ABSTRACT
From Helen of Troy to Hilary Rodham Clinton, powerful, beautiful, betrayed women have been lightning rods for multiple anxieties. As a woman with a voice and sense of performing self so powerful that she posed a phenomenal threat to the accepted moral and sexual categories of her age, Elizabeth Billington defied control. Capitalizing on the popularity of autobiography and of Elizabeth Billington, a superstar of the stage, James Ridgway generates a pornographic, misogynistic, political tract that tests a range of autobiographical possibilities as it reveals the power structures of romantic theater and cultural production. To tell a life story is one way of reducing such a woman to understandable categories. The material James Ridgway presents in Memoirs of Mrs Billington From her Birth, however, shatters the potentially controlling frame of life narrative.
