Sexing the stage: Women, the performance plot, and the sexual encounter in nineteenth-century fiction

At the close of his exordium, the Professor beckoned with his hand—once, twice, thrice—and a figure came gliding upon the platform, enveloped in a long veil of silvery whiteness…But the movement of the Veiled Lady was graceful, free, and unembarrassed, like that of a person accustomed to be the spectacle of thousands; or, possibly, a blindford prisoner within the sphere with which this dark, earthly magician had surrounded her, she was wholly unconscious of being the central object to all those straining eyes…Pliant to his gesture…the figure placed itself in the great chair. Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance

[W]ith one wave of his hand over her—with one look of his eye—with a word—Svengali could turn her into the other Trilby, his Trilby—and make her do whatever he liked…He had but to say “Dors!” and she suddenly became an unconscious Trilby of marble, who could produce wonderful sounds—just the sounds he wanted, and nothing else—and think his thoughts and wish his wishes—and love him at his bidding with a strange, unreal, factitious love…just his own love for himself turned inside out…and reflected back on him, as from a mirror. George Du Maurier, Trilby