Caught in the ACT: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel - Hardcover

Litvak, Joseph

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0520074521 ISBN 13: 9780520074521

Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR, 1992

Inhaltsangabe

Litvak demonstrates that private experience in the novels of Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Eliot, and James is a rigorous enactment of a public script that constructs normative gender and class identities. He suggests that the theatricality which pervades these novels enforces social norms while introducing opportunities for novelists to resist them. This approach encourages a rethinking of the genre and its cultural contexts in all their instability and ambivalence.

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Joseph Litvak is Associate Professor of English at Bowdin College.

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Caught in the Act: Theatricality in the Nineteenth-Century English Novel

By Joseph Litvak

University of California Press

Copyright © 1992 Joseph Litvak
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0520074521
Introduction

“Our society,” Michel Foucault argued famously, “is one not of spectacle but of surveillance.”1 This book takes as its point of departure that rather stark representation of “our society,” which, in Foucault’s account, is also the society of the nineteenth century. That is, the readings offered here presuppose the overtly nontheatrical, even antitheatrical, character of the culture inhabited—indeed, to a certain extent, constructed—by the novels under analysis. Yet if these readings depart from that assumption in the sense of proceeding from it, they would also depart from it in the sense of leaving it behind—or would at least challenge it insistently and inventively enough so that a richer understanding of social interaction, both in the nineteenth century proper and in its lengthy, ongoing sequel, might begin to emerge in its place.

One of my primary concerns, accordingly, is to show how the novelistic tradition examined here unsettles the distinction between a society of spectacle and a society of surveillance. Of course, if spectacle is taken to imply extravagance and ostentation, then spectacular is probably not the first word one would apply to the works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, or even Henry James. On the contrary, just as this tradition marks the triumphant climax of the well-known rise of the novel, so it has been shown less to record than to help institutionalize what has been dubbed, almost as memorably, the fall of public man—a fall from the theatricality of eighteenth-century culture into the world of domesticity, subjectivity, and psychology, whose intimate, personalized scale, far from providing refuge from surveillance, installs it, with remarkable hospitality, in an apparently infinite number of snug little homes, where it can go about its business under cover of an endlessly idealizing misrecognition.2 Thus, while recent studies of eighteenth-century English fiction deploy explicitly theatrical paradigms, it might seem anachronistic or merely wishful to look for theatricality in novels of the privatizing and privatized nineteenth century.3 But I will demonstrate that, though such texts may be less showy than their eighteenth-century predecessors, their very implication in a widespread social network of vigilance and visibility—of looking and of being looked at—renders them inherently, if covertly, theatrical. After all, Foucault himself has to describe the cells of Bentham’s Panopticon, the model of modern discipline, as “so many cages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualised and constantly visible.”4 Foucault is obviously not promoting this displaced theatricality as compensation or consolation for the oppressiveness of the regime that contains it, nor is it my intention to celebrate the generalization of the carceral scene in nineteenth-century novels and their culture. The point, rather, is that, instead of simply precluding or negating spectacle, a society of surveillance entails certain rigorous spectacular practices of its own. Observing those practices at work in and around a series of nineteenth-century texts, the present study repeatedly emphasizes the normalization of theatricality, its subtle diffusion throughout the culture that would appear to have repudiated it.

However cagey, then, however deficient in the Bakhtinian “carnivalesque” exuberance or (as rehearsed in the opening pages of Discipline and Punish) in the sheer Grand Guignol excess that one might associate with earlier manifestations of theatricality, the spectacles of surveillance pervade nineteenth-century fiction. Yet, another major concern of this book is to make clear that they thereby account not only for the peculiar efficacy of that fiction as an instrument of social regulation, as Foucauldian literary critics have argued, but also for its unpredictability, for its tendency not to accomplish—or not to accomplish quite as faithfully as might have been expected—the cultural task assigned to it.

If this book therefore maintains a certain distance from the Foucauldian interpretations to which it is nonetheless indebted, it also differs from, even as it intersects, another recently influential approach to nineteenth-century fiction. I am referring to a group of studies—focused somewhat more on American than on British novels, and somewhat more on the later than on the earlier or the middle nineteenth century—that link nineteenth-century fiction with precisely a “society of the spectacle,” reading it as a commentary on, or as an accomplice of, the seductive new hegemony of advertising and of a necessarily conspicuous consumption.5 Although some of the distinctive preoccupations of critics working in this mode—the marketplace, the commodification of the self—figure significantly here, I hope ultimately to project a more affirmative sense of “spectacle” than that which seems to inform their often scrupulously opaque, even deadpan, accounts. I intend no more to play up any “subversive” potential of consumerist theatricality than to glamorize the theatricality of surveillance. My aim, however, is to show how, if theatrical structures and techniques underlie or enable various coercive cultural mechanisms, the same structures and techniques can threaten those mechanisms’ smooth functioning. In the process, I seek not to reclaim some primordial, anarchic essence of theatricality, but to reveal its pragmatic overdetermination, its perverse capacity for doing more than just serving the interests of whatever political ideologies or cultural dispensations happen to have appropriated it.

Indeed, theatricality, as I develop it here, signifies not a single, unitary style or content, but a set of shifting, contradictory energies. Unlike “theater,” which may denote a fixed place, institution, or art form, “theatricality” resists such circumscription, owing its value as a critical term to this very open-endedness. Nevertheless, the term is meant to have a specific force and to achieve specific effects in the readings that follow: it is directed not only against the coherent, stable subjectivity that the nineteenth-century novel supposedly secures for both its protagonists and its readers, but also against the domestic, domesticating closure—or, in the case of Henry James, against the aestheticization of that closure as the “house of fiction”—in which that subjectivity supposedly discovers its “natural” habitat. This double function may explain why this book is about “theatricality,” rather than about, say, “textuality,” in the nineteenth-century novel. For though the latter term would have (in fact, in the work of other critics, already has) lent itself admirably to the project of deconstructing subjectivity, the trope of “theatricality” enables us both to unpack subjectivity as performance and to denaturalize—to read as a scene—the whole encompassing space in which that subjectivity gets constituted: the intricate web of “romantic” bonds and family ties apparently consolidated by the novels in question.6 In other words, if the self is treated here as not just a text but a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CALIFORNIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 1992
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0520074521
• ISBN 13: 9780520074521
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 304
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar