From Performance to Prison: The Case of Vera ‘Jacko’ Holme Analyzing Body Politics, Gendered Transgression and Socio-Political Identity of a Stage Actress, 1890–1914

In Britain, during the nineteenth century the process of identity formation of a female performer was conditioned by a challenge towards the pre-existing gender norms that underwent a paradigmatic shift owing to the ‘new performative turn’. The story of Vera Holme popularly known as ‘Jacko’, emanates from this very shift. Holme was an actress born in Lancashire in 1881. Often known as the ‘first female chauffeur of Britain’, she not only embodied the social, political and the sexual, but also imparted it through personal and dramatic means thereby challenging the ideology of separate gendered spheres much before the ideas of the ‘new Sapphic woman’ and ‘female masculinity’ came into being. Using the case study of Vera Holme, I study the socio-political identity of a stage actress who embodied gendered transgression across a time that permeated from her public life to private life and vice versa. Themes such as performativity, political theatre, deconstruction of sexuality and body politics become intrinsic in order to decipher the sexual lexicon of the time that fettered women on the condition of being socially and morally deviant. Utilizing the personal papers of Vera Holme, I posit her forays into theatre and politics, within this context, that will not only complicate the understanding of gendered transgressions but simultaneously will throw light on how theatricality socio-economically ‘enabled’ many women to break away from the existing normative patriarchal structures including Holme.