MENKEN, Adah Isaacs

Born Adah Bertha Theodore, 11 April 1835, Milneburg, Louisiana; died 10 August 1868, Paris, France

Daughter of Auguste and Marie Theodore; married Alexander Isaac Menken, 1856; John Carmel Heenan, 1859; Robert Henry Newell, 1862; James Paul Barkley, 1866

Adah Isaacs Menken, feminist actress, poet, and essayist, astounded audiences of the 1860s with her near nudity and daring equestrian feats in a theatrical version of Byron's Mazeppa. Although Menken's perfect figure and unashamed sexuality were of primary appeal to audiences, the multiple talents of this creative and energetic woman should not be dismissed. She knew French, Spanish, Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and was a competent sculptor and an expert horsewoman and marksman. A pioneer in vaudeville and burlesque, Menken made as much as $5,000 a week, much of it lavished on the poets, authors, and journalists who were her favorite companions. Four marriages and multiple dalliances made her notorious. A Hollywood star ahead of her time, she was among the first to employ modern publicity techniques, using photographs, fake biographies, and scandals to fill theater seats. "Notes of My Life" (New York Times, 6 Sept. 1868), for example, is pure fiction.

From 1857 to 1859, Menken converted to Judaism, published poetry in the Cincinnati Israelite, and began her theatrical career.Moving to New York, she associated with Walt Whitman and other Bohemians in Pfaff's famous beerskellar. Menken contributed poems and letters to the New York Clipper, and in a series of short articles for the Sunday Mercury, defended Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, perceptively prophesying their recognition "in the next century." Menken wrote on the affinity of poetry and religion, on politics, and on women. In "Women of the World," she spoke of the need to train women for "other missions than wife and mother."

During a California tour, Menken met Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, Artemus Ward, Charles Warren Stoddard, and possibly Mark Twain. On her European tours she became the associate of Rossetti and other Pre-Raphaelites, had a rather strange affair with Swinburne (he wrote "Laus Veneris" for her), and courted Dickens assiduously. Dickens was kind, but kept Menken at a respectable distance. Menken's greatest theatrical success was at Paris; there George Sand befriended her and she indulged in a scandalous affair with the aging Alexander Dumas. Menken died suddenly in Paris from complications of a chest "abscess."

Before she died, Menken gathered a number of poems into Infelicia (1868), dedicated to Dickens. His dictum, that "she is a sensitive poet who, unfortunately, cannot write," is reductionist, but her mind was better than her poetry, which lacks consistent discipline. Whitman gave her courage to adopt the free verse form that suited her passionate and extravagant nature, and his chant and litany techniques are much in evidence. Swinburne's often indecipherable sensuality was also congenial. Her talent for the occasional haunting image, often imbedded in a matrix of forgettable incoherence and private allusion, seems indisputable.

Menken's constant theme was "infelix." She contrasted the gaudy trappings of her external life to her sensitive and intellectual inner nature, and posed as the suffering victim of man and fate in "My Heritage" and elsewhere. Death and sobs figure prominently but always voluptuously intertwined with sensual and throbbingly sexual images. If she took her form from Whitman, certainly her idol Poe gave the pattern for her content. Her affinity to the "fleshly school" of the Pre-Raphaelites and Swinburne is also apparent.

Menken's passion seems undifferentiated—religion, poetry, sex—all seem part of the same intense impulse. Betrayed in love, the persona in "Resurgam" "died with my fingers grasping the white throat of many a prayer." But no one is aware of this death because "who can hear the slow drip of blood from a dead soul?"

The feminist "Judith" is a militant prophet of the "advent of power" for women. She rejects utterly the hypocritical and "slimy" ways of the "enemy Philistines": "Stand back! I am no Magdalene waiting to kiss the hem of your garment." She beheads Holofernes with gusto and obvious sensual enjoyment: "…the strong throat all hot and reeking with blood, that will thrill me with wild unspeakable joy as it courses down my bare body and dabbles my cold feet." Despite the racy metaphor, the power desire of "Judith" seems primarily the drive toward intellectual and moral control. For Menken, "Genius is power," and Infelicia is full of poems on intellectual and artistic "aspiration."

Menken was perceptive enough to be dissatisfied with the quality of her life and work. The last poem in Infelicia moans, "Where is the promise of my years; / Once written on my brow? / Ere errors, agonies and fears, / …Where sleeps that promise now?" Menken was bright and energetic, but with a streak of bad judgment and superficiality that cheapened the final results of her talent. In the ten brief years of her career, she managed to live ten lifetimes. Glamorous and intelligent, willful and kind, she did almost everything, but nothing supremely well.

Other Works:

Adah Isaacs Menken's diary is in Harvard College Library Theatre Collection.

Bibliography:

Edwin, J., The Life and Times of Adah Isaacs Menken (1881?). Falk, B., The Naked Lady (1934; rev. ed., 1952). Lesser, A., Enchanting Rebel (1947). Lewis, P., Queen of the Plaza (1964). Newell, R. H., My Life with Adah Isaacs Menken (n.d.).

Reference works:

NAW. Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States.

—L. W. KOENGETER