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PERFORMING MENKEN: ADAH ISAACS MENKEN AND THE BIRTH OF AMERICAN CELEBRITY. By Renée M. Sentilles. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003; pp. xi + 313. $4-5.00 cloth.
In this fresh approach to the career of mid-nineteenth-century performer Adah Isaacs Menken, Renée M. Sentilles breaks the conventional chronological narrative of biography and tackles a variety of topics instead, layering the contexts of culture, gender, theatre, media, and war into her discussion. She offers a thorough overview of what was documented about and by Menken and examines the speculation that has been accepted as fact. The various performances of Menken, from the Jewish Deborah, to the pugilist's wife, genteel poetess, the notorious Mazeppas, and simply "the Menken," frame the study, as Sentilles regards Menken "as a deliberate performance, a self-created celebrity who shaped her image to suit the times" (3).
The performer's fuzzy claims about her background included fathers with a variety of last names, multiple places of birth, and a range of possible ethnic origins: African, Creole, Jewish, Irish, Spanish, French, Portugese, or a combination thereof. Menken also bestowed heroic qualities upon herself, as an exotic adventuress in Mexico, Cuba, and Texas, and she added the requisite Indian captivity narrative. In distinguishing between the well-documented public career of Menken and her intentionally obscured personal life and background, Sentilles calls Menken "an invented character" about whom the verb "perform" is critical, as she performed, both on- and offstage, "a Menken identity that...