciousness. Together, they reveal the flexible contours of the New Woman archetype, shaped as much by geography and politics as by individual will.

Nonetheless, Rushdi’s memoirs similarly reflect the tension between narration and omission, particularly in her treatment of childhood, poverty, and social stigma. Rushdi lost her parents early, grew up in conditions of financial insecurity, and initially entered the theatrical world as an illiterate girl, dependent on others to teach her the skills necessary for her craft. While she acknowledges these facts in passing, she does not dwell on their emotional or social weight. Instead, she reframes them as obstacles overcome through determination, emphasizing perseverance rather than vulnerability. This narrative strategy resonates with what Kholoussi (2019) identifies as the contentiousness of Arab women’s autobiographical practice: female self-writing is often constrained by cultural expectations of modesty and propriety, leading to careful negotiation of what can and cannot be disclosed. Rushdi’s memoirs demonstrate this tension. By moving swiftly from orphanhood to theatrical triumphs, she minimizes the stigma historically attached to women in the performing arts in Egypt, where actresses were often viewed with suspicion or outright hostility (Cormack, 2021). Her silences, then, are not mere absences but purposeful omissions, designed to craft a public persona of legitimacy, national service, and artistic excellence. In presenting herself as a leader of Egypt’s theatrical renaissance, Rushdi distances her image from the disreputable associations of her profession, claiming instead the role of cultural reformer and national icon.

The performative function of these silences becomes clear when Rushdi’s memoirs are read in light of Arab feminist thought. As El Saadawi argues, for Arab women to write is itself an act of rebellion against structures that demand silence (1999, p. 352). Yet rebellion does not always take the form of overt disclosure; it can also manifest in strategic silences that allow women to assert authority without exposing themselves to further vulnerability. In Rushdi’s case, the absence of detailed discussion of childhood trauma, intimate relationships, or the social condemnation she faced reflects both constraint and agency. Mikhail (2004) reminds us that Arab women writers have often had to negotiate between personal truth-telling and the cultural imperative to protect family honor and public reputation. Rushdi’s omissions illustrate precisely this negotiation: they allowed her to position herself as the “Prima Donna of the East,” a figure of respectability, while sidestepping narratives that might have reinforced patriarchal dismissal. At the same time, these silences reveal the contradictions of her self-fashioning project. Her insistence on national service and artistic ambition masks the vulnerabilities of class, gender, and profession, but those very gaps remind readers of the pressures shaping women’s voices in twentieth-century Egypt. Thus, her memoirs exemplify what Smith and Watson (2001) describe as the “productive tension” of life writing: a genre where what is unsaid is as revealing as what is spoken. In Rushdi’s case, silence itself becomes a performative gesture, a way to contest marginalization while still claiming space in Egypt’s cultural and political history.