Performing Menken: Adah Isaacs Menken and the Birth of American Celebrity.

By Renee M. Sentilles. (New York and other cities: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. [xii], 313. $45.00, ISBN 0-521-82070-7.) Historian Renee M. Sentilles uses newspaper accounts, personal papers, public records, and various biographies and autobiographies to examine the public and private identities of the notorious mid-nineteenth-century actress and poet Adah Isaacs Menken, as she was most commonly called. However, not only are we unsure of Menken's actual name, but her race, religion, ancestry, and city of origin are also uncertain, as are the legitimacy of her widely publicized marriages and the fates of her children. Born around 1835, probably in New Orleans (which seems apropos), Menken began her ascent to stardom in the South, especially Texas and Louisiana. Rising to celebrity status during the Civil War, she constantly (re)constructed her image to appeal to various publics, taking advantage of printed media and the new photographic cartes de visite to create a complex and contradictory set of identifies for herself and her audiences. Her shrewd manipulation of outrageous, bohemian, or simply middle-class self-representations helped transform Menken into one of the first American "stars"--famous for being famous. Most notably, she played a great deal with gender identity--cross-dressing (on- and offstage), distributing androgynous photos of herself, gambling and smoking with men--yet in her writings, she upheld rather traditional feminine values. Whether describing Menken's "real-life" personas (cowgirl, intellectual, scandalous femme fatale) or onstage roles (Tartar prince, French spy), Sentilles adroitly analyzes how Menken's shifting identities provoked reactions that reflected local, regional, and national culture during the Civil War era. Sentilles also describes how Menken's eye-of-the-beholder status has persisted in modern scholarship: for example, even though she professed to be Christian and sympathetic to the Confederacy, Menken is often included in the Jewish and African American literary canons. This fine study leaves us with an appropriately complex image of a remarkable woman while also providing insights into Civil War-era culture, particularly the burgeoning American star system. [MELISSA BAILAR, Rice University]