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New Anatomies (1981), Timberlake Wertenbaker's first play to be published (in 1984), chronicles the life of Isabelle Eberhardt, the European traveller and writer who lived in Algeria cross-dressed as an Arab man at the turn of the last c. Intrigued, in her own words, "by the mental liberation in the simple physical act of cross-dressing," Wertenbaker was originally planning to write a play about three cross-dressing women (novelist George Sand, Japanese poet and courtesan Ono Kamachi, and Isabelle Eberhardt), but she became fascinated with Isabelle Eberhardt (Wertenbaker vii). Her chief interest in New Anatomies, then, lies in Eberhardt's cross-dressing and its relation to the formation of sexual, gendered, and also religious and national identity.1 Focusing on the fluidity of gender represented by cross-dressing and the fluidity of national boundaries represented by Eberhardt's (re)invention of her own identity, Wertenbaker's play remakes the historical fin-de-siècle Isabelle Eberhardt as a feminist icon for the early 1980s. In his important study of historical drama, Performing History: Theatrical Representations of the Past in Contemporary Theatre, Freddie Rokem notes that by "performing history a double or even triple time register is frequently created: the time of the events and the time the play was written and in some cases also [...] the later time when it was performed" (19). A contemporary reading of New Anatomies, critical or especially theatrical, then, needs to rethink Eberhardt's experiences yet again to take account of audiences' quite different perspective on and fascination with relations between Westerners and Arabs at the beginning of the twenty-first century. In this essay, by examining Wertenbaker's use of her documentary sources, I will explore the aesthetic and ethical implications of Isabelle Eberhardt's historicity for the dramatist herself and for her audiences, particularly for those audiences who first encounter New Anatomies at the "later time" of the early twenty-first century. New Anatomies illuminates both the pleasures of history plays and the problems in reception that may arise from their "triple time register."
Isabelle Eberhardt was the illegitimate daughter of a GermanRussian woman, Nathalie de Moerder (née Eberhardt), wife of a Russian officer, who had run away to Geneva with her children and their tutor, Alexander Trophimowsky. Born in Geneva in 1877, Eberhardt had an unusual upbringing. Even in Geneva she engaged...